The Politics of Humanity: Justice and Power 3030759563, 9783030759568

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The Politics of Humanity Justice and Power Edited by Richard A. Cohen · Tito Marci Luca Scuccimarra

The Politics of Humanity “This collected volume is a passionate testimony for defending humanity, justice and cosmopolitan values in times of multi-level global crisis. It brings together a range of distinguished international scholars addressing burning issues like migration and the political situation in Hong Kong, combined with principled reflections on the social, ethical, and legal foundations of human co-existence and with an emphasis on difference, alterity and vulnerability so urgently needed for a cosmopolitan conception of justice.” —Sophie Loidolt, Professor of Philosophy, Chair of Practical Philosophy, Institut für Philosophie, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

Richard A. Cohen  •  Tito Marci Luca Scuccimarra Editors

The Politics of Humanity Justice and Power

Editors Richard A. Cohen Department of Jewish Thought, Department of Philosophy University at Buffalo State University of New York Buffalo, NY, USA

Tito Marci Department of Political Sciences University of Rome – La Sapienza Rome, Italy Luca Scuccimarra Department of Political Sciences University of Rome – La Sapienza Rome, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-75956-8    ISBN 978-3-030-75957-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Politics, Humanity, Power and Justice  1 Richard A. Cohen Part I Principles of Justice  21 2 Ethics of Hospitality: The Limits of Cosmopolitan Rights 23 Tito Marci 3 Naked Humanity Beyond the Inevitable Ceremonial 53 Richard A. Cohen 4 Globalization and Cosmopolitanization: Reassessing the ‘Humanitarian Turn’ of International Politics Thirty Years Later 81 Luca Scuccimarra 5 Vulnerability and Intimacy: Ethical Foundations for Social Relations in Confucius and Levinas113 Kuan-Min Huang

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Contents

Part II Dangers to Justice 133 6 Migration Crisis and the Rise of Anti-humanitarian Populism in Europe135 Luca Scuccimarra 7 The Future of Justice: Politics, Time and the Contemporary Political Triangulation—Liberalism, Socialism and Fascism153 Richard A. Cohen 8 What Is Radically Wrong?201 Tito Marci 9 Totalitarianism, State and Civil Society: The Case of Hong Kong221 David T. L. Cheung  Correction to: Introduction: Politics, Humanity, Power and Justice  C1 Richard A. Cohen Index237

Notes on Contributors

David  T.  L.  Cheung  is associate professor at the Baptist University of Hong Kong. His research interests include German idealism, phenomenology and hermeneutics. His publications appear in Idealistic Studies, Dao: Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Philosophy East and West, and so on. Richard A. Cohen  is Professor of Jewish Thought and of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, New York. He is Director of the annual Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminar. He concentrates on modern and contemporary continental philosophy and Jewish thought, with further focus on Levinas, Spinoza, phenomenology and political philosophy. He has translated four books by Levinas, edited several books and journals on Levinas, and is author, most recently, of Out of Control: Confrontations Between Spinoza and Levinas (2016). Kuan-Min Huang  is research fellow in the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, and university professor in the Department of Philosophy, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. He received his PhD in the history of philosophy from University Paris-­ Sorbonne in 2001. His research is focused on modern and contemporary philosophers such as Spinoza, Schelling, Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty, and also on contemporary Chinese philosophers, Tang Junyi and Mou Zongsan. His topics of interest are imagination, subjectivity, place and landscape. His recent publications are On the Margins of Imagination: Overflowing of the Poetics of Gaston Bachelard (in Chinese, 2014), Un autre souci de soi. Le sens de la subjectivité dans la philosophie chinoise antique vii

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(in French, 2016) and Reverberation and Affective Communication: Investigations on Tang Junyi’s Philosophy (in Chinese, 2018). Tito Marci  teaches Sociology and Sociology of Law at the University of Rome – La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, Department of Political Sciences, Faculty of Political Sciences, Sociology, Communication, and is Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences, Sociology, Communication. He has published several monographs and numerous essays on subjectivity, hospitality, rights of hospitality, citizenship, gift giving, political participation, migrations, cultural and legal pluralism in multiethnic societies, social inclusion, civil and political society, art and law.Among his most recent books are Il circolo della gratuità. Il paradosso del dono e la reciprocità sociale (Trento, 2012); Codificazione artistica e figurazione giuridica. Dallo spazio prospettico allo spazio reticolare (Torino, 2014); La Società degli altri. Ripensare l’ospitalità (Firenze, 2016); and Pascal e la genealogia. Prolegomeni ad una sociologia concettuale del diritto (Torino, 2020). Luca  Scuccimarra is Full Professor of History of Political Thought, Department of Political Sciences, University of Rome – La Sapienza, in Rome, Italy. In the last few years he has worked mainly on the history of Western cosmopolitanism, the philosophical foundations of modern international law and the developments of a humanitarian paradigm in the global age. His most recent book is Proteggere l’umanità. Sovranità e diritti umani nell’epoca globale [Protecting Humanity: Sovereignty and Human Rights in the Global Epoch] (Bologna, il Mulino, 2016).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Politics, Humanity, Power and Justice Richard A. Cohen I could not be leading a religious life unless I identified myself with the whole of humankind, and that I could not do unless I took part in politics. The whole gamut of human activities today constitutes an indivisible whole. You cannot divide social, economic, political and purely religious work into watertight compartments. I do not know any religion apart from human activity. (M. K. Gandhi, My Non-Violence)1

This volume brings together scholars from universities around the world— from Buffalo, New  York; Hong Kong, China; Rome, Italy; to Taipei, Taiwan—and joins together a variety of intellectual disciplines, from anthropology, Chinese literature, creative writing, Jewish thought, philosophy, political science to sociology. Differences of person, place, culture, The original version of this chapter was revised. The correction to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_10  M. K. Gandhi, My Non-Violence (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1960), 77 [first published in Harijan, December 24, 1938]. 1

R. A. Cohen (*) Department of Jewish Thought, Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2022 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_1

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history and expertise do not alienate but rather fructify the authors and perspectives contributing to the ongoing conversation of the politics of humanity. The politics of humanity is the struggle for justice, for human rights, to be sure, but also for the availability and fair distribution of food, clothing, shelter, health care, culture, a sustainable environment, and all the material conditions necessary for the realization of political rights, for their flourishing. It demands a humane justice, where not only all, the universal, but each, the singular, is respected, a humane justice in which equality, liberty and solidarity intersect to support one another. It is not despite differences but because of them that there is dialogue, conversation, discourse, and a book such as The Politics of Humanity. Its insights and arguments solicit a hearing, as they solicit discussion, but without forgetting the real conditions of such a hearing and discussion, the cooperation that sustains constructive criticism, the dedication and understanding that guides research, the collegiality and friendship that stimulate truth and make justice possible and worthwhile, despite failings and deficiencies, and all the real work that remains to be done. Such a conversation is philosophy in the best and most ancient sense of the term, love of wisdom. It is varied, many voiced, yet not a cacophony, because it is oriented, oriented by justice. Not just a random assemblage or coincidence, it is a collaboration, a collectivity, a cooperation. What unity it achieves is accomplished across variety, e pluribus unum, one out of many, respectful of differences. It acknowledges and celebrates the basic human fact, for instance, that all peoples, and hence all humans are immigrants, even if their migrations occurred in differing times, places, memories and scales. Humans are not vegetables; they do not grow out of the soil, are not enrooted. Genuine conversation, accordingly, is cosmopolitan, pluralist, multiple, rather than imperialist, imposing, repressing, or global, levelling, standardizing. Its interlocutors remain sensitive to the surplus transcendences of diversity, personal, cultural, social, spiritual, political and intellectual. Alterity is not reduced to totality. This is accomplished through a sensitivity to the dignity of person and place, a sensitivity to the concrete, despite the powerful temptations of abstraction, formalism and legalism, especially in the life of the mind. Human rights, for instance, we have said, have material conditions, which a politics of humanity, unlike liberalism and its avatars, does not forget. Humans are not reducible to minds, consumers, cogs, wills or any simplifying abstraction. They are flesh and blood, vulnerable, mortal, suffering, celebrating, aging over time, familial, sometimes strong, sometimes weak, agents, but also subject to the “slings and arrows” of the larger world. There is no simple formula. Truth and justice demand that

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humans—each alone, groups as well—be recognized in their humanity, and more than “recognized,” respected, including the humanity of that vast majority who play but little or no part in the machinations of the powerful elite, but deserving of no less consideration than any person, all the way to the least. A politics of humanity thus believes in what Vaclav Havel famously called “the power of the powerless,” the ethical power of human dignity. In this way attentive to a real humanity, a flesh and blood humanity, of vulnerable persons, of many voices, but also of groups, languages, cultures, shared historical experiences, and the like, the politics of humanity struggles to resist the countervailing violence, destruction and degradations of evil and injustice, including those produced by the very successes of market economy. It is not enough to produce goods, if their very production destroys the environment which is the biological condition of their enjoyment, or if their enjoyment wipes out the things and relations that make life worth living. What is the point of having an automobile if the world is converted into an asphalt parking lot? It is our belief, our hope, that through the present volume’s contents, its questions, and its example, uniting diverse authors to one another and to readers, far and wide, over shared concerns bridging yesterday, today and tomorrow, concerns constituting and contributing to a cosmopolitan humanity, that we have contributed, however humbly, personally, but quite seriously as well, to speaking and answering to the greatest of all of humanity’s outstanding tasks and responsibilities, no less social, economic and religious than political in any narrow sense, namely, the great task of establishing a just world—for each, and for all. Big things have little beginnings. The truths shared and refined in our conversations, like the distinctions they make and what clarity they achieve, contribute to justice, both by shining light on the path to a better future, and as instances of respect, today. It is no accident that truth is distinguished from opinion because the former justifies itself. Why such a volume now? Is not such an international collaboration yet another exploitation of technological possibilities, of trains and planes and a worldwide web, enabling scholars from around the world to meet and communicate? We do not disdain these avenues, obviously, but neither do we take them for everything. Rather, more profoundly, we see in them an opportunity to express our own responses to a broader problem everyone feels, a widespread disquiet, a diffuse uneasiness or anxiety or fear, hard to name exactly, but under a variety of names, the unmistakable sense that we live in a time of acute crisis. That if our now is the best of times, is it not also, and more dangerously, the worst of times? A time of crisis, we hear it,

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we feel it, in the news, in the magazines, on television, in movies, in books, on stage, across the web. Though nowadays—and for good reason—overused, this much bandied term—crisis—is less a label or description that a hyperbole, an alarm, a warning, an alert, a cry in the night, Paul Revere, a wake-up call about something terrible which has already happened, and is still about to happen, something wrong getting worse, a looming disaster, collapse, catastrophe, and a sense that we are already too late, or that it is inexorable, inevitable, cannot be stopped—but yet that it must be stopped! And something terrible has indeed already happened, and something worse does indeed loom, let us only name four of its Gorgon heads: ecological extinction, nuclear war, vast wealth and power disparities, fascisms arising again. And these every day, all the time, the air we breathe—a terrorism of everyday life, of the ordinary. An age of anxiety, for good reason. Each of these four crises by itself spells disaster, to human freedom, to human dignity, to our families, to prosperity, to our highest values, to our best institutions, for instance, democracy, and indeed to life on earth. These crises are inter-related, each exacerbating the others. Separately and together they are traumatizing, cognitively dissonant, overwhelming, bearers and portents of mass misery and mass death—and each of our own making, not monsters but human creations, monsters we have wrought. We ourselves, we are the monsters. No wonder the term “crisis” has worn out, as no doubt will its substitutes, “disaster,” “extinction,” “devastation,” “catastrophe,” and so on. Humans today roam the earth like sleepwalkers unable to awaken. No wonder so many people in relatively affluent countries, and elsewhere, drug themselves with watching sports, binge video series or escapist fantasy movies, or lawn maintenance, or evangelical fervor, or for that matter, with alcohol and painkillers. No wonder there is a revival of zombie movies, the living dead who even in death continue to kill. The crises are so overpowering, the wealthy so inordinately rich and powerful, governments so distant, deaf and corrupted, that it seems whatever we say or do is not only insufficient, but insignificant, futile, risible. So why do anything at all? Why even care? Rome is burning, the fire is raging, the fire engines were sold off for profit, the firefighters deported as alien immigrants. Let us eat, drink and be merry, what else is left. We have been turned into pawns, excluded from power, excluded from sense, lemmings, dulled and lulled, stupefied and made complacent, living day to day, comfortably numb, heads in the sand. Yet popular discontent is on the rise, from right wing populism to left wing progressivism. Something is terribly wrong. Everybody knows it. What is to be done?

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The signs and portents have long been with us. Inspired by Jean-­ Francois Millet’s painting “Man with a Hoe,” Edwin Markham, American poet, read aloud at a New Year’s Eve party in New York City in 1898 his eponymous poem: “Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, / Plundered, profaned, and disinherited, /Cries protest to the Powers that made the world. /A protest that is also a prophecy.” Simon and Garfunkel, half a century later, put to music and pointed again to that prophecy of protest, still unheeded: “The words of the prophets/Are written on the subway walls/And tenement halls.” Amidst prosperity, amidst technological wonders and gadgets surpassing the dreams of past science fiction, streets overflowing with cars, electricity everywhere, televisions, projectors, internet, streaming videos, airplanes, jets, space travel, huge discount stores, unlimited web shopping, despite all this—because of all this!— there is discontent, a growing discontent, as deep as it is wide. “You don’t need a weather man/To know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan sang out in 1965. Never has there been so much poverty in plenty, but never, too, has such plenty been accompanied by impoverishment, in the plenty itself, the billions of burgers, the high-speed railroads, the super highways. But the fact is we do need a weather man, many of them, and weather women, and a long conversation, and great and open deliberation, to begin to dispel the confusion and cut through the deceit, and to uncover, to understand, and above all to address as meaningfully, as sharply and as clearly as we are able the genuine causes of our discontent, and the best ways out. No more conspiracy theories, no more fantasies, the reality is itself deep and complicated enough, and ominous. Enough is enough. We are troubled, we know we are troubled, and many of us—the authors of the present volume especially—are shocked, indignant, critical, with eyes wide open, or as open as we can manage as educated persons, scholars and academics ourselves, as fellow citizens and citizens of the world, that is to say, as concerned and as disconcerted human beings. Today the so-called neutral grounds are and must remain high places. The aim of the present volume, which is to know, is at once also to open eyes, to warn, to alert, to awaken. Our aim is not to excuse, evade or hide the crisis but to analyze it, which means exposing its ruses and fault lines. That the crisis is already here, has already arrived, is already at work, does not mean that we are fully or even mostly cognizant of it, even if we suffer from it. It is a crisis also that the crisis hides itself. Our aim is to show its truth, to out it with truth. For that we must acknowledge— bring to knowledge—its reality and complexity, its multiple meanings and

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tentacles, its globality and locality. It is not some dragon from another world but our own child, with our face upon it, for we, we humans have created it. But because we have created it, we can fix it, defuse it, mold it—and we must, or die. The tasks can hardly be exaggerated, the dangers hardly greater, the tolling bell alarmist. Though we did not each personally choose or make the crisis, and there are not nefarious villains pulling hidden strings, we are now chosen by it, haunted and threatened by it. The villains are also victims, which is no excuse. In the present volume, each author takes up a relevant topic or theme, large or small, to shed light, to understand, to pull our heads out of the morass of ignorance and deception, to stand tall, to see farther and nearer, to walk, together, with upright heads, hearts and lives, affirming our humanity in the midst of inhumanity, to encourage meaningful humane response, oriented by goodness and justice, from the least gestures of politeness and civility, “après vous,” as Emmanuel Levinas has said, to street protests, demonstrations and revolutionary change, when necessary, in the cause of humanity, the politics of humanity. Here, in this volume, as befits a collection of essays, and scholars, we begin with analysis and criticism, but it is only a beginning. Of the four crises mentioned above, environmental collapse, nuclear weapons, wealth disparities and fascism, in this preface, as in the present volume, it is the last—the revival of fascism, call it “populism,” call it “authoritarianism”—which draws our greatest attention. After the travails of the early and mid-twentieth century, it is hard to believe, yet there can be little doubt that the “rough beast,” to use Yates’ term, the “beast of prey,” Nietzsche’s, is re-awakening, swallowing whole states, and on the prowl for fresh meat. Trampling on the dignity of each, the Leader takes charge, and mass obedience replaces integrity. Already millions are under this or that Leader’s bloodstained thumb. We might call fascism, with its aggression and violence, an animal politics, but no animal behaves with such viciousness, cruelty and malice. But it is animal-like in its spontaneity, its immediacy, its present without past or future, as if the here and how were everything. It is of this temporal compression, this narrowmindedness, oblivious to the past and indifferent to the future, which is to say, without gratitude or responsibility, that Ortega identified as the dark and darkening revolt of “mass man.” Mark Twain was no doubt more amusing when he observed: “There are no common people, except in the highest spheres of society.” The fascist Leader proves by his every word and action that he is himself a mass man. Today’s fascisms would erase and forget its

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legacy of mass murder, expansionist war, rapacity, atrocity, incarceration, indoctrination, under the sway of a nefarious roster of monstrous Leaders, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Pétain, Laval, Horthy, Antonescu, Tiso, Tojo, and so on, some psychopaths, others boors, all bullies, all narcissists. And now, following in their bloody footsteps, their epigone, Lukashenko in Belarus; Bolsonaro in Brazil; Xi Jinping in China; Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt; Orbán in Hungary; Modi in India; Tokayev in Kazakhstan; Kim Jong-un in North Korea; Duterte in the Philippines; Duda in Poland; Putin in Russia … the list goes on, the pain and suffering continues, the demeaning powers of “Me first,” dictators brazenly destroying all civic virtues, all civility, and certainly goodness and justice, which is to say, humanity’s common future. They are criminals, and liars, no doubt, because they embrace evil and perpetrate injustice, all this is  certain. But today their fascisms, their lies, evils and injustices, weighing most brutally upon their own fellow citizens, their enemies and their followers, are ills which transcend national borders, threaten us all, because exacerbating the mortal crises we must all suffer, of environmental collapse, nuclear war, and the unbridled rapacity of the financial elite. No wonder fascism troubles us so deeply. “They” are killing us, all of us. What with today’s vast dissemination of information, in schools, in books, in movies, on television, across the world wide web, we must wonder how humanity’s own already widespread experience of twentieth-­ century fascism has been so quickly forgotten? Certainly, no political regime has shed more innocent blood, been more discredited, more painfully discredited, in theory and in practice, across all human history, than fascism? Why then do large numbers of people still resort to the language, the real exclusions and oppressions of such regimes of evil and injustice as if they were solutions to their discontents? Are not the real failures, not to mention the blatant irrationality and rampant defilements of such regimes glaring, and off putting? We can only conclude that there must be something perennially seductive, perennially attractive, like a sirens’ call, like candy, about the charismatic Leader, seductive and attractive both for prospective and actual dictators and for the mass followings that cheer them on. What, then, we must ask, and we do ask, does the revival of fascism mean for politics, for the future of politics, for a politics of humanity, for justice? We would like to think the worth self-evident, but the facts show otherwise, of such high human achievements as modern science and political democracy, say, with their hard fought struggles against mythological thinking, political deception and tyranny, achievements representing an

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enormous and most desirable maturation of humanity, maintained in a public respect for the intelligence and capacity of each person to verify and know truth and to debate and realize justice, and yet today these fundamental and precious achievements are being mocked and dismantled, ruined and discarded by fascism’s ugly return, its shameless irrationality. Leader worship, exclusionary hatred, lies, everything flying in the face of truth and goodness, and of course justice—we are deeply troubled and wonder why and how, and counterpose our wonder, our inquisitiveness, as part of our larger opposition, which is built on an ethical vision of humanity, on human beings as responsible beings, each for the other, each for all, and all for each, and hence ultimately on the politics of humanity such a vision supports. Let us consider human rights, surely a bulwark against fascism, or intended as such from their very beginning. The defeat of Axis fascism in the Second World War depended on the Allies’ superior might, to be sure, but the struggle was not merely a matter of might, though fascists would say so. Human rights were at stake, democracies supporting them, fascists opposed to them. For this reason, the Americans and British framed the Second World War as a “just war,” a war legitimized by its opposition to moral evil and political injustice. With this in mind, we cite the wise, brave, humane and humble words of Eleanor Roosevelt spoken in 1958, in honor of the tenth anniversary of the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” a document written in the aftermath of the horrors of fascism and the Second World War, to forestall their recurrence. Eleanor Roosevelt was invited to speak because she had helped craft the document, with its exalted aims, but also, as in the testimony below, without having forgotten the human reality to which they referred. Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.2

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 Eleanor Roosevelt, March 27, 1958, at the United Nations, New York City.

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Eleanor Roosevelt understood the high ground without losing her footing. “Equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination,” words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, inspiring words, noble ideals, doubtlessly and rightfully, but also concrete, referring to real people, real actions, real relations, real communities, neighborhood and neighborliness. It is precisely taking up such a path that inspires what in this collection we are calling the politics of humanity, uplifting and concrete, future and real, realizing justice today and for tomorrow. The present volume takes up a variety of general and specific topics: hospitality (Marci), morality (Cohen), humanitarianism (Scuccimarra), affectivity (Huang), immigration (Scuccimarra), justice (Cohen), radicalism (Marci) and totalitarianism (Cheung). It views them from a variety of lens and contexts, philosophical, sociological, anthropological, literary, and so on, but remains united in the thematic unity of an ethical inspiration, an ethics that beyond virtue demands justice. Contrary to positivists, on the one hand, political thought and action are not reducible to quantifiable hypotheses, however much the latter satisfy the objectivist proclivities of the natural sciences modelled on mathematics. Contrary to the postmoderns, on the other hand, political ideas and events require not equivocation but clarification, not spin and opinion but informed decision, informed through public discussion guided by truth, and therefore by the honest inquiry and responsible intellection upon which truth is based. Politics is neither science nor art, but ethics. When it is mistaken for science or for art it becomes totalitarian, inhuman, dealing in objects or in images, but no longer with human beings. This volume is therefore guided by ethical considerations, by a commitment to justice, which in no way prejudices our critical approach, but gives it its edge: to realize that the parameters of true and false are not divorced from those of good and evil, justice and injustice, else politics and our humanity be lost. Knowledge and power are essential elements of politics, which is to say, essential elements of justice, if politics and justice are not to be mere dreams. This means we must take seriously the superior guidance of good over evil, justice over injustice, if knowledge and power are not to be become their own masters, sorcerers’ apprentices, as if ethics, politics and justice were reducible to truth or to power. It is not only the postmodernism, think Nietzsche, think Foucault, think Derrida’s defense of Paul de Man, but fascist regimes—with far wider consequence—that reject truth for power. It is not only the positivists, but fascist regimes as well that reduce meaning and truth to formalist systems of propositions, albeit mythic. We

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acknowledge the differences, but all three—positivists, postmoderns, and fascists—are forms of ethical and political irresponsibility, whether they directly will and perpetrate evil and injustice, as do fascists, or indirectly legitimize the theoretical conditions of the same, as do positivism and postmodernism, the one reducing truth to number, the other rejecting truth for whimsy. They each prefer power and violence to goodness and justice. We do not. The struggle for justice constitutes the political. The political is an aspiration for justice and its realization. Knowledge, culture, education, manufacture, health, and all that make up the thickness of concrete human life, are all also part of the political, subject to power, but they go off track when the political veers from justice, which is to say, when power serves itself above all else. Criticism converts into betrayal, facts and truth are disregarded, suppressed, re-­ written, double-speak replaces straightforwardness, and everything becomes a weapon of power ever paranoid to retain and increase its powers. Such is the telos of power, to detach itself from the ethical. But therefore, too, there arises the need for politics, for political struggle to restrain power, to make power serve justice, despite the enormous resistance and real difficulties, and the constant vigilance such struggle requires. The failures and half failures and compromises of such a struggle represent not its indictment, as if a blind alley, but its inspirational charge, to demand more justice, and again more. Has the world ever produced a state with too much justice? Is that our problem, too much justice? It is in the aspirations of the ethical, for good, for justice, for each, for all, in its imperative exorbitance, overcharging knowledge and everything human that we are calling a politics of humanity, which finds the unity within humanity’s diversity in the struggle for justice: against fascism in the political domain, but also against positivism and postmodernism in the realm of knowledge and truth. Such politics requires struggle and vigilance, against evil and injustice, against its brute and popularist strong men and their parties, to be sure, but also against its subtler cultured despisers no less. The destruction of good and justice keep pace with the destruction of knowledge and truth, and are but one movement seen from two perspectives—we must be wary on both fronts, at once. Whatever calm contemplation we may achieve, remains fundamentally distraught, discontent, imperative, gadfly, and the better for it. Political philosophy, like politics, requires a keen eye. One must have clarity, appreciation for differences, in space and time, discerning the formation of identities, structures, their evolution, the tensions they

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maintain, the tensions they have displaced, the tensions which would displace them, factoring in historical and material conditions, ideological pressures, social influences, economic trends, private and public interests, exceptional individuals, surprise turns, even natural events, all the continuities and discontinuities and thousand differences by which the tectonic plates, as it were, of political genealogy and geography, its alliances, amities, enmities, combinations arising, disintegrating, reforming, enduring, gestating, move and are moving. The political philosopher is happy to catch sight of the outlines, the structures, the trends of such kaleidoscopic combination and recombination. But also political philosophy, again like politics, requires a good eye, a sensitive moral compass, a scale of justice, sensitive to forward and backwards, progressive and retrograde, better and worse, virtuous and vicious, ferocity and peace, the whole gambit, the whole complicated movement of values and not just fact, the movement of facts by values, the interpenetration of facts and values, the genuine and the hypocritical, up and down, their mixture. Politics, because it is an ethics, is always a politics of humanity, hence an adventure of justice, an exodus from slavery to freedom, not respiration and perspiration alone, but inspiration and aspiration as well, the latter requiring and driving the former. So a keen and good eye alone recognizes that the same liberalism, say, which was revolutionary and progressive in the eighteenth century, against the privileges of feudalism, becomes itself reactionary and regressive in the twenty-first century when, to defend the privileges of the rich, it is turned against the demands of social democracy. A philosophy of politics must be truthful, certainly, de rigueur, because justice demands truth, requires truth, but its truths must remain appropriate to its subject-matter, which is to say, truths oriented by and toward justice, engaged in history, by real people, a philosophical perspective on the political committed and knowing, as Aristotle put it in his Politics, that “there must be war for the sake of peace, business for the sake of leisure, things useful and necessary for the sake of things honorable.”3 Philosophy, like the wisdom it seeks, like the politics it would illuminate, is thus not without direction, orientation, solicitation. The basic principle, inseparable from imperative, of a politics of humanity is that the most radical, important and guiding difference ruling all 3  Aristotle, Politics, transl. B.  Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. II, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 2115; Book VII, chapter 14 (1333a35).

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differences is precisely the transcendence or alterity of each human being, a transcendence and alterity neither objective nor subjective but arising in proximity, in respect, deference, aid, me for you, where transcendence is originally neither an ontological nor an aesthetic event, but the exceptionally singularizing event of ethics: my responsibility to and for you. That you come first—as my responsibility, as commanding imperative, against the self-aggrandizing spontaneous vitality of power alone—is the beginning of all morality, all justice, all politics. Inordinate responsibility, morality, rupturing all categories, by itself it is not enough, but it is nonetheless the rock—of fundamental generosity—upon which everything worthwhile is built. No doubt Kant was on the right track seeking the root of ethics beyond instrumentality, seeking a final end, the “good without qualification,” and was close to identifying that end as “good will.” What he failed to recognize, however, owing to the primacy he lent to cognition, was that goodness does not depend upon and does not find its end in obedience to law. Obedience to law, such is the self-regulating freedom of knowledge, at the root of all science, but we must ask if it is meant also to serve as the foundation of citizenship, of justice, as if a state were a scientific laboratory.4 To be sure, morality requires justice, requires law, just institutions, but justice must not be allowed to displace morality with its own lawfulness. More deeply, more compelling, is what gives law—natural or legislative— its authority in the first place, what makes law important. Here lies the pacific force of the moral responsibility one person takes for another person, starting with me. You are hungry, I must feed you, here, at the heart of morality, is the beginning and end of justice. It is a disequilibrium, an inequality, my responsibility to and for you, a fundamental generosity, but it reaches out to include everyone, for I cannot be moral to you at the moral expense of another—here is the role of justice, to rectify this imbalance, to universalize the singular, but never to forget it. Morality requires and demands the equality of justice, and justice, to be accomplished and not merely dreamt, requires the equations of science and knowledge. Science is not first, but it is nonetheless necessary if what is first, the other person, and hence all others as well, is to be served. The good will is good 4  Edmund Husserl, founder of contemporary phenomenology, and another subjective idealist like Kant, advocates the same transformation of citizen into scientist; see his “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man” (1935), in Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, transl. and ed. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 149–192.

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and laws are good because they are good for human beings, for all and for each, for all because it never forgets each, aiming in its justice to be good for all by being good for each without exception. Admittedly, assuredly, there is much difficult and nothing simplistic about such politics. To serve all and to serve each—that is the problematic of a politics of humanity: neither the common good alone, nor the good of the individual alone, neither totalitarian nor atomistic, “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Unlike the objects of science or the individuating identifiers on passports, such as fingerprints, facial ratios or DNA sequences, the selfhood arising as responsibility is an election—again it is Levinas’s term, as it is the Bible’s—in the first person singular and not a space–time differential for third person inspection or official registration. Election not as privilege, but as responsibility, the privilege of responsibility for others. Responsibility is not at first an object or objectivity, even though ethical knowledge— institutions, laws, constitutions—will be built upon it. The first difference is a priority, an exigency, one that weighs upon me as a moral obligation: the other’s alterity as vulnerability demanding care from me. What comes first is the other’s appeal, solicitation, obligation, an imposition. These are not first agreed upon, not contracted, and then fulfilled or not. Providing for and protecting the other is sincerity, is responsibility, is the root condition that enables and drives humans to set up contracts, agreements, laws, and the like in the first place. Not by such contracts but beyond and above them, more precious than their legalism and formalities, the singular other obligates me, incumbers me, singularizes me precisely as responsible. No doubt also, it is in the disjunction between proximity and contract, sincerity and legality, that much predatory litigation does its worst. Sincerity eludes the objectifications of bad will. But the truth, or the ethical core remains: our basic humanity comes not from a shared genus, as if it were an object, but from a humanitas, an obligation incumbent on every I, on each I, as its very singularization, or election. The other comes first, you before me—here is the beginning of all responsibility, and hence all intelligibility. Here, outside all formalities and contracts, “imprescriptible, and inalienable,” to invoke the words of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” (1789), lies the source of political legitimacy, of public authority, what Walter Lippmann, after the defeat of fascism in the Second

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World War, spoke of as the unspoken but presupposed “public philosophy,”5 and perhaps what Rousseau should have specified more precisely in terms of morality and justice when he spoke of a “general will” more pervasive and unifying than electoral majorities. The human dignity of each person, which is the justification for democracy—the rule of the people—lies not in the rights of persons taken as isolated atoms, each self-interested independent of other persons. Here is not the place to invoke the usual and obvious counters: humans are born as helpless babies, and raised by others; language, English or Navaho, is by its very nature a social medium; clans, farms, towns, cities, businesses are networks of interdependencies; and so on, all true. “It takes a village to raise a child,” as the African proverb has it. Human dignity is at once inalienable and relational. But never simply a comparative, exchangeable, a measure, or quantity; rather it arises as immeasurable responsibility, for the neighbor, for the “orphan, the widow, the stranger,” for one’s daughter, for someone else’s daughter, and sometimes, in unwonted extremity, all the way to dying for the other person, as have war heroes, rescue responders, and other heroes of the spirit, acknowledged or unsung. The sense of the world, the world of values, begins in my responsibility for my neighbor, because the person who I face is the one who is suffering, but it cannot end until everyone is cared for, protected, given equal opportunities, respected—and here politics must play its role. As Eleanor Roosevelt underscored, everything great begins small, to a human scale, in the smallest gestures of generosity, usually unrecognized, unpublicized, unknown to history. Too many politicians have taken the easier route of saying the right words in public, to gain a reputation for honesty, integrity, solicitude, than to actually fulfill the promise of such terms in daily life, face to face with people from all walks of life, poor and rich, kind and crabby, fellows and foreigners, or in legislation, institutions, the daily labor of making equal care and equal opportunity real. What do generosity, kindness, care, hospitality, and the like mean in the abstract? Knowing the virtues is not enough (though better than not knowing) if they are not enacted, made real. Responsibility, the kindness of each for each, is out of political 5  See, Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1955). Like many well-intentioned post-war liberal democrats, Lippmann analyzed the rise of fascism and the failure of liberal democracy in ideological terms, as if a shift in mental attitude would be capable of fixing things, but fails thereby to recognize that governments also stand and fall on material conditions, that plutocracy, the rule of money, whatever ideology it espouses, is essentially undemocratic, like the fascism is eventually adopts.

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control in the sense that each person can be responsible without government permission, and, in the worst cases, contrary to government policies and laws. No government can crush responsibility, though they can—and this is their purpose—encourage, support, enhance the moral life of justice. Responsibility must also take responsibility for good government, to control politics, justify just institutions, procedures, laws, health care, and all the interventions demanded to realize the good of all, for the good of each. We are neither alone nor ensconced in a Garden of Eden, but are social beings, each independent not in an abstract legalist individualism of rights, but in a singularity combining rights and duties, the singularity of responsibility, in the intimacy of commitments, and in the proximity of larger broader obligations to all, near and far. Justice, fairness, care for all, must supplement, extend and protect personal generosity. Morality which demands giving all to the neighbor must be rectified by justice which cares for others, for all others, as well. With hindsight we can now better see that Locke and Hobbes were fearful for property, for the propertied, equating political freedom with the freedom of the property holder, the monied, fearing the rapacious mob. But property and individuals are never private in the sense of being outside of society, a human society. Justice is necessary not to tame beasts, thieves, the rapacious mob, but quite otherwise, to limit and rectify goodness, to spread generosity, to share goods fairly, to care for everyone. Justice does not block bestiality, but prevents morality from losing itself in vague sentimentality. Realpolitik is fundamentally mistaken to think power is or ever can be divorced from goodness and justice. Or to say this differently: power divorced from goodness and justice is but evil and injustice. Denying ethics does not make this go away, despite the harsh words and harsher deeds Thucydides attributes to the Athenians who subjugated Melos, which have been repeated innumerable times, tributes to the violence of power unleashed. Plato and Aristotle both understood more correctly, more truly that politics—good or bad— is a type of ethics, the public empowerment of virtue through justice, whether successful or stymied. Morality is not enough, and the community of virtue by itself, without state sanctioned justice, perpetrates ethical horrors.6 Moral responsibility demands social responsibility, the two cannot be separated without losing each. Here is another maxim of the politics of 6  See my recent article, Richard A. Cohen, “Judges 19–21: The Failure of the Community of Virtue,” in Religions, 2020.

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humanity. Morality without justice becomes mere sentimentality, hollow words. Justice without morality becomes totalitarian, hypocritical words. Liberalism, then, for all the genuine nobility of the human rights it defends, when defending them to reject their real corollary, the social justice which is their flesh and blood, shatters the social fabric into anarchy or succumbs to the tyranny of fascism, or in truth becomes both at once, fascist totalitarianism: individuals isolated, rendered helpless, without social support, subject to the will of the One Leader, backed by the terrorizing power of the state, the One Party State. To begin with responsibility, each person responsible for the other, is to avoid the fundamental category mistake of positivism and liberalism, which apply scientific categories, “universal” and “particular,” “genus” and “species,” and the statistical analyses such categories enable, as if the latter were sufficient to grasp the human, the ethical dialectic of human dignity and human sociality. By such a category mistake it reduces the dignity of each to individuality as particularity, which is to say, as eccentricity, or conformity, as oddity, or regularity, replacing persons with caricatures, objects, calculable abstractions, numbers instead of names. In the name of such calculations, whose ultimate form is financial, money exchanges, and whose ultimate aim is the accumulation of money, which is not even an aim but the exaltation of a means, what is lost is our true singularity and dignity, found in responsibility, each for each, each for all, all for each. Politics, aiming for justice, aims to empower such responsibilities, and hence also, necessarily, to bridle the powers that would trample on them. Relationship with others is not some special event or experience, certainly not an accident, but lies in the very bowels of selfhood. We are mortal vulnerable beings, open to one another, responsive. Responsibility is the form such responsiveness, such intersectionality takes in adults. Otherwise so much remains inexplicable, before it is ideologically spun by this or that self-serving interest. How explain that people raise children, take care of the elderly, pay taxes to support education and health care, protect total strangers? It is certainly not all forced, not all fear of police or prison. How explain that people sacrifice personal interests narrowly conceived for the greater good, for aspirations of their own, yes, but aspirations shared by others, for the greater good of a humanity they will never know, generations to come. People join movements, political parties, take to the streets, vote, write letters, speak out, and so forth, not always for personal gain, for narrow self-interest, but in the name of dearly held values, ethical values. Only those who represent their own interests without

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regard for the general good promote the self-serving ideology of self-­ interested individuals each on the make, each competing against all others, a war of all against all, wolves against wolves. Because in today’s world it is money that rules, it is no wonder that this self-serving ideology serves the rich, an ideology of material selfishness, of disregard of others, its freedom the freedom of the free market, of buying and selling, not of cooperation and human solidarity. We must acknowledge, then, that the libertarian and neo-liberal defense of human rights is disingenuous, claiming to defend in human rights the humanity of the human, it makes sure to exclude social rights, the rights of society, of our solidarity with others. The politics of humanity, in contrast, is not against human rights, does not belittle or discard them, but rather takes them more seriously, puts them in their material and social context, to flesh them out in terms of their concrete fulfillment. The right to free speech, for instance, or press, or assemble, means so much more, not less, when society cooperates and chips in to provide free public education, from kindergarten to university, as has been done in Europe, where liberal democracy has matured into social democracy. The first step is to realize that the universality of justice, while depending upon science, on truth, is not reducible to the same but is instead and fundamentally an ethics, a matter of human betterment. As T. H. Green in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the first political philosophers to challenge liberal individualism, said: the aim of politics is not to maximize my happiness, or your happiness, but the common good, whereby we all flourish and which benefits us all. Hobbes was wrong. He thought justice derived from the state, that it was equivalent to the power of enforcement, and that injustice was therefore reducible to law breaking. But he confused might with right. Might is necessary, to be sure, because we are not angels, but it is right not by power alone but only when it supports right—this is the great difficulty of all politics, to bend power to right. Power by itself does not justify itself but wills only more power, always more, indifferent to right and wrong. Politics, whose task is to bend might to right, requires vigilance, constant and  unrelenting vigilance against power. Neither morality nor justice is reducible to power, even if justice requires power to protect, maintain and extend morality. This is why public force, public sanctions, durable institutions, and law itself, must be subject to constant public review, and always open to improvement, to greater approximation to genuine justice. True patriotism is protest. Not obedience, it is contestation, remonstrance, truth

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spoken to power, like the reproofs of the biblical prophets, for the sake of the more justice which is always lacking and always outstanding. Love of country is to realilze that no state, including one's own, is just enough. The problem has never been that a state, any state, has been too just, that we must retrench, cut back, retreat from too much justice, but rather that there has never been enough justice. This is an ennobling truth, however much a recidivist and chauvinist notion of patriotism denies it. Hobbes was wrong, but so was Locke. The constitutive figure of politics  is  not a wolf  but is also not an isolated self-serving individual, an autonomous freedom restrained only by other freedoms, which conception is but a reflection of the then rising influence of capitalism, and the “possessive individualism” of its free market, later identified and meticulously analyzed by C. B. Macpherson.7 The basic unit of politics is not an isolated individual, not a particular of a universal, but rather a responsibility, the zero-point of moral goodness, being for-the-other before being for-itself. It is a social relation, to be sure, but one that never effaces and indeed respects the singularity of each person, because it understands that singularity as moral responsibility, extending all the way to justice. Politics, justice, the politics of humanity, is an ineluctable extension of this original responsibility. Infinite responsibility for the one who faces, it is not enough to care for the neighbor alone, because that neighbor has neighbors as well, is other to others, is supported and threatened by the larger world. Strange as it may sound, giving my all, including all of me, to you, to the one other—is not good enough. There are other others who also must be cared for— all of them. Only justice can serve them, me included. The source of justice is not power or contract, not will, not law, not freedom, but all of these put into service to rectify and secure the infinity of moral responsibility. The universality of moral singularity demands the universality of social solidarity, demands law, justice, and the universality of knowledge required for justice. Nothing is more delusional or more dangerous than realpolitik. It is untrue to politics, and untrue to humanity, not just blind but dismissive, corrosive and callous toward our generosity for one another. “Be realistic!” is the howl of unreality, the delusional rallying cry of bullies and liars, of the selfish and self-indulgent, of those who would sacrifice the world for

7  C.  B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

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their own vanity rather than grow up and shoulder the responsibilities by which human beings achieve dignity, worthiness. The subtler intellectualized cultivated rarified forms of this same stupidity and violence are found in positivism and postmodernism, the first because it would totalize objectivist truth at the expense of social and human truths, and the second because it would make truth impossible, including social and human truths. To pursue this two-pronged claim exceeds the bounds of the present Introduction. Let us instead recall the sobering words of that lifelong social activist Rosa Luxemburg, murdered and martyred by right-wing thugs in Germany in 1919, who in 1900 declared: “No courser insult, no baser aspersion, can be thrown against the workers than the remark: ‘Theoretic controversies are only for academicians.’”8 It matters how and what we think, we workers, citizens, academics, professionals, Americans, Chinese, Christians, Jews, men, women, all of us, as it matters how and what we do, and it matters to each of us, to everyone, and for everyone. Here, gathered together as scholars, truth-seekers, scientists, social scientists and humanists, in the following we hope to demonstrate, by analysis, interrogation and example, that intellectual responsibility is originally and always a moral responsibility, and as such is inextricably bound to our social and political responsibilities, guided by the ideal of justice for all while respecting each.

References Aristotle. (1995). Politics (B. Jowett, Trans.). In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, Revised Oxford Translation (Vol II). Princeton University Press. Cohen, R. A. (2020, October). Judges 19–21: The Failure of the Community of Virtue. Religions 2020, 11(10). Reconciling the God of Traditional Theism with the World’s Evils. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11100531, Article Number 531, 21pp Gandhi, M. K. (1960). My Non-Violence. Navajivan Press. Husserl, E. (1965). Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (Q. Lauer, Trans. and Ed.). Harper & Row. Lippmann, W. (1955). The Public Philosophy. Little, Brown & Company. Luxemburg, R. (1978). Reform or Revolution (Integer, Trans.). Pathfinder Press. Macpherson, C. B. (1962). The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford University Press. 8  Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, transl. Integer (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978), 9.

PART I

Principles of Justice

CHAPTER 2

Ethics of Hospitality: The Limits of Cosmopolitan Rights Tito Marci

Introduction This is a brief study of the question of hospitality, which analyses the issue from the perspective of ethics and rights. In this regard I think it is important to reconsider and re-debate the problem of migration—and of the tragedies linked to migration flows— within a broader conceptual framework or one that defines the relationships, practices, and the very notion of hospitality. And this is to the extent to which hospitality puts into play the figure of the foreigner, as well as the problems of foreignness and otherness correlated with it. Let us say from the outset that the concept of “foreigner” refers essentially to a relationship, to a condition of reciprocity. One is always foreign to someone else; we are all foreigners to those we consider foreign. In fact, the very intrusion of the other, of those who are foreign, inescapably qualifies, defines, and constitutes us as foreigners ourselves, foreign to those who are foreign. And if the other, the outsider, is someone who identifies us, who constitutes us in our intimacy as foreigners, it means that starting

T. Marci (*) Department of Political Sciences, University of Rome – La Sapienza, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_2

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precisely from this original moment we always remain foreigners to ourselves. It is necessary, then, to shift our gaze, to reposition it, and to bring it to the perspective of the relationship of hospitality. The parties in this relationship are constituted as outsiders, foreigners, others among themselves. There is no subject except in relation to the other (and with the other), which is to say there is no constitution of the subject except within the terms (albeit hostile, unexpected, or denied) of hospitality. Hospitality— the relationship of hospitality—makes the subject appear as an other with respect to the other, or better, the subject appears with the other on his or her own in the space of hospitality, and it is this space that, lastly, establishes, defines, and qualifies their reciprocal subjectivity—just like their specific identity (as outsiders, foreigners, friends, or enemies). To put it differently, the subject does not precede his or other other, but appears with the other within respect to the relationship of hospitality. This is why, in a time when an unstoppable exodus of people, multitudes, and population is being recorded, we must go back to reflecting on the profound meaning of this relationship.

The Problem of Identity, or Identity as a Problem As may be easily understood, this question essentially refers, on the anthropological level, to the problem of identity. And identity, as sociological studies show, is a social process, which is to say it is a process of collective construction. It is not a mere biological fact ascribable to human nature; nor is it a “metaphysical” fact that may be ascribed to a priori principles of the mind, immutable and non-temporal. It is, rather, a social, cultural, and symbolic fact, a still-developing aspect of the social structure that involves human personality, and therefore an integral part of each individual. The structure of people’s personality is developed in connection with the social (and relational) ability to guide and regulate the sensitivity and behaviour of individuals, via processes of control and coercion that permit the self-­ regulation of the group and of individuals (social and individual self-regulation). However, structural personality traits that, through social processes of control, education, and regulation, are from certain standpoints inevitable and constrictive, are often experienced and summarized conceptually, in accordance with the predominant canons of knowledge, as natural qualities and innate attributes (Elias, 1986, pp. 165–175). And it is based on

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this synthetic reduction that the question of identity in its controvertible relationship with the concept of belonging is problematically exposed. It is precisely this phenomenon, the assimilation (and overlapping) of the two terms with respect to an “identity-based belonging,” that ends up revealing the divergence between the sense of identity and the condition of the foreigner and, in more recent times, the citizen/foreigner, us/them dualities (a massive opposition, conceptually reinforced by the historical emergence of the idea of “nation,” of belonging, and national identity, and that proceeds in parallel—and dangerously—with the other political opposition, that between friend and foe). Indeed, what do we mean today by the term “identity-based belonging”? Trust, certainty, and awareness of belonging to a specific territorial community, to a given legal system, to a given political body, to a particular nation. Law guarantees and strengthens this idea of belonging, through a fundamental legal principle, the principle of sovereignty, that articulates the law within international law, and based on which a State’s discretionary powers include those of delimiting its own territory, defining rules of belonging to the national community, and therefore instituting and regulating the binary opposition between “national” and “foreign.” The link between State, territory, and population thus appears fundamentally important: the State, as a limited entity, defines its territory, builds its own space of jurisdiction, and sets its boundaries (physical, political, and juridical). In our legal systems, this link also establishes the relationship between nationality and citizenship, from which the protections of political rights are derived. In a formal sense, citizenship is, in short, nothing other than the ability to take part in and contribute to political power, particularly through elections. In this sense, foreigners, those who are situated outside the national space, who are placed outside the borders, are not granted political capacity (in some countries, foreigners are granted the possibility of taking part in local elections, but are always denied access to active citizenship, which is to say the ability to take part in the construction of central, executive, and legislative power). On this level, nationality, as a political and juridical dimension within whose margins identity-based belonging is defined, is constitutive of personal identity (what we call “people’s status”). Belonging to the nation-­ state, with its territory and citizenship, is a fundamental prerequisite of personal identity (consider the “identification card,” which includes name, surname, place and date of birth and, in fact, nationality).

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If we remain on these terms, which institute and establish a relatively stable political and juridical control as regards the fundamental relationship of inclusion/exclusion, belonging/extraneousness, we immediately understand that identity, in the meaning of political (national) belonging, appears more than anything else a pre-established dimension and not a dynamic process that is open and disposed to encountering the other. The other, if anything else, as a foreigner, is the one who strengthens the feeling of identity-based belonging and who at the same time appears to us in terms of a negative reciprocity, as an “unknown,” as belonging to another nation, as a threat or as a potential enemy. But we know nothing of the other as such, as the other “for him or herself.” We know the other only— from this particular perspective—as a foreigner through the various figures that articulate, in our eyes, his or her extraneousness, from the more reassuring one of the tourist, to the more disturbing one of the migrant, or to the even more problematic one of the refugee or illegal immigrant. If the tourist is the visitor who circulates freely and temporarily in the host country’s territory (unlike the foreign resident who has established him or herself in a place and is staying there), migrants are forced visitors, foreign workers forced to hire out their labour in a different country. They live in the protected space of the host State, circulate freely within state boundaries, and are consumers taking part in the market economy; some access social security protections, enjoy trade-union rights, and benefit from the same housing rights as a nation’s citizens. However, they are not citizens and do not participate in political power (and here the contrast between labour mobility and circulation on a global scale, and the closure of the political space of citizenship, is underlined); symbolically, they are not part of those who live together thanks to the remote (and imaginary) will upon which the national pact is founded. The condition of refugee, to the contrary, underscores the sovereign choice of States as regards the composition of the population and access to the territory. This sovereign choice serves as a filter to a right derived from a source other than the desire to decide to live elsewhere, which is to say the right of persecuted populations, which corresponds to the right to be granted asylum by the countries that receive them. On the other hand, we grant no rights to the illegal immigrant, except for those to which they are generically entitled as human beings. Since they have not been received, they have no right to circulate, stay, or reside in the territory of a foreign nation.

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Memories of Extraneousness Before proceeding on our path towards reconsidering the relationship— and right—of hospitality, we had to consider those figures that, on the legal and political level, articulate the relationship between citizens and foreigners. At the same time, we had to reconstruct, in its essential bases, the characteristics that define the reassuring, stable condition of identity-­ based belonging. Now, before reaching our conclusions, we still have to devote some time to rethinking and debating the foundations upon which the citizen– foreigner binary opposition, and the us–them polarization, rest. Upon what certainty is this opposition built? In a conference held at the French Social Weeks in 1997, Paul Ricoeur sought to provide a response to this question (Ricoeur, 2013, pp. 39–50). His conclusion was essentially the following: “If we do not know who we are, at least we know what we belong to” (Ibid., p. 44). To put it differently, the awareness of belonging to a community, of being its members (the fact of being of a certain nationality out of a “symbolic adoption”), compensates for the inability to truly know who we are, to answer this fundamental question. It is necessary to explain: the concept of belonging is so strong that it spurs us to personify the collective dimension we depend on, or better, to consider the nation we belong to as a person. It is starting from this collective personification that the foreigner finds his or her negative definition as someone who does not belong to our sphere of identity and to the group we belong to. Only the memory of having been foreigners, according to Ricoeur, can cause this sense of identity-based belonging, this stable and certain position upon which our (often assimilated) concepts of citizenship and nationality rest, to waver. It is the theme of memory, then, that Ricoeur develops in his reconstruction, and his references are two biblical passages: Leviticus 19:34 (“34 But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt”) and Matthew 25 (“I was a stranger, and ye took me in”). In the first passage, the foundational experience of exile, the historical memory of exile (the memory of having been foreigners) is entwined with the issue of love for one’s neighbour and the exhortation of hospitality. This is for the most part a “symbolic memory” through which the

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actual condition of foreigners is internalized. The second passage evokes (on the eschatological level) a final judgment, a “double judgment.” Now, it is precisely the “symbolic memory,” the “profound re-­ memorization of the final absence of the last roots underlying our existence”, that, according to Ricoeur, destabilizes our identity, which is to say our certainty of belonging to a given identity (Ibid., p. 44). The recollection of our original extraneousness should, in some way, permit the passage from the certainty of the identity of belonging (belonging to a political body) to the radical uncertainty as to our being there, our dwelling in the world. According to Ricoeur, we have to pass from the question “What do we belong to?” (the answer to which is provided at the level of identity of belonging) to the question “Who are we, deep down? Who am I?” (the answer to which introduces a path of destabilization, laceration, that opens the way to the problem of our own original extraneousness). In essence, the regime of the two different questions corresponds to a different order of the identity of belonging (reinforced by the reassuring feeling of belonging to a given political body), and a more disquieting, fragile, and profound identity (that which exposes us to the territory of otherness, to the hidden areas of our own extraneousness), that the identity of belonging tends for the most part to mask and conceal. The path of destabilization begins, on the psychological level, with regard to the other, initially perceived, in accordance with our “natural and spontaneous xenophobia,” as a fundamental threat to our identity of belonging, which is to say to our stability. But it is precisely the confrontation with the other that takes the lid off our fragility, casting into doubt our certainty of always being the same to ourselves, always identical in change. It is this same confrontation that, on the cultural, political, and social level, causes the idea upon which we place the feeling of our collective identity (an identity that nearly always rests upon a founding violence, upon an original barbarism) to waver. Identity-based passions are profoundly rooted in us, and it is for this reason that psychologically, culturally, socially, and politically, we resist the intrusion of the other; and it is for this reason that we do not proceed to understanding the other, the person who, as a foreigner, shares our own condition of extraneousness. “The important thing from this standpoint,” writes Ricoeur, “is not to remove the bad feeling, but to bring it to the light of language. The real question is: what do we do with this sentiment; how do we combat it? Here begins the work of the recollection of exile” (Ibid., p. 45).

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To thwart the “ghost of the foreigner,” to overcome all the dangers of confrontation with the other, it is necessary, then, to leverage memory, the recollection of our original condition of extraneousness, of exile, to the point of feeling ourselves to be others among many, of beginning from the recognition of our own linguistic extraneousness (of linguistic non-­ communication): “the diversity of languages constitutes a primitive fragmentation.” It is starting from here that we discover, perhaps for the first time, “the miracle of hospitality in the form of translation.” And translating means “inhabiting another language: the other language of our own” (Ibid., p. 46). It is at this point, then, that Ricoeur introduces the theme of the “return to hospitality,” to a right reciprocal to hospitality: “to reinvent hospitality thanks to the fictitious or real recollection of having been foreign”; it is a return to Leviticus and to Matthew, in the interval between the two biblical texts: “If we must remember having been, and always being, foreigners, it is for the sole purpose of rediscovering the path of hospitality” (Ibid., p. 47). On this path, which assumes a common living, a “sharing of being in one’s home,” Ricoeur rediscovers the duty—and right—of hospitality. And he rediscovers it through Kant’s Plan for perpetual peace. “It is not a matter here of philanthropy, but of law. Hospitality in this case means the right the foreigner has, upon his or her arrival in another’s territory, not to be treated as an enemy […]. It is the right of every man to come forward as a member of society.” In other words, this means that every guest is a virtual candidate for citizenship. Only in this sense does hospitality become an actual right. Of course, but what right is this? “At this point,” Ricoeur reminds us, “we come to the foundation of international law, to that underlying element of the law that was not intercepted by national law, but that has yet to find its appropriate institutions, given that even the UN is merely an expression of its members’ goodwill. It is a coalition; in this sense, it is not yet an institution in the strong sense of a superior, sovereign forum” (Ibid., pp. 48–9). It is necessary, then, to restore meaning to international law by effectively rethinking the reciprocal right of hospitality along the line of legal cosmopolitanism formulated by Kant. And on this point, Ricoeur’s questioning perhaps reaches its most advanced stage. “Is it possible to conceive a citizenship without borders? In other words, can one escape from the citizen-foreigner binary relationship?” Here is where the difficulties begin.

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“Where is the underlying problem? It is that we do not know—and no one knows—how to combine, in a human and intelligent way, international law—and its foundation of reciprocal right of hospitality—with the binary structure of the political: citizen-foreigner. We do not know” (Ibid., p. 49).

The Institution of Hospitality We must therefore accord to Kant the merit of having re-proposed, in modern times (in the Enlightenment-era climate of natural law and of eighteenth-century humanitarianism), the idea of a “cosmopolitan right” limited to “conditions of universal hospitality” (Kant, 1995, p. 301): a law that, as men, identifies us as guests of one another, without any other (rationally based) existing right to scorn and mistreat one another reciprocally for reasons of origin; a “Natural Law,” then, perceived as a need of reason, like having to be unrenounceable and irrepressible. Although this is still a matter of setting limits, boundaries, and conditions upon the exercise and the practice of a hospitality still perceived as a universal experience, the German philosopher in fact had the merit of elevating it to the category of the juridical. In fact, he had the merit of elevating the hospitable imperative, as we have seen, to the legal/political equivalent of the moral categorical imperative: “cosmopolitan right must be limited to conditions of universal hospitality” (Ibid.). And beyond its inevitable contradictions, this means rethinking a law open to the outsider, to receiving the other, albeit within the margins of the risk that this opening always brings with it; this means drawing—and perhaps by overturning—Kantian natural law towards territories closer to us (but certainly quite far from him), considering man not as an autonomous, self-sufficient individual, in full possession of himself, but as an originally and ontologically lacking subject, exposed to a law that, at the same time, delivers him into a situation of debt, of duty to the other. By forcing Kant’s legal philosophy just a bit, we might also state that this right does not retreat before the idea of a social relationship as a meeting place among strangers, as a paradoxical space in which the other is manifested in the contact he or she has with him or her: a space certain of opposition, but also of reciprocal “interpretation,” in which the first are presented to the others as others before themselves. At any rate, juridical integration has its “reasons” and its limits, beyond which one would fall into that anomie that has always threatened the possibility of coexistence. In the same way, law defines (and redefines) its very

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boundaries within which the play of inclusion/exclusion is necessarily placed (done, undone, recomposed). By its very nature, law includes whenever it excludes, and excludes whenever it includes: this is its paradoxical dialectic. But in this continuous dynamic, law is truly such (at least in its ethical projection, in its essential ethos) if it remains open to the intrusion of the other, exposed to the emergence of that possible diversity that inescapably removes it from the politics of belonging, from the hostile defence of an identity preconstituted and defined a priori. Thinking of the right of hospitality with regard to this opening thus means accessing an idea of hospitality as a relationship within which the reception of the other as a foreigner is placed, but also, and at the same time, the recognition of my original extraneousness, both with regard to the other and with regard to myself, my own identity: recognition, then, of myself as a foreigner with respect to those whom I am willing to receive, and of myself as a foreigner to myself, as someone who dwells in a permanent otherness to one’s own separate, particular, finite identity. In the same way, hospitality is not just one right out of many (“right of hospitality”): it is the right itself to the extent to which it enters into the territory of debt by affirming a duty to others. Its Law comes before positive legislations and the rigidity of legal codes; it precedes States and Nations (and always constitutes a challenge to them); it comes before the political rights of the consolidated identities and of established communities, whether family, national, or state. We should then conceive hospitality (and, at the same time, the right of hospitality) beyond the particularist domain of state law (beyond positive state law), beyond any “culturalist” and “identity-based” constitution, beyond any project of community belonging. A relationship of hospitality that does not assume the objective integration of “Us,” that does not postulate a collective becoming, that does not, at the same time, recognize the abstractness, separateness, arbitrariness, and coercion of the State’s law. In fact, it is not a matter of constituting any community (be it ethnic, racial, political, national, international, or supranational), since the reference to hospitality assumes an original experience that precedes any constraint or bond founded upon belonging, any communion founded upon identity, any appropriation defined by a common subject. But at the same time, we must not forget that hospitality assumes, on an even deeper level, an original relationship with the other that precedes the individual’s own constitution, the conscience of identity; in fact, it is actually a matter of an opening to the other, of an accommodation of the

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other, of an acting for the other that precedes the very definition of the inter-individual relationship. Indeed, it is not a matter, here, of the other as identity (as psychological individuality or ethnic, national, or cultural entity), but, in fact, as otherness (as an absolute and universal singularity). However, things are not as simple as they might appear at first glance. Since the times when its practice was conceptually elaborated, the sphere of hospitality has in fact appeared marked by an irremediable ambivalence. Greek Antiquity, in its mythological narratives, clearly showed that underlying every hospitality was a hostile principle, an inhospitable, sacrificial foundation. Behind the Hospitable Zeus (Xénios), behind the Hospitable Apollo, there is always a victim, a murder. Behind the establishment of a city, of a temple, of a festival, of a rite of hospitality, and behind the foundation of the law of hospitality, a murder lies concealed (Detienne, 2002, pp. 252–6): hospitality is founded upon and originates in its opposite; it coexists with the inhospitable. I am entering into the paradoxical and complex space that ambiguously defines the terms of different experiences of otherness—one political, negotiable, resolvable in the economics of differences, and the other existential, that cannot be assimilated or reduced to any possible order—that the juridical and ethical meaning of hospitality for the Greeks brings into play; it is a meaning that, still in the language of Homer, likens the term xénos with the ambivalent one of phílos, thereby underscoring the obligatory behaviour vis-à-vis the “foreign guest.” This is because hospitality, the law of hospitality, is truly possible only in relation to what, albeit in accommodation, still remains extraneous, other, irreducible to any form of belonging or assimilation. And it is just as paradoxically possible only if the other, the outsider, weakens his or her extraneousness, his or her potential hostility, at least by ordering his or her difference upon recognition of the accommodation accorded to him or her. As we know, the ancient world, and especially the Greek and Roman world, always saw in the hospitality relationship the oscillation of those two opposing moments of hostility and of accommodation that the modern world (modern rationalization), by separating and polarizing them in a rigid dichotomy, has resolutely held as opposite and distinct, ascribing them to the lexicon of politics (consider, among others, Carl Schmitt1): friendship and animosity, extraneousness and belonging, otherness and identity, hostility and alliance. It is an opposition that the Latin language 1

 Above all the Carl Schmitt of the Concept of “politic,” of 1932 (Schmitt, 1932).

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still maintained link and united in the hostis-hospes hendiadys (Benveniste, 1976, I, p. 64): in the figure of guest–hostile, the friend–stranger. And it is in fact on this level that the institution of hospitality, upon closer analysis, was still able to manifest itself in all its complexity and in all its paradox. The guest, from this standpoint, is both hospes and hostis, the reassuring mirror image, the proximity to ourselves and, at the same time, the disquietude of otherness. It is the outsider and, at the same time, ourselves in the moment when we traverse the experience of being estranged from the world we live in. It is the other, then, and even more than ourselves: the other that, in his or her fearsome extraneousness, allows us paradoxically to overcome the fear of our estranged condition, projecting it onto itself, onto its otherness. However, it was perhaps precisely social conflict, the ambivalent antagonism of the tension between opposites that is typical of the relationship of hospitality among strangers that, on the wave of the social transformations (political, economic, technical, and cultural) of modern civilization (1795), Kant sought to resolve by formulating, in the Third definitive article for a perpetual peace (Kant, 1995, p. 302), his idea of a “right of hospitality”—a Besuchsrecht (right of visit) more than a full Gastrecht (right of hospitality, of residence). In line with the universalist expectations of his cosmopolitanism, Kant, in fact, reinterpreted the problem of hospitality through the idea of a law able, of course, to recognize the freedom of circulation of goods (freedom of trade) and of people (freedom to visit), but aimed, at any rate, at solving the problems posed by otherness, by dissolving them definitively in order not only to the unversalizing claims (a priori by necessity) of a principle of reason (of an inescapable having to be), but also to the realization of a process of gradual homologization (and, we might say, “globalization”)— cultural, legal, political, economic, and social (on this level, we may also state that, in the Kantian spirit, the extension of law to the terms of universal hospitality would appear, more than anything else, to find an essential correspondence in the need for the expansion of trade). It is no accident, then, that in more recent years marked by planet-wide wars, by inter-ethnic conflicts, by the crisis of international relations, and by the precarious nature of multicultural relations, a philosopher like Jacques Derrida, reinterpreting the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas, re-­ proposed the ethical theme of hospitality at the margin of Kantian cosmopolitanism, which is to say beyond those juridical limits within which Kant had confined it.

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If the technical deployment of reason (the potential of its calculation and its economy) is not followed by the realization of an effective social integration among strangers; if, in other words, the experience of reason does not find correspondence in that of freedom, and the “progress” of rationality does not coincide with that of peace, it is necessary, then, beyond any philosophy of history, to rethink the relationship of hospitality with regard to the reformulation of an unconditional hospitality (unlimited by laws, policies, and economies) capable of accommodating the other in all his or her paradoxical ambivalence and otherness. In other words, it is necessary to reconsider hospitality up to the limit of its paradox and of its contradiction: a hospitality that is such (that is truly such) only if exposed limitlessly to the possibility of its negation, if open to accommodate even the inhospitable, what irremediably pushes it to the margins of its own cancellation; a hospitality, then, that, at the very moment when one suffers, is capable of accepting the possibility of being contradicted, disavowed, dissolved, and upset with regard to its mirrored overturning: the entering into the territory of hostility that has always threatened it and that has always maintained a necessary relationship of tension with it. It is a matter, then, of rethinking what Derrida called unconditional hospitality: impossible hospitality, heterogeneous to the political, the juridical, and even the ethical, but not for this reason “unreal,” since it is at any rate disposed to something that can always happen. A hospitality, then, that is exposed without limit to the arrival of the other, beyond rights (beyond the hospitality conditioned by the asylum right, by the right to immigration, by citizenship), albeit the right of universal hospitality that Kant speaks of, and that remains still controlled by political or cosmopolitan right. This is because—and here lies the paradox—only an unconditional hospitality, exposed beyond the limits of what condition gives it, can give meaning and practical rationality to its authentic concept. It is as if to say: “unconditional” hospitality exceeds economic calculus, juridical measurement, political boundaries, but nothing and no one can, in reality take place without it. In fact, if law—and, to a greater degree, the “law of hospitality”—with its rules, its conditions, and its restrictions, always appears to compress, and even dissolve, every authentic ethic of hospitality, it is only paradoxically upon this, through its unlimited opening, that it can, at any rate, take place. Only to the extent in which it permits us to access the more authentic sense of duty, of obligation, of debt to others, is law truly revealed for what it is, and what it must always be: that which, by defining our demands, protecting our interests, stabilizing our

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position and our identity, places us inescapably in relation to outsiders, the ones against the others. In fact, whenever we are attributed or granted a right, we find ourselves, at the same time, in debt, in a situation of debt: by establishing a right, a duty is unconditionally affirmed. Even before accessing the word (the linguistic community), and even before, via the word, accessing the conscience of our own being, we in fact, through law, access what defines our own personality, our own personal identity, our identifying details (our name): that which, then, binds us to others and qualifies us (heteronomously) as parties in relation to the universe of others, both to those who “pre-exist” us in the chain of generations, and to humanity in general. By concealing this paradoxical oscillation—the continuous toppling of right into duty, the constant overturning of having the right to being in debt—actually ends up not recognizing that bond of hospitality that has always, albeit in its contradictions, inhabited and disposed of law (and rights). However, on the opposite side, it must be equally admitted that if true hospitality (unconditional, that admits no limits of any kind) always appears to exceed and to disavow every regime and condition of law (Derrida, 1997), it is only based on it that it can become truly effective. In other words, if hospitality does not wish to be a mere chimera or to risk accommodating its own negation, it must accept the conditions (political, social, and economic) that law inescapably places upon it. And this is because if the unconditional law of hospitality—it bears repeating—is such only in the extent to which it accommodates its own contradiction, and is exposed to its own cancellation, it is also true that its ethical nature cannot be effective except by compromising itself on the level of legal conditions (the rules that over the centuries have established and defined the rights of asylum, of residence, of citizenship, etc.). From this standpoint, then, we may state that law makes hospitality possible—and with it, the conditions of its very possibility—ordering itself, paradoxically, upon its own contradiction, or convoking it in its transgression. Beyond an ethic of hospitality (a “common” ethic of hospitality) that always commands the unconditional accommodation of others, that always assumes the primacy of the other with respect to it, that is always exposed to an original convocation (Lévinas, 1990); beyond the asymmetrical relationship that calls us to an infinite responsibility to the other, the paradoxical question of a “right of hospitality” is therefore once again imposed upon our reflections.

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In 1902, Giorgio Del Vecchio, the Kant-inspired philosopher of law, published in “Rivista Italiana di Sociologia” a small essay entitled L’evoluzione dell’ospitalità. In this essay, he recorded the passage from the “systematic hatred of the foreigner” to a state of peace no longer conceived as the mere effect of a pactum (of a convention) between different lineages, but felt as the “most typical and legitimate condition of life” (Del Vecchio, 1902, p. 5). As may well be understood, Del Vecchio’s reconstruction retraced the “philosophy of history” underpinning Kant’s Perpetual Peace. These, in fact, in accordance with a “universal reason of coexistence,” were the necessary junctures posited as requirements essential for the gradual development of a “natural” condition of peace among the peoples: industry, exchange, trade, and law. From here, he states that with the increase in communications among peoples (an increase that “removes the reason for destructive rivalries”) and in place of primitive antagonism, “the progressive refinement of moral sentiment, in line with the changed forms of life” caused the well-being of others to become an “ideal and real element of oneself” (Ibid.). Against the background of these observations, Del Vecchio introduced the theme of hospitality as a practice also generally observed among ancient peoples as “regimes less progressed in coexistence.” Therefore, underscoring the juridical side of an “evolutionary reason” by which “the liberal agreement among the various peoples tends naturally to increase with the enlightenment of consciousnesses and of civil progress,” he came to see the institution of hospitality “as a function of the primitive condition of the foreigner,” someone who was “deprived of legal protection” because he or she “was not a person” (Ibid., pp. 7–8). To sum up, according to Del Vecchio, the primitive coinciding of the concepts of “foreigner” and “enemy” (also a verbal coincidence: ξενος, hostis, gasts) itself showed that, in less progressed societies, the foreigner was “outside of the law” because he or she was outside his or her own community, without the shared protection of the group he or she originally belonged to, and its protection. It is thus only with the development of exchange and trade that the institution of hospitality saw profound change, becoming a negotiation and acquiring a more markedly juridical and commercial value. For the very needs of traffic and commercial utility, the principle according to which the foreigner was excluded as such from every community of law with citizens (and thus denied any legal protection), had to be at least

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mitigated. With the evolution of commercial relations, public replaces private hospitality. The foreigner is no longer the “roving animal,” but his or her legal existence starts making itself independent from the original group. The citizens’ protection is no longer entrusted to primitive solidarity but is now exercised by political authority; in the same way, “out of historic necessity itself,” the State sees to the protection of foreigners. Slowly, then, especially through the development of treaties and mutual concessions among States, and “according to the needs of the broader and more specific international communications,” the condition of foreigners is improving. “Civilization and trade naturally, from hand to hand, fill the abyss that separated peoples from one another; institutions and ideas change at one time.” In the foreigner, the quality of peregrinitas fades away, so to speak, “to make way for the increasingly clear and unprejudiced esteem for his or her humanitas. And the idea of man is now indissolubly associated with the idea of law” (Ibid., p. 14). This, then, is the line of development that, according to Del Vecchio, explains the evolution of hospitality. Although slow and subject to “historic alternatives,” but gradually promoted by the growing role of commerce in the economic sphere, the progressive juridical likening of the foreigner to the citizen (according to the affirmation of the principle of “solidarity of the human family”) “is one of the most certain and noteworthy traits of social evolution.” Foreigners are no longer excluded, as in antiquity, from the “consortium of citizens,” but have been allowed to take part—to an increasingly large degree—in the moral and civil life of the nation where they have established themselves. The private protection of foreigners becomes less necessary, and primitive hospitality thus loses its specific function. The need for sui generis treatment diminishes, and relations with outsiders progressively find their juridical basis within that increasingly general legal horizon that presides over human relations. “The principle of equality is thus affirmed degree by degree, out of cultural necessity; and the continuous development of private and public international law brings human destinies closer to that point in which all men shall be considered in accordance with a single principle, in a universal regime of freedom” (Ibid., p. 15). “A single principle,” then: the principle of exchange. As already discussed, Del Vecchio’s reconstruction, while absorbing the studies of a legal anthropology that was shortly thereafter to yield its better results in the works of, among others, Mauss, Benveniste, Detienne, Vernant, and Derrida, retraces, in its essential features, Kant’s philosophy of history.

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And if in Kant hospitality, as the recognition of a natural right, is still, from the standpoint of Natural Law, perceived as having to be, as a legal/political imperative of reason whose equivalent is the moral categorical imperative (“Cosmopolitan Right—we read in the third article of For Perpetual Peace—must be limited to conditions of universal hospitality”), in Del Vecchio this same right—the right of hospitality—is now understood as almost realized or about to be realized “out of cultural necessity” (or out of the necessity of exchanges and of international commerce). This gives rise to the paradox to which his conclusions appear inevitably to lead: at the end of its evolution, hospitality disappears, which is to say it loses its original meaning. To put it differently the evolution of hospitality coincides with its inevitable disappearance: it ends up existing in its own realization, and exhausts its function as it is realized. The “continuous development of private and public international law brings human destinies closer to that point in which all men shall be considered in accordance with a single principle, in a universal regime of freedom”: “to the point,” then, in which hospitality will no longer be needed. Since this—Del Vecchio appears to suggest to us—can exist so long as the foreigner exists, the other, the person who cannot be assimilated, exists so long as the difference between citizen and foreigner exists. In other words, summarizing the evolutionary line of Kant’s philosophy of history (the progressive deployment of Reason), Del Vecchio saw hospitality, at the peak of its evolution and in light of the developments of transnational trade, as a function of international law and a task entrusted to the national States. The institution of hospitality, in being realized, thus ended up dissolving into the system of social integration regulated upon the principle of exchange, which is to say upon the model of mercantile rationality that made a formal and abstract equality the universal principle of inter-individual relationships. As an evolutionary necessity, for this reason, and for its “cultural necessity,” hospitality paradoxically ended up being realized through its own disappearance, in the absence, in effect, of its essential prerequisite: the other, the foreigner. This is because, as we know, hospitality exists so long as extraneousness does. In light of this paradox, it then appears clear to us why, nearly a century later, the scholars who with the most perseverance have rethought the problem of integration in the age of globalization (and these also include Habermas) no longer speak of hospitality. In fact, it comes as no surprise that, two centuries later, returning to Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Habermas fails to bring up the question of hospitality again, and instead ends up not

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mentioning hospitality at all (Habermas, 1998, pp. 177–215). While proposing a subtle, scrupulous, attentive, and detailed reading of Kant’s treatise, Habermas not only paradoxically neglects examination of the Third Article, in which the theme of hospitality finds its most rigorous formulation, but actually erases the very term “hospitality” from his vocabulary.

Reciprocal Extraneousness Hospitality, then, exists so long as we remain reciprocally foreign. Ricouer, in his 1997 conference (prophetic for some, and still current), entrusted to the memory of wandering and exile, to the recollection of having been foreigners (“we are all former barbarians”), the most authentic meaning of hospitality. Today, due to the changed conditions of our global world, it is not necessary to look to the past, but the present; the reality we live in, is enough to comprehend the extent to which, after all, our condition is still marked by the trait of extraneousness. In spite of the globalization of the markets, of communications, and of productive processes (or perhaps because of it), we are still foreigners. In fact, now as never before, the growing and complex phenomenon of migrations reflects its ambivalences, its contradictions, on those processes of social inclusion/exclusion that increasingly remodel and transform the “multiethnic” fabric of modern societal configurations. In the face of numerical “homologation” and the functionalization of inter-individual relations, it does not then appear entirely unfounded to call problematically into question the principle of hospitality to the extent to which—unlike economic exchange (“regulated” exchange) that takes individuals out of the societal context—it defines a sphere of encounter among “foreigners” grounded upon the level of social relations. Above all, it is a principle that, albeit in its ambivalence and paradoxical nature, since very remote times has been placed not only in the territory of ethics, but in that of law as well. And while exchange considers the other as an individual outside of social relations (as a generically abstract individual, alien to societal relations), hospitality paradoxically considers (and includes) the other as extraneous to the interior of social relations. In other words, it seems to us valid to bring into the argument the problematic principle of “hospitality,” in that this idea, unlike that of economic exchange (“regulated” exchange), defines an area of contact between “outsiders” which is based on social reciprocity. It is a principle, also, that despite its ambivalent and paradoxical aspects, has long since

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belonged not only to the sphere of ethics, but also of law. Today it has become increasingly important to re-examine the concept and practice of “hospitality” (as the area where “others” relate with one another), since, as we said above, it is especially today, with the spread of globalization and migration across the entire planet, that the way in which “outsiders” relate to each other has become a decisive factor in our communal lives in society. A factor that increasingly involves multi-ethnic societies, exposing them to a double risk that prevalent political systems, even democratic ones, are finding difficult to avoid. In fact, if the confrontation between different cultures heightens the risks of conflict (whether ideological, ethnic or religious) between groups and individuals who are more and more confined within their different “identities,”2 policies of “multicultural” (even if stimulated by a serious attempt to plan adequate systems of selection and admission) run the risk of introducing and favouring processes of social exclusion or conformity which are liable to compromise and totally destroy the plurality of the kind of communal life that can only exist where there is viable diversity. Every “inclusion” conceived of in this way always implies a sacrifice of difference, or rather, of that otherness that cannot be broken up by abstract and formal processes of assimilation. In terms of this problem, hospitality can still be regarded as a valid analytical tool with which to re-examine a basic relation between outsiders who are able to acknowledge the permanent nature of their otherness and able to reconcile themselves to their own alienness. An analytical tool which is above all capable of repudiating not only individualistic liberal viewpoints (which relegate the solution of cultural, political, and social inclusion to the universalism of legal norms that are basically neutral compared to the various “private” ethical conceptions, without taking cultural diversity into account), but also which can overcome the current kind of communitarian notion that places the problem of social inclusion on the plane of differences in ethical values and collective cultural rights. This is an outlook which undoubtedly has its difficulties, limitations, and contradictions, but worth adopting if one holds that the domain of hospitality does not only lie within the realm of ethics, but also of politics (or “cosmo-politics”) and law. It is in fact to law that we must turn, since as was the case in the ancient world (Greece, Rome and the middle ages), law can still call upon the rules of hospitality, or in other words, that 2  The Clash of Civilisations, 1996, by Samuel P. Huntington, is representative in this regard (Huntington, 1996).

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dimension of acceptance that has always formed, controlled, and guaranteed, paradoxically, the spaces where outsiders meet one another. As we said, nearer to our own time, one need only think of that cosmopolitic western tradition which, following Christian Wolff (Wolff, 1972), reached its climax in the reflections of Emmanuel Kant (Kant, 1995). Kant, by extending cosmopolitan right to the “conditions of a universal hospitality,” observed how the question was not only one of ethics (and mere “philanthropy”) but also of right, or at least a right that could guarantee that the outsider would not be treated as an enemy on the territory of a foreign state (Kant, 1995, p. 301).3 We should therefore re-examine, in the light of the prospects that this right opens up, the basic concept of the other as it transcends the idea of identity. This change of viewpoint is essential, if we really wish to give shape to a cosmopolitic society no longer bound to identities that are culturally determined, closed within their own concrete form, but which is open to the idea of permanent otherness: the universal society of outsiders, of others, of those who universally share in their reciprocal alienness. Thus, instead of the myth of belonging to a community or an ethnic group or a nation, and against the rationalization of individualistic, mercantile, and equalitarian ideas, we need to reconsider, from a sociological point of view, the ethical and juridical question of hospitality: the acceptance of the other, the outsider, the one who does not belong, who cannot be assimilated. Above all, we must re-examine hospitality with regard to the problem of social inclusion, since, in our opinion, hospitality cannot only be construed as a basic relationship in which to place the problem of the Other and alienation in general, but also in the wider sense of an existential and ethical sphere of action in which a social relationship can be created that is capable of integrating persons who are permanently in a state of absolute otherness. Things however are not as simple as they might at first appear. Since the time the concept of hospitality was first given practical form, it has always been cursed with an irredeemable ambivalence. As we said, Greek mythology clearly showed how behind every show of hospitality there lurked an element of hostility, an inhospitable, sacrificial component. This is because hospitality, the Law of hospitality, is only really possible in relation to those who, even when accepted, remain nonetheless alien, the other, someone 3  It is curious that, two centuries later a sociologist like Habermas, going back to Kantian cosmopolitism (and thus to his Perpetual Peace), neglects to reformulate the question of hospitality from the point of view of ethics, and in fact says nothing about hospitality at all (Habermas, 1998, pp. 177–215).

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who cannot belong or be assimilated. It is also, illogically, only possible when the other, the outsider, disables his otherness, his potential hostility, by adjusting his difference in acknowledgement of the acceptance offered to him. Friedrich Nietzsche, an expert on the Greeks, in an aphorism of Morgenröthe (n° 319) in a book written in 1881, made this observation: “This is the meaning of the custom of hospitality: to paralyse any hostility there may be in the foreigner. Where the foreigner is no longer seen as an enemy, hospitality is less obvious; it flourishes as long as his evil intentions are assumed to exist” (Nietzsche, 1984, p. 188). Recently Jean Baudrillard said much the same thing: “The Other is the guest. He is not already equal in rights and different, he is a foreigner, an extraneus. And in his otherness, he must be exorcised” (Baudrillard, 1991, p. 154). Anyway, from this perspective, we can also say that the laws of hospitality paradoxically do not enclose the other in himself but instead incur the debt of acceptance that allows the other to accept us in turn and release us from our original otherness. It might be easier to understand this train of thought if we try to transfer the terms of this relationship from the area of social relations to that of our inner self (where there is a significant correlation with the social dimension). In the case of relations of hospitality, the other is not only the person who exhibits his own diversity but also he who in his alienness signifies otherness in general: that same otherness which belongs to us ourselves, as others, as others of the others. It belongs to us inside our own homes, endangering our security, our domestic safety; it is part of us as it tears up our roots, insinuating the outsider, the enemy, the other, into our daily lives, into the way we have always lived in the world. To put it another way, we can but recognize in the other, the stranger, our possible enemy, the other-who-is-myself: myself-as-the-other and the other-in-me4; me must acknowledge an alienness that exposes us to our own original otherness. This is similar to the observation of the philosopher and anthropologist Helmuth Plessner when, referring to Freud’s idea of the “uncanny,” he defines the stranger as “what is familiar and homely in the other.” If this construction is valid, Plessner says in his essay of 1931, “man does not see ‘himself’ only in a ‘here’, but also in a ‘there’ of the other. Familiarity is therefore not defined by ‘nature’ and does not confine itself within certain borders (almost as if it belonged outside of history), but since it is wide open it reveals to man the uncanny nature of 4  For a different view of these problems, see also Julia Kristeva, Strangers to themselves (Kristeva, 1988).

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the other in the elusive intertwining of his own nature with that of the other” (Plessner, 2006, p.  102). However, Kant was perhaps trying to resolve the social conflicts, the ambivalent antagonism involved in the tension between opposites that is typical of relations of hospitality between strangers, in the aftermath of the social changes (political, economic, technical and cultural) of modern civilization when he formulated, in the definitive third article for perpetual peace, his idea of a “Right of Hospitality”—a Besuchsrecht (right of access) rather than a full Gastrecht (right to hospitality, to residence). In line with the universalist expectations and requirements of his cosmopolitism, Kant in fact re-examined the problem of hospitality by using the idea of a right which was able to acknowledge the free movement of goods (freedom of trade) and persons (freedom of access), but which nonetheless aimed at solving the problems posed by otherness by removing them completely, by creating a process of progressive cultural, juridical, political, economic, and social homologation (and one could say, of “globalization”). In other words, Kant, in keeping with his philosophy of history which developed the idea of a linear progression of reason, ended up confining the question of hospitality within the terms of an economic rationalization (the spirit of commerce) whose object was the creation of a political (or cosmopolitical) integration between persons (individuals and states) who could be assimilated within the same project of pacification and juridical rationalization. He overlooked, however, the complex, self-contradictory nature of the status of the guest (the person who is actually the other in himself) which turns the hospitality relationship into an area threatened by conflict and marked by an irremediable ambivalence. Even when reviewing the problem of otherness (a problem that stems from his philosophic anthropology) through the political creation of a necessary juridical integration between strangers (an idea still being pursued in a different way by Habermas), Kant concluded by unilaterally polarizing the ambivalence of hospitality, by excluding from the territory of hospitality (the cosmopolitical space) the radical otherness, the hostility and antagonism that have always inhabited it (with effects that soon reveal themselves in all their deadliness—we have only to think of our own times). Anyway, beyond legal measures and political boundaries stressed by Kant, we can reconsider the “right of hospitality” as something that permits us to acquire the most genuine sense of duty, of obligation, of our debt to others. Every time that a right is assigned to us or acknowledged by us, we simultaneously find ourselves in debt, in a situation of

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indebtedness; by stating a right we unconditionally impose a duty. Even before we enter into the world of words (the language community), even before, by acquiring language, we develop a consciousness of ourselves, we in fact gain, through rights, that which defines our personality, our personal identity, our legal name: that which links us to others and represents us as persons in relation to the world of others, both to others that “pre-existed” in past generations, and to humanity in general. “Before we can even say ‘I’, the law has made each of us a subject of law” (Supiot, 2006, p. 2). If we ignore this paradoxical alternation—the continual transformation of rights into duties, the constant see-saw between having rights and owing obligation—we end up not recognizing the hospitality bond that has always, in all its inconsistency, existed and which allocates the right (and rights). On the other hand we have to also admit that if the genuine hospitality (that without conditions, which allows no limits) always apparently transcends and repudiates any regime or condition of right, it is only by being based on right that it can prove to be effective. To put it another way, if hospitality is not to be a mere chimera or is disinclined to risk accepting its own negation, then it has to accept the conditions (political, social and economic) which right unfailingly imposes upon it. This is because, it is worth repeating, if the unconditional Law of hospitality is only such in as much as it accepts its own contradiction, in as much as it exposes itself to its own cancellation, it is also true that its ethical nature cannot be effective unless it compromises itself at the level of juridical conditions (the rules which have from time immemorial set up and determined the rights of asylum, of residence, of citizenship, etc.). We can thus state that right makes hospitality possible—and therefore the conditions of its own possibility—by paradoxically ranging itself with its contradiction, or rather, by summoning it as it contravenes the rules. Beyond an ethic of hospitality (a “common” ethic of hospitality) which dictates the unconditional acceptance of others, which always presumes the pre-eminence of the Other compared to the self, which always submits to an original summons (Lévinas, 1990); beyond the lopsided relationship that entrusts us with an infinite responsibility with regard to the other, we once again come up against the paradox of the “right of hospitality.” It is not a case of merely re-examining the status of the “refugee” or the “stateless” or the “right to asylum,” even if, also in these cases, the problem of “right of hospitality” is dramatically present. It is not just a case of envisaging, as Hannah Arendt put it, that unique right whose origins lie in the

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very beginnings of organized political life and which stands out “as a symbol of human rights in the field of international relations” (Arendt, 1996, p.  389), or a case of going back to the ancient idea of “city-refuge” (Derrida, 1997). It is a case instead, of thinking of the right in its original sense of hospitality (in all its ambivalence).5 It is in this sense that we have to give Kant the credit of expounding, in the enlightened, natural law climate of seventeenth-century humanitarianism, the idea of a “cosmopolitan right” limited to “conditions of universal hospitality” (Kant, 1995, p.  301). This right identifies each of us, as human beings, as guests of the other, without there being any other right (founded on reason) to spurn us or maltreat us because of our origins. Even if it is always a case of setting limits, boundaries, and conditions on the exercise and practice of a hospitality conceived of as a universal experience, Kant can be credited with raising hospitality to the ranks of law. In fact, he managed to raise the hospitality imperative to the juridical and political equivalent of the moral categorical imperative: “the cosmopolitan right must be limited to the conditions of universal hospitality” (ibid.). This means that envisaging a right that is open towards the outsider, to the acceptance of the other, is within the margins of risk that such an opening entails. Such a right, in fact, does not shrink from the idea of a social relation as a point of encounter between outsiders, that paradoxical space where the Other manifests himself in the contact we have with him: a space where there is undoubted opposition, but also reciprocal interpretation, where the ones present themselves to the others as the others to themselves. Looking at the right of hospitality in terms of this openness means, as was seen above, subscribing to the idea of hospitality as a relationship within which not only lies the acceptance of the other as a stranger, but 5  Anyway, the definition of the term “refugee” (Article 1), as we can read on the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, is very important for our topic, especially if, with this, we come back to Kant. In fact, according to the 1951 Refugee Convention, a “refugee,” is someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. In other words, a remarkable feature of the Convention is the establishment of a system of international protection to persons who are in need of it. From the perspective of international law, the Convention accords the status of a refugee to a person who has lost the protection of their state of origin or nationality. It is essentially the loss, or failure, of state protection which makes international protection necessary for refugees.

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also, at the same time, the acknowledgement of my primary alienness, both as regards the other and as regards myself, my own identity: the acknowledgement of myself as a stranger with respect to the person I am prepared to accept, and of myself as a stranger to myself, just as a person who lives in permanent otherness to his own separate, particular, finite identity. From this necessary exposure to the presence of the other, therefore, the right is open to the essential relationship between ethics and hospitality. We must therefore think of hospitality (and also the right of hospitality) as lying outside of the specialized domain of state law (outside the positive right of the state), as being distant from any constituted form of culture or identity, from any system of belonging to a community. We must regard the hospitality relationship as one that does not presume the objective inclusion of “Us,” that does not imply a collective future, and that does not acknowledge the abstract, separate, arbitrary, and coercive nature of the laws of the state. It is not a case of establishing some community (be it ethnic, racial, political, national, international, or supranational) because hospitality presumes a primary experience that predates any link or connection based on belonging, any commonality based on identity, any possession defined by people in common. At the same time, however, we must not forget that hospitality presumes, to an even greater extent, a primary relationship with the other that precedes the actual formation of the individual, or the consciousness of identity, or the “representations,” in other words, of the principium individuationis; in fact, it really involves an openness towards the other, an acceptance of the other, action on behalf of the other that precedes the actual determination of the inter-­ individual relationship. It does not involve the other as an identity (as an individual or ethnic, national, or cultural entity), but as otherness (as an absolute, universal singularity); as a non-negotiable otherness,6 that cannot be attributed to differences (those involved in “regulated exchange”), but can be paradoxically placed within the ambit of a social relation based on reciprocal otherness, beyond any equivalence. Effectively, if we look more closely, we immediately realize that the hospitality relation does not involve an inter-individual relationship: as a space open to the unconditioned event of the other, it in fact precedes the very notion of the individual. As a fundamental experience of the other, hospitality lies at the origins of every individuation, every identification of 6

 The expression is Jean Baudrillard’s (Baudrillard, 1991, p. 145).

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self; it comes before the establishment of an identity. That is why, when all is said and done, acceptance pre-establishes the social relation. There is no relation, in fact, without this basic decentralization, without this shifting of the relation on to the plane of otherness. Nor is there any genuine ethic or right without the experience of this relation: without the experience of otherness, or rather, without the acknowledgement of the value and transcendence of the other. The ancient idea of hospitality perhaps still holds true: if the other is universal (because never able to be determined or appropriated), the individual on the other hand is always particular and partial, since bound by a logic of identity (and individuation), which, through the other, is defined as the difference from the other. Otherness as such (in as much as it is “always other,” in as much as it is an excess in respect of the same, in as much as it cannot be part of any experience that is not one of alienation, of dispossession) always transcends the limits of the individual and the community. It alone can be elevated to a universal value, beyond the establishment of the identity/difference pair which is always based on the parameters of an abstract individuation that is in any case socially established and codified. This is because otherness itself produces a primary displacement beyond the fact of its identification (beyond the fact of its identity). It is always other with respect to any form of objectification, always redundant with respect to the (symbolic) nature of the exchange that it establishes as difference; otherness in fact is never definable or classifiable within the forms of its possible determinations, and it is because of this that it is held to be universal, since it lies paradoxically outside any of its particular categories. In practical terms, this means that the other, if genuinely such, cannot and should not take possession of his otherness, he cannot and must not identify himself as its property or as belonging to it, it cannot and must not claim the being-other as a measure of his identity. The other, in other words, must never be “it-self” (in the fixedness of this definition), but always other, the outsider, according to his otherness. Since, if otherness cannot in itself be appropriated or claimed as identity, the other must always know how to genuinely rise to his necessary yet paradoxical and universal de-establishment. To put it another way, the other must always be other with respect to the same (to his identity just as to his difference), just as I, in the hospitality relation, am always other with respect to the other and to myself.

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And here we finally arrive at the last station of our journey. Using the hospitality relation, it is not just a question of regarding the other (the stranger, the foreigner, the outsider, the illegal immigrant) as an essential element of our identity, but, at a deeper level, it is a question of rethinking the problem of the social inclusion of outsiders in terms of otherness, or rather, on the social, ethical and juridical plane of alienness (and alienation7). We should, therefore, restart from here, from all the philosophy (I am referring particularly to Bataille, Blanchot, Lévinas and Derrida) which, although its methods have been repeatedly criticized, has managed to exploit the deep-rooted sense of otherness as an unprecedented opportunity to reflect upon the issues and conditions that are a feature not only of the processes of formation of social identities, but also of the problems of including outsiders. Our starting point should be the sociologist and anthropologist Louis Dumont when he observed, on orienting his researches towards an ontological viewpoint, “We conceive of a being as an individual, as a kind of isolated monad, and we say that this being, for example, has ‘relations’ with other beings: today, intellectuals express their attachment to the ‘communication’ between monads, and we need the rigour of the philosophers to remind us that a being is always in a relation, and in fact from this relation arises symmetrically, the ego and the other” (Dumont, 1986, p. 36). This is what, in part, the ancient laws of hospitality teach us: in the hospitality relation, whoever is offered hospitality remains invariably other with respect to the society that is nonetheless accepting him; he is always an outsider with respect to the procedures of social inclusion and assimilation, who remains on the margins of the processes of cultural absorption. The laws also teach us to understand the problem of social inclusion within the complex dynamics of acceptance and otherness which have always been a feature of the “hospitality” relation with outsiders, with persons who recognize one another (and who identify themselves) in their reciprocal alienness, both by means of what makes them the object of hospitality and at the same time hostile to one another. Placing this paradoxical area of ethics within the realm of law does not mean invoking right, and rights, as the only general medium of social inclusion of outsiders (and solidarity with them) that is available in our modern multiethnic societies (Habermas); it does not mean regarding right solely in its purely 7  The idea of “alienation” in this sense has no connection with Marx’s theory of “alienation.”

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procedural and formal value, nor does it mean assuming a coexistence between different people based on the “mildness” of a right that is sympathetic towards diversity (Zagrebelsky, 1997); it means, as well as all of these, restoring to right its essential ethical character that exposes it to the dynamics (however paradoxical they seem) of acceptance and hospitality, returning it to the very level of duty and obligation on which it always had its origins. Only in this way, I believe, can we perhaps give back to our social coexistence that vitality that is nourished, for good or evil, in our relations with others; others who remain outsiders even though being defined (and establishing themselves) in the “symbolic” terms of differences, in the stable condition (within boundaries) that social action and right imposes upon them. This is because the outsider, if such he is, is only and invariably found in the indescribable “gap” (and the leftover) between the phenomenon of otherness and the idea of difference. So, rethinking the concept and the practice of hospitality (the terrain of relating among “others”) thus today becomes an operation as important as ever, since precisely now, with the development of globalization and migration processes over the entire surface of the earth, the way of relating among “outsiders” is presented as a fact decisive for our social coexistence. In fact, the process of social integration among outsiders has always recorded tensions oscillating between inclusion and repulsion, friendship and hostility, homologation and marginalization: a continuous oscillation between accommodation and rejection that to this day traverses the migration policies of economically more developed countries. Beyond the more established stereotypes and prejudices, the migrant at times appears to us as a resource necessary for the economic and demographic development of our so-called opulent societies, and at other times—and more often—as a threat and as an enemy to be expelled (especially during times of crisis). And yet, the destiny of our multiethnic societies appears well outlined at this point. And if the borders within which we jealously guard our own identities are becoming increasingly transient under the blows of dislocation and the decentralization of productive processes, the barriers we raise to defend our claimed “cultural identity,” our mythical, original “purity,” become even more rigid by reaction. And if it cannot be denied that an indiscriminate opening of the borders, without an adequate and programmed regulation of migration flows, could in no way permit peaceful, flexible, and orderly social inclusion, it is equally true that an excessively restrictive reception policy would end up impoverishing our societies along with our economies.

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To rethink these questions, then, beyond the specific and tangible political measures of inclusion or exclusion, means in some way to focus our attention on the possible—and more inevitable than ever—transformations of the cultural and social settings within whose margins, for better or worse, the migration phenomenon is inscribed. But even more, it means reconsidering this problem in light of a far vaster process that increasingly regards us specifically, and not only as members of host countries, but also as the next guests of a “global” world that paradoxically sees us increasingly close in reciprocal extraneousness, increasingly bound by common alienation, increasingly active participants in a singular otherness, increasingly connected as outsiders, and increasingly foreign in a space that entwines and links our individual lives. Most likely, hurled into the global order of the markets, we will become increasingly extraneous to others and to ourselves. Not only will we have to move as a result of labour mobility, given the dislocation of capital and of productive processes, with regard to the changeable concentration of wealth and resources and based on the increasingly frequent ecological and environmental troubles (if not disasters), but, within the horizon of the global market, we shall all be, sooner or later, destined to a growing condition of alienation. International finance already makes us foreigners in a world whose rules we no longer know, in a non-localized space without land or boundaries, which expropriates our ability to recognize ourselves within the framework of those identities (cultural, national, state, local) that modern tradition had for so long a time, for better or for worse, assigned to us. Beyond and within the Schengen boundaries, we shall always be foreigners among outsiders, others among others, guests/exiles outside and inside our own home. On the horizon set out by this perspective, the sociological gaze will then be able to help us redefine boundaries and bulwarks, to reconnect networks and fabrics, to reconsider boundaries to be crossed and to be overcome. It is necessary to rethink, as soon as possible, the order of a social inclusion (or “non-exclusion”) that, precisely within the space defined by conflicts and tensions, by limits and boundaries, is able to place at its foundation an ethics and a right of hospitality capable of traversing and breaking down the closures that the law itself necessarily, and paradoxically, imposes upon it. It is to this paradoxical dialectic that we must now look: the relationship of hospitality is constituted on the boundary, in the tension of the limit, on the margin that exposes it to measurement and to the legal condition.

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References Arendt, H. (1996). The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., III ed. New York, 1966 [Trad. it.: Arendt H (1996), Le origini deltotalitarismo, Edizioni di Comunità, Milano]. Baudrillard, J. (1990). La trasparente du Mal. Galilée [Trad. it.: Baudrillard, J. (1991). La trasparenza del male. SugarCo]. Benveniste, E. (1969). Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. Les Editions de Minuti [Trad. it.: Benveniste, E. (1976). Il vocabolario delle istituzioni indoeuropee. Einaudi]. Del Vecchio, G. (1902). L’evoluzione dell’ospitalità. In “Rivista italiana di Sociologia”, year V, fasc. II–III, March–June. Derrida, J. (1997). Cosmopolites de tous les pays, ancore un effort! Galilée [Trad. it.: Derrida, J. (1997). Cosmopoliti di tutti i paesi, ancora uno sforzo! Cronopio]. Detienne, M. (1998). Apollon avec le couteau à la main. Gallimard [Trad. it.: Detienne, M. (2002). Apollo con il coltello in mano. Adelphi]. Dumont, L. (1975). La Civilisation indenne et nous. Librairie Armand Colin [Trad. it.: Dumont, L. (1986). La civiltà indiana e noi. Adelphi]. Elias, N. (1984). Über die Zeit. Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie II (Von M. Schröter, Hrsg.). Suhrkamp [Trad. it.: Elias, N. (1986). Saggio sul tempo. Il Mulino]. Habermas, J. (1996). Die Einbeziehung des Anderei. Suhrkamp Verlag [Trad. it.: Habermas, J. (1998). L’inclusione dell’altro. Feltrinelli]. Huntington, S. P. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster. Kant, I. (1795). Zum ewigen Frieden [Trad. it.: Kant, I. (1995). Per la pace perpetua. In Scritti politici (a cura di N.  Bobbio, L.  Firpo, und V.  Mathieu, pp. 283–336). Utet]. Kristeva, J. (1988). Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Fayard. Lévinas, E. (1961). Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. Nijhoff [Trad. it.: Lévinas, E. (1990). Totalità e infinito. Jaca Book]. Nietzsche, F. (1881). Morgenröthe [Trad. it.: Nietzsche, F. (1984). Aurora. Adelphi]. Plessner, H. (2003). Macht und menschliche Natur (1931), Gesammelte Schriften (Vol. V, pp.  135–234). Suhrkamp [Trad. it.: Plessner, H. (2006). Potere e natura umana. Manifestolibri]. Ricoeur, P. (2013). Straniero, io stesso. Il dovere dell’ospitalità. In “Vita e pensiero,” no. 5, year XCVI, September–October, pp. 39–50. Schmitt, C. (1932). Begriff des Politiche (1927). Duncker & Humblot. Supiot, A. (2005). Homo juridicus. Seuil [Trad. it.: Supiot, A. (2006). Homo juridicus. Saggio sulla funzione antropologica del Diritto. Bruno Mondadori]. Wolff, C. (1972). Jus Gentium, a cura di M. Thomann. In Gesammelte werke, II (Abteilung—Lateinische Schriften Band 25). Georg Olms Verlag. Zagrebelsky, G. (1997). Il diritto mite. Einaudi.

CHAPTER 3

Naked Humanity Beyond the Inevitable Ceremonial Richard A. Cohen In political life, taken unrebuked, humanity is understood from its works—a humanity of interchangeable men, of reciprocal relations. The substitution of men for one another, the primal disrespect, makes possible exploitation itself. … Justice consists in again making possible expression, in which in non-reciprocity the person presents himself as unique. Justice is a right to speak. (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity).1

The aim of this chapter is to unravel a conviction. Not a faith or dogma, or a peremptory certainty, which besides being suspect would be inadmissible, but rather to say and to clarify something more, indeed,  most precious. It is not a conviction in the sense of a basic or unalterable theoretical principle, but rather as a basic and unalterable accusation, or what Levinas in the above citation has called rebuke. I refer to the alterity of the other person as convicting me, rebuking me, an accusation of myself. The other 1  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, transl. A.  Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 297, 298.

R. A. Cohen (*) Department of Jewish Thought, Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_3

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not as thing or object but imperative. My guilt and responsibility before the other as my initial, inaugural, obliged encounter with the other person as other. Expressed philosophically it is a claim, following Kant and Levinas, for the primacy of ethics, above epistemology and aesthetics, the other in the imperative before nominative or allusive. And furthermore, following Levinas but not Kant, it is a claim for an ethics in which moral responsibility to the other person comes first, before law but not as a luxury or bonus, not awaiting a moral cleansing of myself, but as the first imperative, shattering my identity, commanded  to alleviate the other’s suffering, beingfor-the-other before being for-myself. It is the conviction that here lies each person’s highest vocation and the highest vocation, indeed the essence of humanity. Here the cosmopolitan is distinct from globalization, because it is not commodification, but rather a quest for justice which excludes no one, a justice supported by and in defense of moral responsibility. Do not worry, it is not an essence in the sense that perturbs our finicky anti-essentialists, because it exists not as a universal or a generality, not as a definition, sign or signification at all, but always and only in the singular, indeed, in the first person singular, as significance, a weight, the weighing of the other upon me, an intelligibility of caring. Beginning in my moral obligation toward the one who faces me, building upon this obligation to ensure it for everyone, responsibility is mine and everyone’s, a matter of justice.

Vasily Grossman To give expression, to find the right words to convey the significance of such a conviction—beyond definition, sign or signification—I borrow the words of another, citing from Vasily Grossman’s great novel of World War II, nearly eliminated by Soviet censorship, Life and Fate (1962). From this novel capacious in the great Russian tradition of epic novels, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, or Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, I draw attention to words taken from a short manifesto which appears within it. The manifesto was written by a character named Ikonnikov, of whom we only know that he is its author and that he dies in the Soviet gulag. We never meet him in person. His manifesto, handed from prisoner to prisoner, from soldier to soldier, is as only a Russian manifesto can be, radical, revolutionary, irrepressible and completely unexpected. In the novel, it is read by two characters, a confirmed “Old Bolshevik,” who is a prisoner-of-war, and the Nazi commandant  of the prison. The Nazi has had the Bolshevik brought to his office, not for

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interrogation, but to express himself, because he too, the Nazi, has a subversive idea, which he can tell to no one else; namely, that Stalinism and Hitlerism are actually on the same side, fighting for the same thing, tyrannical government, even if they are currently at war with one another. His arguments are powerful and convincing. The Bolshevik, however, says nothing, but narratively reading his mind readers know that he completely disagrees and rejects the Nazi commander’s idea. (Perhaps in this way Grossman thought he could fool his Soviet censors? Not likely. More likely he wanted Ikonnikov’s manifesto to be taken seriously by both Nazi and Soviet, and by everyone else for that matter.) What I want to highlight for our purposes is that whatever the similarities uniting Nazi and Soviet, or the dissimilarities dividing them, Grossman makes explicit that both the Nazi and the Bolshevik disdain, detest and completely reject Ikonnikov’s manifesto. The manifesto is too long to cite in full, though I recommend it be read in full, and the novel as well. I go to its heart. After discoursing on the failures of ethics, of the much exalted The Good, for which untold numbers of people have been oppressed, silenced and slaughtered, we read from Ikonnikov’s manifesto: Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother. The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good. This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil! This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of the human heart—before it becomes a tool or commodity in the hands of preachers. Before its crude ore is forged into the gilt coins of holiness. It is as simple as life itself. Even the teaching of Jesus deprived it of its strength.

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Kindness is powerful only while it is powerless. If man tries to give it power, it dims, fades away, loses itself, vanishes. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.2

Levinas, who also cites from Ikonnikov’s manifesto in Grossman’s Life and Fate, speaks of this powerless irrepressible goodness as “weakness without cowardice.”3 No argument is or could be given for it, leaving literature and poesy for its proper invocation. There what is most precious 2  Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, transl. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 407–408, 409, 410. Allow me to invoke another beautiful citation which in its own way highlights the same inexplicable but unwavering ethical fundament, from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The narrator is reflecting on the death that day of his dear and admired friend the author Bergotte. Wondering about the soul’s survival in afterlife, he muses: “All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in in a former life there is no reason inherent in the conditions for life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be forever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—if then!—to fools.” Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. III, “The Captive,” transl. C.  K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), 186; my attention was drawn to this citation by an article by Edmund Wilson, entitled “Marxism and Literature,” in his collection, The Triple Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 206. 3  Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, transl. Nidra Pller (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 6. I don’t have to remind the reader that Proust’s reflections recall certain of Plato’s myths in Republic, Phaedo, Symposium and Phaedrus. Below we will comment on another of its literary treatments in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.

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is somehow made to shine through, somehow made to radiate its contagious grip nonetheless. What we are made to feel is nothing subjective, as if arbitrary, yet also is entirely subjective, as singularizing, that nothing is more noble or more worthy, nothing more definitive of the human, than to take responsibility, to care for another person—if need be independent of, regardless of, heedless of all the formalities, postures, positions, powers, totalities, policies, labels, classifications, and the like, which in Totality and Infinity Levinas sums up as “the inevitable ceremonial,”4 or what in the present context we are identifying as the dehumanization of globalization, contrasting it with the humanity of cosmopolitanism. Obligating me, imploring me, questioning me, wordlessly calling me forth to rise to the singularity or election of my responsibility, to and for you, the other, “face,” transcendence, “surplus,” breaking me of my natural complacency, trumping my self-interest, shattering and belittling my willful self-­ aggrandizing, piercing and awakening me from “the inevitable paralysis of manifestation.”5 It is a fire which burns without consuming, the ardor of responsibility, a generosity giving all that it has and is, and giving more, giving itself. To these fine phrases, but more pointedly to the seductions of a knowing condescension, the wave of the hand, shrugged shoulders, the wink and conspiratorial dismissal of naiveite, I must append a sobering comment by Levinas, who was aware as any of the various, devious and deceptive ways of self-interest, not only in the rapacity of  today’s global commodification, but no less having infiltrated the halls of academia, in a totalizing positivism, to be sure, but also in a certain self-rightous postmodernism. No doubt it is a comment too straightforward for all  their sophistications. “It is time,” Levinas writes, “the abusive confusion of foolishness with morality were denounced.”6 So little, powerless, less than nothing, without position, without power, without publicity, without name or identity: moral responsibility, for each other, including the very least. The true freedom of responsibility, “out of control,” as I have said of it elsewhere: Here I stand, Here I am, me voici, Hineni, come what may, no matter the knowledge and power, the realpolitik, the global forces 4  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, transl. A.  Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 30. 5  Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, transl. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 31. 6  Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, transl. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 126.

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and their bank accounts, lawyers, armies, the true subversion of their pretentions occurs every day, all the time, everywhere, in one person helping another “for no reason,” each time awakening a worldwide counter force, a cosmopolitanism of kindness and responsibility, the primacy of ethics. The primacy of ethics, against the powers that be, against the political alliance of ontology (“It gives.”), positivism (objectivism) and authoritarianism (“He gives.”), means also resisting the sirens’ call, the illusory independence of aestheticism, to resist such thinkers—Nietzsche and George Bataille at their head—who claim for art, the work of art, the world as art work, the freedom of an unbounded creativity of will (Übermensch) or representation (postmodernism), whose alleged fecundity is but another distraction, another veneer, another romantic escape from the autocratic powers which nevertheless, proximately or remotely, continue to retain the reins of power. Perhaps I need to be clearer. I am referring to the aesthetic vision of the difference between cosmopolitanism and globalization, between liberation and suppression, let us say, which determines their difference in ontological and epistemological terms, as if being itself could be relied upon to sustain the human in the face of the inhuman. For instance, to rely on Bergson’s distinction between creative temporal duration, open to intuition, and spatialized practical time, subject of intellection—as if this distinction, in being, and the difference between intuition and intellection, whereby the former is said to be primary, were sufficient to resist globalization. No doubt intuited duration, which dwells on the specificity of things, and objectivist intellection, in the third person, cannot be reduced one to the other. But the political issue goes one step further, to determine whether this difference can resist authoritarian totalizing, whether it effects a radical break which challenges such authoritarian totalizing, or not. No doubt scientific positivism, objective truth, is utilitarian, practical, ultimately a form of power, unfolding today as commodification, while intuition and the aesthetic, centering on themselves, without submission to instrumental reason, what according to Heidegger is a dwelling in the freedom of its own truth, its own essential being—but does such dwelling today offer an alternative to instrumental reason or simply a nostalgic and temporizing escape? Bergson has written, beautifully as usual: “With its applications which aim only at the convenience of existence, science gives us the promise of well-being, or at most, of pleasure. But

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philosophy could already give us joy.”7 Yes, let us suppose it is so, but is “joy”—Nietzsche’s “joyful wisdom” say—sufficient to upend instrumental reason and its globalizing authoritarian commodifying tread? My point is that not joy but responsibility, moral responsibility, responsibility for justice, that in ethics lies the transcendence genuinely alternative to and irrepressibly challenging the hegemony of power. No doubt—and here is the core of the most popular philosophy ever taught by philosophy, namely, Epicureanism—each of us can also seek the joy, my joy, your joy, which Nietzsche sought, as we see reproduced by many philosophers who proclaim the opposition between science and art, truth and joy, truth and lies, is the axis of protest, as in Bataille, who we have mentioned, but also Foucault and Deleuze. Does this go to the heart of the matter? Is it enough? Is it creativity that sets us free? Is it really aesthetic difference—call it “ontological difference,” or call it “differance,” or even “impossible”—is it really aesthetic difference that has a transcendence sufficient to maintain the alterity of the other? We know the seductive mantras: quality has been reduced to quantity, so celebrate quality. Instrumental reason is without ends, so celebrate the centripetal world of the artwork, an end-in-itself. Reality is bought and sold, capital is accumulated, so expend without reserve, festival potlach, light the torch at both ends. But do these not remind us even more of the temporary relief, the letting off of steam of adolescent rebellion? Are they not reactions rather than responses, that is, the flip side of what they oppose—hence still determined by what they allege to oppose—rather than genuine alternatives? What is certain is that faded jeans became manufactured, and torn jeans a chic fashion. That is to say, what seems like rebellion today, and no doubt is, is tomorrow mass produced, packaged, advertised, bought and sold at Macy’s, and delivered by Amazon. So that Andy Warhol who mocked this process by deadpan inevitably has become indistinguishably a partisan of the process. In a word, the irony flattens, aesthetic rebellion is coopted, to revive Marcuse’s apt term. The larger political point is that “aura” will not save us. Expenditure remains the reverse side of saving, and only the rich—like aristocrats of old—can expend extravagantly. My argument is not that aesthetics is not or cannot be a rebellion. It is rebellion. My argument is that aesthetics is not rebellious enough. Or, to return to my 7  Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, transl. Mabelle L.  Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 129. (In French the book is La Pensée et le mouvant (Paris, 1934)).

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conviction, my argument is that what genuinely challenges and convicts totalization, globalization, authoritarianism, what is irreducibly out of control, far from the temporary relief or escape achieved through aesthetic distance or exhiliration, is precisely the exceptional immediacy and weight, the incomparable exigency of moral responsibility of one for another, precisely Ikonnikov’s dumb senseless goodness. In seeking a way out of the hegemony of knowledge, whether Kantian or Hegelian, no doubt we are all tempted by the aesthetic path opened up by Schelling, Shiller, Bergson, Nietzsche, and all of today’s latter-day aesthetes. But it is not enough, or thinking it is enough is to fool oneself, to leave intact and in charge the positivism, commodification, authoritarianism, globalization, instrumentalism, and their ilk, from which one believes one is rebelling. There is, however, another, deeper, better route: the ethical as the irreducibly cosmopolitan, breaking out, free, not because it is badder but because it is better than being.

Aristotle In this light, I turn to Aristotle, to his Politics. Unlike political theorists such as Machiavelli, Hobbes and Schmitt, who support realpolitik, politics divorced from morality, for Aristotle, as for Plato, politics is a form and development of ethics. This is why Aristotle’s Politics is volume two of a two-volume set whose first volume is the Nicomachean Ethics. So, a citation from his Politics: Voice, of course, serves to indicate what is painful and pleasant; that is why it is also found in the other animals, because their nature has reached the point where they can perceive what is painful and pleasant and express these to each other. But speech [logos] serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust. For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust, etc. It is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household and a state.8

Three comments. First, the distinction and hierarchy of (1) pleasure, (2) utility and (3) morality found here in the Politics parallel the same which appear in the Nicomachean Ethics to distinguish three forms of friendship. 8  Aristotle, The Politics, transl. T.  A. Sinclair, revised by Trevor J.  Saunders (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1982), 60 (1253a15–17).

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Second, humans are distinguished from animals not simply or only because they have speech beyond voice, but also—and this is what Aristotle calls “the real difference”—because “humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust.” In other words, the distinguishing mark of the human, of humanity—because being human is social—is ethics, an aiming for the good and in political life an aiming for the just. To be sure, in his Ethics Aristotle seems unable to decide whether what is best absolutely is private intellectual self-reflection (contemplation), and hence an activity beyond friendship, or not. But however one decides such a rarified question, to have or to not have friends in the highest sense, the human in contrast to the animal is life oriented upward toward the good and the just. I emphasize this point notwithstanding, indeed in the face of today’s herd of alleged post-postmodern scholars who, following Agamben and Derrida,9 would instead conflate—in the name of an alleged  liberation from anthropocentrism no less!—the human–animal distinction. What they do not realize, however, despite their obvious cleverness, or perhaps because of it, is that their pet conflation presupposes, despite the consequent contradiction, having given primacy to epistemology, even while gainsaying  and  suppressing the deeper ethical approach such a question calls for. Finally, third, Aristotle is quite aware that logos, or speech, or reason, can serve two masters: the useful and the good, the practical and the virtuous. Let us add too that he, for one, is not confused about their hierarchy: the good rules the useful, or ought to. And this, that there are these two ends of reason so different from one another, the useful and the good, explains why Aristotle must and does begin his Politics with a discussion of business. The importance of this discussion of business (and indeed very often its existence) is often overlooked, but today it has become more rather than less relevant, if not imperious. Aristotle understands that for humans to be engaged in politics they must be free. Only free persons are capable of self-rule. Therefore, a person must have sufficient material wealth not to be disturbed or diverted by such interests when engaged in political deliberation. A starving person is not free. An ignorant person is not free. An uncultured person is not free. Freedom has material conditions, hence is conditioned by a certain  See, Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, transl. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 9

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level of material prosperity for its effectiveness or realization in the political arena. Business is not everything, and certainly not the highest thing, but it is something. Politics, for its part, is that sociality which aims higher, for justice, that is, that which Aristotle like Plato before him understands to be the common good, the public weal. Let us underscore that this means that political life is concerned with the common good, the good of all citizens, while private life, the life of business, is concerned with private good, self-­ interest, the good of oneself and one’s family. So, to look at this more closely, if a person chooses to engage in a life of full-time business, to become a worker, an entrepreneur, a businessperson, to spend all or most of their productive time in pursuit of private gain, satisfying private greed, then precisely by virtue of such a constant pursuit and orientation  that person disqualifies himself or herself from political life. To put the matter in its simplest terms: selfishness, greed, a life of private gain, of business, on the one hand, and politics, pursuit of the common good, pursuit of justice, on the other, do not mix. Aristotle’s point—unacquainted as he was with Adam Smith’s invisible hand—is that selfishness and justice are incompatible. Of course polities need money and material resources, to fight wars, to support dead soldiers’ families, to pave roads, and so forth, money and resources which wealthy people can most provide. But politics, since it aims at justice, requires such resources not for private gain, not for the wealthy, but for public good, for everyone. “We do not say,” I recall a sentence from Pericles’ “Funeral Oration,” “that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.”10 It is sad, let me add, to think how far we today, in the time of late capitalism, have strayed from such an orientation, when civic-mindedness and public volunteerism is too often cast as foolishness, just as Levinas warned. Especially in America, where contrary to everything Aristotle taught, a spoiled billionaire businessman with no political experience or civic-minded proclivities managed to get elected President. In sharp rebuke, in his Politics, Aristotle speaks favorably of the city of Thebes because, so he writes: “In Thebes there was a law requiring an interval of ten years to elapse between giving up trade and participating in office.”11 10  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II, section 40, transl. Rex Warner (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1964). 11  Aristotle, Politics, 185 (1278a25).

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Aristotle is all too aware that public speech is perverted into prevarication, deception, propaganda masking and promoting the selfish material greed of the few, the rich and powerful, when it ought rightfully to serve and inspire the public welfare of all. Especially, one would think, to recall Pericles’ speech once again, in a democracy, because in a “democracy power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people.” And because in a democracy, so Pericles continues, “No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty.”12 If only it were so!

Antonio Gramsci and Kant In honor of our colleagues from Italy I will briefly jump to the twentieth century, to a brilliant Italian Marxist political thinker, Antonio Gramsci, to his Prison Notebooks of 1930–1931. Gramsci, a Communist Party activist and member of parliament, was imprisoned (despite his parliamentary immunity) by Mussolini’s Fascist regime, and wrote more than thirty notebooks in prison. Suffering medical breakdown in prison, sent to a clinic, he died in 1937 at the age of 46. The following citation contains a joke, which Gramsci has borrowed from Freud’s book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Gramsci writes: There is a very widely held view in certain circles … that lying, knowing how to conceal astutely one’s true opinions and objectives, knowing how to make people believe the opposite of what one really wants, etc., is of the essence in the art of politics. This view is so deeply rooted and widespread that people do not believe in telling the truth. … Recall the Jewish anecdote: “Where are you going?” Isaac asks Benjamin. “To Cracow,” Benjamin replies. “What a liar you are. You say that you’re going to Cracow in order to lead me to believe that you are really going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. What need is there to lie, then?” In politics, one may talk of circumspection, not of lying in the mean sense held by many; in mass politics, telling the truth is, precisely, a political necessity.”13  Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book II, section 37.  Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. III, ed. and transl. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 17. To this citation perhaps we may append the epigram Czeslaw Milosz selected to place at the head of his anti-Soviet book The Captive Mind, the words of “An Old Jew of Galicia”: “When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, its great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is 12 13

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The joke illustrates how even in saying the right words, words officially, technically or formally true, one can be lying. Surely this is one of the attractions of the ceremonial, to lie “truthfully.” If we naively ask why Isaac questions Benjamin at all, because he knows where Benjamin is going, we would be forgetting that such exchanges are often simply part of ordinary civility, but also, as here, part and parcel of commercial competitiveness and one-upmanship, where lying, trickery, double-dealing, exaggeration, and like deceptions are endemic because each profit-seeking entrepreneur is in competition with every other. Caveat emptor. Highlighted in contrast to the joke, however, more important is Gramsci’s adherence—in “mass politics,” that is, in democracy—to the Kantian political ideal of transparency, of truth telling. Kant defines “public right” according to the following principle: “All actions affecting the rights of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with their being made public.”14 We might wonder how Gramsci is able to agree with Kant, what with his adherence to Marxism, with the latter’s theory of superstructure and substructure, of ideology, of truth relativized to class (bourgeois or proletariat), whereby all political speech, accurate or inaccurate, is never objective but always and necessarily special pleading, serving one’s own class, what one might call “fake news.” Here, however, with such an objection, in defense of objective truth, we must be careful not to mischaracterize Marxism based on anti-Marxist propaganda. The Marxist are no doubt correct in their claim that the ruling capitalist elite lie, trick, cheat, slant, censor and otherwise distort reality and news, whether through the communications media which they own outright or the state apparatus which they control with their money (campaign contributions, lobbying, publicity campaigns, etc.). Clearly the capitalist elite could care less about objective truth or the common good when their first priority is to accumulate as much and as rapidly as possible maximum capital. So distortion of truth, its relativization, which means ultimately its destruction, to serve class interests does apply to the capitalist elite. Marxists, however, do not speak for the elite monied ruling class. They act and speak for a proletarian humanity, claiming that such a class, and its suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worse kind of rascal.” Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, transl. Jane Zielongo (New York: Random House, 1990), v. 14  Immanuel Kant, “A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, transl. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126.

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representation of such a class, is not likewise parochial, slanted to merely class and hence “special interests,” but rather, and radically otherwise, that the proletariat represents humanity, humanity liberated from classes, the cosmopolitan. To be sure, quite naturally, there is an ongoing debate within Marxist circles as to whether or to what extent the proletariat represents classless humanity before the revolutionary overthrow of the ruling capitalist class, but all Marxists agree that overthrowing the capitalist ruling class aims not to install another class but to end classes and class war altogether and finally, thus ending as well the relativized and deceptive lies—in the name of objective truth—of the current ruling capitalist class. (No wonder, then, that Stalinism, which instead of being classless was totalitarian, setting up one ruler and his obsequious class of apparatchiks, was such a blow to Marxism and its true aspirations.) Thus, taking account of the radical difference between bourgeois and proletariat, we can understand Gramsci’s anticipatory, indeed revolutionary, expectation—which would not be reducible to wishful thinking—that truthful deliberation will arise, and can only arise, with the rise of “mass politics” or democracy, which Marxists speak of in terms of proletarian classless society, and which we are calling cosmopolitanism, ethically conceived. Cosmopolitanism was of course much attacked by the Nazis, in the name of German racial supremacy. Cosmopolitanism is a social and political term, with two related senses, one individualistic and the other political and international. The first sense refers directly to humanism. When the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope was “[a]sked where he came from,” he answered: ‘I am a citizen of the world’.”15 In Greek his word for “citizen of the world” was kosmo-polites. Concurrently, on the other side of the planet, in China Confucius expressed a cognate notion when he said: “The gentleman [junzi] is at home in the world.”16 Across the Mediterranean, the Talmud has its version as well: “Who is wise?” it asks, and answers: “He who learns from all men.”17 Such hospitable engagement with others regardless of differences in birthplace, country, language, ethnicity, culture, tradition, and the like, is found in wisdom 15  Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Books VI-X, transl. R.  D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 2005), Book VI, line 63; 65. 16  Confucius, Analects, transl. Arthur Waley (New York: Random House, 1938), Book 1, chapter 1; 85. 17  Saying of the Fathers, transl. Joseph H. Hertz (New York: Behrman House, 1954), Book IV, chapter 1; 65.

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literature throughout the world. It is the beginning of cosmopolitan wisdom. Racists are terrified by its autonomy and responsibilities. The second sense of the cosmopolitan, having to do with states and international relations, is one discussed by Kant in several places, notably including two newspaper articles, one appearing in 1774 entitled “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” and the other in 1795 entitled “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.”18 His basic idea is not complicated in theory even if it has proven difficult in execution, namely, that there should be some world organization, or world government, or world order, the name does not matter, whose function would be to limit and regulate the sovereignty of states, to prevent war and secure world peace. Unregulated sovereignty, of states as of persons, is morally immature, each country like a child insisting “Me first, me first.” In truth, it is worse than childish because exacerbated by a now global capitalist competition, which sometimes uses states and sometimes is used by states, buttressed with sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, underwater, on land, in the skies, and now in outer space, states and corporations behaving like Hobbesian wolves. Russia invades and annexes Crimea because it has the power to do so. China does the same to Tibet. And America is king of the hill, presently. Political cosmopolitanism, then, would mean the abridgement of such unbridled national sovereignty, cooperation to secure the higher morally more mature ideal of world peace. Kant thinks of this too—peace—as a “public right.” Indeed, he distinguishes three different kinds of public rights, those of individuals, which he calls “political,” those of sovereign states, which he calls “international,” and those enabling a world regulatory supervision for the sake of peace, for which he reserves the term “cosmopolitan.”19 In each case what Kant advocates is moral enlightenment, which is to say, a transparent deliberative process to determine what is just and how such justice overrules and subdues the violence of unbridled will to power. Cosmopolitan public right would thus establish not the enforced peace of military victory but the enlightened peace of social and political cooperation. Needless to say racists are no less terrified by this prospect. Individual and international cosmopolitanism are deeply related. First, they are humanist, placing the humane above the parochial in the realm of values. Instead of imposing one arbitrary and exclusionary particularity or  These two articles are found in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss.  Ibid., 112.

18 19

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another, it means singularity appreciating singularity, in a word, dignity and personality. After all, each person and country have its distinguishing particularities, its languages, its history, its geography, and the like, like fingerprints or DNA.  But, second, cosmopolitanism re-contextualizes such differences by submitting them to the higher authority of ethics, of responsible persons and responsible states, both “good neighbors.” Cosmopolitanism, in individuals and in states, is a responsibility, to respond to the other, whether individual or state, for the betterment of all. Morality is the basis of cosmopolitanism, justice is its aim. Not easy, to be sure, but most precious. “A gentleman,” Confucius says, “takes as much trouble to discover what is right as lesser men take to discover what will pay.”20 Cosmopolitanism is an ethical humanism. No wonder Gramci, seeking justice, appeals to truth, truth for all humanity. Owing to limits, the rest of my presentation focuses on the cosmopolitanism of the individual rather than that of states. And it does so first, by reference to literature rather than philosophy. First, Heinrich Heine, whose cosmopolitanism is deliberate and self-conscious, and then Herman Melville, who is less often so identified. We then conclude with two philosophers.

Heinrich Heine Heine was many things, poet, philosopher, literary critic, journalist, lyricist and songster, patriotic German living in Paris (the most cosmopolitan city of nineteenth-century Europe), and a positive and revolutionary influence on Marx and Engels in their formative years.21 Further, he was a Jew, and still very much and quite self-consciously a Jew despite “purchasing” in 1825 an “entry ticket” to Europe with his conversion to Christianity, adding the names “Christian Johann” before “Heinrich.” Heine in his life and writings united these multiple roles and fields of meaning without reducing one to the other, building bridges, finding affinities, in a hospitable cosmopolitanism that ameliorated, even if it could not overcome, by intelligence, wit, culture and civility the then stronger countervailing currents  Confucius, Analects, Book IV, no. 16; 105.  Regarding his politics, the following statement by Heine scholar Leslie Bodi provides a good summary: “He believed in the historical necessity of revolutionary change; emotionally, however, he was torn between Promethean enthusiasm and an insight into the horrors, the irrationality and the inhumanity inherent in political action.” Leslie Bodi, “Heinrich Heine: the poet as frondeur,” in Intellectuals and Revolution, ed. Eugene Kamenka and F. B. Smith (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 44. 20 21

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of mutual suspicion and hostility between France and Germany, not to forget many additional and longstanding social, economic, religious and political frictions, to put this matter delicately, which separated Christian and Jew. We can say to Heine’s credit that to the very limited extent that some Nazi’s cared at all for higher culture, and it is well established that few did, there was probably no German author they hated more passionately than Heine—even while  they could not stop singing his songs! Nietzsche, in sharp contrast, who detested vulgar anti-Semitism and anti-­ Semites, including his own sister and brother-in-law as well as certain public intellectuals such as Eugen Dühring and popular artists such as Richard Wagner, among others, and who considered himself a “good European”—a cosmopolitan—instead, considered Heinrich Heine Germany’s greatest lyricist and his only equal as a master stylist of the German language.22 Let us read some lines from Heine’s own Last Will, written shortly before his death in 1856, after eight painful years of confinement due to paralysis in a small Paris apartment he called his “mattress-grave.” I ask that my funeral be as simple as possible, and that the expenses of interment should not exceed the usual amount of those of the humblest citizen. … If I have unwittingly offended against good morals and decency, which are the true essence of all monotheistic doctrines of faith, I ask pardon of God and man. I forbid that any speech be made at my grave, either in German or French. At the same time I express a wish that my countrymen, however happily the destinies of our native land should shape themselves, should never bring back my ashes to Germany. I have never cared to devote my person to political mummery. It has been the greatest task of my life to work for a cordial understanding between Germany and France, and to frustrate the plots of the enemies of democracy, who exploit national prejudices and animosities for their own uses. I believe that I have deserved well of my fellow countrymen and of the French, and the claims which I have on their gratitude are no doubt the most valuable legacy which I can bequeath to my universal heirs.23

Extraordinaire rapprochements, noble aspirations, quintessential cosmopolitan. As to his conciliation of German and Jewish, drawing them 22  See, Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, transl. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 245 (Ecce Homo, “Why I am so Clever,” section 4). 23  The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, ed. Frederic Ewen (New York: Citadel Press, 1959), 500–501 (transl. Frederic Ewen).

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together, respecting their difference and the singularity of each, according to Hannah Arendt, Heine was the only person ever to have pulled this off,24 because, as she writes, “[h]e knew that separate peoples are needed to focus the genius of poets and artists; and he had no time for academic pipe-dreams.”25

Herman Melville There is every reason to recognize the cosmopolitanism of one of America’s acknowledged greatest writers, Herman Melville, without in the least diminishing his American genius. America, after all, is a “nation of immigrants.”26 Melville, in particular, though born in America to an American-born family, had not only read widely from world literature, both modern and ancient, but had personally travelled to Europe and the Middle East. Even earlier, as a young man, he had travelled the world as a merchant seaman, as far as the South Pacific and its islands, including Tahiti, half a century, by the way, before Paul Gauguin. More profoundly, he had made his name as a writer of two popular travelogues of exoticism and adventure, Typee (1846) and its sequel Omoo (1847), in both of which the protagonist narrator takes to task the narrowness of Westerners, highlighting their blithe ignorance and presumptuous intolerance, singling out especially in this regard the Christian missionaries, and depicting natives and their customs in a favorable light (for both of which some critics took Melville to task). Notwithstanding their not especially subtle criticisms of the West, Typee and Omoo  were enormously popular in America and Europe, and made Melville a very famous writer. Of course, today when we think of Melville it is not Typee or Omoo that come to mind, or any other of Melville’s several other novels, but rather

24  See, Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978. “Heine is the only German Jew who could truthfully describe himself as both a German and a Jew. “(74). The more usual position, from both sides, is of course the oppositional and hierarchical one, as for instance one finds, from the Jewish side, in Israel Zangwill, Chosen Peoples: The Hebraic Ideal ‘Versus’ The Teutonic (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1918). 25  Arendt, Pariah, 75. 26  This expression was made popular by the eponymous book, A Nation of Immigrants (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1959) by then Senator John F. Kennedy, re-published posthumously (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

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his greatest, which is indeed a very great novel,27 now numbered among the classics of world literature, which is to say a book at once incomparable and cosmopolitan, namely, Moby Dick, published in 1851. So great and original  was this book that along with the Pequod within it, it sank Melville’s career, removing Melville from fame to obscurity until Moby Dick was “rediscovered” half a century later. Apparently, his readers wanted Typee and Omoo II and III, but not what they got, an exquisitely wrought and profoundly thought metaphysical epic of human will against nature. The book is cosmopolitan, as is the international crew of the Pequod, whose most distinguished members, its four harpooners, hailed from around the world: the tattooed Queequeg from the South Seas, son of a cannibal tribal chieftain; Tashtego a Native American Indian; Daggoo an African; and Fedallah a Parsi said to have lived in China. But here I turn elsewhere,  to another of Melville’s books, a novella, also, I would say, a great piece of literature, namely, Billy Budd, Sailor.28 Less than a hundred pages, this novel was first found in manuscript form in 1919, and first published in 1924, thirty-three years after Melville’s death in 1891. It did not appear in a properly critical edition until 1962. The book is no Moby Dick, but then no other book is Moby Dick. More than anything else by Melville, however, this novella, in its title character Billy Budd, recalls us to our starting point, the “senseless goodness” described in Ikonnikov’s manifesto in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Like much of Typee and Omoo, but most like Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Sailor, takes place at sea. Indeed, unlike any of the earlier works, it takes place exclusively at sea, aboard a warship of the British Royal Navy, the aptly named—for a warship—the H. M. S. Bellipotent. Melville sets it in the summer of 1797. The  dating is important because it is only a few months after two mutinies in the Royal Navy which occurred in the real world, the so-called Spithead mutiny of April and the Nure mutiny of May 1797, together known as “the Great Mutiny.” This context is important because in Melville’s novel the protagonist Billy, an ordinary sailor, will be accused, falsely, of plotting mutiny.  Awareness of the historical  context 27  See, e.g., D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 159: “It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equaled …. It is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.” 28  Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Published posthumously and without final authorial editing, this edition, among several others, seems to be the best—most accurate, most faithful to Melville’s text—from a scholarly point of view.

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enables readers to realize the seriousness of such a charge. There are three main characters: Billy Budd, an ordinary sailor; John Claggart, also a sailor, but Billy’s superior; and the Captain of the ship, Captain Vere. More deeply, however, Billy is good, Claggart is evil, and Vere, as Captain, represents sovereign political authority which must, as we shall see, adjudicate between them. Billy Budd is not just good, but goodness personified, a figure embodying moral wholesomeness, social straightforwardness, unsullied moral purity and good will. In the story he is several times likened to Adam before the fall. Twenty-one years old, he is a foundling, which is to say a person of origins unknown, a born cosmopolitan as it were. He is handsome, all “strength and beauty.”29 Straightforward, frank, he is simple in the sense of being sincere and honest, without reflection or hidden agenda. “Billy,” Melville puts it, “though happily endowed with the gaiety of high health, youth, and a free heart, was yet by no means of a satirical turn. … To deal in double meanings and in situations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature”30—“of self-consciousness he seemed to have little or none.”31 Not surprisingly, his fellow seaman “all love him.”32 One of the ship’s seasoned sailors christens him “Baby”—Baby Budd. And it is right, like Billy’s last name, he is no more than a bud, not even a flower, for he is untainted by the second thoughts and thick skin that the experience of human evil thrusts upon most humans like it or not, and which we often mistake for maturity. Melville’s Billy Budd, Baby Budd, except for his youth, can in no way be confused with someone like “Billy the Kid,” who was an angry and aggressive adolescent, delinquint not innocent, a brat, a bully, in truth a sociopath with a six-shooter, a conscience less killer. Billy Budd, however, is not immature; he is innocent, trusting, all good will and honesty, naïve in the sense suggested at the beginning of this paper. Not surprisingly either, with such a figure as with Adam, evil will be his downfall. All good, morally pure, uncorrupted, Billy is inexperienced in evil and its devious ways, and hence unprepared for its outrages, almost without defense and certainly without sufficient defense. Enter the evil Iago-like character John Claggart. Like the snake in the Garden of Eden. Not an ordinary seaman, he is a petty officer and, not to  Budd, 44.  Ibid., 49. 31  Ibid., 52. 32  Ibid., 47. 29 30

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make too much of the pun, he is a very petty person. But “petty” isn’t the half of it. His evil is far deeper. He is envious, cunning, devious, calculating, in short, an “evil nature,” “like the scorpion,” to cite Melville. Like the snake, as I have said. Antithetical to Billy, he is no less an antipathetic character. For such a character, for such evil, the purity of Billy’s goodness—Billy’s very existence—is a thorn, an offense, an insult, provoking Claggart’s envy and hatred. The good is not defined in opposition to evil, though it opposes evil, but evil, in contrast, is so defined, by its opposition to good.33 And thus Claggart hatches a plot to entrap and destroy Billy, concocting a scheme to implicate him in mutiny. When the groundwork of his plot has been sufficiently well laid, Claggart goes to Captain Vere and denounces Billy for mutiny. It has often been said of evil-doers, and is often enough true, that their condemnations of their enemies are often the very delineation of their own machinations. As to the third main character of Melville’s tale, Vere, the ship’s captain, he is a man of integrity, which is to say, of inner nobility, clear intelligence and fine perception, and, as an officer in the Royal Navy, indeed as the ship’s Captain, he is no less a man of duty, order, discipline, with even a touch of the “martinet,” but this last perhaps owing, again, to the historical moment, so near to the Great Mutiny, and inasmuch as he captains a ship which at the moment of the tale’s events is sailing alone, away from the rest of the fleet, indeed out of communication with them, his Captain’s role as final arbiter of justice is rightly accentuated. So given the characters, good, evil, sovereign, given their relative positions and powers, sailor, petty officer, captain, we are not surprised that Melville has Claggart explicitly remind Captain Vere of the Great Mutiny in the course of his accusation of Billy for mutiny, knowing full well that under any circumstances, but especially under these particular circumstance, the Captain cannot tolerate the least hint of mutiny.  Claggart is intent on doing Billy in.  Happily, however, because Captain Vere is a good judge of men, and very well acquainted with both Billy and Claggart, listening to the latter’s surprising and  incongruous accusation, he is immediately and naturally 33  On such an asymmetry, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in which a “noble” morality, by which the good define themselves by their deeds, is distinguished from a “slave” morality, which consists in rejecting the good of noble morality. To be sure, Melville’s opposition of good and evil, Billy Budd and John Claggart, conforms to neither of Nietzsche’s models.

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suspicious of its veracity. Nonetheless, mutiny being a very serious charge, to clear things up and to keep the very idea of it quiet, Captain Vere has Billy brought to his quarters. Claggart is ordered to repeat his accusation to Billy’s face. Unflinching, and cunning liar that he is, Claggart does so. He bears false witness. And it is precisely because everything Billy hears coming out of Claggart’s mouth is an outright and most outrageous lie, and because of his own innocent and trusting nature, Billy is not only nonplussed, he is rendered speechless by Claggart’s fabrications. He is amazed and stunned, “he stood,” Melville writes, “like one impaled and gagged,” unable to speak, “a convulsed tongue-tie.”34 And then comes the fatal tragic event. I cite Melville: “The next instant, quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night, his right arm shot out, and Claggart dropped to the deck.”35 In a flash, by a seemingly irrepressible reflex, Billy punches and decks the lying accusing Claggart. “‘Fated boy,” breathed Captain Vere in a tone so low as to be almost a whisper, ‘what have you done!’”36 We find out the first of it straightaway: Claggart is dead. The Captain calls a surgeon who verifies the death. After which we hear the second and worst of it, when Captain Vere exclaims what is doubtlessly the most famous line of the book: “‘Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!’” Sailors cannot strike their superiors, ever, in any way, for any reason, and certainly they cannot strike them dead. Captain Vere’s exclaimed observation captures in twelve words the deepest message of Melville’s’ Billy Budd, Sailor. Billy Budd, Baby Budd, the bud of unsullied goodness, innocence wed to good will, and John Claggart, crooked and crafty, who concocts Billy’s downfall, a minion of the devil surely. And yet it is Billy, “an angel of God,” who will in the next hour be tried by the “drumhead court” convened by Captain Vere, and found guilty, as he is, of having struck and killed an officer, Claggart, and sentenced, as is then required for such a crime, to death, and then hung by the neck early next morning witnessed on deck by all the ship’s officers and seamen. After the court martial, the conviction, and the hanging, a mere two pages after Billy’s mortal blow to Claggart, Melville sums up: In the jugglery of circumstances preceding and attending the event on board the Bellipotent, and in the light of that martial code whereby it was  Ibid., 98.  Ibid., 99. 36  Ibid. 34 35

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formally to be judged, innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places. In a legal view the apparent victim of the tragedy was he who had sought to victimize a man blameless; and the indisputable deed of the latter, navally regarded, constituted the most heinous of military crimes. Yet more. The essential right and wrong involved in the matter, the clearer that might be, so much the worse for the responsibility of a loyal sea commander, inasmuch as he was not authorized to determine the matter on that primitive basis.37

Of course “primitive” here does not mean rude or crude. It rather means fundamental, profound. It refers to the goodness with which we began this chapter, and the goodness upon which we believe all ethics rests, a goodness beyond words or justification, the proximity of that cosmopolitanism whereby humans recognize one another and help one another as humans beyond or before all the conventional differences which may and often do otherwise alienate them. Melville is fully aware, tragically aware we should say, as is Captain Vere, both that the navy’s martial code is necessary and that it can, and that in this case it has perverted “essential right and wrong.” Not only is Captain Vere aware of the injustice, the discrepancy, whereby good is punished, and not only is he helpless to fix it, and indeed must supervise its execution, but as well, as Captain, he must manipulate the crew, to dampen their natural discontent and rebellion at such a verdict and hanging, because the crew, Melville reminds us, is no less aware, and no less feels the profound wrong of it all. It is indeed their very humanity. In his commentary on this short novel by Melville, Loren Goldner takes Captain Vere to be a figure of Burkean conservatism.38 No doubt he is correct, but even more deeply Captain Vere is a tragic figure, torn not between just and unjust, but like Antigone torn between the justice that is legal—the “inevitable ceremonial”—and the justice, or what Aristotle called the “decency” tempering justice, the “senseless goodness” which has never yet has found adequate legal expression but nonetheless colors, and indeed in the best of possible worlds guides all that is right and wrong. One might still say Captain Vere is Burkean because unable to mediate between the two types of justice, legal and extra-legal, as no one is fully able, he sides perhaps a bit too enthusiastically with legality.  Ibid., 103.  See, Loren Goldner, Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man (New York: Queequeg Publications, 2006), chapter 19, 264–286. 37 38

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What Melville has thus written with Billy Budd, Sailor is not some philosophical or systematic proposal to solve all ethical conflicts but rather a tragedy to burst the formalism of the necessary formalities, to shatter every sanctimonious complacency derived from adherence to ceremonials, procedures, regulations and laws, to remind us of what they can only forget or approximate, a higher justice, a justice which is not yet, but which should move us even more deeply in the face of all we have accomplished toward making justice real in courts, policing, laws and constitutions, for none of them are enough, none of them are just enough. For Levinas “the very epiphany of the face” “consists in undoing the form” in which we are always “already dissimulated.”39 No one is good enough. Nor, for Levinas is any institutionalized justice, no matter how just, fully just, and hence no current justice, no matter how just, is just enough. “Justice itself is born of charity,”40 “the beyond the State”41 to which the just state is beholden. Heartbreaking as is Billy Budd, Sailor, its power lies in its rebuke and the source of that rebuke, its speaking for a mute goodness, for a goodness without words, for the moral proximity which is the irrepressible power of the powerless. I recall Vasily Grossman’s words: “A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.” It is this kindness, this human generosity that undergirds and drives the cosmopolitanism which will forever resist globalization, quantification, commodification, with the weakest but most powerful opposition of all, the naked defenseless human face.  All violence, and all evil, as all injustice, comes down to harming another person, our neighbor.

Emmanuel Levinas Levinas has taken up the difficult task of giving voice to the community without commonality—“humanity is not a genre like animality”42—the most fundamental ineradicable cosmopolitanism: a “humanism of the other,” my responsibility beyond and otherwise than the interchangeable linkages which constitute totality, whether in the name of identity, difference or deference. It is the self as elected, chosen before choosing. A  Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 31.  Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, transl. Michael B.  Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 107. 41  Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse, transl. Gary D.  Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 185. 42  Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 7. 39 40

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shattered self, the selflessness of irrecuperable non-identity—because responsible for the other. Of the singularity of the other, and of the singularity of my responsibility, Levinas calls attention to “Uniqueness of the one of a kind—or uniqueness having broken with all kinds.”43 “This madness”—which is the strictest sobriety, but mad from the point of view of the totality, globalization—“is what is human.”44 Appropriating the most extreme religious language, without the slightest extremism, except in the name of goodness and justice, Levinas will call such uniqueness holiness— the humanity of the human, the politics of humanity, responsibility, for the nearest, the neighbor, and the far, all humanity, all sentient life, for all and everything. Continuing with such language, let us recall a citation from Levinas which will bring to mind Grossman, and no less Dostoyevsky’s several “holy fools”: I’m not saying men are saints, or moving toward saintliness. I’m only saying that the vocation of saintliness is recognized by all human beings as a value, and that this recognition defines the human. The human has pierced through imperturbable being; even if no social organization or any institution can, in the name of purely ontological necessities, ensure, or even produce saintliness. There have been saints.45

Of such a singularizing yet ethical and cosmopolitan vocation, humanity as aspiration, for goodness, for justice, which joins each human to each other without reduction, starting in proximity but requiring a politics of humanity, Levinas also appropriates a line from Rilke: “Nothing is theater anymore, the drama is no longer a game. Everything is serious.”46

Socrates I end with a few words about ignorance. The older I get the longer I have thought about Socrates’ famously professed ignorance, which was also his wisdom. Ignorant and wise at once, he knew that he did not know. Commentators have often thought his ignorance ironic. Call himself 43  Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, transl. Michael B.  Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 123. 44  Emmanuel Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 145. 45  Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 171. 46  Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 55.

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ignorant, Socrates understood very well and made mincemeat of the knowledge claimed by his interlocutors. Having exposed their ignorance, can he also really be ignorant? Many commentators speak of his professed ignorance as ironic or rhetorical gambit. And it is clear to all from his leading questions and argumentation that Socrates knows a great deal. What is really at stake is the value of knowledge, its weight, its worth, its status. Socrates’ interlocutors are arrogant, thinking that what they know makes them great, while Socrates remains humble, despite all that he obviously does really know. He remains humble, then, not because he is stupid or ignorant of this or that, but because unlike his interlocutors Socrates knows that his knowledge is quite limited, and quite limited because he wants to know about the most important things, not facts, not information, but the greatest and highest values which are to guide human life, such as the true meaning of goodness, of justice and of piety. His interlocutors mistakenly think they know about such things, when in fact they do not, and hence are ignorant, while Socrates does know about those things, but what he knows, knowing what he knows, includes knowing that he hardly knows enough or knows sufficiently, or knows profoundly about them. To know that he does not know means knowing he does not fully know them, but that so important are they—the truth about goodness, the truth about justice, the truth about piety—that he is humbled, not frightened off, but humbled to keep learning more, to keep raising questions, to keep seeking answers. But I think there is also another dimension to Socrates’s ignorance beyond its irony and humility. Something that has to do, then, not simply with lack of knowledge or incompletion of knowledge. Rather it has to do with a lack inherent in knowledge as such. We know that Socrates turned from his youthful studies of nature, natural science, to the study of humanity, to the humanities, to the study of the values we have already listed, goodness, justice and piety. I used to criticize Socrates in comparison to Levinas by saying that Socrates wanted to “know the good” whereas Levinas taught that one must “do the good” and that in waiting to know the good first one would never get around to doing the good. I still believe in this criticism, that ethics, not knowledge, is first philosophy. What has changed, however, is that I now see that Socrates too, by the choice of his topics, of what was worth studying—goodness, justice and piety—and his dogged study of them, was very likely aware of this hierarchy as well. Turning from natural science to the humanities, for the deepest questions and answers, this already bespeaks the prioritization of ethics over

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knowledge. And that here, too, then, is the deepest sense of his ignorance: to recognize the primacy not of the true but of the good, the good beyond being, beyond knowledge, yet sustaining knowledge and truth, and society, statecraft and religion as well. It is “ignorance,” so Levinas has written, “in the sense that nobility ignores what is not noble.”47 The primacy of ethics is Kant’s teaching as it is Levinas’s teaching, as it is Gramsci’s. We have discovered it as well in Grossman, Heine and Melville. It is the core of the cosmopolitan, a breaking away, never finished, ever renewed, from the inevitable ceremonial of the world, being, knowledge, state, money, ego, pleasure, and all the totalizing self-­ enclosures whose exclusions are designed to protect in-group from outgroup. Call it ignorance, or call it charity, goodness, justice, or holiness, it is to breach those callous totalities that we converse, that we speak and speak again.

References Agamben, G. (2003). The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford University Press. Arendt, H. (1978). The Jew as Parsiah (Ed. Ron H. Feldman). Grove Press. Aristotle. (1982). Politics (T. A. Sinclair, Trans. and Rev. by Trevor J. Saunders). Penguin Books. Bergson, H. (1946). The Creative Mind (M.  L. Andison, Trans.) The Philosophical Library. Bodi, L. (1979). Heinrich Hseine: The Poet as Frondeur. In E.  Kamenka & F. B. Smith (Eds.), Intellectuals and Revolution. Edward Arnold. Confucius. (1938). Analects (A. Walley, Trans.). Random House. Derrida, J. (2008). The Animal That Therefore I Am (M.-L.  Mallet, Ed. and D. Wills, Trans.). Fordham University Press. Goldner, L. (2006). Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man. Queequeg Publications. Gramci, A. (2007). Prison Notebooks (Vol. 3, J.  A. Buttigieg, Ed. and Trans.). Columbia University Press. Grossman, V. (1987). Life and Fate (R. Chandler, Trans.). Harper & Row, . Heine, H. (1959). The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine. (F.  Ewen, Ed. and Trans.) Citadel Press. Kant, I. (2007). Kant: Political Writings (H. Reiss, Ed. and H. B. Nisbet, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Kennedy, J. F. (1964). A Nation of Immigrants. Harper & Row.  Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 178.

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Laertius, D. (2005). Lives of Eminent Philosophers (R. D. Hicks, Trans.). Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library). Lawrence, D. H. (1968). Studies in Classic American Literature. Viking Press. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity (A.  Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1994). Beyond the Verse (G. D. Mole, Transl.). Indiana University Press. Levinas, E. (1998a). Entre Nous (M. B. Smith and B. Harshav, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Levinas, E. (1998b). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (A.  Lingis,Trans.). Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1999). Alterity and Transcendence (M. B. Smith, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Levinas, E. (2001). Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (J. Robbins, Ed.). Stanford University Press. Levinas, E. (2003). Humanism of the Other (N.  Poller, Trans.). University of Illinois Press. Melville, H. (1970). Billy Budd, Sailor (H. Hayford and M. M. Sealts, Jr., Ed.). University of Chicago Press. Milosz, C. (1990). The Captive Mind (J. Zielongo, Trans.). Random House. Nietzsche, F. (1969). On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Random House. Proust, M. (1981). Remembrance of Things Past (Vol. 3, C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin, Trans.). Random House. Thucydides. (1964). History of the Peloponnesian War (R.  Warner, Trans.). Penguin Books. Wilson, E. (1963). The Triple Thinkers. Oxford University Press. Zangwill, I. (1918). Chosen Peoples: The Hebraic Ideal ‘Versus’ The Teutonic. George Allen & Unwin.

CHAPTER 4

Globalization and Cosmopolitanization: Reassessing the ‘Humanitarian Turn’ of International Politics Thirty Years Later Luca Scuccimarra

Foreword: Globalization and International Order One of the most characterizing aspects of the ‘new’ political and legal order, born from the so-called 1989 divide, is the emergence—or, as some affirm, simply the re-emergence—of a form of international political morality based not on the ‘particularism’ of the modern society of States, but rather on the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the rising ‘global society’.1 Against the traditional State-centric approach to international relations, from the 1990s on there have been more and more positions favouring a real Translation revised by Emma Catherine Gainsforth. 1  I use the expression ‘international morality’ to refer to the constellation of moral principles specifically responsible for regulating ‘relations between citizens or officials of different States’, as proposed by Terry Nardin in his book Law, Morality and the Relations of States (1983, 233).

L. Scuccimarra (*) Department of Political Sciences, University of Rome – La Sapienza, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_4

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‘global’ turn of politics, founded on ‘universal principles that challenge the presumed moral supremacy of territorial boundaries and which favour instead the welfare of humanity generally’ (Hayden, 2005, 1 ff.). This view is based on a marked redefinition of the consolidated—albeit problematic—relation between ‘the old international legal order of sovereign nation-states’ (Beck, 2006, 132) and the sphere of fundamental and intangible legal and moral entitlements that modern philosophical thought firmly associated with the human condition. According to many scholars the constitutive factors of this ‘humanitarian turn’ (Holliday, 2003) of international politics include some of the most radical shifts generated by the manifold transformative process which—in want of a better term—we generally call ‘globalization’. As has been stressed, this notion points firstly to ‘an intensification of cross-­ border interactions and a growing interdependence between national and transnational actors through a “deterritorialization” whereby social spaces, distance and borders lose some of their previously overriding influence’ (Hayden, 2005, 4 f.). These developments have been described as being characterized at a reflexive and experiential level by the emergence of a new and more inclusive view of politics sharply contrasting with the ‘inside/outside divide’ (Youngs, 1996)—and the segmental view of international political space—typical of Modern Age: The idea of global politics calls into question the traditional demarcations between the domestic and the foreign, and between the territorial and the nonterritorial, found in modern conceptions of ‘the political’. These categories not only shaped modern political thought but also institution-building, as a clear division was established between great ministries of state founded to focus on domestic matters and those created to pursue geopolitical questions. Global problems highlight the richness and complexity of the interconnections which now transcend states and societies in the global order. Moreover, global politics is anchored today not just in traditional geopolitical concerns – trade, power, security – but in a large diversity of social and ecological questions. (Held, 2004, 366)

As has been pointed out on several occasions, we cannot, however, understand the later developments of this process without taking into account the role played by other—and more problematic—‘contextual factors’ (Bellamy, 2012, 301) pertaining to the turbulent political, economic and social dynamics of the late nineteenth century. Among these, we can certainly include the new and shocking phenomenology of ‘organized violence’ which took shape—against all optimistic previsions—with

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the end of the Cold War and the waning of the bipolar world order: according to the British academic Mary Kaldor, despite appearing to be ‘low intensity’ conflicts, the ‘asymmetrical wars’ of the Global age are characterized by a systematic recourse to extreme behaviours such as mass killing of civilian populations or their forced deportation (Kaldor, 1999). This explains why ‘the proliferation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, not always qualifiable as genocides or democides, but easily ascribable to the more indefinite notion of ethnic cleansing’, could impose itself very early as ‘one of the major emergencies of globalization’, (Portinaro, 2017, 182) allowing us to better understand the modalities— and the timeline—of the ‘humanitarian turn’ of the Global age: since it is also and foremost pathological phenomena of this kind that ‘have made older ideas of national autarky or isolation increasingly untenable’, contributing to a ‘growing recognition of the need for some normative conception of global community, responsibility, and governance’ (Kymlicka & Walker, 2012, 1 ff.).

The Great Transformation According to the philosopher Seyla Benhabib, these developments, coinciding with contemporary processes of globalization, have been most evident particularly in three political-legal areas: the sphere of humanitarian interventions, concerning ‘the treatment by nation states of their citizens or residents’; the sphere of repression of crimes against humanity, which involves relations ‘among enemies or opponents in nationally bounded as well as extraterritorial settings’; and finally the sphere of international migrations, which, on the contrary, ‘pertains to the rights of individuals, not insofar as they are considered members of concrete bounded communities, but insofar as they are human beings simpliciter, when they come into contact with, seek entry into, or want to become members of territorially bounded communities’ (Benhabib, 2006a, 29 ff.). Despite the sometimes significant differences, in all three areas it is possible to grasp more or less evident signs of the emergence of a new way of conceiving international relations, characterized by a shared responsibility for safeguarding basic human rights in every part of the world and therefore able to challenge the logic of ‘differentiated relations’ typical of modern politics (ibid.). As noted by Ulrich Beck—one of the main protagonists of this line of thought—in this transition

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a far-reaching shift in the relations of priority between international law and human rights takes place. The principle ‘international law trumps human rights’, which holds in the first modernity dominated by the nation-state, is superseded by the principle ‘human rights trump international law’, which governs global relations in the second modernity and whose implications have not yet been followed through. (…) The category-forming principles of the first modernity – collectivity, territoriality, borders – are superseded by a system of coordinates in which individualization and globalization are directly interconnected and provide the conceptual framework for new definitions of state, law, politics and the individual. The bearers of human rights are individuals (not collective subjects such as ‘people’ and ‘state’); hence human rights are essentially individual rights. But they must be understood at the same time in a globalized sense, since they are unthinkable apart from a universalistic claim to validity that grants these rights to all individuals, without regard to social status, class, gender, nationality or religion. (Beck, 2006, 121 ff.)

All things considered, the area of humanitarian intervention in particular—in the peculiar military form it assumed beginning in the early 1990s (Defarges, 2006)—can account for the disruptive impact produced by this kind of approach on the traditional founding basis of the international order. In fact, in such a context, the consolidated acknowledgement of a sphere of inviolable human prerogatives has become—also thanks to the enhanced performativity of the language of human rights—the starting point for a new and ambivalent way of legitimating the use of physical force between States, based on the systematic questioning of the traditional categorical framework of the inter-state relations system. Against the rigid classification of the realm of military force defined by the UN Charter— acts of aggression, acts of self-defence, acts of enforcement authorized by the UN Security Council (Farer, 2003, 58)—the supporters of this kind of intervention claim that in cases of a crisis that greatly endanger the lives of innocent people or threaten their welfare, the international community has the right—and, according to some, even the duty—to resort, also through its single members, to the use of force in order to restore the conditions for a peaceful and orderly coexistence in the concerned States, acting, if necessary, even against the will of their governing authorities—a condition which is not codified by international law, but is based on the most profound ethical-legal principles, equally binding for everyone in virtue of a shared condition of humanity.

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Clearly this approach radically questions ‘the particularistic principle of the sovereignty of states and the inviolability of their borders’ underpinning the process by which the system of modern international relations took shape, from the Peace of Westphalia to the establishment of the United Nations (Zolo, 2006, 57 ff.): namely ‘the sovereign state’s once indisputable claim to be the principal locus of power and loyalty’ and its parallel claim to ‘an unfettered discretion with respect to the production and distribution of public Goods and to the definition of rights and duties’ of persons residing within the state’s recognized frontiers’ (Farer, 2003, 55). As surprising as it may seem, precisely this innovative re-­interpretation of the foundations of the system of international relations was accepted and supported in the 1990s also within the limited arena of global politics players, as shown by the openly interventionist stances which punctuate the political and diplomatic debate sparked by the shocking sequence of humanitarian crises triggered by the ‘new wars’ of the Global era: from Saddam Hussein’s violent repression of the Kurdish insurrection at the end of the Gulf War to the Civil War in Somalia, from Tutsi extermination in Rwanda to the endless Balkan civil war and the Kosovo crisis, which was a real turning point not only because of the levels of military intervention but also because of the theoretical means employed to support its legitimacy ‘in both ethical and political terms’ (Bonanate, 2006, xv). Of course, different ideological and discursive registers were chosen by the protagonists of international politics to support this ‘new humanitarian interventionism’ (Wheeler & Dunne, 2001; Wertheim, 2010). While French ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ of the early 1990s was dominated by the categorical imperatives of the ‘ethics of extreme urgency’ supported by Kouchner and his French Doctors since the establishment of Médecins Sans Frontières, today the arguments used by Western leaders to justify the intervention of NATO forces to protect Kosovo Albanians appear to be decidedly more vague and ambivalent—a sort of ambiguous ‘utilitarianism of values’ that we find explicitly theorized in the ambitious Doctrine of the International Community exposed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in his famous Chicago speech delivered in the spring of 1999: Twenty years ago we would not have been fighting in Kosovo. We would have turned our backs on it. The fact that we are engaged is the result of a wide range of changes – the end of the Cold War; changing technology; the spread of democracy. But it is bigger than that: I believe the world has changed in a more fundamental way. Globalisation has transformed our

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economies and our working practices. But globalisation is not just economic. It is also a political and security phenomenon. We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist. By necessity we have to co-operate with each other across nations. (…) We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not. We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore new political ideas in other countries if we want to innovate. We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure. (…) We may be tempted to think back to the clarity and simplicity of the Cold War. But now we have to establish a new framework. No longer is our existence as states under threat. Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish. In the end values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer. As John Kennedy put it ‘Freedom is indivisible and when one man is enslaved who is free?’ (Blair, 1999)

However, what united these ideologically and argumentatively diversified positions was the shared opinion that it is ‘unacceptable for regimes to use the principle of sovereignty as a shield behind which they can claim to be free to engage in activities that pose enormous threats to their citizens, neighbours, or the rest of the international community’ (United States Department of Defense, 2005, 1; Bellamy 2009a, 24). In the political and diplomatic debate of those years, the point being discussed was no longer whether extreme behaviours taking place inside state borders are legitimate, but how to react to them in order to protect the victims—it is on the basis of this assumption that in the abovementioned Chicago Speech Tony Blair openly questioned, albeit with all due caution, the basic principle of non-­interference set out in the UN Charter as one of the cornerstones of the international legal order:2 The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts. Non-interference has long been considered an important principle of inter2  Charter of United Nations, art. 2 (7): ‘Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII’.

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national order. And it is not one we would want to jettison too readily. One state should not feel it has the right to change the political system of another or foment subversion or seize pieces of territory to which it feels it should have some claim. But the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as ‘threats to international peace and security’. When regimes are based on minority rule they lose legitimacy – look at South Africa. (Blair, 1999)

A more explicit articulation of the fundamental ‘systemic’ meaning of this shift can be found in the words of a great intellectual ‘lent’ to politics, the writer and essayist Vaclav Havel, at the time President of the newly constituted Czech Republic. In fact, according to Havel, the dramatic events taking place in Kosovo following the developments of the civil war in Yugoslavia were the grounds for testing the elaboration of a new model of state sovereignty, based on the unconditional recognition of universal values ‘such as respect for human rights and liberties, equality of citizens, the rule of law and civil society’ and therefore exposed to the supervision of the international community in the exercise of its fundamental legal and institutional prerogatives (Havel, 1999). From this point of view, despite the fact it started ‘without a direct UN mandate’, the intervention of the Atlantic Alliance in the territories of former Yugoslavia could claim the superior legitimacy deriving from actions carried out in the respect ‘for the rights of humanity, as they are articulated by our conscience as well as by other instruments of international law’, and so on the basis of a ‘law that ranks higher than the protection of the sovereignty of states’.3 With the intervention in Kosovo, for the first time in the history of international relations traditional politics based on ‘national interests’ seemed to give way to politics based on principles, able to reflexively articulate in terms of solidarity and global responsibility the new experience of life in common

3  ‘There is a value which ranks higher than the State. This value is humanity. The State, as is well known, is here to serve the people, not the other way round. If a person serves his or her state such service should go only as far as is necessary for the state to do a good service to all its citizens. Human rights rank above the rights of states. Human liberties constitute a higher value than State sovereignty. In terms of international law, the provisions that protect the unique human being should take precedence over the provisions that protect the State’ (Havel, 1999).

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brought about by a world ‘that connects people – regardless of borders – through millions of links of integration’: If, in the world of today, our fates are merged into one single destiny, and if every one of us is responsible for the future of all, nobody – not even the State – should be allowed to restrict the right of the people to exercise this responsibility. I think that the foreign policies of individual states should gradually sever the category that has, until now, most often constituted their axis, that is, the category of ‘interests’, ‘our national interests’ or ‘the foreign policy interests of our state’. The category of ‘interests’ tends to divide rather than to bring us together. (…) Principles unite us rather than divide us. Moreover, they are the yardstick for measuring the legitimacy or illegitimacy of our interests. I do not think it is valid when various state doctrines say that it is in the interest of the state to uphold such and such a principle. Principles must be respected and upheld for their own sake – so to speak, as a matter of principle – and interests should be derived from them.4

Military Interventionism and ‘Responsibility to Protect’ In truth, at least on one point the idealist Havel did not prove to be a valid prophet. Far from contributing to unite the international community in the recognition of ‘principles’ and ‘values’ of solidarity equally binding for all states, the intervention in Kosovo, also because of the questionable modalities in which it was carried out,5 was to become a source of divisions and contrasts at international level, contributing to fuel harsh and inconclusive ‘debates about the “right” of humanitarian intervention and the relative weight of sovereignty and human rights’ (Bellamy, 2009b, 176) within and outside the Security Council. The violent accusations by the Permanent Representative of China to the United Nations condemning the actions of NATO countries during the complex process of approval of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) are a clear indicator of the level of the political and ideological tension created by this traumatic passage. The Chinese ambassador did not limit himself to denouncing the serious violations of the basic principles set out in the United Nations Charter—‘respect for sovereignty and  Ibid.  A spectacular form of high-altitude bombing of Serbia, which critics of the NATO action soon began to mockingly call ‘humanitarian bombing’ (Chitty, 1999, 1 ff.). 4 5

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non-­interference in each other’s internal affairs’—committed by those states with their unilateral intervention in Kosovo, but openly stigmatized the ‘ “human rights over sovereignty” theory’ as a false and highly destabilizing conception, useful only to legitimize new hegemonic claims by the United States and its allies (United Nations, 1999). This perspective was embraced in the following months also by states that did not form the elite of global politics, such as those belonging to the so-called Group of 77, which at the time included the vast majority of non-industrialized or developing countries: after having explicitly rejected through their Foreign Ministers the ‘so-called right of humanitarian intervention’ as a principle without any foundation in the UN Charter or in international law, the latter stressed the need for ‘scrupulously respecting’ the sovereignty, territorial integrity and national unity of individual states also when implementing the more general practices of international ‘humanitarian assistance’, with an approach that seemed to take the debate back at least ten years.6 As many have noted, it was the Ghanaian politician and diplomat Kofi Atta Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations from 1996 to 2006 and prominent ‘norm entrepreneur’ of the Global era (Traub, 2006, 102), who pushed the collective reflection on these issues beyond the unproductive contraposition between ‘interventionists’ and unconditional defenders of ‘sovereignty’. Inaugurating the 54th session of the UN General Assembly, the last of the twentieth century, Annan took a clear stance against any ‘absolute’ interpretation of the principle of non-interference, drawing attention to how ‘state sovereignty’ had been completely ‘redefined’ in recent decades by the ‘forces of globalization and international cooperation’, as well as the new culture of human rights grounding contemporary politics: The State is now widely understood to be the servant of its people, and not vice versa. At the same time, individual sovereignty – and by this I mean the human rights and fundamental freedoms of each and every individual as enshrined in our Charter – has been enhanced by a renewed consciousness of the right of every individual to control his or her own destiny. These parallel developments – remarkable and, in many ways, welcome – do not lend themselves to easy interpretations or simple conclusions. They do, however, demand of us a willingness to think anew – about how the United 6  Group of 77 (1999, §§ 69–70), in explicit reference to the framework of principles defined in the General Assembly resolution no. 46/182 (United Nations General Assembly, 1991). See also Group of 77 (2000, § 54).

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States responds to the political, human rights and humanitarian crises affecting so much of the world; about the means employed by the international community in situations of need; and about our willingness to act in some areas of conflict, while limiting ourselves to humanitarian palliatives in many other crises whose daily toll of death and suffering ought to shame us into action. (Annan, 1999, 36 ff.)

According to Annan, the real challenge facing the international community at the beginning of the new millennium was, therefore, to develop an adequate reflection on these changes, striving to ‘find common ground in upholding the principles of the Charter’, that would allow to reconcile state prerogatives and individual rights, insomuch as ‘strictly traditional notions of sovereignty’ could ‘no longer do justice to the aspirations of peoples everywhere to attain their fundamental freedoms’ (Ivi, 42). The road map outlined by the Secretary General also entailed systematically addressing the ‘monumental’ questions raised by the new vocabulary of international relations, starting from the need ‘to define intervention as broadly as possible, to include actions along a wide continuum from the most pacific to the most coercive’ (Ivi, 40). The central issue, however, was still the urgent need to provide clear and fair normative and procedural grounding for the renewed collective commitment to defend individual rights, starting from two ‘equally compelling interests’—brought to the fore by the dramatic events of the ‘humanitarian decade’. On the one hand, ‘the universally recognized imperative of effectively halting gross and systematic violations of human rights with grave humanitarian consequences’; on the other, the need to bring this commitment within the scope of the UN Charter, reconciling its pursuit with respect for the overall regulatory framework, with particular reference to the powers attributed to the Security Council as ‘the body charged with authorizing force under international law’ (Ivi 38 ff.). The compelling need for the ‘international community’ to address once and for all ‘the dilemma of what has been called humanitarian intervention’ was restated with even greater urgency by Annan in the so-called Millennium Report, presented in April 2000 at the United Nations General Assembly and titled We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century: with this report the Secretary General stigmatized the deeply polarized, either-or nature assumed by the debate on ‘defence of humanity’ and ‘defence of sovereignty’ as key elements of the international order, firmly refusing to dismiss the prospect of humanitarian

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interventionism as ‘an unacceptable assault’ on the traditional prerogatives of the state and openly inviting all Member States ‘to unite in the pursuit of more effective policies to stop organized mass murder and egregious violations of human rights’ (United Nations General Assembly, 2000, §§215–219). However, the ‘conceptual’ shift in the approach to humanitarian crises, advocated by Annan in his Address of the previous year, began to emerge only in the final Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), an independent international body established in September 1999 by the Government of Canada, with the difficult mandate ‘to wrestle with the whole range of questions – legal, moral, operational and political – rolled up in this debate, to consult with the widest possible range of opinion around the world, and to bring back a report that would help the Secretary-General and everyone else find some new common ground’ (Evans & Sahnoun, 2001, VII). The Commission’s comprehensive final document, published in December 2001 with the title The Responsibility to Protect, provides the first conceptual articulation of the attempt to reframe the relationship between sovereignty and human rights in terms of integration rather than opposition, according to the most innovative lines of thought that had emerged during the debate of the previous decade (Bellamy, 2009b, 176). Unlike the most radical supporters of humanitarian interventionism, the Commission did not view this shift as a ‘dilution’ or even a ‘transfer’ of sovereign power by states, but rather as a ‘necessary re-characterization’ of the very dimension of sovereignty, in the passage from the traditional form of sovereigntycontrol characteristic of the statehood of the early modern age to a more current form of sovereignty-responsibility, being outlined in the document—with a somewhat stretched interpretation—as strictly adhering to the overall framework of principles underlying the current international order: Thinking of sovereignty as responsibility, in a way that is being increasingly recognized in state practice, has a threefold significance. First, it implies that the state authorities are responsible for the functions of protecting the safety and lives of citizens and promotion of their welfare. Secondly, it suggests that the national political authorities are responsible to the citizens internally and to the international community through the UN. And thirdly, it means that the agents of state are responsible for their actions; that is to say, they are accountable for their acts of commission and omission. The case for thinking of sovereignty in these terms is strengthened by the ever-increasing

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impact of international human rights norms, and the increasing impact in international discourse of the concept of human security. (ICISS, 2001, 13)

If, on the one hand, the functionally qualified model of sovereignty developed in the ICISS Report fully reaffirms the traditional external responsibility of states ‘to respect the sovereignty of other states’, it is also true that in this context everything seems to revolve around the internal responsibility ‘to respect the dignity and basic rights of all the people within the state’, as a cornerstone of a new form of ‘good international citizenship’. According to the authors of the Report, in fact, traditional sovereign prerogatives inside and outside the state presuppose an adequate exercise of the fundamental function of individual and collective protection that forms its original constitutive core; if this is not the case, because the state concerned ‘is unable or unwilling to fulfill this responsibility’, it is up to the international community to remedy this situation, through the exercise of an articulated form of international responsibility to protect, which at least in the event of ‘excessive and unwarranted suffering on the part of civilian populations’ can provide for the suspension of the ‘principle of non-intervention’ and targeted use of military force. The objectives of the document, however, also include the need to go beyond a public discourse obsessively centred ‘on the act of intervention’, and to consider a much broader set of humanitarian protection measures, able, if properly implemented, to reduce the occurrences of military interventions. In the Report ‘responsibility to protect’ means not only ‘responsibility to react’ to cases of proclaimed humanitarian crisis, but also ‘responsibility to prevent’ and ‘responsibility to rebuild’, on the basis of an articulated and functional sequence aimed at drawing the attention of international policy actors to the ‘costs and results of action versus no action’, providing the necessary ‘conceptual, normative and operational linkages between assistance, intervention and reconstruction’. This approach reflects how the members of ICISS definitively distanced themselves from the polarized field of tension previously created by the aggressive and, at least in part, ideologized language ‘of the “right to intervene” ’, while refocusing ‘the international searchlight back where it should always be’, that is, ‘on the duty to protect communities from mass killing, women from systematic rape and children from starvation’ (Ivi, 17): The substance of the responsibility to protect is the provision of life-­ supporting protection and assistance to populations at risk. This responsibil-

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ity has three integral and essential components: not just the responsibility to react to an actual or apprehended human catastrophe, but the responsibility to prevent it, and the responsibility to rebuild after the event. (…) It is important to emphasize from the start that action in support of the responsibility to protect necessarily involves and calls for a broad range and wide variety of assistance actions and responses. These actions may include both long and short-term measures to help prevent human security-threatening situations from occurring, intensifying, spreading, or persisting; and rebuilding support to help prevent them from recurring; as well as, at least in extreme cases, military intervention to protect at-risk civilians from harm. (Ivi, 17 ff.)

Conceiving the ‘Humanitarian Turn’ of International Politics: The Cosmopolitan Paradigm As is known, these developments have found a first, partial, ‘normative crystallisation’ (Serrano, 2011, 3) in the doctrine of responsibility to protect, solemnly approved by the UN General Assembly in the United Nations 2005 World Summit Outcome Document. Paragraphs 138 and 139 mention the main points developed by the ICISS Report—although according to some in a somewhat ‘diluted’ way (Bellamy, 2006, 144; Weiss, 2007, 117)—stating some principles that should represent a point of no return along the path towards a new and more advanced international order: specifically, that ‘all states have a responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’; that the international community, through the UN, has the duty ‘to encourage and help states to exercise this responsibility’; and that when a state ‘manifestly fails’ in its responsibility, the international community should ‘be prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner’ to protect populations from these four crimes in a manner consistent with the UN Charter (Bellamy & Williams, 2012, 513 ff.; see United Nations General Assembly, 2005, §§ 138–139). Many years after its approval by the United Nations, however, the doctrine of responsibility to protect is still highly controversial: its concrete legal and political meaning is at the centre of a lively—and on some occasions also bitter—debate. The first to criticize this doctrine were the most radical supporters of the humanitarian turn of global politics, human rights activists and scholars who consider the formulation adopted in 2005 to be

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a set of weak and vague dispositions, not legally binding, in short, a watered-down compromise, unable to modify the traditional attitude of states and the international community towards mass atrocity crimes committed or tolerated within state borders by those in power. In the last few years, however, responsibility to protect has also been criticized for being too broad and for allowing the powerful to interfere in the domestic affairs of weaker states, creating new and more insidious power hierarchies at a global level (Cunliffe, 2011). This critical position has been unexpectedly confirmed by the occasional application of this paradigm to situations of political and social crisis not strictly corresponding to the extreme cases provided for in the UN 2005 Outcome document—‘genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleaning and crimes against humanity’. This is the case of regime changes, such as in Ivory Coast or Libya, considered by many authors as the most clear demonstration of the duplicity of a doctrine which can at any time become a ‘Trojan Horse of western interventionism’ (Bellamy, 2005, 2011), paving the way for a kind of neo-colonial protectionism. But rather than dwelling on the controversial outcomes of this process, in the second part of my reconstruction I would like to focus on the meaning this principle has acquired in the broader, articulated philosophical and political debate on the ‘nature’ of global politics and its general principles of legitimacy. This issue brings us closer to the second key-concept contained in the title, if it is true—as some have pointed out—that the notion of cosmopolitanism has recently become ‘the preferred self-­ description of most political philosophers who write about global justice’ (Kymlicka & Walker, 2012, 1 ff.). In the philosophical debate on global politics of the last two decades, the theoretical and practical sphere of the new ‘humanitarian interventionism’ has gained attention as the emerging context of a new form of cosmopolitical responsibility, that dissolves ‘the boundary between the internal and the external, while questioning the legitimacy of state action both internally and in external relations between states’ (Beck, 2006, 136). Underpinning this interpretation is the reference to the basic tenets of the radical form of moral universalism that Thomas Pogge defined as moral cosmopolitanism: First, individualism: the ultimate units of concern are human beings, or persons  – rather than, say, family lines, tribes, ethnic, cultural, or religious ­communities, nations, or states. The latter may be units of concern only indirectly, in virtue of their individual members or citizens.

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Second, universality: the status of ultimate unit of concern attaches to every living human being equally – not merely to some sub-set, such as men, aristocrats, Aryans, whites, or Muslims. Third, generality: this special status has global force. Persons are ultimate units of concern for everyone – not only for their compatriots, fellow religionists, or such like. (Pogge, 1994, 86)

Clearly, in this perspective there no longer seems to be place for the traditional conception of the State—and the various forms of political or cultural community corresponding to it—‘as an enclave of special responsibilities that are distinct and justified separately from general or global responsibilities’ (Beitz, 1999, 200). On the contrary, underpinning this approach is the belief that ‘all persons stand in certain moral relations to one another’7—in other words, that the whole of ‘humankind’ belongs ‘to a single moral realm in which each person is regarded as equally worthy of respect and consideration’ (Held, 2005, 12).8 A position that, once purified of its most binding prescriptive consequences (Benhabib, 2008, 97), can be effectively translated into a form of ‘legal cosmopolitanism’ committed to providing the basic moral prerogatives of human beings with a universal legal status, through the construction of ‘a global political order, (…) grounded on the equal legal rights and duties of all individuals’ (Hayden, 2009, 43).9 As noted by Seyla Benhabib, we can find this development somehow anticipated by Hannah Arendt’s well-known concept of the ‘right to have rights’, as long as we depart from the strict theoretical framework of her civic republicanism (Arendt, 1973, 259 ff.). In fact, while in Arendt’s theorization this right was ‘viewed principally as a political right and (…) narrowly identified with the “right to membership in a political community”’, following the international political and legal transformations of 7  Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty”, in Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives, ed. Chris Brown (London, Routledge, 1994), p. 87. 8  For a more in-depth analysis see Benhabib (2008, 97): ‘Moral cosmopolitanism espouses a universalistic morality that views each individual as being worthy of equal moral concern and respect. Our obligations to kin, family, and country, it is argued, do not supersede our obligations to distant strangers. From a moral point view, particularistic attachments, deriving from our rootedness in certain linguistic, cultural, religious, and other communities, have no privileged claims upon us’. 9  Here the emphasis is ‘on creating or transforming institutional schemes so as to provide concrete procedural and organizational mechanisms dedicated to securing and protecting the human rights of all persons’. On the issue see also Beardsworth 2011, 36 ff.

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the late twentieth century, it became possible to re-conceptualize it in a post-national way ‘as the claim of each person to be recognized as a moral being worthy of equal concern and equally entitled to be protected as a legal personality by his or her own polity, as well as by the world community’ (Benhabib, 2011, 9 and 62). In the new horizon of sense of the global age, the ‘right to have rights’ therefore means: the recognition of the universal status of personhood of each and every human being independently of their national citizenship. Whereas for Arendt, ultimately, citizenship was the prime guarantor for the protection of one’s human rights, the challenge ahead is to develop an international regime which decouples the right to have rights from one’s nationality status. (Benhabib, 2004, 68)

It is no coincidence that, addressing this specific point, James Bohman emphasized the key role played by humanness as the basic normative status of the new legal and political order in the global age (Bohman, 2007, 104). In this context, in fact, ‘membership in humanity’ embodies ‘not just a status, but also the normative power to make claims to others that may obligate them’. According to this interpretation to adhere from a political and legal point of view to the principles of a ‘cosmopolitan morality’ means adopting ‘the perspective of humanity’ as a privileged standpoint in critically addressing the regulations and practices currently in force within and beyond State borders. As Bohman points out, it is in fact at this level that ‘the perspective of the generalized other’ is expressed—‘a perspective not only critical, but also obligation-producing to the extent that it validates previously unrecognized claims to justice’ (Ivi, 116).10 It is worth highlighting the central role played in this process of normative re-founding by the ‘ubiquitous language of human rights’ (Benhabib, 2008, 94), as new ‘lingua franca of global moral thought’ (Ignatieff, 2003, 53). In fact for many supporters of the ‘cosmopolitical’ approach to the dilemmas of global society, the privileged reference to ‘something quite fundamental about what it is to be human’ (Vincent, 2007, 117 ff.) has been provided with a comprehensive normative framework by the acknowledgement of a sphere of intangible subjective rights, valid beyond any kind of particularistic belonging. Moreover, it is precisely because 10  Bohman takes up the notion of ‘generalized other’ from one of the cornerstones of twentieth-century social psychology, the essay Mind, Self and Society by George Herbert Mead. In this regard see Mead (1934, 154 ff).

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human rights are ‘Janus-faced’ (Habermas, 2001)—turned simultaneously towards the acknowledgement of the universal value of human beings and towards the determination of the procedural conditions for its achievement—that the principles of ‘cosmopolitan morality’ have gone beyond being mere theoretical statements, and have become a program for practical action, gaining space within the complex international legal framework of global society. In the new dynamics of global politics, the classical Westphalian assumption that nation-states are the only or main subjects of international order clearly appears to be ‘counterbalanced and, at least in part, threatened by the recognition of inalienable rights belonging to single individuals’ (Colombo, 2009, 43). This has given rise to new possible institutional developments within the ‘international human rights regime’ established over sixty years ago by the United Nations and in the meantime developed into a disorganized ‘set of interrelated and overlapping global and regional regimes that encompass human rights treaties as well as customary international law or international soft law’ (Benhabib, 2006a, 27).11 According to Benhabib, this process can be viewed as overcoming ‘strictly international’ norms of justice towards ‘thicker cosmopolitan’ norms, centred on the protection of rights accrued to individuals ‘not as nationals, or members of an ethnic group, but as human beings as such’ (Benhabib, 2011, 9): Cosmopolitan norms of justice, whatever the conditions of their legal origination, accrue to individuals as moral and legal persons in a worldwide civil society. Even if cosmopolitan norms arise through treaty-like obligations, such as the UN Charter can be considered to be for the signatory states, their peculiarity is that they endow individuals rather than states and their agents with certain rights and claims. This is the uniqueness of the many human rights agreements signed since World War II. They signal an eventual transition from a model of international law based on treaties among states to cosmopolitan law understood as international public law that binds and bends the will of sovereign nations. (Benhabib, 2006a, 16)

It is also on account of the tangible results of the progressive ‘cosmopolitanization’12 of the international order that some exponents of today’s 11  On the controversial modalities of construing the ‘human rights regime’ see Knippers Black (2009, 33 ff). 12  I take the category from the essay The Cosmopolitan Vision by Ulrich Beck, who, however, uses it in a perspective of empirical sociology to draw attention to the ‘becoming cos-

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legal cosmopolitanism, having set aside the emphatic ideal of government of the world inherited from classical cosmopolitanism, have decided to push for different and more flexible forms of ‘global institutional design’ (Caney, 2006),13 choosing to enhance the ‘transformative and constructive potential’ of a transnational governance system that, although still largely ‘inter-state’, seems to have decidedly exceeded the traditional model of the ‘society of States’ centred on ‘Westphalian sovereignty’ (Benhabib, 2004, 12). As stressed by Jürgen Habermas, who is among the strongest advocates of a ‘constitutionalization of international law’, in the complex functional and organizational context of ‘global society’, it is much more realistic to strengthen the weak institutions of the world community and to pursue human right policies, pushing for a further and more effective institutionalization of a cosmopolitan law that allows for interventions in the ‘inner affairs’ of the nation state, protect nationals against human rights violations by their own government and persecutes functionaries who commit crimes in the service of their office or in the course of their business. The institutionalization of cosmopolitan law does not require the establishment of a world government based on a monopoly of the means of legitimate violence held by a global state.14

In this interpretive horizon, even the weak version of ‘responsibility to protect’ accepted by the UN in the finals statements of the 2005 World Summit has been viewed as an advancement towards the futuristic international order envisaged by the most convinced supporters of legal cosmopolitanism who take inspiration from some famous passages of Immanuel Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden (1795): namely a global sphere of inter-subjective relations based upon the recognition of universal individual rights, binding the states and enforceable against these, even with the use of force when necessary (Sangha, 2012). In this perspective, despite persistent legal limitations, the responsibility to protect offers ‘a fresh normative and cognitive agenda through which to understand the primacy of mopolitan of reality’ that ‘is also, and even primarily, a function of coerced choices or a side effect of unconscious decisions’ (Beck, 2006, 19). 13  For a specific reading of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ in reference to the alternative between ‘thick’ and ‘thin cosmopolitanism’ see Dahl-Eriksen (2016, 127 ff). 14  Habermas (1999b, 451). For a direct, albeit mediated reflection on the theme of ‘Responsibility to protect’, see Idem (2008, 337 f).

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human rights and the relative or conditional nature of state sovereignty’, thus constituting an important theoretical and practical contribution for the overcoming of that ‘tension between state sovereignty and human rights endemic to the UN, which hampered efforts to address systematic human rights violations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo in the post-­ Cold War period’ (Wyatt, 2019, 103). Moreover, it seems to perfectly exemplify the ‘principle of collective responsibility that lies at the heart of a cosmopolitan approach to human protection’, inasmuch as it imposes on all members of the international community, and in particular the major powers permanently represented in the UN Security Council, ‘a universal and, at the same time, collective duty (…) to intervene – through the use of force ultima ratio – in cases of gross human rights violations’, ‘understood to both supersede and take precedence over broader concerns with preserving the boundaries of sovereign states’ (ibid.). Precisely these aspects have allowed to view the UN resolution of September 2005 as a fundamental step in the development of a post-Westphalian ‘space of experience’, in which serious violations to the physical integrity and well-­ being of human beings cease to be a ‘matter of morality alone’, becoming instead a breach of a new internationally recognized ‘legal code, a breach that may call forth the means to challenge, prosecute, and rectify’ (Held, 2002, 77). A crucial change of perspective capable of triggering profound ‘transformative changes’ at all levels of contemporary politics, paving the way for a new phase in the history of the international humanitarian order which, from the Second World War to the present, has beeen dealing with ‘the protection of those in immediate danger and the prevention of unnecessary suffering’ (Barnett, 2010, 1).15

15  According to Barnett, this order ‘concerns the protection of those in immediate peril and the prevention of unnecessary suffering’ and ‘includes norms, informal institutions, laws, and discourses that legitimate and compel various kinds of interventions with the explicit goal of preserving and protecting life. There are now a surfeit of conventions and treaties that are designed to protect the fundamental right of all peoples-the right to life. International human rights, humanitarian, and refugee law were distant cousins for most of the last century, but over the last two decades they have become intertwined, reinforcing each other and creating an increasingly dense normative structure’.

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Cosmopolitan Morality and Democratic Self-Determination Certainly not all the scholars debating the issue share this optimistic vision of the dynamics at play in the political and legal domain of global society. On the contrary, for some of them precisely the reference to the imperatives of a moralized ‘politics of humanity’ represents a dangerous destabilizing factor with reference to the egalitarian institutional and normative architecture shaped by the UN Charter, starting from ‘the principle of non-intervention and the general ban on war, both of which were designed to limit violence’ (Devetak, 2007b, 22). According to the harshest leftist critics of the ‘humanitarian paradigm’, also the responsibility to protect, like all forms of humanitarian interventionism, if taken seriously, would in fact require the current international system, still centred on the particularism of inter-state relations, to give way to a true ‘global humanitarian regime’, able to grant an effective international legal status to all human beings, and not only to States (Zolo, 2006, 57 ff.). On the contrary, within a context of international relations still centred on state particularism, it remains subject—also at the level of the UN—to the extrinsic dynamics of decision making by single governments, and ends up coexisting with more or less crude forms of ‘interest-based politics’ (Chomsky, 2009).16 Moreover, in its re-proposal of a procedurally unmediated relation between the exercise of force and the principles of global justice, this kind of ‘humanitarian realpolitik’ (Köchler, 2001, 53 ff.) appears to be especially functional to the ‘spectacular’ dynamics of redistribution of power in political decision making, ushered onto the international scene with the end of the bipolar world order (Colombo, 2009, 13 ff.). Considered in this perspective, the ‘humanitarian turn’ of post-1989 international politics loses any progressive quality, and becomes the concrete theoretical and practical horizon for the articulation of a new, and at the same time old, form of ‘military interventionism’, at the service of specific political and economic goals of Western powers (Zizek, 2005, 126). According to the most radical critics of such a dynamic, behind ‘the purely humanitarian anti-political politics of merely preventing suffering’ (ibid.) there is, in fact, the ‘neo-imperialist’ objective of building a new and unilateral hierarchy of command, founded on ‘a cosmopolitan monopoly (…) on morality, law and violence’ (Beck, 2006, 143). As has been  On the issue see also Chomsky (2008).

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said, this approach implies an openly unequal, even ‘racist’ treatment of a large part of existing states, once again paving the way to the traditional dualistic and asymmetrical structure characteristic of colonial humanitarianism (Scuccimarra, 2017). And what is worse, the grandiose legal and moral arguments put forward by its advocates often conceal the need to ensure ‘that the forces of the capitalist market prevail in every corner of the world’ to the advantage of its powerful economies, even if this means marginalizing and impoverishing many parts of it (Wood, 1999, 3).17 Examined in light of a post-Gramscian concept of hegemony, the same humanitarian ideology may be viewed as one of the main means for consolidating that system of ‘inequitable distribution’ of global resources in favour of the powerful and to the detriment of the powerless, which has been defined by Mattei and Nader as the new world order of plunder: Notions of structural adjustment, comprehensive development, good governance, international human rights, and humanitarian intervention (…) are currently the key elements of a strong rhetoric of legitimization of international corporate power determining the diffusion of oppressive institutions aimed at plunder: the imperial rule of law. These notions are today ‘naturalized’ in the global discursive practice, and are called the ‘Washington Consensus.’ Their uncritical use produces a state of denial of the way in which the rule of law, often shielding plunder, is produced and developed by professional ‘consent-building’ elites. The consequences of such denial are the creation of a legal landscape in which the law ‘naturally’ gives up its role of constraining opportunistic behavior of market actors. This process results in the development of rules and institutions based on double standards that are functional for the interests of corporate capital and that dramatically enlarge inequality within society.18

We are evidently addressing a key point in the recent debate on the new political and legal order of the global era, namely the need to provide an accurate reflective account of the complex, and in some ways unprecedented, relations of power that constitute and articulate the homogeneous and legally qualified, at least in principle, space of the arising ‘world society of individuals’ (Beck, 2000, 80). As has been pointed out, any perspective 17  On the limits of this extrinsic criticism to the political and economic foundations of the ‘New Global Order’ see Manokha (2008, 46 ff). 18  Mattei and Nader ( 2008, 120 ff). On the issue, with special reference to responsibility to protect, see also Chimni (2012, 17 ff).

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that is unable to grasp the inconsistencies, the ‘asymmetrical traits’ and the ‘empty spaces’ that run parallel to the processes of ‘cosmopolitization’ taking place on the international political scene, will hardly be able to understand the concrete political structure of global society, which remains characterized by a markedly hierarchical dimension, which is in fact hierarchical to the ‘highest degree’ (Colombo, 2009, 19; on the issue see also Beck, 2005). Once again, even superficial knowledge of the recent debate on ‘new military humanism’ (Chomsky, 1999) is sufficient to grasp the delicate epistemic and categorical issues at play at this level of theoretical problematization. In the wake of the centrality acquired by Carl Schmitt’s anti-­ normative concept of ‘political’ also in the field of internationalist studies,19 the critique of the ‘humanitarian turn’ in international politics has often led not only to an explicit rejection of any demand to morally re-found the international system of relations, but also to the re-introduction of the basic founding assumptions of the traditional Westphalian system, articulated according to a national-democratic perspective or even an openly post-colonial one.20 According to supporters of this ‘statist anti-­ cosmopolitanism’ (Devetak, 2007a, 151 ff.), a ‘pluralistic’ model of international society, based on the general acknowledgement of an intangible sphere of territorial control and on the principle of non-interference, seems to constitute a necessary prerequisite for the exercise of the democratic rights to self-government of citizens of all states, including the weaker and more peripheral ones (Bellamy, 2003). On the contrary, the imposition of a ‘cosmopolitan regime’ protecting human rights is said to progressively erode territorial forms of representative democracy—the only viable forms of democracy in a world of nation-states—thus anticipating the institution of a global ‘directory’, removed from any form of control from below. As David Chandler stresses, the new rights of cosmopolitan citizens, additional to their territorial citizenship rights, are ones which they cannot act on or exercises themselves, and in this crucial respect the new rights are highly conditional. While there may be a duty to protect the new rights of the cosmopolitan citizen the cosmopolitan framework provides no mechanism of accountability to give content to these rights. There is no link between the ‘right’ and the ‘duty’  Chandler (2008). For a more general overview (see McCormick, 1998; Galli, 2015).  See Welsh (2004) and, for a radical post-colonial version of the pluralist approach, Ayoob (2002). 19 20

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of its enforcement. The additional rights upheld in the cosmopolitan framework turn out to be a chimera. (Chandler, 2003, 342 f.)21

According to this conception the defence of democratic and political self-determination values depends on the safeguard of ‘old rights’ of territorial sovereignty (Mouffe, 2005): beyond this sphere, in fact, looms the disturbing prospect of a world of rights without citizenship, somewhat prefigured by the ghostly inconsistency of the ‘universal human subject of cosmopolitan rights’ (Chandler, 2003, 342). According to this approach, to embrace the perspective of humanitarian universalism means to radically question the inestimable heritage of principles, values and practices of self-government which took shape in the last two centuries in the segmented spatial structure of the ‘Westphalian’ order. Preserving this heritage seems to imply, conversely, that it is necessary to renounce any claim for external control over the forms in which state sovereignty is concretely exercised by those who are entitled to do so at the nation-state level. Because of these beliefs, the most radical supporters of this approach seem to be willing to keep quiet even before the most extreme cases of State violence (or violence tolerated by the State): hence the victims of that violence become ‘silent remainders of a politics that cannot countenance rights other than those attaching to sovereign states’ (Devetak, 2007a, 168).22 It is perhaps unnecessary to remark on the questionable constructive logic informing this kind of approach: what we find here is in fact nothing other than an attempt to apprehend the complex political dynamics triggered by the processes of globalization on the basis of the rigid oppositional framework either-or characteristic of the early modern age, preserving what represents its basic theoretical assumption: the reference to state control of space as the ‘absolute principle’ of politics (Devetak, 2007a, 160). This line of reasoning appears to be an attempt to systematically bypass the new epistemic and categorical challenges posed by the decline of the traditional State system, without addressing the epochal shift produced by the crisis of the theoretical and political paradigm of the early modern age.  On this point see also Chandler (2002, 119 ff).  A surprising anticipation of this position can be found in the article ‘Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l’homme’ published by Michel Foucault on the French newspaper Libération (Foucault, 1984). 21 22

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Therefore, it is also in answer to the ruinous—and clearly embarrassing—outcomes of this extremist ‘anti-cosmopolitical’ line of thought, that in the recent debate on the dilemmas of humanitarian intervention a more articulate conceptual approach has taken shape, which systematically questions the crystallized ‘disjunctive’ logic characteristic of modern political discourse. According to supporters of this perspective, the complex judicial and political issues at the centre of today’s debate in fact require the elaboration of a new and more flexible categorical framework, to appropriately account for the multiple material and intellectual dynamics, which we found only superficially approximated by the traditional semantics of national sovereignty. The challenge we face involves the re-­conceptualization of the State ‘as a political unit that can maintain internal order while being able to engage in international cooperation, without claiming exclusive rights, or having the “winner-take-all” quality, traditionally associated with sovereignty’—a goal that requires to definitively go beyond the ‘monistic’ and ‘absolute’ conception of sovereignty of the ‘Westphalia model’, in favour of a ‘modular’, ‘gradual’ and ‘relational’ characterization of that same concept (Keohane, 2003, 277 ff.).23 In this context, attempts have also been made to shape the universalistic issues raised by the ‘dominant schools of contemporary cosmopolitanism’ in a more or less democratic and participative key, beginning with a critical examination of the overall categorical framework (Moses, 2007). According to some of the leading figures in the recent debate on the issue, the solution to the crucial political dilemmas of the global order also entails asking: ‘what sort of cosmopolitanism is required for democracy under the current circumstances of politics’ (Bohman, 2007, 11). For many, the answer to this question must be sought in the rigorous re-­ discussion of the abstract reference to humanity, a concept the supporters of contemporary ‘moral cosmopolitanism’ identify as the starting point for the establishment of a just global order (Moses, 2007, 8). Despite the radical anti-humanitarian prejudice—‘Humanität, Bestialität’ (Habermas, 1999a)—professed still today by many followers of Schmitt’s concept of the political, according to supporters of this form of critical cosmopolitanism it is, in fact, still possible to conceive ‘the perspective of generalized other’ with modalities that safeguard the principles of belonging and of 23  For an attempt to ‘break down’ the traditional concept of sovereignty, which has to a certain degree influenced the more recent debate on humanitarian intervention, see Krasner (1999). For a comprehensive overview of this area of the debate see Jacobsen et al. (2008).

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democratic self-determination set forth by modern political discourse; this is possible if the notion of ‘humanity’ is assumed not as an abstract normative projection of a ‘pregiven biological category’, but as the outcome of a process of ideological-discursive construction, variably articulated on the contrasting force of a ‘constitutive outsider’ (Moses, 2007, 7; Vincent, 2007, 114). From this point of view, ‘to adopt the perspective of humanity’ means to question the procedural articulation of the universalistic ideal brought forth by the supporters of moral cosmopolitanism: a process in which ‘humanity’ ceases to be merely an aggregate of persons having the same abstract ‘moral property’ and is transformed into a universal sphere of political interaction between individuals and groups, in which the ‘right to have rights’ of all human beings can truly be recognized (Bohman, 2007, 102 ff.). It is not possible here to explore in depth this particular theoretical line of thought, which, if taken to its extreme consequences, would lead us to question many of the deep-seated constructive common places that have characterized the recent intellectual debate on the relationship between sovereignty and human rights. In a theoretical context of this type, there appears to be no space for the metaphysical vision of popular will elaborated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political theory, nor for an ‘absolutist’ conception of sovereignty, shorn of the complex procedures of ‘interaction, recognition and legitimation’ through which ‘rights, including statuary rights, are socially and historically constituted’ (Devetak, 2007a, 167). On the contrary, everything seems to converge towards a plural horizon of identity representations, political negotiations and social practices, in which also the link between popular sovereignty and human rights is open to new and unpredictable developments (Reus-Smit, 2001). As I approach the conclusion of this brief reconstruction, I will limit myself only to recalling the crucial importance, also practical, that a reflective approach of this kind seems to be able to foster in reference to the specific political and cultural conditions of our present. Although the doctrine of responsibility to protect has become an integral part of the United Nations system in recent years, this does not seem to have produced any relevant results with regard to the urgent matter of the protection of civil populations against widespread violations of human rights, however they may be called. On the contrary, the confused and contradictory anti-globalist rhetoric that has gained consensus worldwide, as an integral and substantial part of the aggressive public discourse of so-called sovereignist populism, has encouraged positions that drastically reject all forms of

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humanitarian responsibility, including the basic duties of assistance arising from international conventions agreed to decades ago, such as the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees (Benhabib, 2020). From this point of view, the Trump administration’s policy on international obligations perfectly embodies the ‘great regression’ taking place in global politics with reference to the expansive constellation of cosmopolitan principles and values born from the trauma of the Second World War (Geiselberger, 2017). The problems that contemporary politics then attempted to address are, however, still before us, as demonstrated by the tragic events that have been afflicting the population in the Syrian territory for almost ten years and their highly destabilizing repercussions on the dynamics of global migrations. Today more than ever, therefore, it is essential to question, with an adequately articulated theoretical and categorical discourse, the rigid internal/external divide inherited from the conceptualizations of early modernity, while also assessing the—albeit imperfect—attempts to go beyond that model developed by contemporary politics in the course of a demanding process of reflective elaboration that starts with the ‘humanitarian turn’ of the early 1990s and brings us to the controversial experimentation of the responsibility to protect principle. As Seyla Benhabib writes, it is primarily at this level where we meet the decisive challenge for the constitution of a post-national solidarity, one finally capable of addressing the issues posed by the contemporary era. A perspective which should also entail the awareness that what is at stake here is also the elaboration of a new way of conceiving the space of democratic self-­ determination, beyond the impermeable boundaries of traditional nation-­ state citizenship.24

24  Benhabib (2006b, 45 ff). On this issue see also Held (2005, 26): ‘Within the framework of cosmopolitan law, the idea of rightful authority, which has been so often connected to the state and particular geographical domains, has to be reconceived and recast. Rightful authority or sovereignty can be stripped away from the idea of fixed borders and territories and thought of as, in principle, an attribute of basic cosmopolitan democratic law which can be drawn upon and enacted in diverse realms, from local associations and cities to states and wider global networks. Cosmopolitan law demands the subordination of regional, national, and local “sovereignties” to an overarching legal framework, but within this framework associations can be self-governing at diverse levels’.

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CHAPTER 5

Vulnerability and Intimacy: Ethical Foundations for Social Relations in Confucius and Levinas Kuan-Min Huang

The problem of politics and society begins from the basic fact that human beings share a living space. Some reflections come from the divergence in finding the answer to the question: how is it necessary for human beings to live together? In the Hobbesian model, the necessity for such a space (called commonwealth or state) can be traced back to the virtual contract originated from the natural state of everyone against everyone. According to the model, human beings self-protect by urging to transfer certain rights (to sovereign) in order to construct a state. This contractualist tradition provides a theoretical foundation for such sovereignty and the nation-­ state authority departing from the theologico-political regime controlled by the churches or the priests. Within the social contract tradition, Rousseau has indicated an opposite presupposition of the necessity to live together in contrast to that of Hobbes. However, the common idea of social contract that combines security and war in the political discourse cannot avoid the constant threat of war by justifying the defense of one’s

K.-M. Huang (*) Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_5

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own country in the Westphalian system. The direct equalization of nation-­ state with the political community institutes the general framework of modern political world, be it national or international. In fact, the raison d’être of nation-state for protecting human lives is somewhat self-defeating in witness to the two world wars during the twentieth century. Despite the returning of the form of empire, either dominated by the market power of capitalism or haunted by the authoritarian communism, the human world is still under the menace of all kinds of wars. The various types of conflicts continue to ruin the common world in which we live. It is the case by which we are in a position to rethink the conditions of living together. One possibility of rethinking is to take an alternative route when considering protection and conservation of self and common living. The Hobbesian model, continued by Carl Schmitt, is to regard the others as enemies, to consider the menace as coming from outside, that is, from the strangers external to one’s own community. The imaginary contract by transferring one’s own right to form the sovereignty of the state contains a paradox: living together is living with one’s own potential enemies. This concept of body politic implants a political violence in the foundation of state, a violence not only limited in political domain but also revealing the fragile moral foundation of living together. The distinction or contradistinction between ethics and politics will, on the contrary, lead us to consider the contemporary human conditions by way of an alternative model for the construction of the society. My chapter proposes to consider another natural state from the conditions of temporality and affectivity.

The Natural Attitude Toward Vulnerability and Intimacy Seen from an everyday point of view, a human life is often presented as a course from birth to death. It is by no means a trivial picture of ordinary human life. Buddhism is in fact founded on the mediation of these fundamental phenomena, such as birth (living), growing old, sickness, and death. The defilement or affliction (klesa) is rooted in the disturbed status while confronting the changing course of the mundane life. It is easy to understand the Buddhist basic concern that every human being, constrained by biological conditions, is Being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode; Heidegger, 1986, 251), passing through the steps of birth, growth, and

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sickness. This concept of life course is common to all individual human beings, indicating that everyone is finite under the birth-death bond. The finiteness implicated in death-limit may ignore the variation of the existential states (gender, age, poor or rich, skin color, intelligence, etc.). Whatever status he or she would be in, an individual human being, while persevering in existence, is subject to many kinds of health variations, physical and psychological. The health expresses the body condition in its changing status, which means that the bodily individual, while persevering in existence, is subject to becoming. Being healthy or sick is not a permanent status but a moment in the becoming process. An individual is age-­ bound and, therefore, time-bound. The temporal finiteness in human existence is expressed in the vulnerability. A newborn baby needs the motherly care and an elder lady needs a caretaker to help her to complete daily activities: these are the fundamental facts of vulnerability. The vulnerability of an individual is inscribed in the temporal extension and the limit of corporal ability. The temporal extension means that before one’s birth and after one’s death, others have lived or will live during the intervals. A baby assumes the parents’ existing before it. A dead person leaves behind him the other persons surviving his death. By way of assuming the facticity of birth and death, an individual is exposed to the temporal finiteness. The ability of maintaining one’s own bodily existence is accompanied with the disability in all dimensions. Between birth and death, the existence is a process full of sinuous occasions and moments with unpredictable events that challenge the ease and comfort in life. An individual will assert the control of his activities as he wishes, but in fact, he could not prevent the unwanted things from happening to him. The events or the encounters, regardless of his own free will, reveal a factual discrepancy between the ability and the disability of himself. Admittedly, the facticity of human existence is often remarked by such disability. On a somewhat superficial level, religious faith can be seen as important because it can offer consolation in front of such an inability to relieve a person’s unexpected sufferings. The above descriptions range far beyond the scope that one individual can reach on some collective conditions of human life. An individual, while being conscious of his own decisions and feelings, is highly dependent, not only on the natural and artificial goods (air, food, bed, house, clothes, etc.) but also on the interactions with other living beings (human, animal, vegetable). The condition of vulnerability indicates the existential

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dependency. The independency of free will must meet with the existential dependency that connects an individual with other individuals or groups. For every human being, mutual dependence prevails universally and presents facts in the life-world. Behind that dependency, a kind of connection, implicit or explicit, encompasses different sets of individuals, as one can imagine a set as a family, a company, or a random group. People enter a restaurant to find some food and ask for a service. These people seem to be connected in a loose way to have the same purpose. In fact, they are mutually dependent on following a certain rule of ordering. If someone comes in demanding the waiter to fix his bicycle, the connection of food service is broken. It’s not just a problem of rule-following, but also a disorder troubling a pre-established human connection for a performance of social behaviors. It is of no doubt that the problem of other mind or alter ego is very challenging in the philosophy of mind, but on the horizon of the life-­ world, the presence of other minds is surely evident. Without discussing the problem of the appresentation of the other’s mind, I just limit my observation on the interactions between others and myself put in an immediate horizon of mutual dependency and connection. Although being taken as separated from myself, others are an inevitable factor of my existential environment. Roughly speaking, I am surrounded by others. The overlapping of the different surroundings constitutes the complicated connections of many individuals, under various forms as archetypes of community or society. The natural attitude immersed in everyday life adds some colorful significance to the vulnerability. At this level, we have the mundane life of human bodies. The significance embedded in the bodily existence leads to a confusion of mind-body mutual effect, an affective type of life. A mother is affectively connected to her baby she is taking care of. The motherhood is the description of this tight bond that links two vulnerable individuals. For instance, a baby’s cry is for the mother a profound sound that touches her heart. Her response to her baby’s cry shows an effect of consolation on the baby who still lacks the ability of recognition, but in hearing the answering voice of its mother, this baby feels a secured affective reconnection with her. In this case, a primary or primitive type of intimacy is established in their living together as two individuals. Despite the evident asymmetry between these two (a baby is far more fragile than the mother), they are mutually dependent on one another.

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The existential interaction of human beings could be regarded as not only causal or instrumental, but also affective. With the natural attitude, the manner of living together is neither mechanic nor functional in a social dimension (Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim). The affectivity in the social life constitutes the ontological need for the intimacy. Being intimate with something (toothbrush, pillow, shoes, clothes) brings forward the repetitive rituals in everyday life. The affective dimension of the intimacy with things calls into play the bodily operation. Riding bicycle or using a hammer (Heidegger, 1986, 69) are examples familiar to almost everyone; the skill shows the immediate engagement of the body without recalling into mind the relevant semantic knowledge. The more a body is affected by the thing, the more it can adapt itself to the situation adequately in connection with that, by using the body to handle it. As long as the human bodies can detect the necessary affective correlation, the familiarity adds values onto the things they connect to. The inoperative mode is especially significant in revealing human beings’ instrumental dependency on particular things. Not only things as bicycle or hammer are relevant in this issue of intimacy, the body itself can be classified in this manner. Once someone feels discomfort in a certain organ, he will then discover how this organ could not be neglected. Being intimate with someone (parents, lovers, family members, friends) refers to a similar situation but this intimacy is more evident in social interactions. An adolescent is sensitive to the social connection: his identity is based on his fellows, so once there is the case of exclusion, he often feels dramatically upset. The intimacy can also be expressed in the encounter with an environment, either hostile or friendly. The ambience of a place (home, hospital, park) is also read as an expression of the personal feeling of the environment. In fact, what is central to the formation of social intimacy is the interaction with the surrounding people. Parents, family, and friends are usually the source of intimacy. We shall include neighbors in this account. The interactions of parents with children are the most important factor in forming the intimacy on a personal level. It would be a topic of general psychology. What we emphasize here is not the psychological dimension of the formation of personality, but the social dimension. The intimacy constitutes a certain pattern in the social life. Similar to the inoperative mode of things, if an existing group shows hostility to a newcomer, where the social intimacy is not yet functional, the difficulties for this newcomer to maintain a smooth social relation with this group will be evident, which is typical. The discrimination (racial,

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sexual, intellectual, economic, etc.) manifests the negation of intimacy. The bodily movement or gesture is characteristic for expressing the scope of intimacy. A cold look shows one’s exclusion or despise. The body is then socially affected by this gesture of rejection. It is not necessary that the intimacy comes from the homogeneous attitudes or the commonly shared values. The neighborhood contains some heterogeneous elements other than the family. Since the establishment of modern civilization, the traditional homogeneous social organization is no longer the case. The transition from village to urban or metropolitan lifestyles serves as the dominant factor that has led to changes in the condition of collective dwelling. It often ends with the presence of moral conflicts due to the plurality of values. The alienation of modernization seems to annul or suppress the function of neighborhood. Despite the importance of the diversity in modern society, we may admit that a certain ideal of the neighborhood can still offer a model of intimacy for human dwelling. It would be argued that this image about vulnerability and intimacy puts emphasis on the feeling. In Durkheim’s term, it is about social sentiment (Durkheim, 1960, 122). From an angle of a sociological analysis, the integrity of society is accompanied by the internal division according to the labor function. What Durkheim tries to explain is the compatibility of individual autonomy and the social dependency. The state of juridical and moral anomy (anomie) caused by the unilateral economic development is the motive for his sociological concerns. The necessity of collective authority to intervene in formulating moral rules is the remedy to cure the anomy. The sociological image of moral necessity for living together is then not only to defend their common interests shared by individuals, but also “to associate, that is, not to feel lost among adversaries, to have the pleasure of communing (le plaisir de communier), to make one out of many, which is to say, finally, to lead the same moral life together” (Durkheim, 1960, 15). Despite the functional necessity of division of labor for modern industrial society (taking the example of Durkheim’s contemporary Europe), Durkheim has a strong intention in giving a reason for living together in modern times. In spite of the functionalist explanation of labor, this reason is moral rather than utilitarian. What he concerns is the moral effect produced by the division of labor: “its true function is to create in two or more persons a feeling of solidarity” (Durkheim, 1960, 56). Based on the analysis of the different usage of repressive law and restitutive law (Durkheim, 1960, 112), Durkheim distinguishes between negative solidarity and positive solidarity in order to

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find the real foundation of social integration (Durkheim, 1960, 116). Yet Durkheim admits that justice and charity are “two independent layers of morality,” which cannot be radically seen as mutually excluded. Durkheim asserts then that “In reality, for men to recognize and mutually guarantee rights, they must, first of all, love each other; they must, for some reason, depend upon each other and on the same society of which they are a part” (Durkheim, 1960, 121). Seen from this perspective, there seems to be a difference in defining the task of sociology between Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. The Weberian sociology on which Alfred Schütz founds his social phenomenology has focused on the signification of social action and social relation. The Durkheimian sociology aims at the moral crisis as the motivation for the understanding of social facts. Weber has nonetheless the concern for the vocation ethics, such as the protestant ethics serving as key to the development of modern capitalism. Behind the apparent difference, we can detect the inalienable position of morality in the domain of social action. In the domain of natural attitudes, we have investigated how the intimacy is implied in the everyday life on a personal level and noted that the moral motivation is requested in a sociological explanation. Given these facts, there is a further step beyond the natural attitude to consider the ethical foundation of social relations. The following phenomenological perspective will help to shed light on further ideas.

Ethical Foundations of Social Relations Through Vulnerability and Intimacy The radicalization of the ethical demand by Emmanuel Levinas is a hint for our reflection. It shall be noted that Levinas is hostile to “human sciences” or social sciences. For him, the stated sociological analysis as an objective description is by no means a well-founded conceptualization for catching the very essence of living together in a social manner. Yet phenomenology as a rigorous science has an ambition to probe the structure of meaning in social actions and interactions. We will briefly sketch Alfred Schütz’s approach as a contrast with Levinas. Sociology as a form of knowledge, in the manner of Max Weber, intends to justify the understanding (Verstehen) in an objective sense. Social actions and social relations have something to do with the event happening between the I and the other. Schütz follows this route by inserting a

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phenomenological foundation to the constitution of the meaning that emerges from experiencing the presentation of the other. He fulfills this phenomenological foundation in the time-consciousness developed in details by Edmund Husserl. An intentional action is meaningful because of the incorporation of the project, that is, behavior oriented to a previously made plan or project, or act in the future perfect tense (modo futuri exacti) (Schütz, 1981, 86; 1967, 64–65). The intention is analyzed in an “In-Order-To (um-zu)” motive (Schütz, 1981, 115; 1967, 86). He has contributed to social phenomenology by bridging the transcendental intersubjectivity to the social life-world. In assuming the acquired conceptualization of Weber’s sociology, he deepens the horizons of intersubjective consciousness in the manner of phenomenological constitution. By way of concrete personal encountering, the thou-relation can become reciprocal and turn out to be a We-relation. Although Schütz states his analysis of social action in terms of face-to-face relation, ideally speaking, as he has noted, “the partners are aware of each other and sympathetically participate in each other’s lives for however short a time” (Schütz, 1981, 229; 1967, 164), his approach is indeed based on scientific observation. In Levinas’ radical view, the experience of the other is not reducible to epistemic constitution of the alter ego. The transcendental ego, presupposed in the process of catching the meaning of the other I, is the very core of the conscious experience. The objection raised by Levinas stems from some ambiguity rooted in the transcendental ego of the consciousness. Levinas tends to separate the identity model of the ego from the subjectivity. Departing from the concept of intentionality, Levinas disrupts two interpretations in the Husserlian concept of intentionality: the objectifying intentionality (Levinas, 1982, 138; 1998, 123) and the kinaesthetic transitive intentionality. With the intentionality as kinaesthetic transitivity, the subject (ego) restrains itself from absorbing the other in the objective representation. The danger lies in the fact that the representation is a mode of totalizing ontology. Due to the evasive intentionality, the subject “truly transcends itself” (Levinas, 1982, 142; 1998, 126) while entering into “the relation with an other than oneself” by way of transitivity. Levinas insists further that the kinaesthesis, which is “the subject’s original mobility” (Levinas, 1982, 159; 1998, 147), reveals “the corporeity of consciousness” (Levinas, 1982, 156; 1998, 145). By integrating the time-consciousness and the sensing (Empfindnisse), Levinas takes the intentionality of the subject as a transitive opening toward the other. The alterity is an interruption of the representation under the control of the

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Same. Not only is the alter ego understood as the source of alterity, the ego itself, while transcending itself in its consciousness of time, in temporalizing itself in the flux of time, is also related to the alterity. The fusion in the time-consciousness is the clue to discover the intersubjective relationship. In fact, the early Levinas has announced that “time itself refers to this situation of the face-to-face with the Other” (Levinas, 1983, 68; 1987, 79). Being exposed to the face-to-face relationship, Levinas discards the concept of the other as object of a virtuous action in Durkheim (Levinas, 1983, 75–76; 1987, 84), and renounces the symmetry of the intersubjectivity. In evoking the well-known examples in the Bible, Levinas refers to the Other as “the weak, the poor, the widow and the orphan, whereas I am the rich or the powerful” (Levinas, 1983, 75; 1987, 83). The radical alterity in ethics and social life is determined by the asymmetrical intersubjectivity. The existent is alive in the sense that he survives the other’s death. The existence is not a pure fact; on the contrary, it carries a relational signal toward the other. Life as survival immediately renders an ethical sense. To be in face with death, the impossibility of continuing my life constitutes my radical alterity. Yet the assumption of my living without taking the place of the other’s death is also another type of radical alterity. The analysis of sensation is not evoked solely to justify the original impression (Urimpression) as endorsing the lived experience (Erlebnis) but rather to pay attention to the non-representational experience of suffering, death, and survival. Seeing the radical relation with the other, Levinas retraces back to a moment absolutely anterior to the constitution of the transcendental ego. He calls it the “pre-original anteriority” (Levinas et al., 1972, 73; 2003, 50), the principle of an-archy, or the passivity “more passive than passivity of receptivity.” Therefore, inside the subject himself, there is an absolutely anterior moment opened by and for the other that escapes from the absorption of the totality. Levinas, in Totality and Infinity, catches the corporeity in the moment postponed within the tension of the instant due to “an infinite dimension which separates me from the other, both present and still to come, a dimension opened by the face of the other” (Levinas, 1961, 200; 1979, 225). The moment of opening and postponing the presence of the subject interrupts his very existence. By way of the face, of the infinity of the other, the subject feels himself vulnerable. The poor and the stranger are referred to as the source of interruption: “The face in its nakedness as a face presents to me the destitution of the poor one and the stranger; but this poverty and exile which appeal to my powers, address

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me, do not deliver themselves over to these powers as givens, remain the expression of the face” (Levinas, 1961, 188; 1979, 213). Starting from the irreducible presence of the face, one will note that the weak and poor one evokes the third party by the interpellation and the command. For Levinas, the justice, the responsibility, and the social relation are all originated in the epiphany of the face. Levinas’ position is quite different from the Cartesian cogito or from the Husserlian transcendental Ego. The so-called “I” is in fact a “me,” endowed with a passivity more passive than the receptivity. The subjectivity is a reply (répondre à) to the command, to the inalienable responsibility (répondre de), in order to serve “the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan” (Levinas, 1961, 233; 1979, 245). This command is actually required by the infinite exigencies. The rupture opened by the face of the other (and by the infinity) presupposes the an-archic principle. Levinas explores the exposure ascribed by the sensibility. In inverting the Spinozist conatus of persevering the same existence, Levinas refers to the mode of “having been offered without any holding back” as “non-commencement, the non-initiative of the sensibility” (Levinas, 1974, 94; 1999, 75). This mode is also termed as the vulnerability, in the sense of being grasped, preyed on, wounded, or held hostage. Behind the vulnerability, there is the universal experience of persecution that Levinas links to maternity, to “the groaning of the wounded entrails by those it will bear or has borne (gémissement des entrailles, blessées en ceux…)” (Levinas, 1974, 95; 1999, 75). This metaphor of vulnerability intentionally distinguishes between two modes of corporeity: body of flesh and blood (de chair et de sang) and body in flesh and bone (en chair et en os) (Levinas, 1974, 99; 1999, 78). For Levinas, the incarnate subject is the subjectivity of flesh and blood. It is not only the issue of sense-giving (signifiance pré-originelle donatrice de tout sens) offered by the sensibility, but the sensible vulnerability referring to the maternity, to “an irrecuperable pre-ontological past” (ibid.). It is better to not take the terms “maternity, flesh and blood, wound” as the ontic phenomena, or as if the pre-ontological past referred to the ontic origin. For Levinas, metaphysics as first philosophy is in fact ethics, for it emphasizes the priority of the infinity over the totalizing or totalitarian ontology. The other as the Face of the infinity can escape from the inclusion of the totality. The suffering, the passions, and the passivity, all converge in the concept of passion (Pathos) of the incarnate body. The metaphysics of subjectivity overwrites a different concept of subject by way of the incarnate sensibility. The vulnerability determines the

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subjectivity as the one for the other, as “being torn from oneself for another in giving to the other the bread from one’s mouth” (Levinas, 1974, 99; 1999, 79). Levinas denies the model of self-sufficiency of subjectivity. He primes the vulnerable subject as the ethical condition. The strange alienation of the subject in the rupture opens the path toward the other. In this sense, the vulnerability provides a condition for the social relation. Hospitality and persecution go in pairs. The social interaction stems far from the model of give-and-take, but from the asymmetry in giving sense, in giving one’s own bread to another, or, put in the pre-­ original way, one is already given the bread in the house, by way of “the hospitable welcome.” Levinas thus states the principle of hospitality: “The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation” (Levinas, 1961, 128; 1979, 155). The femininity is related to the maternity, as we can see in the analogy between womb and home. The status of being given the bread indicates the primary dependence. Hospitality has indeed two aspects at the same time: host and hostage. Levinas surely reminds us of the original hostage of the subject in respect of the other. The ethical discourse on vulnerability also emphasizes the immediacy of the sensibility. Levinas designates at the same time the proximity as “narrower, more constrictive, than contiguity, older than every past present” (Levinas, 1974, 95; 1999, 76). I would substitute here the term “proximity” with “intimacy.” Levinas discards the homogeneity of the spatial contiguity in order to preserve the inner dynamics of the proximity in a non-representational mode. He describes it as “a restlessness,” as being “never close enough” or “closer and closer” (Levinas, 1974, 103; 1999, 82). By proximity, the subject is exposed to the other as the neighbor (le prochain). The face that commands through the saying engages the subject as “subjectivity obsessed by the neighbor” (Levinas, 1974, 105; 1999, 84). The identity (the Same) is troubled by the obsession as non-­reciprocity that “does not relieve any possibility of suffering in common” (Levinas, 1974, 106; 1999, 84). The proximity is the knot that connects the one to the other in the community indicating the radical exposedness of oneself to the other, to “the immediacy of a skin and a face” (Levinas, 1974, 107; 1999, 85). This knot is the archetype of social relation. For Levinas, the proximity which opens space for the neighbor corresponds to the teachings from the Bible. A relation “before any liaison contracted,” be it holy or social, conducts the community of fraternity with “a relation of kinship outside all biology” (Levinas, 1974, 109; 1999, 87).

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The image of the community in the mind of Levinas is of no doubt obsessional: with the proximity, there is an unconquerable distance. Being obsessional with the social bond, a responsibility is urged from the other. The picture of persecution goes back to experiences of war, of genocide, of holocaust. The original sin is transformed into the pre-original responsibility, for the reason that “the obsession by the other, my neighbor, accusing me of a fault which I have not committed freely, that (…) denudes me absolutely” (Levinas, 1974, 127; 1999, 92). However, we can reverse this image by exploring the ambiguity of the proximity. Since the proximity suppresses the distance implied in the intentionality, and in the representation, the other is radically close to the subject. The alterity is nonetheless kept as absolutely infinite, so that there could be no real substitution but only usurpation, as a kind of sin. How then is it possible to keep alive in the endless accusation (“as though I were responsible for his mortality, and guilty of surviving”) (Levinas, 1974, 115; 1999, 91), requiring the infinite responsibility? To escape from the paradox of Levinas, we would need to interpret the responsibility in an alternative way, that is, to find a consolation in keeping ourselves open to the other. The facticity and the ethical obligation of social relation are revealed in the face-to-face relation. The bareness of being exposed to the weak one is my origin of vulnerability. Although there is no reciprocal exposedness between the one and the other, the vulnerable affectivity is disproportionally shared. The affective sharing commands the social intimacy. In assuming the responsibility for the other, the proximity is in fact a space for living together. The habitation is not only a welcome for me, but also for the widow and the orphan. Levinas thus assigns the role of the feminine as “the primary hospitable welcome which describes the field of intimacy” (Levinas, 1961, 128; 1979, 155). He ordains that the absence (or  the retreat) is taken as a mode contrary to the representation. In the intimacy, one finds the habitation to withdraw from the world of the self-­ consciousness. The dwelling in the world is not at all unfamiliar. It is only by finding “a land of refuge” that the subject can respond to “a hospitality, an expectancy (une attente), a human welcome” (Levinas, 1961, 129; 1979, 156). Despite the biblical background of messianic hope, we can complement the idea of rigid alterity constituted by the urgent accusation with this idea of the intimacy of the dwelling. If this world is not to be abandoned as a gnostic desert in preferring for a hope of the land of salvation, there would be possibility to respond to the hospitality within the neighborhood.

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Through the Levinasian ideas of vulnerability and intimacy, I have tried to sketch an alternative thinking for the ethical foundation of social relations. Although the terms such as “maternity,” “flesh,” “blood,” and “habitation” seem to suggest a picture of a family constituted by parents and brotherhood, it has in fact nothing to do with the narrow concept of nation-state built on the same blood, or the same ethnic characters. The requirement of the ethical foundation fights with the intrusion of violence and war. This picture of society aims at the construction of peace. In responding to this version of ethics, I would like to move on to discuss the Confucian heritage in the same regard.

A Confucian Approach to Social Relations It is well known that the doctrine of Confucius is centered on the benevolence. The original model of benevolence is the inter-human actions and relations. The obligation of human beings is not just a personal duty in a family or in a nation. The ethical dimension is installed through the multiple layers of interactions of actors, but the term “actor” is ambiguous when seen from the different perspectives. In a sociological analysis, the actor is understood in a third-person perspective. Criticized by Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, this perspective is thought by them as overlooking the sensibility immersed in the life-world, as the attitude of consciousness. Levinas is typically hostile to the epistemic model of social facts and urges to introduce the I-Thou relation of Martin Buber to form the We-relation. By way of the We-relation, a community can possess its shared experience. In a similar manner, the form of the I-Thou relation is frequently evoked in the dialogues of Analects. In a short dialogue between Confucius and his disciple Tsâi Wo concerning the duration of mourning, the disciple tends to shorten the three years’ mourning to one year. Confucius interrogates him by pointing back to the affection of the disciple: “would you feel at ease?” Confucius then exposes his pondering: “a superior man, during the whole period of mourning, does not enjoy pleasant food which he may eat, nor derive pleasure from music which he may hear. He also does not feel at ease, if he is comfortably lodged” (Analects 17:21, Legge 1893, 328). The term “superior man” mentioned in this citation has nothing to do with social hierarchy. It is a matter of moral consciousness. Questioning about the immediate feeling is the approach that Confucius applies to raise the common ground for the social rituals. Confucius grounds his justification for

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the three years’ mourning on the observation that “it is not till a child is three years old that it is allowed to leave the arms of its parents” (ibid.). Confucius criticizes his disciple for even lacking “three years’ love” for his parents. The funeral mourning refers back to a quasi-symmetry between parents and child. The problem is not really the number of years but the inner structure of vulnerability, which is rather symbolic. It is often that the fragile status of childhood escapes from one’s memory; the existential condition for the baby is as universal as the condition of being toward death. The finiteness of human being, in a temporal sense, is presented by the limitation set by birth and death. If the mourning is not just toward the lost parent, it could be understood as a signal to remind us of the primary and fundamental vulnerability. The sense of temporality, symbolized in the three years of love, could link to the immediate feeling aroused in face with the existential situation. It is reasonable to say that when Confucius resorts to the personal feeling of his disciple, his aim is not to impose the necessity of funeral ritual. What he tries to evoke is the vivid feeling of moral duty. The mourning reflects the vulnerability. In response to the existential vulnerability, Confucius pays attentions to those who need care. In a dialogue on moral ideals with his disciples, he reveals his own ideal in treating the vulnerable people. One disciple states his emphasis on friendship in his own moral cultivation; another disciple cares about the perfection of himself, but Confucius conceives of the things otherwise and states his wishes as following: “in regard to the aged, to give them rest; in regard to friends, to show them sincerity; in regard to the young, to treat them tenderly” (Analects 5:25, Legge 1893, 183). In this statement, the aged and the young are the ones who are vulnerable. The ways to take care of them are to construct an environment of intimacy, in short, to treat them with hospitality. Besides the personal relations, the presence of intimacy gives a more solid basis for human to live together. In this respect, the ethical foundation is constructed by way of the communal environment. Confucian ideal crystalizes this ideal in the neighborhood. Confucius demands that “it is virtuous manners which constitute the excellence of a neighborhood. If a man in selecting a residence, does not fix on one place where such prevail, how can he be wise?” (Analects 4:1, Legge 1893, 165). The ethical condition for constructing the neighborhood is the virtue: “Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors” (Analects 4:25, Legge 1893, 172).

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In the same Confucian tradition, Mencius follows the idea of taking care of the weak. He is attentive to the widower, the widow, the solitary, and the orphan—“these four classes are the most destitute of the people, and have none to whom they can tell their wants” (Mencius 1.2: 5, Legge 1895, 162). The politics of benevolent actions should take these vulnerable people as the first target of the government. The ideal of the neighborhood is transmitted in the politics of justice. Mencius describes his concept of the benevolent government by offering a habitable land in which “those who belong to the same nine squares [i.e. a neighborhood confined in a certain boundary] render all friendly offices to one another in their going out and coming in, aid one another in keeping watch and ward, and sustain one another in sickness. Thus the people are brought to live in affection and harmony” (Mencius 3.1:3, Legge 1895, 245). Mencius’ diction is essential to Confucian ethical foundation of social and political justice. The idiom “aid one another in keeping watch and ward, and sustain one another in sickness” expresses the condition of living together. The harmonious affection is the source of intimacy. Vulnerability and intimacy are complementary conditions for the social life. The vulnerable people—widows, solitaries, orphans, and the infirm— none are to be left outside of the community. On the contrary, the vulnerability reveals the very urgency of sharing. When these people lack the means to express their wants, they are abandoned and left without any access to sharing the goods. In this case, in order to secure these vulnerable people, it is necessary to resort to the neighborhood to create some space for living. In contrast to the temporality of mourning, the neighborhood expresses the aspect of spatiality. It is all about the dwelling space. The condition of the benevolence is the impossibility of feeling at ease while being aware of the suffering of those vulnerable people. Mencius is in line with Confucius by developing his own concept of “the mind which cannot bear to see the sufferings of others.” In a rhetoric to persuade a king to rule the kingdom with a commiserating government, Mencius sets this kind of commiseration as a requisite to be human. His example resorts to the vulnerability: “if men suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, they will without exception experience a feeling of alarm and distress” (Mencius 2.1:7, Legge 1895, 202). The action to save the child is aroused by the automatic affection. For Mencius, “the feeling of commiseration is essential to man” (ibid.), and as fundamental as all three other types of feelings: shame and dislike, modesty and complaisance, and approving and disapproving. His analogical thought describes these four types of feeling

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as four ethical principles in comparison to the limbs of human body: “Men have these four principles just as they have their four limbs” (Mencius 2.1:7, Legge 1895, 203). The bodily metaphor refers to the vivid sensibility. The sense of living by using the limbs is the manifestation of “I can (je peux, Ich kann).” Therefore, the moral norms (pity, modesty, shame, and honesty) are rooted in the sensible feeling. The commiseration, approving the sensibility of suffering and vulnerability, is in fact the basis for realizing the sense of humaneness (benevolence). To create a better environment of dwelling is also a task to motivate the core moral feeling, that is, the sensation of suffering. The cruel fact is that the vulnerable people are often marginalized, ignored, or even excluded from society. The feeling in Confucian tradition is not just ethical but also social and political. Mencius’ ethical and political concerns are also representative in this tradition. To claim Confucianism as the sole source of ethics in Asian traditions might be an exaggeration, but it at least gives a picture of certain reflections on the ethical conditions of social life. In the ethics of Levinas, there is a strong background of Jewish biblical values. By way of considering the ethical foundation for the society through some theses of Levinas, one can also imagine the possibility of construing the social phenomenology by way of resources from Asian traditions, one of which is Confucianism. This comparison is a dialogue of two traditions. The aim is not to ensure their dogmatic positions, but rather to discover the common ground for social life. The clues discussed above can serve as somewhat like a starting point.

Conclusion We are living in a global village. The rapid exchange of information makes it easy for one to forget the physical distance. The historical experiences quickly become documents registering the collective memory. Once the vivid experiences of the past are stored as files in a database, they are just a set of codes or a fragment in the sea of data. The accessibility will turn into the obstacle to the refreshment of the reality. The paradox lies in the process of recollection itself: as soon as a memory is recalled, it is forgotten in the next moment. The digital era urges us to rethink the possibility of living together, through historical and geographical proximity. Physically and digitally, the human communities are still under transformation. The struggle for territory or for natural resources is transformed into the battle

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of collecting big data. The war is always near. Digitalization will be another new form of alienation. Through a way of methodical reduction, a social phenomenology could describe the social relations and actions as understandable. Likewise, the natural attitude rooted in the life-world has also offered some conditions to motivate the knowledge of these social relations and actions. However, both are in danger of turning social actors into objects, items, or data. The intersubjectivity shall be recognized to enable the core ground of social self-understanding. One possibility is to think about the ethical conditions of society where humans are living together. Levinas’ radicalization of phenomenology is to reevaluate the phenomenological works on the basis of practical “reason” or human affection. Despite the critics of theological turn in regard to the approach of Levinas and others (Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion), the essence of social action is ethical. The vulnerability and the intimacy are the clues leading to seriously consider the alterity implied in the formation of community. Being in debt to the Asian (esp. Chinese) traditional wisdom, I deploy another resource for construing a phenomenological consideration of the ethical foundations of social relations. The reason is not to regionalize this phenomenology: neither to form the regional themes such as society, community, or politics, nor to limit the considerations solely on one’s own tradition or to justify its contemporary usage. My aim is rather a dialogue of traditions in order to position oneself as living among and with the others. The vulnerability uncovers the principle of equality in ascribing to the intersubjective basis of social relation. The members of the community should not be selected according to some external criteria. No one is primarily excluded from the community and set as the one who has no part in it. On the contrary, the temporal constitution shows that the one is connected to the other in the flux of time. The temporality serving as the common layer for the inter-human existence is the pre-original source for confronting the alterity. Without annihilating the distance, the intimacy, introduced by the proximity, discloses the principle of the overlapping subjectivity, that is, social solidarity. The inter-human connection, by admitting the vulnerability inscribed in the pre-ontological condition, urges everyone to respond to others through the face-to-face relation. One command encroaches another command. A subject, out of his natural feeling, is intruded by the interrogation urged by the other. The affectivity uncovered by the intimacy sheds light on the necessity for solidarity. In this manner, the human

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community is constructed, not as everyone against everyone, nor as everyone bound for everyone, but as everyone opened to one another. Being evaluated from the perspective of ontological vulnerability, the affective connection is reasonable. Hospitality is not to be taken for the generosity stemming from the pity or the sympathy. It is the ethical requirement that makes hospitality the unavoidable duty. The immediate result of these affective interactions is the neighborhood. As we have said in the beginning, the concept of the communal neighborhood is no longer limited to regions, to blood, or to ethnic similarity. The social solidarity commanded in the light of the neighborhood of intimacy is now possible to go across the past frontiers. As Appadurai puts it, the work of producing neighborhoods “is often at odds with the projects of the nation-state” (Appadurai, 1996, 191). It is judicious to consider the global production of locality suited for dwelling and habitation. It is in this sense that the Confucian value system is still regarded as meaningful in the modern or postmodern world. The ethical conditions concealed in the Bible or in the Confucian canons need modern interpretations, rather than immediately serving as directly applicable norms for modern times. But the concern deduced from the natural attitude could be of eidetic value for considering the human lives in a collective form. However, the collectiveness will not be reduced to a totalitarian regime, but it still needs an ethical foundation. The condition of living together will start from the incarnate body and the habitable place. The alterity of the other is not the reason for alienation, but, on the contrary, it leads us to admit the bodily vulnerability and the local intimacy.

References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large. University of Minnesota. Confucius. (1893). Confucian Analects. In The Chinese Classics, Vol. 1 (J. Legge, Trans.). Clarendon. Durkheim, E. (1960). Division of Labor in Society (G. Simpson, Trans.). Free Press of Glencoe. Heidegger, M. (1986). Sein und Zeit. Max Niemeyer. Levinas, E. (1961). Totalité et infini. Martinus Nijhoff; Totality and Infinity (Alphoso Lingis, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. Levinas, E. (1982). En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Vrin; Discovering Existence with Husserl (R.  A. Cohen & M.  B. Smith, Trans.). Northwestern University Press, 1998.

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Levinas, E. (1974). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. Martinus Nijhoff; Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (A. Lingis, Trans). Duquesne University Press, 1999. Levinas, E. (1972). L’humanisme de l’autre homme. Fata Morgana; Humanism of the Other (N. Poller, Trans.). University of Illinois Press, 2003. Levinas, E. (1983). Le temps et l’autre. PUF; Time and the Other (Richard A. Cohen, Trans.). Duquesne University Press, 1987. Mencius. (1895). The Works of Mencius. In The Chinese Classics, Vol. 2 (J. Legge, Trans.). Clarendon. Schütz, A. (1981). Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Suhrkamp; The Phenomenology of the Social World (G. Walsh & F. Lehnert, Trans.). Northwestern University Press, 1967.

PART II

Dangers to Justice

CHAPTER 6

Migration Crisis and the Rise of Anti-humanitarian Populism in Europe Luca Scuccimarra

Crisis? What Crisis? It is difficult to underestimate the relevance that the so-called migrant crisis—by many hastily, though symptomatically, downplayed as a mere ‘refugee crisis’ (Karolewski & Benedikter, 2018, 99)—has acquired over the last few years within the space of the political experience of the European Union and its generally out-of-synch member states. The various moments of formal exchange and debate dedicated to this issue at different political and institutional decision-making levels; the many programmatic and operational documents reflecting—albeit provisionally— these exchanges; the amount of more or less official and more or less meditated discourses that have accompanied the difficult, and to date completely unsuccessful, implementation of these documents; and finally the diversified effects therefore produced in the highly mediatized public

Translation revised by Emma Catherine Gainsforth.

L. Scuccimarra (*) Department of Political Sciences, University of Rome – La Sapienza, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_6

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spheres of the single member states have all turned the problem into one of the most pressing issues on the political agenda of the EU, maybe the political issue par excellence, in the waning stage of the European integration process (Quinn, 2016). As is known, this situation originated with the sudden increase—defined by some as truly ‘unprecedented’—of the number of ‘migrants’ on the move towards the European continent from countries in Africa and the Middle East, recorded in the fateful two-year period of 2015/16. According to EU estimates, in 20151 alone, more than one million people were displaced, mostly men, women and children fleeing the horrific military escalation in Libya and Syria caused by the nasty consequences of the ‘Arab Springs’, and victims of endemic conditions of extreme poverty and environmental degradation afflicting many states in the sub-Saharan Africa. Although this was a widely diversified “flow” in terms of composition and displacement—hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians travelled to Greece while others made the desperate journey from Africa to Italy (Karolewski & Benedikter, 2018, 99)—it was dramatically uniform in the attempt to physically access ‘Fortress Europe’—a term used because of the complex and often labyrinthine procedures for determining refugee status and international protection, implemented by the states upon arrival on the basis of the controversial rules set out by the Dublin Convention.2 This is why, as already highlighted, most of the post-2014 migrants have been ‘irregular’ and asylum-seeking migrants who have sought international protection (in 2015, 1.3 million, 1  As Karolewski and Benedikter explain, “Eurostat points to 1,2 million asylum seekers that then came through Greece and Italy to Hungary, Austria, Germany, France and Sweden, Denmark and Norway, with Germany, Hungary, Sweden and Austria as countries with the most applications” (Karolewski & Benedikter, 2018, 99 ff.). 2  As Bernd Kasparek points out, “the Dublin Convention (1997) laid down criteria to determine the state responsible for processing the application of an asylum seeker. While not spelled out explicitly neither in the Convention nor in its succeeding acts of law, the criteria establish a principle of causation, that is, the state that has ‘caused’ the entry of an asylum seeker is also responsible for processing the asylum claim. Causation may refer to insufficient policing of the border or the issuing of a visa. The principle of causation has until today remained the central rationale of the Dublin System, and the criteria are described as ‘objective, fair criteria both for the Member States and for the persons concerned’ (Council Regulation (EC) No. 343/2003; Regulation (EU) No. 604/2013)” (Kasparek, 2016, 62). For radical criticism of the “twofold falsehood” on which the Dublin Regulation rests, see Picozza (2017).

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compared with the two previous years of 431,000 (2013) and 627,000 (2014)). This crush of asylum-seeking migrants had required EU member states to have in place, both before and during the asylum-determination process, a large and sophisticated network of border control agents, police, inspection officers, and supporting human services, plus the budgets to support these needs. These, the EU and its member states have not had.3

It was precisely the very particular spatial and temporal dynamics of this unexpected migratory flow—and the actual shock it produced on an administrative managing system that was inexplicably completely unprepared to deal with it (Guiraudon, 2017)—that brought the notion of ‘migrant crisis’ to the fore, together with its variants ‘migration crisis’ and ‘refugee crisis’ as key expressions of a new vocabulary of European politics that has increasingly dominated the European public discourse, regardless of the effects of the drastic—and in some cases undoubtedly brutal—containment measures adopted by the EU and its member states over the past few years. The fact that the issue is now part of our common horizon of experience and political reflection is therefore confirmed, with sufficient evidence, by the increasing ‘systemic’ importance—and the increasing levels of formalization—it has acquired in the debate in political science—in turn increasingly rarefied—concerning the current ‘European crisis management model’ and its most macroscopic procedural flaws. In this context, the dramatic events of 2015/16 have indeed become a perfect case study of the unaccomplished levels of improvement of the European governance system, which has developed on the basis of the very technical— and somewhat esoteric—types of analysis prevailing in this field of research: The proper management of this crisis would have required a strategic combination of a mixed mode of governance: co-governing to guarantee that all of the Member States agreed on the characteristics of the crisis and the exceptionality of the measures to be taken; hierarchical governance to entrust the Commission, via a Council’s Decision, to take certain actions. The hierarchical mode was mainly the Commission’s top-down initiative that showed the limits of this institution in taking supranational decisions without the unanimous, binding support of the Member States. The 2015 events illustrated the gap that still exists between the need for supranational initiatives to solve complex, transboundary challenges and the Member 3  Buonanno (2017, 102). The author refers to data produced by surveys carried out by the Council of the European Union and by Eurostat.

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States’ sovereignty. The co-governance mode could have been followed by a hierarchical governance mode inside the Council rather than as a ­top-­down initiative from the Commission: intergovernmental coordination of the crisis first and then a strong mandate to the supranational institutions, like the Commission. The 2015 crisis raises concerns about the governability of the entire EU system when it faces this kind of challenge.4

The debate that has taken place over the past few years also includes attempts to question the general reliability of this consolidated representation of the dynamics in progress, through a more or less successful effort to recontextualize—and therefore render relative—the figures, however significant, being discussed, provided that the available data are accurate.5 Why should the movement towards Europe of a couple of million people in a five-year period be considered as relevant, in absolute terms, if it is also true that ‘there are about 65.6 million displaced people in the world, about the same as the population of the United Kingdom’? (Stone, 2018, 105).6 And why should the epochal population displacements triggered by conflict in the Middle East be read only from the perspective of the North-­ South axis, leaving out ‘the reality that countries neighboring conflict zones have borne the inordinate burden of providing safe haven for people fleeing violence, taking in hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of refugees, usually for several years if not decades’? (Stierl et al., 2016, 22).7 Indeed, it is a fact that of the millions of Syrians who have fled their country since 2011, more than 2 million re-settled in Turkey, more than 1 million in Lebanon (where Syrians now make up roughly a third of the total population), more than half a million to Jordan, and several hundreds of thousands to Iraq and Egypt. Likewise, hundreds of thousands of Eritrean refugees and about half 4  Morsut and Kruke (2018). The authors apply the analysis model developed by Jan Koiman for the study of complex systems of governance, such as the one characterizing the EU. 5  Nando Sigona, deputy director of the Institut for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) at Birmingham University, expresses strong doubts with regard to this issue (Sigona, 2015). 6  Stone here refers to UNHCR 2017 statistics. The correlation is even more overwhelming if one refers to the data released by the same organization for the year 2018. See UNHCR (2019). 7  The “New Keywords Collective” is a collaborative project of collective writing emerged from a meeting on “The ‘European’ Question” in 2015 at King’s College London, whose aim is to re-evaluate critically current and past migration policies in Europe.

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a million South Sudanese refugees have relocated to Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda. The same is true for the disproportionate number of refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq, who have primarily moved into neighboring countries. That some among these untold millions of displaced people would also seek to move toward Europe cannot be surprising. Any of these countries of the so-called Global South would surely have far greater grounds to speak of a ‘refugee crisis’ than the EU. (Ibid., 22 ff.)

Semantics of the Crisis and Migration Policies What we are witnessing are obvious—and somewhat extrinsic—attempts to renegotiate the rules of the ‘numbers game, exploited by national governments, EU institutions, and international organizations, as well as fear-­ mongering news media and right-wing populist political parties, (…) to fortify the more general staging of a spectacle of “invasion” or “inundation”’ of masses of irregular migrants of ‘the sacrosanct space of Europe’.8 Along with these painful ‘counter-count’ strategies applied to the figures of the crisis—which reach the point of maximum impact in the drafting and dissemination of ‘data and other information with respect to those who have lost their lives braving European borders, but whose tragedies have largely gone uncounted by state authorities and border policing agencies’9—what has also become increasingly relevant in the context of this debate is the much more demanding discussion centred on the reconstruction of what Michael Krzyzanowski has defined as the ‘geopolitical and politico-economic ontology of the so-called Refugee Crisis’ (Krzyzanowski et al., 2018, 1). These are interdisciplinary guidelines of investigation explicitly aimed at contrasting any reductive representation of the migration issue as an external threat to the supposed security and stability of Europe,10 through a systematic intersection with the other 8  Stierl et  al. (2016, 22), where reference is explicitly made to a ‘spectacle of statistics’, ‘decisive for erasing the individuality and political subjectivity of people on the move as well as effacing their collective struggles and hardships, and thus for portraying “unauthorized” border crossers as a menace.’ 9  Ibidem. See also the recent report of the International Migration Institute network, “‘Counting migrants’ deaths at the border” (IMI, 2018). 10  Tazzioli and De Genova (Tazzioli & De Genova, 2016, 2 ff.): ‘As a network of scholars in critical migration and borders studies, we have been particularly concerned to defy the intellectual and political ghettoization of these topics in relation to the ordinarily unquestioned manifold and transversal reality of the multiple “crises” that coexist alongside the purported “migration” or “refugee crisis” in (and of ) “Europe”.’

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relevant factors of a crisis that is also economic, political, juridical and institutional, ‘in (and of) Europe’. It is a move which broadens the perspective of the discourse and also includes ‘the recent and ongoing proliferation of wars, civil wars, military interventions, and neocolonial occupations across the planet in which European powers are and have long been profoundly implicated’(Tazzioli & De Genova, 2016, 2 ff.). As has been pointed out, this approach leads to a wide-ranging discussion which calls into question income levels, national economies, national commitments to democracy, past individual and collective migration and asylum experiences, current politics, and many other related (and often unrelated) issues that should, at least officially, influence various countries’ reactions and their openness toward the incoming migrants and asylum seekers. (Krzyzanowski et al., 2018, 2)

Over the last few years, the critical and theoretical exchange on this crucial aspect of our contemporary world has developed above all through the problematization of the widely conditioning role that the ‘language of “crisis”’ (Tazzioli & De Genova, 2016, 3) plays in the construction of our specific way of representing, interpreting and understanding contemporary migrations. According to supporters of this type of approach, far from operating simply as ‘the descriptor of a succession of events’ unfolding in the chaotic political and social scenarios of the last few years, the term ‘crisis’ has rather imposed itself as a ‘paradigmatic frame for thinking about our times’, as ‘a powerful narrative device that, when invoked, produces a set of meanings that structure knowledge of social phenomena and, crucially, shape policy decisions, governance structures but also our own approach as academics to studying the world’ (Dines et al., 2018, 441). As the anthropologist Janet Roitman underlines, in this capacity, the term ‘crisis’ has become ‘the defining category’ of any type of process or event ‘mobilized in narrative constructions to mark out or to designate “moments of truth”’ (Roitman, 2014, 3) This function tends to be fulfilled mostly through a process of systematic abstraction from the singularity of events, thanks to what is, in many respects, the ‘self-explanatory’ character acquired by the notion of ‘crisis’ in the course of its long conceptual history (Ibid.). Furthermore, the preliminary question that must be posed by anyone intending to address the core issues of the so-called migrant/refugee crisis thus becomes the following: ‘how does crisis open

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up but also foreclose the ways in which we frame, analyse and understand contemporary migration?’ (Dines et al., 2018, 441). As in other lines of deconstruction of the pervading ‘contemporary discourse on crisis’, also in this case an important source of methodological and categorical inspiration has been offered by the very personal research developed by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck, one of the main exponents of the so-called linguistic turn of late twentieth-­ century historiography (Koselleck, 2004). It is to the latter, in fact, that we owe the first in-depth examination of the crucial role played by the classical notion of ‘krisis’—employed by the ancient Greeks in the juridical, theological and medical fields to designate a choice between ‘lifedeciding alternatives’ such as ‘right or wrong’, ‘salvation or damnation’, ‘life or death’ (Koselleck, 2006)—in the process of conceptual-terminological constitution of the modern experience of politics and its peculiar temporal structure. In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, ‘crisis’—in its national variants—becomes a crucial concept of philosophy of history used for the interpretation of the political and socio-economic dynamics of the period, to the extent that it appears capable of thoroughly expressing a ‘new sense of time’ embodied by the—typically modern— prognoses of an imminent ‘epochal change’ (Ibid. 358). Precisely this development caused the term to enter into the everyday language of modernity, and to become a ‘central catchword’, capable—despite its ‘metaphorical flexibility’—of infusing all aspects of life with a sense akin to that of a situation that has reached a breaking point, and with the underlying ‘implicit request for decisions and choices’ (Ibid., 358 ff.). According to some interpreters, it is precisely this ‘demand for decisions and choices’, still conveyed by the expression today, that caused it to become a catchword in a public discourse, which, at a closer examination, is dominated by a sense of emergency, that of a looming catastrophe and not so much by a reflective approach aimed at an understanding and a participatory management of a phenomenon that has indeed become systemic. It has been shown that ‘labeling a complex situation (such as that of the contemporary dynamics of mass migration and refugee movements) as a “crisis” and therefore as “exceptional”’ means ‘adding an unnecessarily alarmistic connotation to this discourse’, imbuing it with ‘a specifically political function’ which, ‘as such, is obviously not arbitrary but intentional and purposeful’ (Krzyzanowski et al., 2018, 3). Also in this field, the ‘language of crisis’ seems to be decidedly functional to the activation of ‘particular forms of governmental intervention, usually through the

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deployment of authoritarian measures: a situation of “crisis”, after all, appears to demand immediate responses that cannot afford the more prolonged temporalities of democratic debate and deliberative processes, or so we are told’ (Heller et al., 2016, 11). What is more, this type of ‘script’ (De Genova et al., 2018) inevitably tends to overlook the complexity of the dynamics at play, incentivizing ‘the tendency to view and manage migration according to binary divisions, such as integration versus segregation, modernity versus cultural backwardness, the deserving versus the undeserving’ (Dines et  al., 2018, 441) and, above all, ‘genuine “refugees”’ versus ‘“bogus” asylum seekers or “fake refugees” (“economic migrants”)’, with the overall effect of an ‘an escalating criminalization of refugees as such’ (De Genova et al., 2018, 247). In the context of this discourse—as well as in all the different contemporary variants of the model—there seems to be no longer any trace of the crucial reference to the role played by ‘judgment’ as ‘final and resolutive decision’ on the situation in progress (Gentili, 2018, 7 ff.), which, according to Koselleck, characterized the modern articulation of the concept because of the constitutive etymological link between ‘criticism (Kritik)’ and ‘crisis’—both derivations of the Greek verb ‘krino’—paving the way to its complete temporalization as a point of passage ‘towards something better or worse or towards something altogether different’ (Koselleck, 2006, 358). On the contrary, everything in this discursive context seems to point to an exception that has become a rule, therefore managed by the competent authorities through a ‘convulsive but plainly routine government of illegalized migration’, which ‘appears to both operate through “crisis” and yet to be in a permanent crisis itself’ (Heller et al., 2016, 10). This is evidently a decisive deviation from the original political meaning of the term-concept ‘crisis’ and from its more general function as an indicator and factor of historical change, as philosopher Giorgio Agamben, among others, has stressed, in a remark that counterpoints Koselleck’s theses: The concept ‘crisis’ has indeed become a motto of modern politics, and for a long time it has been part of normality in any segment of social life. The very word expresses two semantic roots: the medical one, referring to the course of an illness, and the theological one of the Last Judgment. Both meanings, however, have undergone a transformation today, taking away their relation to time. ‘Crisis’ in ancient medicine meant a judgment, when the doctor noted at the decisive moment whether the sick person would survive or die. The present understanding of crisis, on the other hand, refers

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to an enduring state. So this uncertainty is extended into the future, indefinitely. It is exactly the same with the theological sense; the Last Judgment was inseparable from the end of time. Today, however, judgement is divorced from the idea of resolution and repeatedly postponed. So the prospect of a decision is ever less, and an endless process of decision never concludes. (Agamben, 2013)

Thus also in its ‘migratory’ variant, today ‘crisis’ appears to be ‘characterized by indecision, if not undecidability’ (Revault d’Allonnes, 2012, 10). In other words, ‘crisis’ becomes permanent, as demonstrated—apart from anything else11—by the ‘exceptional’ measures taken by the European political actors to contain its prolonged impact: the construction of walls and barbed wire fences on land, the military patrolling of the seas, the establishment of centres for the reception and identification of migrants on the move—the so-called hot spots—and the drafting of agreements with non-European countries to outsource the ‘management’ of flows (Guiraudon, 2017). These interventions are hardly solutions of the existing problems. On the contrary, they all betray a common purpose which is to defer their impact, both in time and in space, and are therefore shaped by a fundamental relationship of coessentiality to that same ‘crisis’ they claim to be tackling. It is not surprising, therefore, that for some of the protagonists of the most recent theoretical debate on the subject, investigating the deeper meaning of the ‘migrant crisis’ also means reflecting on the tautological circularity that today characterizes this peculiar way of constructing representations of the present, clearing the field of any equivocal representation of its constitutive relationship with time. It is at this level of analysis, in fact, that it is possible to fully grasp the paradoxical political nature of the current ‘discourse of crisis’, if it is true—as Agamben claims—that it is precisely this peculiar temporal regime, which lacks any opening up to the possibility of change, that has allowed the concept of crisis to become a real ‘instrument of rule’, used ‘to legitimize political and economic decisions that in fact dispossess citizens and deprive them of any possibility of decision’ (Agamben, 2013).

11  According to the most radical critics of this line of the discourse, in fact, the semantics of crisis tends to ‘to conceal the violence and permanent exception that are the norm under global capitalism and our global geo-politics, and may serve to perpetuate the conditions that have led to the purported “emergency” in the first place.’ See Heller et al. (2016, 10).

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‘Migrant Crisis’ and Anti-humanitarian Populism Not all the protagonists of this lively debate, however, agree with the position of uncompromising rejection of the ‘semantics of the crisis’, taken by the most radical critics of the current political and media scenario.12 On the contrary, some believe it is possible to contrast the largely ideological use of the formula ‘migrant/refugee crisis’, which has become widespread over the last few years, with the more nuanced and articulated considerations on the issue of migration, viewed as an ‘experience of crisis’, capable of opening up to a better understanding of the complex context of events and processes called into question by this aspect of contemporaneity. Among the most interesting strategies to contrast the prevailing tendencies that have emerged in this discursive field, it is worth mentioning, in particular, the attempts to rethink the so-called migrant crisis in a radically self-reflective perspective, which centres on the analysis of the ‘far-­reaching economic and political contradictions’ produced by recent mass migrations in the very heart of the European way of life. This approach inevitably leads to address a broad and varied ‘constellation of crisis’, both political and cultural, marked also by the revival of more or less muscular forms of identitarian nationalism, ‘commonly articulating themselves in the idiom of one or another reactionary populism’ (De Genova et  al., 2018, 240). As the German scholar Georg Diez reminds us in a grim memorandum on the subject, which is also a disenchanted reflection on ‘the future of Europe’, today the ‘migration issue’ is a decisive challenge to the politics of the continent, raising fundamental questions about European societies, challenging the legitimacy of the system, and increasing the political strength of the far right. Europe, this old continent of migrants and migration, of people fleeing and people arriving, was thrown into a profound identity crisis that has led to stunning political upheavals. In Western Europe, these range from Brexit in the United Kingdom to the rise 12  For a clear example of this position of complete closure, see Krzyzanowski et al. (2018, 2 ff). The authors, in fact, claim that ‘the discourse of the “Refugee Crisis” itself’ is ‘strongly ideologically charged’, conceptually ‘wrong’ and ‘purposefully’ based on ‘the notion of crisis which, as such, implies larger facets of, in most cases irrevocable, socio-political and politicoeconomic change’. In this regard, the position of De Genova, Garelli and Tazzioli (2018, 240), although radically critical, is decidedly more nuanced, its aim being to distinguish ‘hegemonic discursive formations of crisis’ from the ‘real crises for the preservation and social reproduction of human life’ which have ensued across the world as a more or less direct result of the ‘manifold states of exception’ unleashed by the former.

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of far-right parties in Germany, France, Italy, even Spain. In the eastern part of the continent, right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland propagate increasingly xenophobic and authoritarian policies that have brought the European Union to the brink of dissolution. (Diez, 2019, 2)

In the context of this discourse, the ‘migrant crisis’ is therefore no longer a matter of numbers, or the extrinsic outcome of ‘unfathomable conflicts erupting elsewhere’(Heller et  al., 2016, 12). Rather, it is the expression of a problematic constellation ‘that goes to the very heart of questions about the nation state, identity and belonging’, according to the effective formula proposed by Alison Jeffers at a time when the issue had not yet become such an urgent one (Jeffers, 2012, 4). To reconsider the matter from this perspective indeed allows to fully grasp the backward dynamics that in recent years have affected the late twentieth-century conception of liberal-democratic citizenship, as a dimension fully articulating the fundamental link between subject, rights and belonging that founds the entire history of political and legal modernity (Costa, 2013). This also explains the increasingly widespread tendency to view the ‘migrant/refugee crisis’ of contemporary Europe as a paradigmatic expression of the broader anti-universalist and authoritarian trend that characterizes the consolidated space of experience of ‘democratic politics’, which we have become accustomed to refer to with the comprehensive—and somewhat vague—category of ‘populism’ (De Genova, 2018). Despite the great diversity of approaches that, over the last few years, have disputed the right to have the last word on this mysterious trend of contemporary politics, the recent and most advanced season of studies on the subject seems to have produced a shared vision, according to which ‘populism’, as a model centred on the construction of a closed, bounded and highly antagonistic representation of ‘the people’ (Müller, 2017, 3 ff.) as key subject of the discourse and practice of modern democratic-­ representative systems, tends to employ a series of ‘fundamental oppositional determinations’ (Koselleck, 1992, 141 ff.) that cannot be reduced to the consolidated above/below vertical axis—‘people’ versus ‘elite’13—if not at risk of some gross simplifications (de la Torre & Scuccimarra, 2019, 13  According to Panizza (2005, 3), ‘populism is an anti-status quo discourse that simplifies the political space by symbolically dividing society between “the people” (as the “underdogs”) and its “other”. Needless to say, the identity of both ‘the people’ and ’the other’ is a political construct, symbolically constituted through the relation of antagonism, rather than sociological categories. (…) An anti-status quo dimension is essential to populism, as the full

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144 ff.). These studies have also pointed to the fact that among these variants, a leading role in the contemporary populist experience—European but not only—is played precisely by a horizontal inside/outside axis— ‘natives’ versus ‘foreigners’ or ‘insiders’ versus ‘outsiders’—as the privileged form of articulation of an ‘ethno-nationalistic populism’ that tends to construct ‘the people’ as a culturally or ethnically bounded collectivity with a shared and distinctive way of life and sees that collectivity as threatened by outside groups or forces (including ‘internal outsiders’: those living on the inside who, even when they are citizens of the state, are not seen as belonging, or fully belonging, to the nation). (Brubaker, 2017, 359)

It is precisely starting from this horizon of enquiry that the most recent sociopolitical debate has spoken of the rise of a form of ‘anti-immigrant populism’, specifically aimed at protecting ‘the people’ from the threat posed to its cultural, political, economic and even physical integrity by the wave of ‘refugees’, ‘asylum-seekers’ and ‘generally migrants’ caused, in recent years, by the particular global geopolitical situation. The clearest expression—both material and symbolic—of this variant is the wall, to keep out migrants, erected along the so-called Balkan route by the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which soon became an integral part of the rhetorical and discursive strategy of the main right-wing populist parties, also in Western Europe (Ruiz & Brunet, 2018). It is evidently a step forward in the politics of rebordering characterizing all forms of ‘right-wing populism’.14 It is also, however, an effective demonstration of the close relationship, of a common belonging, between this model and the ‘migration crisis’, which the former allegedly intends to overcome, if it is true—as has been said—that populists dramatize—and often of course exaggerate and distort—the threats from which they claim to offer protection. And when in power, they dramatize their response to crisis. They do so by staging events that purport to show jobs being saved or created, walls being built, undocumented immigrants being deported, terror suspects being rounded up, and alien cultural forms such as the niqab being removed from public space. (Brubaker, 2017, 366) constitution of popular identities necessitates the political defeat of “the other” that is deemed to oppress or exploit the people and therefore to impede its full presence’. 14  Yuval-Davies (2019). On the issue see also De Genova (2018).

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To fully understand the phenomenon being discussed, however, it is necessary to further complicate the picture, taking into consideration the specific results produced by the systematic intersection of this horizontal line articulating the populist discourse with its more common vertical vector, pivoting on the construction of the figure of ‘people’ as a counterpart opposed ‘to economic, political, and cultural elites’ represented ‘as comfortably insulated from the economic struggles of ordinary people, but also as differing in their culture, values, and way of life’ (ibid., 363): in contexts of xenophobic populism, anti-elitism tends, in fact, to attack—at times through superficial economic and cultural comparisons—also and above all those parts of civil society that appear more actively engaged in supporting refugees and migrants, often in the framework of transnational humanitarian cooperation networks. This context of discourse and action seems, in some ways, to reactivate, although in a decidedly more violent manner than in the past, the comparison-clash between the more traditional national-state elites and new actors of cosmopolitan inspiration, a clash that the jurist David M. Reisman, many years ago, described as a key element of the new political and legal landscape produced by the advent of the global era (Reisman, 2000). Here too it is necessary to look at Orbán’s Hungary in order to grasp the relevant effects produced by this form of anti-humanitarian populism also on the concrete terrain of politics of law: in fact, in Hungary, the measures aimed at protecting national homogeneity were followed by a ‘crusade against civil and nongovernmental organizations’ that reached its peak in 2018 with the approval of the so-called Stop Soros Package, an articulated set of legislative measures aimed at preventing people to assist migrants. Its name is a reference to the ongoing campaign against the activities of the financier and philanthropist Georg Soros, who has become the negative symbol of the ‘principles of an open society—one that supports relatively open borders and prioritizes global interests over national ones’ - in government propaganda (Timmer & Docka-Filipek, 2018). In addition to providing strict bureaucratic and financial controls on non-­ profit organizations active in the field of reception of refugees and asylum seekers, this legislative package has introduced significant restrictions on the freedom of action of individuals in the field, making all forms of assistance to foreigners from third countries deemed to be punishable—assistance also aimed at ‘providing them with international protection’ (Boros, 2018, 2). This radical strategy that pursues absolute control of the borders was reflected also by the measures, which followed soon after, to close

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Italian ports, introduced by the so-called Security Decrees of the government led by the Five Star Movement–Northern League coalition, openly aimed at hindering, if not at completely preventing, the activities of search and rescue of migrants at risk, carried out daily by humanitarian organizations of various European countries in the Mediterranean sea. It would, however, be a mistake to think that the ‘criminalization of humanitarian actions assisting refugees and migrants’ is an extreme phenomenon to be found only in forms of government of explicit ‘ethno-­ nationalist’ inspiration. On the contrary, the so-called crimes of solidarity constitute a category that is formally provided for by the criminal law of many states of proven liberal-democratic tradition (Fekete, 2009; Tazzioli, 2018); the judicial reports of the last few years show a progressive increase in the procedures against activists and volunteers for activities that fall within this type of crime, despite appeals launched within the EU by NGOs permanently engaged in the defence of fundamental rights.15 As has been pointed out, the ‘reasonable utopia’ of a new international legal order, able to guarantee ‘the recognition of the universal status of personhood of each and every human being independently of their national citizenship’ (Benhabib, 2004, 68), falls victim to the ‘great regression’ taking place in the political and legal culture of European societies under the pressure of a generalized ‘populist turn’ (Geiselberger, 2017). Indeed, one of the areas in which this utopia seemed closest to being adequately implemented is undoubtedly that of international migration, to the extent that it seemed possible to envisage a type of regulation based on ‘the rights of individuals, not insofar as they are considered members of concrete bounded communities but insofar as they are human beings simpliciter, when they come into contact with, seek entry into, or want to become members of territorially bounded communities’ (Benhabib, 2006, 30). Only a few years ago, in the face of the slow progress made in this field since the UN 1951 Refugee Convention, the philosopher Seyla Benhabib could rethink in a particular post-national form the ‘right to have rights’ developed by Hannah Arendt, as a decisive legal expression of the ‘claim of each human person to be recognized and to be protected as a legal personality by the world community’ (Benhabib, 2011, 9). The ‘migrant crisis’ experienced by advanced Western societies over the last few years seems, however, to leave us with very few reasons for hope. The marginal condition of the new ‘unwanted’, who are kept out also when they are  Edmond-Pettit and Fekete (2018). On the issue, see also United Nations (2018).

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inside, can therefore rightly be compared to the conditions of the refugees and stateless people in Europe between the two wars, making the harsh words written by Hannah Arendt almost seventy years ago all the more relevant today: We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation. Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen the ever-increasing number of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all the so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity. (Arendt, 1973, 259 ff.)

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Koselleck, R. (2004). Begriffsgeschichte and Social History. In R. Koselleck (Ed.), Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (pp.  75–91). Columbia University Press. (Original Edition: Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte. In Idem (Ed.), Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt a. Main, 1979). Koselleck, R. (2006). Crisis. Journal of the History of Ideas, 67(2), 357–400. (Original Edition: Krise, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, a cura di Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck, Vol. 3, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1982, pp. 617–50). Krzyzanowski, M., Triandafyllidou, A., & Wodak, R. (2018). The Mediatization and the Politicization of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 16(1–2), 1–14. Morsut, C., & Kruke, B. I. (2018). Crisis Governance of the Refugee and Migrant Influx into Europe in 2015: A Tale of Disintegration. Journal of European Integration, 40(2), 145–159. Müller, J.-W. (2017). What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press. New Keywords Collective. (2016). Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of “The Crisis” in and of “Europe”. Available at: http://nearfuturesonline.org/wp-­content/ uploads/2016/01/New-­Keywords-­Collective_11-­1.pdf. Last access: 23 Nov 2020. Panizza, F. (2005). Introduction: Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. In Idem (Ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. Verso. Picozza, F. (2017). ‘Dubliners’: Unthinking Displacement, Illegality, and Refugeeness Within Europe’s Geographies of Asylum. In N. De Genova (Ed.), Borders of “Europe”. Autonomy of Migrations, Tactics of Bordering (pp. 233–254). Duke University Press. Quinn, E. (2016). The Refugee and Migrant Crisis: Europe’s Challenge. Studies, 105(419), 275–285. Special Issue: Europe in Crisis. Reisman, W. M. (2000). Unilateral Action and the Transformations of the World Constitutive Process. The Special Problem of Humanitarian Intervention. European Journal of International Law, 11(1), 3–18. Revault d’Allonnes, Myriam. (2012). La crise sans fin. Essai sur l’experience moderne du temps. Seuil. Roitman, J. (2014). Anti-Crisis. Duke University Press. Ruiz, A. B., & Brunet, P. (2018). Building Walls. Fear and Securitization in the European Union. Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau. Sigona, Nando. (2015, October 16). Seeing Double? How EU Miscounts Migrants Arriving at Its Borders. The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/seeing-­double-­how-­the-­eu-­miscounts-­migrants-­arriving-­at-­ its-­borders-­49242. Last access: 22 Nov 2020. Stierl, M., Heller, C., & De Genova, N. (2016). Numbers (or, the Spectacle of Statistics in the Production of the Crisis). In New Keywords Collective (2016, pp. 22–25).

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Stone, D. (2018). Refugees Then and Now: Memory, History and Politics in the Long Twentieth Century: An Introduction. Patterns of Prejudice, 52(2–3), 101–106. Special Issue: Refugees Then and Now: Memory, History and Politics in the Long Twentieth Century. Tazzioli, M. (2018). Crimes of Solidarity. Migration and Containment Through Rescue. Radical Philosophy, 2(1). Available at: https://www.radicalphilosophy. com/commentary/crimes-­of-­solidarity. Last access: 28 Nov 2020 Tazzioli, M., & De Genova, N. (2016). Europe/Crisis: Introducing New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe’. In New Keywords Collective (2016, pp. 2–7). Timmer, A. D., & Docka-Filipek, D. (2018). Enemies of the Nation: Understanding the Hungarian State’s Relationship to Humanitarian NGOs. Journal of International and Global Studies, 9(2), 40–57. UNHCR. (2019). Figures at Glance. Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/ figures-­at-­a-­glance.html. Last access: 28 Nov 2020. United Nations. (2018, August 6). Saving Lives Is Not a Crime. Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Agnes Callamard, Submitted in Accordance with Assembly Resolution 71/198. Yuval-Davies, N. (2019). Autochtonic Populism, Everyday Bordering and the Construction of ‘Migrant’. In G.  Fitzi, J.  Mackert, & B.  S. Turner (Eds.), Populism and the Crisis of Democracy, Vol. 3: Migration, Gender and Religion (pp. 69–76). Routledge.

CHAPTER 7

The Future of Justice: Politics, Time and the Contemporary Political Triangulation—Liberalism, Socialism and Fascism Richard A. Cohen Thus know wisdom for yourself, if you find it, there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off. For there is no future for the evil man. (Proverbs, 24:14, 20 (transl. Robert Alter))

Introduction: Politics and Time Politics, the domain of sovereignty, of humans publicly ruling humans within groups unto death, has to do not only with power and right, their legitimation, application, distribution and limitation, as is usually supposed, but also with time, with past, present and future, with before and after. The exact relations must be explained. What must also be explained is why the import of time, on political power and right, still needs explaining, both for political theory and for political agency. The answer may seem remote, or

R. A. Cohen (*) Department of Jewish Thought, Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_7

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abstract, but its influence remains considerable: the long suppression of time by a civilization which had very early adopted and adapted to a metaphysics of eternity. The moral of its story can be told in a nutshell: the eternal is good, even divine, the temporal is evil, sinful. Filtered through such a metaphysics, prevalent for millennia, with residuals continuing to this day, indeed, with avidly faithful adherents in the West and elsewhere, no wonder the real significance of time has been distorted, dismissed and denigrated. Not until the nineteenth century, and then as a symptom of deeper changes, primarily the rise of a more secular worldly approach set in motion by the Industrial Revolution, by modern science and its technology, as by the rise of democracy such historical developments supported, not until so late a date did the temporal finally begin to receive its due, though first—and inadequately—as dialectic, historically conceptualized by Hegel, politically concretized by Marx, and internalized existentially by Kierkegaard. Time, however, long repressed, would have its day. Revolutions in production, science, technology, politics and philosophy, centuries in the making, reorienting humanity’s vicissitudes and visions from the otherworldly to the hither, eventually also demanded and gave rise to a superior understanding  of temporality. At the end of the nineteenth century, first articulated by Henri Bergson in 1889,1 and then in the first decades of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl,2 these two seminal thinkers sketched the beginnings of an analytically sophisticated and sensuously grounded account of time greatly freed of the debilitating metaphysics of eternity, appreciative, that is to say, of the foundational and positive significance of temporality, its fundamental role in and contribution to intelligibility. And so, too, beyond the intellectually challenging eye-opening discoveries of these two founders, who as philosophers were concentrated on the time of subjectivity and consciousness, the newfound significance and status of time must also be recognized in the broader realms of sociality and politics, which is to say, in terms of political theory and agency. Released from the grip of eternity, we must rediscover or discover for the first time the impact of time on statecraft, political parties, political programs and ideologies, leadership, democracy, indeed of 1  See, Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, transl. F. L. Pogson (New York: Harper & Row, 1969; originally published in French, 1889). 2  See, Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal-Time Consciousness, transl. James S. Churchill, ed. Martin Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971); originally published in German, 1928 (of lectures given as early as 1904).

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politics entire, whether leftist, centrist or rightest, whether socialist, liberal, conservative or fascist. We must factor in temporality—stances toward past, present and future—if we are to better grasp all the many variations and permutations which constitute the political in its ongoing developments, its factions and their frictions, from the most picayune dickering over diplomatic phraseology to the most sublime declamations of principles and horizons. To be sure, politics remains the public contention of might and right, but no less is it constituted by dispositions toward time, which in collaboration and contestation produces its basic valences, whether progressive or regressive, forward looking or backward looking, or sticking to the present and resisting change. These three factors— power, right and time—must be sorted out, distinguished, traced, even and especially inasmuch as they are inexorably and indissolubly interwoven. The present chapter is a contribution to such an undertaking.  If the above claims for time appear exaggerated or obscure at first glance, a second’s consideration assures their credibility, as it also reveals the haplessness of their concealment. Who does not know, for instance, that conservatives aim to preserve and prolong, and reactionaries aim to return and reinstate a past, however selectively—accurately, inaccurately, scientifically, ideologically—that past is envisioned and interpreted. It is for the sake of such a past, imaginary or real, indeed as some mix of the two, that they oppose the present, and oppose the improvements suggested by progressives for a better future. Who does not know, too, that progressives and revolutionaries, to the contrary, reject what they declaim as the failures, wrongs and inadequacies of the past, and of the present, that they agitate to create a better, worthier future, to fix present and past wrongs, selectively or totally. Finally, who is not aware that authoritarians and fascists—sometimes called “populists” today—despite their noisy complaints and aggitated discontents, are but choruses singing praise and allegiance to the present, to the Leader, a present about whose true power structures and real history they  remain blissfully oblivious, preferring as they do an imaginary, indeed a mythic pastiche representing a “greatness” that never was and by their own behavior never will be. Their obsessive grievances and discontents, magnified, megaphoned, but separated from real causes, generate great spectacles of shadow boxing opposition, which are ultimately charades, enabling discharges of energy but leaving the status quo, the present, the powers that be, intact and strengthened, until the same prejudices, biases, fantasies and myths, empowered, wreak havoc, violence and bloodshed. It is clear, then, and even the slightest reflective

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attention provides ample evidence, that we must invoke time, temporal outlooks, postures toward past, present, future, before and after, in all of the most fundamental attitudes and outlooks of power and justice, whether recidivist, quietist or progressive, whether real or imagined. It is no exaggeration to represent all political outlooks and intentions, from rebellion to collaboration, and all their partisans and parties, their functionaries and institutions, which constitute the political, as agencies in a struggle for power and justice, to be sure, but also and no less constitutively as movements in a struggle to establish and entrench the primacy of a preferred time over other times and other people. The temporal character of the political is perhaps most evident in consideration of the continuities and discontinuities of history. (Which makes history too another bone of contention.)  As virtue, for Aristotle, to be virtuous must be enacted “at the right time,” so too is this true of political movements. The Revolution of 1905 in Russia failed, but the Revolutions of 1917 succeeded. One was the wrong time, the other the right time. In America, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 failed, met too much social resistance, while the Civil Rights Act of 1964, let us say it had a better reception, for all that remains to be done. We can speak of time, the times, being ready or not, ripe or unripe. The point is that chronology, succession, timing makes a difference, sometimes all the difference. The most important instance of this, which is more than an instance, however, for us— because its result is the triangulation of liberalism, socialism and fascism, which is the basic structure and issue of our contemporary macro-political world—has to do with the changing historical meaning of liberalism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Europe and the Americas the liberal fight for human rights, democracy and rule of law was revolutionary, progressive, promising.  It established an unprecedented justice achieved only by overthrowing the then regnant, entrenched and arbitrary privileges of feudalism, monarchy, nobility and established Church. But this “same” liberalism, of human rights and legal protections, became in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century an instrument of oppression, of injustice, of prejudice, used to prevent the extension of freedom from legal rights to its material conditions, such as education, health care, housing, culture, environmental protection and the like. Time, change, development, history, these made the difference. The very success of liberalism turned its once revolutionary goals into stumbling blocks for further progressive development, so that it is today’s conservatives who are “neoliberals,” insisting that the revolutionary innovations of yesterday—human

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rights, democracy, rule by law—are the eternal truths of today and forever, the sufficient expressions of unchanging human nature, so that with their success history itself has come to an end (as was argued popularly by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 worldwide rightwing best seller3). As early as 1848, however, attuned to the importance of history, Marx and Engels had exposed this rhetorical ruse of the liberals, who only  empowered and defended human rights and law insofar as they protected property and so-called free market capitalism: “By freedom,” Marx and Engels wrote, “is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.”4 In brief, what was once self-­consciously instituted by the actions of interested political agents and parties, indeed by revolutionaries, now  becomes, with its success  and historical victory, consecrated as eternal law, human nature timeless and unchangeable. Again the myth of eternity, now as liberal ideology.  Like power and ethics when considered concretely, time is complex, multifaceted. Its predominant structures of dimensionality and directionality, for one, take on different meanings depending on their level, whether personal, familial, social, economic, historical or political. So, for instance, while each individual is mortal and dies, the sense of death alters in consideration of its familial, social, economic, historical and political contextualization. Nor is there any surefire method or infallible intuition, no logarithm, no calculus, to weigh and sort out these differences and their nuances for all time and for all places. Simplification is a great danger, for 3  Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Press, 1992). Not surprisingly, Fukuyama is more greatly perturbed by a possible loss of creative individuality, the struggle for prestige of the few, more worried about the rise of Nietzsche’s numb “last man,” than about the current political-social-economic oppression of billions of people or about the global environmental crisis. “Liberal democracy,” he would assure us, “is vastly preferable to its major competitors, fascism and communism” (Fukuyama, 284), but then he attacks liberal democracy for producing the last man. Such, in fact, has always been the fascist critique of liberal democracy. It seems blatantly contradictory until we realize that like all fellow travelers of liberal democracy, Fukuyama prefers anything, including fascism, to socialism. Forty years earlier in 1952, in his monumental The Destruction of Reason, Georg Lukacs had already analyzed such fair-weather friendship, its whining, and its attachment to such ambiguous figures as Nietzsche: “an important source of Nietzsche’s fascination for the parasitic intelligentsia of the imperialist period. With his assistance it was able to conceal its cowardice, compliance with imperialism’s most repugnant forms and mortal fear of the proletarian revolution behind the masks of a ‘concern about culture.’” Georg Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, transl. Peter Palmer (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2017), 352. 4  Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 48.

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the humanity it misconstrues, and yet a great temptation in our age of publicity, of democratic elections and the “quick buck” of global capitalist marketing. Nor is politics reducible to rational choices, since its agents— real human beings—are not reducible to rational decision-makers. Which is not to say, either, that in politics rational choices can be dismissed as negligible, as conditioned superstructures or epiphenomenon, symptoms or reflexes of deeper anonymous and impersonal forces, such as is suggested by Hegel’s cunning of reason, or Marx’s class struggle, or Adam Smith’s invisible hand, or Freud’s unconscious. Freedom is neither immaculate nor fake, neither angelic nor a cog, but difficult, what Levinas called “difficult freedom,” a praxis, an oriented-orienting, not a determinism, nor a superficiality to be manipulated. Concrete integrality is as true of time as of power and ethics, which is to say, true of the time of politics, and the politics of time, the time of ethics, and the ethics of time. We shall have more to say about these concatenations below. They apply as well to theory, itself a praxis, so that Rosa Luxembourg, who abhorred the hauteur of elitist intellectualism, would insist in 1900: “No coarser insult, no baser aspersion, can be thrown against the workers than the remark: ‘Theoretic controversies are only for academicians.’”5 Politics is the work of justice, the struggle for justice, the future of justice, now and yet to come. Justice not as a given but as an ongoing task, a task outstanding in both senses of the term, important and unfinished, an aspiration rather than a fait accompli, but one that must be protected by laws and institutions, and above all by people, people with hands, hearts and heads. There are many “reasons” for the West’s long history of demoting time for eternity, from the unchanging Ideas of Platonism to the heavenly kingdom of God. For Hannah Arendt it arose from humanity’s mortal envy of the immortality of gods and nature.6 For whatever reason or unreason, change, movement, time, generations, development and history were relegated to the status of non-being, illusion, epiphenomena, deception, ignorance, and finally, under the aegis of Christianity and Gnosticism, sin, evil, the demonic. Zeno of Elea had long ago—though without effect— exposed the farce: Achilles cannot overtake a tortoise in a footrace, the 5  Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, transl. Integer (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978), 9. 6  Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: World Publishing Company, 1963), 42: “embedded in a cosmos in which everything was immortal, it was mortality which became the hallmark of human existence”—a mortality seeking immortality through memory, as fame, like Achilles, or in ideas, as per Plato and Aristotle.

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arrow shot from a bow never reaches its target. Preposterous paradoxes, but unavoidable according to the strict logic of the philosophers, scientists and theologians. Zeno’s paradoxes stood for two and half thousand years, ignored but twisted into the fabric of Western metaphysics—its philosophy, science and theology—until Henri Bergson finally answered them in the late nineteenth century. Nor was “common sense” more enlightened. Time? What is it? Look to the sun dial, the clock! Thus, common sense also reduces time to an abstraction, a measurement of motion, a line on a sun dial, hands on a clock face, the grid of a calendar. In these objects common sense somehow finds time, and Plato’s Timaeus did not disagree.7 What did Bergson see that philosophy, theology, science and common sense had not seen hitherto? First of all, what time is not: it cannot be defined by stops, resting points, seconds, minutes, hours, calendars, and so on, however useful these demarcations may be for measurement, calculation, communication, standardization, that is, for practical purposes. Rather, time is flow, continuity, growth. The past flows into the present which flows into the future. Time’s dimensions interpenetrate, like a melody, not an on-off switch, like the smooth high fidelity of a vinyl record rather than the crisper compressed digits of a “compact disc.” Deeper than the measurement of time, then, is its duration. Achilles beats the tortoise and the arrow reaches its target because before they are intellectualized into measurable intervals they are movements, flows, continuities. One measures clock time, but one intuits duration, enters into it, because existence itself is its manifestation. Henceforth reality and time, being and time, cannot be thought apart. Henceforth philosophy must recognize that clock time, its measure, however strict, however  useful for trains, planes and appointments, is derivative. Bergson made the breakthrough, but after his account of duration came Edmund Husserl’s even more refined analyses of “internal-time consciousness,” and then Heidegger’s recognition of its existential and historical sense, ecstatic and engaged temporalizing, and on top of all these novel insights, deepening them, requiring that they too be rethought further, Levinas recognized time’s 7  Plato, Timaeus, 38a: “the past and future are created species of time, which we unconsciously but wrongly transfer to eternal being, for we say that it ‘was,’ or ‘will be,’ but the truth is that ‘is’ alone is properly attributed to it, and that ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are only to be spoken of becoming in time, for they are motions, but that which is immovably the same forever cannot become older or younger by time.” Translated by Benjamin Jowett, in, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Random House, 1966), 1167.

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irreducible ethical-social character, the “time of generations,” the “future of justice,” as we shall see. For all of them, though most especially from the ethical perspective of Levinas, the political must now be reconsidered, rethought and engaged with eyes wide open to its temporality. Because he gives primacy to ethics, inextricably bound to the social, Levinas’s account of temporality entails and demands a reconsideration of the political. Like his contemporaries and teachers Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, for Levinas objectified time is derivative. More profoundly, time operates by temporalizing, as an ex-stasis or synthesizing flow of interpenetrating dimensions, past and future, and a movement in a one-­ way directionality. But Levinas’s analyses go further. It is not enough to think of time synthetically and existentially rather than objectively and quantitatively. One must also be careful to retain the transcendence of its dimensions, the pastness of the past, the futurity of the future. Synthesis alone would reduce these to a presence, whether self-presence or substantial immanence, even if avoiding the specious present of objectification. Levinas’s conception of time is able to preserve its transcendence unlike his mentors and predecessors because it binds time ultimately not to existence, consciousness or being, but to inter-subjectivity, relationship with the alterity of the other person, and therefore also, and most importantly, to the ethical exigencies, the responsibilities which open up such a relationship. Because it is a social event, time is an ethical event. It follows that in binding time to sociality, and sociality to ethics, acknowledging their irreducible transcendence, Levinas also has prepared the ground to grasp the political as it deserves, as social, ethical and temporal. First in priority, then, is to understand how Levinas links time and sociality via ethics. Relationship with the other, as ethical, is not for Levinas a sporadic or contingent experience. Rather it is the material-transcendental condition, as it were, for the humanity of the human. Humanity, sociality and ethics arise together, as concern for the vulnerability of the other person, in the guilt of being too late for the suffering the other is already undergoing, which has passed, is past, and yet too early, as it were, for the justice that ultimately is required, yet remains outstanding, yet to be accomplished, the not yet, future. Time, like society and the political which is constructed out of and upon society, is a function of moral responsibility to the other person, and to all others, opening up a past, via guilt, and a future, via justice. Moral responsibility gives rise to political responsibility as care for each other requires care for all others, hence demanding not only love, generosity, self-sacrifice, at a personal level, but also all the protections of government, laws, courts, peace, schools,

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hospitals, a healthy environment, and so on. Levinas also allows us to grasp the deeper sources of the inner link which binds politics and justice, a link which realpolitik refuses, not because realpolitik is savvier, as it believes itself, but because it is more selfish, narrowminded, evil and unjust. In fact, realpolitik, like positivism and relativism, is but another symptom of the “crisis” which has afflicted the world’s political landscape for at least a century, if not longer. It is at bottom a crisis of ethics, in political terms a crisis of justice, that is, the specter of a future without justice, humanity without a future. One calls to mind no less than four instances of impending human and planetary devastation, each promulgated by injustice: (1) nuclear war; (2) environmental collapse; (3) obscene wealth disparities; (4) resurgence of fascist dictatorships. It is the last of these which is our primary concern in the present chapter, though they are all four inter-related. One of the notable legacies of the Industrial Revolution is economics supplanting politics in both power and ideology. Not just the contemporary hegemony of cost-benefit analyses, though including this, at the very source of liberalism as revolutionary politics which overthrew feudalism, human rights and freedoms were modeled—knowingly or not—on an imagined free market economy, on conjuring up independent entrepreneurs and workers, binding themselves to things, now commodities, to their peers, now legal persons, and social ventures, now voluntarily contracts, all with the new support of a legal system administered by legally appointed officials and sanctioned by official governmental authorities. Such legalism, ultimately tied to commercial contracts, served as the real and theoretical basis of a new vision of human nature, of political agents and agency, of the rights and duties of citizens and governance. Voluntary free contract versus hereditary obligatory privilege. No doubt liberalism’s ideas of freedom and human rights, borrowed from a then rising capitalism, were powerful persuaders in the ideological and material battles to shatter and overthrow what it exposed as the degrading encumbrances of feudal corporatism and privilege. Nonetheless, despite their undoubtedly powerful moral and instrumental value in the early battles of liberalism against feudalism, that success once achieved is not sufficient to turn its distortions, its strictly capitalist origins, however once persuasive and moving, into complete or final truths of human nature or of politics. The repressed will return, the truth will out. And in this instance, the repressed was a more concrete, more realistic, thicker grasp of human nature and politics  attuned not merely to legalities and legalism but to real human relations, to sensibility and desire, certainly, but no less trenchantly to

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human sociality and solidarity. The Romantic reaction to liberalism, let us say at this juncture, was carried by a quite similar critique, and hence was no fluke. But it was and remains but a reaction, the rebound expression of the opposite extreme, opposing legalist rationality with that legalism’s repressed, its opposites, its own inventions of myth, tradition and passion, rallying to a no less abstract  “nationalism” in place  of “rationalism,” oblivous to the artificiality of both, flip sides of the same coin. Clearer and deeper thinkers made soberer assessments and criticisms of liberalism, going beyond mere grievance, reaction and recidivism. Marx and Engels, for instance, pointed to the incongruities of class conflict, piercing the liberal’s paradisal dreams of freedom and rights by counterposing the uglier but more accurate actual inequalities of ruling class proprietorship. So too Marx’s contemporary in England, Thomas Hill Green, gave influential lectures at Balliol College on the import of the social dimension of the political, of “positive freedom,” and its real conditions, in contrast to “negative freedom,” and its ideological abstraction. Criticizing the liberalism of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith for its false atomization of the social body, he taught that care for justice demands more than “self-interest.” There are higher more compelling obligations to institute and achieve the “common good.”8 A century later Professor C. B. Macpherson exposed by meticulous close textual readings the illegitimacy, the sophisms by which Hobbes and Locke had earlier conjured what liberals subsequently dressed in a beatific rhetoric of freedom and rights, namely, the human as “possessive individualism.”9 Advancing these same criticisms, in 1944 Karl Polanyi in his great work, The Great Transformation,10 exposed the ideological pretentions of liberalism’s rhetorical counter-offensives and their distortions. Many additional critics can be named. They all expose liberalism—liberal democracy—as the political face of the more selfish material interests of a hegemonic capitalism. Liberalism serves legalism because and insofar as legalism serves capitalism.  However seductive its exalted self-congratulatory words, it has reduced justice to a matter of exchange, profit and capital accumulation, 8  See, T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings, ed. Paul Harris and John Morrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). “[E]very right is derived from some social relation.” (110). And contra realpolitik: “where there is no recognition of a common good, there can be no right in any other sense than power” (42). 9  See, e.g., C.  B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10  Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2nd ed., 2001), originally published 1944.

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serving not the excluded many but the wealthy few. Is it any wonder, then, that amidst the greatest material prosperity humanity has ever experienced—the wonder of capitalism, but most of it in the clutches today of four thousand billionaires, and their political hirelings—there is such enormous dissatisfaction, such widespread popular discontent? To the point that a significant portion of the ruling class itself (a class which in total, after all, numbers but a relatively tiny coterie of individuals) has come to doubt the continued utility of democratic processes and institutions. It seems the sages were right: one cannot buy happiness, not even with billions. In any event, it is clear that the liberalism which was once truly revolutionary, whose advocates overthrew the tyranny of feudal privilege, has now become a shelter for a new tyranny of financial privilege, of the power of money and the monied. We now say, as was never said in human history, that “time is money,” because it has never been truer. In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant famously determined time as the form of subjectivity. This represented a step forward from understanding time as the movement of things, but only a baby step. When Kant turned late in his life to political matters, in a short article published in 1798, which proved to be his last publication, entitled “The Contest of Faculties,” subtitled “A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: ‘Is the Human Race Continually Improving?’,”11 he explicitly considers politics in the light of time, past, present and future. As the reference to improvement in his subtitle suggests, what interests Kant in this article is what he calls “a history of future times, i.e., a predictive history.”12 History for Kant is neither determined nor arbitrary, neither providential nor a throw of dice. It is nonetheless teleological, constituted by concerted actions aiming at an unaccomplished goal, a goal which he specifies as the bringing of the kingdom of God—a just world—to earth. In this Kant has already glimpsed the primacy of the future for historical-political temporalizing.13 Because a 11  Immanuel Kant, “The Contest of the Faculties,” in Kant: Political Writings, 2nd Enlarged Edition, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 177–190. 12  Ibid., 177. 13  The twentieth-century thinker – Marxist—who has most emphasized the primacy of the future, as hope, personal, social, political and religious, is perhaps Ernst Bloch, in The Principle of Hope, 3 Volumes, transl. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); originally published in German, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 3 Volumes, 1954, 1955, 1959. This book was written in the United States, where Bloch lived from 1938 to 1947, fleeing certain murder at the hands of the Nazis. In 1948 he became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig in East Germany, continuing there until 1957 when he was forced to retire because of his principled stand against the USSR’s suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

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futural orientation, a teleology, is primordial, determinative, Kant considered insightful political wisdom to be “prophetic,”14 not as divine or miraculous revelation but as informed and provocative foresight. So a question arises: since the future is ultimately novel, not determined or dictated by the past (nor already complete in the Mind of God), and therefore fundamentally unknowable, how is “predictive” or “prophetic” wisdom possible? “The answer,” Kant writes, “is that it is possible if the prophet himself occasions and produces the events he predicts.” And thus, remarkably, we see already formulated in Kant, seemingly despite himself, despite his rationalist dualism, albeit transcendental, of necessity and freedom, and despite his many later critics, an activist dialectical history. The time of history is the temporalizing of praxis, at once produced and producing, announced by Kant even before Hegel and Marx, which latter to be sure develop the role of history more intentionally, thoroughly and broadly. It did not await Bergson’s discovery of duration for philosophy and common sense to acknowledge the tri-dimensional character of time, as past, present and future. Not surprisingly, then, Kant proceeds in the same article to distinguish three basic variants of “prophecy.” “There are three possible forms which our prophecy might take. The human race is either continually regressing and deteriorating, continually progressing and improving, or at a permanent standstill, in relation to other creative beings, at its present level of moral attainment.”15 We see too that like all mainstream political philosophers Kant also recognizes politics as a form of ethics. Politics is concerned with power, but never with power alone, power divorced from justice, or when it does assert such a divorce then just so far must it also be evaluated as unjust. Inseparable from ethics, politics is also inseparable from time. If our current politics is deemed to represent a regression, to use Kant’s term, conservatives will admonish and strive to save and preserve the best of the past before it is lost, and we along with it. If we are deemed to be progressing, in contrast, we must upbuild the road to a better future, must help it to arrive, or so progressives advise and advocate. And if history is really at a standstill, a recurrence, and we are all that we can or want to be, then a wise politics must oppose both conservatives and progressives, and enjoy the now, keep to it, hold fast. We take from Kant the following points, admittedly underdetermined: (1) politics is a historical temporalizing praxis oriented ethically–teleologically  Ibid.  Ibid., 178.

14 15

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by a future of justice; (2) the future of justice is concretely specified according to ethical–temporal orientations: preserving, retrieving a past, for conservatives; innovative improvement, betterment of future, for progressives; effective satisfaction, contentment with the present, for authoritarians. We will perhaps be accused of reading more into Kant’s texts than they can bear. There is no doubt that what is needed, a more nuanced and historically sensitive account of time, ethics and politics, can only be found beyond them. Hegel repeatedly browbeats us with such a claim, correctly realizing the new and integral role history must be accorded in understanding the development of human spirit, but hamstrung, nonetheless, by his own continued attachment to a limited propositional logic which belies such promise. We have already indicated that it is Bergson’s notion of duration that first opened the door to conceiving the temporalizing of time beyond earlier dualist and logicist assumptions. But duration, however profound and original, is just a start, one whose political implications Bergson never developed, even if in his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), he did consider its moral and religious implications. Given our concern with time and politics, however, we find greater illumination by a closer look at the contemporary sociological studies, published in 1929 and 1936, of Karl Mannheim in his book Ideology and Utopia.16 This is because far from being an extraneous gloss or a derivative superstructure, time—temporal orientation—for Mannheim is integral to politics, to the clamor and clash of party outlooks. “The innermost structure of the mentality of a group can never be as clearly grasped as when we attempt to understand its conception of time,” Mannheim observed, “in the light of its hopes, yearnings, and purposes. On the basis of these purposes and expectations, a given mentality orders not merely future events, but also the past.”17 Here we are in another intellectual atmosphere than Kant’s, no longer under the dominance of the objectifying abstractions of rationalism. Time is central, real, concrete, duration, an unfolding, history, historical actors orienting and oriented by a forward and backward, time as an integral determinant of all registers of meaning, including the political. That 16  Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, transl. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936). Georg Lukacs sharply and correctly diagnoses the relativism and ultimate failure of Mannheim’s thought; see, Georg Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, transl. Peter Palmer (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2017), 632–641. 17  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 209.

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conservatives focus on the past and progressives on the future, everyone knows, though we often forget—but here we must retain Kant’s insight— that both are future-oriented visions: one aiming for a future of retrieval and repair, the other at a new future which develops possibilities it believes have remain unfulfilled, perhaps unthought, in and by the present, which is to say, a more just future that corrects, exorcises, overthrows past injustice in the name of greater justice. Time here is no longer a spatial representation, limited to the mind, but also no longer a form of subjectivity, limited to the individual. It is neither form nor content but their integration, duration, and envelops or permeates everything. Conservative and progressive alike express primordial orientations toward the future, one to return, to fend off the new, the other to improve, to make better. And so too with authoritarians, “populists,” fascists, attached so deeply to the present, the status quo, that detached from the real past or possible future they invent pasts and futures for themselves, mythically, exploiting prejudices and passions which they stoke, mirrors of their own frustrations. And in this way their much touted discontents paradoxically serve to prevent real change and cement acquiescence in the status quo. So, too, when we factor in temporality, we are able to say that conservatives and progressives, unlike authoritarians, frame their thinking historically as activists, aiming to change the present, the real present, and not just a hyped specious present which exists in and by rhetoric alone and remains untouched by truth or criticism. This latter point—the quietism of authoritarianism— must be underscored because the real violence of authoritarians, of fascists, which luxuriates in an impassioned rhetoric of discontent, of conspiracies, victimhood, nationalism, religious platitudes, and the like, deafens itself to its own political escapism, its rejection of actual history, its preference, instead, for being swept up in the euphoria of self-serving simulacra, posturing, myth, and what is a theatrical rather than a serious politics, but nonetheless for all its unreality a political theatre of real and not merely imagined violence and bloodshed. Enthralled in the moment, by the moment, for the moment, the authoritarians—Leader and mass following—relate to the past and future by obliviousness, substituting fantasy, myth, wishful thinking, rather than reality and truth. It is the most pernicious of all political self-delusions, one to which we shall return in the final section of the present chapter. That politics, like all sociality, is inextricably bound to time, is a starting point for its proper conception and praxis. The concrete, the real, depends on how one understands the contribution, the bearing, the weight of each

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component—time, sociality, politics—in such a complex and integral concatenation of sense. We shall be following lines of thought opened up by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. What this means primarily is that we never lose sight of the ethical import of such a concatenation, of its temporality, to be sure, but of the ethics of that temporality no less. Time, sociality and ethics, and hence politics and justice, must be thought together because they are in conception and praxis inseparable. Such is our thesis. The conservative, including reactionaries, wants a future which returns to a selected past because such a future, retrieving the past, is meant to be better than the present or alternative futures. As with all political movements, conservatives want justice. The progressive, including socialists, wants to initiate a new future as a more just future, a better future, ethically superior to the present and past. They too want justice. The Marxist critique of ethics is itself ethical. Justice, however, is not the monopoly of progressives or conservatives, who in any event differ deeply about what it is or should be. Authoritarians, including fascists, for their part, want to keep things as they are, the same, against any retrieval of another past or any better future, against any ethical “better or worse” as such, and hence despite much grumbling and griping they consider that these are the best of times, the glory days, including their  exagerated  moaning and groaning. Past, present, future, these are not place holders on a clock or calendar, but orientations toward the future, postures, principles, political desires, visions of justice.

Politics, Time and Ethics “I love a human being not yet born.” Avrom Sutzkever, “Like Sun Through a Crevice” (1989)18

A conservative past nostalgia, a progressive future yearning, an authoritarian present amnesia—these are the broad but specific orientations advocated and concretized in the political, by leaders, ideologies, parties, programs, policies, propaganda, divisions of power, types of power, and so on. Each strives to realize a worldview against the others. The first two utilize the imperative language of ethics, the language of justice, whether to persuade or harangue, each to defend its aims and each to oppose its 18  The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever, ed. and transl. Richard J. Fein (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 234.

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rivals. When liberals and liberalism proclaim their justice, the “justice” of social democracy and fascism are rejected, maligned as unjust, as false idols, misleading seductions, at best partial truths exaggerated or absolutized. When socialists and social democracy represent justice, the “justice” of liberalism and fascism are no less rejected, maligned as unjust, and treated as false idols, misleading seductions, at best partial truths exaggerated or absolutized. Deep and seemingly irreconcilable as such disagreements are, they do not sink into a more deleterious because truly unbridgeable relativizing and relativism, however. This is because in both cases it is justice that is explicitly defended, and injustice that is explicitly attacked.19 As such these disagreements, profound as they are, show not the futility of politics but rather its necessity, indeed the inescapability and inevitability of politics, if there is to be justice at all. Politics as an ethical discipline is not a mathematics or physics. Conversation, deliberation, disagreement, contentiousness and compromise—yielding an always temporary and temporizing rule by shifting consensus and means of consensus—are its very lifeblood, its very atmosphere, its charge. The same cannot be said, or said as straightforwardly for authoritarianism. Here one must distinguish ethical politics from realpolitik, even and especially while recognizing that the latter, realpolitik, remains an ethical politics self-deluded  to the point of denying precisely this. There is no other politics than ethical politics because politics is nothing other than the conjunction of power and justice. So despite itself realpolitik remains an ethical politics but one that has chosen the dark path of injustice, a path of indifference to good and evil, justice and injustice. Realpolitik declares ethics an irrelevance, asserts its indifference to justice, even demeans justice as distraction, self-deception, the weakness of empty words, siding with violence, with power for its own sake. But there is no such neutrality in politics, precisely because politics is an ethics: to be against or indifferent to justice is equally to support injustice. As amorality is immorality when morality is called for, so too indifference to justice, or rather more accurately exaltation of violence and power are injustice. Realpolitik admits 19  This does not contradict the truth of our earlier observation that fascism, unlike liberalism and social democracy, is not interested in justice. Its worship of unadulterated power is certainly not an interest in justice, quite the opposite. But this does not mean that it does not have its own rhetoric of justice, which dissipates, it is true, in the rhetoric of its basic nonprinciple: might makes right. The difference, then, is that only fascism serves power for the sake of power alone, a vicious vortex or tautology of power empowering power, whereas liberalism and social democracy serve justice, such as they understand it.

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as much by its ancient slogan: might makes right, when what it wants to say is a tautology: might makes might. Which is to say that might is never satisfied, because like money it is a means, hence by itself can never achieve self-sufficiency, as Aristotle would say, can never be powerful enough, always needs and seeks more power. Only justice can make might right. To be sure, exposing a contradiction, or castigating a tautology, though necessary for reason, is not sufficient to deal with authoritarianism, which wallows in such irrationality. Rather, because its injustice and violence are harmful and because it becomes fascism, its excesses must be subdued, its insatiable lust for power checked. Such is contained in the purpose and power of the rule of law, the protocols and procedures of democracy, to constrain otherwise limitless expressions of will to power by justice armed. Politics, the bending of power by and toward justice, the empowering of justice, while it begins in conversation, and ends in conversation, in the uprightness of the face-to-face, must sometimes also travel rougher roads, take harsher measures, from physical constraint to war, compelled by justice to an unwonted violence to check wanton violence. Because fascism and realpolitik, despite their contradictions and irrationalism, despite the horrendous bloody catastrophes they perpetrated in the early and mid-twentieth century by their blazing self-destructive violence, because they remain nevertheless not only theoretical possibilities but, sad to say, viable political options in the world today, we must take seriously and consider further the idea, or the defiant posture, the evil and injustice, to speak more accurately, of a politics which tramples upon ethics. In its own terms, such a politics judges exclusively in terms of success, “winner” or “loser,” “friend” or “enemy,” defined by loyalty and quantity, years in power, amounts of arms, money, palaces, land, twitter followers, and the like. Having dismissed ethical  judgment, magnitude is all that remains: bigger is better (or, again, bigger is bigger). But there is also the issue of excluding quality, excluding ethics, of maintaining the fiction of its own quantitative self-judgment. Power, as we have indicated, wants only power, more power. Nietzsche understood as much in his notion of “will to power,” which is always the “will to overpower.”20 One can read this willing which wills only itself, this power which acknowledges only power, one can read this political notion back into the philosopher’s concept of “substance,” whose key is an absolute self-sufficiency, as Spinoza makes 20  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, transl. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), 407 (Book Three, Section 776).

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explicit on the first page of his Ethics: “By substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that the conception of which does not require the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed.”21 The philosopher’s substance is translated by the fascist into xenophobia. Or perhaps the other way around, perhaps the philosopher’s conception of “substance” is already a sublimated  expression of xenophobia, chauvinism, racism, and the exclusivism which lies at the heart of all authoritarian politics. Such considerations  require more nuanced development, but not here. Certainly, however, one can see in fascism and realpolitik, in the indisputable authoritatian Leader and mass followers, the expression of unbridled egoism, of unrestrained and unleashed selfishness, the “me first” without principle, the will to will, power for power, as dictator, king, Ubu Roi, emperor, “the great,” and finally a divine delusional apotheosis unto death. No limit, and certainly no criteria above desire and power. Power for the sake of power, power feeding power, self-conflagration, it is the dark tale of evil and injustice, the long history of violation. Its locus classicus in ancient Greece is the infamous Melian Dialogue of Book Five of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, where the stronger Athenians offer the weaker Melians the chance to submit or face certain defeat, dismissing their talk of justice as the ineffectual chatter of the weak. For its political–theoretical apologia we mention two celebrated works of political philosophy, Machiavelli’s Prince and Hobbes’ Leviathan, and the more recent fascist inspired attacks on democracy and human rights by the learned jurist and Nazi Prussian State Councilor Carl Schmitt, and after him the distorting speculations of his disciple Reinhart Koselleck, Professor of History. But realpolitik in action rarely displays the finesse, nuance and cleverness of such thinkers. It is satisfied to broadcast its baseless and simplistic slogans and fantasies for all to see and hear, such as, to take a particularly egregious instance, we find in Hitler’s propaganda minister Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which teaches that “Justice is that which Aryan men hold to be right,”22 or unashamedly on every page of Hitler’s Mein Kampf or in Mussolini’s many out landish utterances. Despite the oafish antics of America’s 45th President, there is no comic version.  21  Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, ed. Seymour Feldman, transl. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), 31. 22  Quoted in Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, 745.

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For reasons we have raised, fascism is not and cannot be a theory, much less based in principles. It is a movement, in the most literal sense, an agitation, shouting, singing, boots marching, fists punching, guns shooting, torture, murder, incarceration and war. Such agitated activism excited the Italian futurists, until they died on the battlefields. In retrospect we appreciate how proleptic were Heinrich Heine’s words in Almansor (1821): “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.” Carl Schmitt had already provided Hitler the “theory” for burning down the Reichstag, since under the pressure of unbridled power words are drowned out, become meaningless, mere chatter, demeaning the etymological sense of “parliament,” a speaking place. Debate, discussion, deliberation, so-called civilized conversation, reconciliation, suasion,  honest disagreement, minority opinion, are but a waste of time and energy—the will of the Leader is sufficient, and without alternative.23 Such exclusions, such trampling on discourse, is already well afoot from all the politicians who claim, without any evidence, that they alone speak for or exclusively represent this or that “silent majority.” The dictatorial Leader always speaks for all, because outside his will there is nothing. It is not another form of democracy, even if the masses support it, because it is the expression of but one will.  Fascism, despite its patent irrationality, succeeds—gains followers—to the extent that it recognizes, appropriates and redirects real discontents which have arisen in today’s unprecedented world of global capitalism. Never before has the entire planet been ruled by one system, of any sort, let alone economic, and let alone one driven by greed. The global market, the freedom to buy and sell, the commodification of all things, has shattered all the thicker non-monetary allegiances—of family, locale, clan, history, tradition, religion—which had hitherto provided significance and solidarity to human community. Reducing humans to buyers, sellers, consumers, business competitors, such allegiances fade and disappear, leaving in their wake isolated individuals, atomized, alienated, stripped of social support, a support which political justice, contrary to market economy, reinforces and enlightens in the name of the common good. Fascism, rejecting justice, manipulates the fears and discontents of the same isolated individuals, responds to alienation, providing false calm and balm, entices, 23  See, Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, transl. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). “Discussing, bargaining, parliamentary proceedings, appear a betrayal of myth and the enormous enthusiasm on which everything depends” (69).

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seduces such isolated individuals to join the mob, the movement, not for the greater good, which it mocks and disparages, but for the good of joining itself, of gathering, rubbing shoulders,  united by the Leader’s will, enabling each to forget, even if only temporarily, their individual troubles. As justice requires mindfulness, fascism exploits the passions. We shall see below in greater detail how this Dionysian dialectic of passion works, joining Leader’s will and mass submission. One thing is certain, it destroys not only its enemies, to whose destruction it is dialectically bound, but no less itself as well. Self-conflagration, vanity’s bonfire. We learn from Bergson that the interpenetrating flow of duration subtends the divisions and stops of calendar time. The past grows, like a snow ball rolling down a snow-covered hill, its increasing weight bearing upon us. Hence the after is different from the before. Time’s dimensions are not simultaneous. Every present, then, is unprecedented, unique, having a past unlike any other, even if in the preoccupations of our lives we may overlook its uniqueness. To borrow an example from Jorge Luis Borges: If today someone rewrote Cervantes’ great novel Don Quixote, word for word, producing an exact verbatim copy of the original, it would still be completely new, unique, a first, because the Don Quixote written by Cervantes and published in 1605 and 1615 was not published after a previous version had been already published, while this “new” “copy” does follow an earlier text, as never before. Indeed, each plagiarism would also be unique, as each performance of Beethoven’s fifth symphony is unique. Each and every moment, in other words, is unique, unprecedented. Which means it is also open to a new future, a future, to speak politically, potentially more just than the present or past. This is why Aristotle, in his Poetics (1451b1–6) argued that “poetry is more philosophical and serious than history,” because history records events that have actually happened, unique events, never to be repeated, while poetry can teach what is still possible, revealing possibilities not yet actualized or anticipated. Thus, again the status of politics as fundamental: the past influences the present, more or less, but does not determine it, since every present is new if only for having a unique past. The future, for its part, however much anticipated, however well predicted, say, as the fulfillment of a present itinerary or plan, nonetheless retains its novelty as well. Ultimately and radically the future is unforeseeable, always new, hence a creative possibility, despite the patterns and repetitions (Hume called them habits) according to which most humans live their daily lives. In 2019, who knew that the Covid-19 pandemic was approaching? In 1988, who knew the Soviet Union would

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collapse? The present is unprecedented, the future unknown, even if for the most part our lives, and the lives of societies, follow continuities rather than novelties. To be sure, Bergson’s theory of duration, like Darwin’s earlier theory of evolution, suggested to some thinkers vitalist or biologist models for humanity’s development. Made famous by Herbert Spencer, and then Oswald Spengler, under the name “Social Darwinism,” such an allegedly naturalist modelling was yet another instance of the worship of power and success. No doubt sentient life develops by exploiting reproductive niches, but nothing other than unwarranted scientism compels humans to model their own choices and self-understanding accordingly. Social Darwinism would understand the victors as justified by their survival, the winners justified by their flourishing, when all the world knows how often in our world evil is rewarded and goodness left unappreciated. Such naturalist transferences explain too much and too little, reducing humans to convenient generalizations carved out of this or that science. Nationalism, allied to racism, would be one such fantastic conjured beast. In truth, temporality, continuities and discontinuities of time’s dimensions, linking the irrecuperable pastness of the past and the outstanding futurity of the future in the tension of the self-presence of the present, is a complex structure, further complicated because at once personal, social, economic, political and ethical, and therefore a proceeding that cannot without falsification and violence, intellectual and physical, be reduced to any single or simple heuristic image, whether biological, mechanical, semiotic or otherwise. Notwithstanding, our humanity arises in the primacy of the ethical. If, as we have suggested, the great innovation of the temporal theories of Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, was to recognize time’s synthetic character, we must also ask—as Levinas asked—how the transcendence of past and future, their discontinuity from the present, their resistance to the syntheses of self-presence, is maintained. No doubt these theorists were correct to set the stoppage of time back into motion, but perhaps in doing so they went too far in the opposite direction, exaggerating the reach of temporal synthesizing, the hold of duration. Such is Levinas’s contention. Time, he argues, is neither objective nor subjective, even treating the latter in its being, existence or worldliness, but rather is inter-subjective, a relation to the other person. Objectivity lacks movement, but subjectivity  by itself, even that of Dasein, including its historicizing, lacks radical transcendence. The transcendence of the past and the transcendence of the future are functions of the transcendence of the other person. And for this

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reason, temporalizing opens up not as an ontological or an epistemological structure, as these theorists had proposed, but through ethical imperative, because relationship to the other person is first of all responsibility to and for the other person. Time is ethical, imperative not nominative, because it is irreducibly social, such is Levinas’s innovative claim. We recall Aristotle: “best is he who makes use of virtue not in relation to himself but in relation to another. For this is a difficult task.”24 To take time seriously, then, requires recognizing the irreducible intersection, the unified meaning complex, and no less the irreducible  and disturbing imperatives demanded by the integral unity of time, ethics, sociality, and politics. 25 Regarding this existential–ethical reach, we recall Aristotle’s words regarding the purpose of his study of morality in his Nicomachean Ethics, “for we are conducting an examination not so that we may know what virtue is, but so that we may become good, since otherwise there would be no benefit from it.”26 Ethics, more than a set of propositions or theses, is always a claim, truth value overcharged and commanded by ethical virtue. Let us look more closely at the link between responsibility and time. Self and other, and all others, are embodied beings, and therefore vulnerable, to the point of mortality, beings who suffer. Encountering the other is to be responsible for the other’s suffering, responsible, that is to say, to alleviate suffering, ultimately to prevent the other’s death. These are also temporal structures. That is to say, the self is ethically responsible to and for the other person because the self always arrives too late on the scene: the other is already suffering. Such is the irrecuperable transcendence of the past, a past which was never present, has always already passed, what Levinas calls the “immemorial past”—but for which I am nonetheless still responsible, indeed guilty, without having contracted myself. Self and other are not simultaneous, not at the same time—because my taking responsibility comes too late, dealing with pain and suffering which have already occurred, already passed. But I should have helped! Myself, such is the I, or we, by means of the structures of social justice for which I am no less responsible. Time arises precisely in this exigency, my striving to catch 24  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.2, 1130a7; transl. Robert C.  Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011),93. 25  For a fuller treatment of the conjunction of time, sociality and ethics according to Levinas, see chapter 2, “Being, Time and the Ethical Body,” in my book, Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 37–56, 330–331. 26  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.2, 1103b28; 27.

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up, to remedy, to fix the other’s ill or wound or hurt, but too late. “In my responsibility for the other,” Levinas writes, “the past of the other, which has never been my present, ‘concerns me’: it is not a re-presentation for me.”27 It is the same with medicine: the sooner the disease is diagnosed the sooner can it be treated. Better preventative medicine in the first place. And no less with charity or tzedakah (righteousness), so that the hierarchy or “golden ladder” of types of charity, as one finds in Maimonides,28 for instance, can be temporally re-read as advocating helping others sooner rather than later, and best of all to anticipate and provide help before any predicament arises. Time, like listening to another person, arises not in synchrony but across the diachrony opened up by inter-subjectivity, the gap of temporal dissonance which is ethical dissonance, awakening me to responsibilities for which I can never be awake enough, and which chose me before I chose them. Ideally, my responsibility coupled with justice would provide for all troubles beforehand, but our world is not so redeemed. My responsibility is always catching up to traces it can never fully anticipate or overtake, which is to say, the responsible self is guilty. And so, too, as we are about to see, the state, however just it be, is never fully just, never just enough. The diachrony of time is not an ontological, aesthetic or semantic-­ semiotic structure. The rupture of ethics is deeper, the pain more exigent. Never on time, always too late, beyond any stoicism, I am guilty before the other, responsible to and for the other, remedying, alleviating, feeding, healing, loving, consoling, before and better than my own being, my own willing, my own well-being, and in extreme instances my own life. Such is the very singularity, the guilt and “election”—chosen before choosing—of responsibility. The alterity of the “ought” impinges from the future as well as the past, and quite specifically. What holds open futurity, the “not yet,” the coming to be? Here Levinas introduces the sociality of what he calls “the third,” that is, all those others other than the one one faces. The world is made up of more than two people. The other is vulnerable to suffering originating outside the dyad of two. The Bible introduces a snake that walks and speaks, and deceives. One has parents, and aunts, uncles, in-laws, and so on. There are friends, acquaintances, colleagues, neighbors, strangers, 27  Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” interview of October 1982, in Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, transl. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 115. 28  See, Moses Maimonides, Mishnah Torah, “Laws of Gifts to the Poor,” 10:7–14.

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those near, those far, those farther, multitudes, across the planet. Responsibility begins in the face of the other but does not end there. No one, nothing, is excluded from responsibility. If I give all my food and clothing to you, others go without food and clothing, and you will be hungry again soon enough. Thus responsibility demands justice, consideration of others, not only the one, the neighbor. And thus too it requires truth, knowledge, technology, law, institutions, the state, and all that constitutes our shared  enduring and civilized existence. “The relationship with the third party is an incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity in which the face is looked at. There is weighing, thought, objectification.”29 And thus politics—power and justice—arises out of moral proximity to rectify the goodness of its infinite asymmetry. “Justice,” Levinas writes, “society, the State and its institutions, exchanges and work are comprehensible out of proximity.”30 Thus Levinas radically rejects Hobbes, who saw humans as wolves, the state as gamekeeper, and “justice” its whip. Rather, justice limits goodness, is distributive, caring for all because caring for each. Morality requires and regulates justice, that is, the state. “Law and order” serve justice, not themselves. What has this to do with time and the future? Answer: nothing is more “not yet,” more futural, more transcendent, and more pressing socially, than the justice that has not yet been accomplished today. Each of us suffers for this unaccomplished future, and each of us is called upon to realize it, to improve the justice we have with the justice we have not yet achieved. The future of justice cannot be extrapolated from the present, because the present is novel and the future as well. Today’s justice, fine as it be, cannot anticipate all that justice must become.31 We are all children of our time, to be sure, but at the same time we are all no less responsible for better times, for greater justice, for righting wrongs. Which is to say, we are obligated to struggle for a future of justice based on our best projections, for the sake of future generations as yet unborn. The justice we have is surely not just enough; the justice we demand is meant to be better; what is best, we struggle to enable future  Ibid., 158.  Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, transl. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 159. 31  Richard Sugarman, in Levinas and the Torah: A Phenomenological Approach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), links the prioritization of the future as improvement, as movement toward justice, to the Hebrew Bible: “The idea of history, and an understanding that the future can be better than the past, is born in the Western imagination with the opening of the Book of Exodus” (89). 29 30

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generations to see from a higher vantage point than our own. Such is the justice that is always yet to come. We know the goal, justice. Politics is the grand exodus, long and arduous, concrete and ennobling, a journey  of generations, toward and for the creative upbuilding of justice. Nothing, then, is more future than justice, or greater in the sense of spiritual elevation, opening up the very futurity of the future, the prospect of a better world. And injustice, to the contrary, is precisely the closing of that future, excluding, blocking, demoralizing, repressing, trapping, dividing or otherwise turning the human spirit against its own improvement, into the imaginary of an eternal present or a recidivist past. “The future is the time of pro-phecy,” Levinas writes, taking up the biblical term, Kant’s term, “which is also imperative, a moral order, herald of an inspiration.”32 We recall the epigram from Proverbs above: “For there is no future for the evil man.” The future is utopian, not in the sense of an impossible nowhere, but rather as a future not yet realized, a future to be created, created by recognizing and overcoming the injustices of today. The directionality of futurity, then, is betterment, improvement, progress. We cannot see or know beforehand, but we can and must try our best to better the world of today, to rectify its injustices, to institute and spread justice for all. We can only see a few steps ahead, but we know the direction. And we can say what a world of justice must accomplish, even if we cannot say precisely with roadmap in hand  how we get from here to there: Justice is a world in which no one’s suffering goes unattended, a world in which no one suffers from taking responsibility, from behaving morally, where each person’s infinite obligation does not upset universal responsibility. Levinas calls such a utopian futurity, where morality and justice are in harmony, “time bearing a promise,”33 declaring that because it rises to its proper height as such an endeavor “time … is better than eternity.”34 What this means concretely in our world today is that there is too little justice.35 For all that we have accomplished, the problem today is not too much justice, but too little justice. As always, too much remains to be  Levinas, Entre Nous, 115.  Emmanuel Levinas, “The Awakening of the I,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 185. 34  Levinas, Entre Nous, 115. 35  Levinas is no wide-eyed optimist. Nothing is more difficult than morality and justice. On the concluding page of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (185) he refers twice to “the little humanity that adorns the world” and once to “the little cruelty our hands repudiate.” 32 33

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done, because too much suffering remains unattended, and too much suffering is worsening and exacerbated. Justice is a demand not a laurel. “Since justice constantly has a bad conscience,” Levinas writes, it “does not forget that the law is perfectible. It leaves open the possibility of revision of a judgment once pronounced.”36 To which he appends: “This is why democracy is the necessary prolongation of the State. It is not one regime possible among others, but the only suitable one. This is because it safeguards the capacity to improve or to change the law by changing—unfortunate logic!—tyrants, these personalities necessary to the State despite everything. Once we choose another tyrant, we imagine, of course, that he will be better than his predecessor. We say this with each election!”37 The future of justice means we must try and try again, and to keep on trying, to make the world a better place for everyone. Without guarantees!  Our greatest best  future  is one of justice, justice which  remains outstanding—most noble, most unfinished, challenging, always raising the ante of our elevation.

Triangulation: Liberal Democracy, Social Democracy and Fascism In accord with the three dimensions of time, three broad political orientations, each with its radical and moderate wings, each with its excesses and deficiencies,  contend to dominate our times: liberal democracy, social democracy, and fascism. Such a configuration is no accident, in general because politics like everything else transpires across time, is situated in and by history, and thus also in particular because these are the specific political agencies and outlooks whose forces and contentions define our contemporary social-political-historical time. Both aspects, structural and historical, must be considered and properly weighed if we are to understand the whys and wherefores of politics today. We have already briefly indicated their times, let us review them once again. The first chronologically is liberal and representative democracy, heritage of the Enlightenment, and of political revolutions, English, American and French, which instituted popular government under law, limited as well by so-called inalienable human rights, specified as formal freedoms, of speech, religion, assembly, press, habeas corpus, among others. Justice would mean equal human rights for all, enforced by impartial  Emmanuel Levinas, “In the Name of the Other,” in Is It Righteous to Be?, 194.  Ibid.

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government, government beholden to the people. Obviously, to erect such government, the privileges and inheritance of feudal blood, of ancestral land, of sword and robe, had first to be eliminated. Liberalism shattered the corporate mentality of feudalism in the name of the individual’s unencumbered freedom. The second, social democracy, in its moderate form represents itself as a required ethical–social supplement and improvement of liberal democracy, to provide the social–material conditions which alone can make legal rights realizable, such as public education, health care, affordable housing, job security, social security, and so on. In its radical form it represents a revolutionary overthrow of liberal human rights altogether and their replacement with something new, unforeseen, historically novel and better, but only discoverable in and through revolution. Like liberal democracy, social democracy also claims to aim at justice, but now by rectifying, “realizing” the empty legalistic freedoms of liberal democracy with their actual conditions of accomplishment, for instance a more equitable distribution of material goods, attenuating or replacing the inordinate rule by and for the rich, with their armies of lawyers under liberal democracy, by rule by and for the people, rule for the common good, the commonwealth of social democracy. Fascism, third, is the politics of Leader and mass followers, whereby the will of the Leader is the sole sanctioned directive, not limited by independent law and judiciary, or by human rights, or by traditional distinctions between private and public. It is the total state, the One Party, the unimpeded rule of the Leader’s will in all things. What distinguishes fascism from earlier tyrannies, is not simply, as is often thought, its vastly superior technologies of surveillance and control, which enable its totalitarianism, though these are unprecedented and ubiquitous, but rather its ideological opposition to social democracy. Both socialism and fascism oppose liberalism, radically, one to improve it the other to eliminate it—hence they are also engaged in a fight to the death with one another. Though fascism, eschewing reason for will, propagates itself through self-victimization, conspiracy theories, fantasies and myth, it does so in the name of some  grand restoration or innovation, despite the fact that its concrete reality is purely negative, a destruction and deconstruction of all that is otherwise, hence a violence and war in practice. Its delusions and violence are directed primarily against its own projected demonic construction of social democracy, whereby such terms as “socialism” and “communism” function as vituperatives, bogeymen, curse words, group rallying cries to drown out even the possibility of critical thinking. Already we can see important fault lines between these

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three political options: liberal and social democracy both aim for justice, for right, but disagree about its nature, liberals holding to legal rights, social democrats insisting on their concrete conditions. Fascism, in radical contrast, dismisses right for the rule of might concentrated and expressed exclusively in and as the Leader’s will, leveraging its frustration with liberal legalism and social democratic equality into violence against reason, law, rights and a genuinely universal or common good. Our thesis is that a fuller truer sense of these distinctions and discriminations—these identities, comparisons, contrasts, contentions, collisions, combats—can only be one augmented by their temporalities, continuities and ruptures such as between contemporary fascism and earlier tyrannies, or between fifth- and sixth-century BCE Athenian democracy and modern representative democracies. Each additional layer of signification helps fend off the natural dissociations and abstractions of overgeneralization, from the pull of the logic of ideas, as if politics were a debating society or a university seminar—without dismissing, indeed better to better appreciate what rationality does lie in the historical  concrete. Politics includes debate, argument, logic, and is not above causalities, no doubt, but it is far broader, deeper and messier, dealing in people, power, desire, aspiration, ambition, fear, public opinion, pandemics, resentments, frustrations, greed, ruthlessness, generosity, business, transportation, communication media, militaries, arms, satellites, natural resources, geography, weather, and so much else of the world’s reality which is a blending of subject and object, form and content, cause and goal. To recognize time as yet another factor in this complex concatenation is only to come closer to it, to better appreciate its reality. Simplicities, overgeneralizations, pat answers, spin, are also part of the currency of politics, of the advocacy of its advocates, the distortions of adversaries. All astute participants—for we are all participants—if they are not to be duped must ask of all three of these basic outlooks, of liberalism, socialism and fascism, what future are they preparing? Not just what they say, but what they do. What is the reality of their pasts, beyond their appropriations, and in their light what do their appropriations signify? Who benefits—what people, what groups, what power— from their present? Not only what they proclaim, their words, but the truth of their claims. These are at once questions of politics and of political philosophy, which cannot be neatly separated. We have two different questions regarding our contemporary political triangulation. Because fascism, unlike liberal and social democracy, rejects justice as human rights and rule of law, and justice as fairness, how does it

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garner popular support? No doubt it uses and abuses the language of justice, engages in “double-speak.” But citizens, despite the herd mentality attributed to them by elitists and, paradoxically enough, by their own fascist leaders, citizens  are not generally fools. Or at least they cannot be fooled, as the saying goes, all the time. Since fascism discards and even attacks respect for the dignity of each for the conformism of “follow the Leader,” are we to conclude that its masses of adherents are somehow indifferent to justice, or blind to injustice? Are they rather not convinced by an alternative exclusionary belongingness, gathered  togther, rallied in the name of one or several fabricated associative banners such as racism, chauvinism and nationalism—indeed, exactly by these. By comparison with genuine justice, that is to say, with communities bound by clear and shared humanizing principles, here we must speak instead of “false consciousness,” that is, strongly held but false beliefs, delusions. But to answer our question regarding popular support for injustice concretely rather than abstractly, we must acknowledge the infiltration and subversion of liberalism and liberal democracy by the profit-driven economics of capitalism, by its narrowing insistence on one and only one kind of freedom to the exclusion of all others, namely, market freedom, the freedom to buy, to sell, to legally contract to buy and sell. It is according to this subversion that liberal democracy becomes a mask for plutocracy, rule by the rich, and a legitimate target of fascism (and social democracy). At the same time while nothing is more powerful nothing is more hidden, or meant to be more hidden, than the influence of money, not votes, not public opinion, not reason, as the real power behind “liberal” political power. No wonder fascism is driven to fantastic conspiracy theories and myths.  Rousseau had warned of our predicament as early as 1762 in the Social Contract, regarding democracy’s citizens opting out of their political duties with money, paying taxes to their representatives, whether soldiers or legislators: “It is necessary to march to battle, they pay troops and remain at home; it is it necessary to go to the council, they elect deputies and remain at home. As a result of indolence and wealth, they at length have soldiers to enslave their country and representatives to sell it. … In a country that is really free, the citizens do everything with their hands and nothing with money.”38 When citizens are content (Rousseau says “indolent”) to pay taxes to pay others to fulfill their own political duties, can it be any wonder that those who are far richer, the super-rich, corporations, 38  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, transl. H.  J. Tozer (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1998), 96 (Book III, chapter 15, Deputies or representatives).

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trade associations, foreign countries, will pay more money and gain control of their alleged representatives?! If one simply pays for democracy, as if it were a commodity, it goes to the highest bidder. Aristotle had far earlier advanced the same warning in his Politics: “the greedy grabbing of the rich does more harm to the constitution than that of the people.”39 While money rules, money makes sure that nothing is more hidden than its real power. So that the ideology of liberal democracy, of human rights, rule by law, the sanctify of individual freedoms, and so on, come to serve as veneers, masks, diversions from the real power of money. Nothing could be more cynical. Even when the influence and power of money can hardly be more obvious, for instance in American elections, the newspapers, streaming news services, and other large media corporations cooperate to bury such  a story. They too, after all, are in the business of making money. Corporate lobbying and procurements, especially regarding quickly obsolete military armaments, money appropriations today on an unprecedented scale which few ordinary citizens can even fathom, and are not meant to question, these too remain hidden from public view, even while government officials are publicly castigated in the media for comparatively minor financial peccadillos, which are more easily presented and grasped by the general public. Somehow no one is meant to notice that the government uses public funds to finance the automobile industry, say, by building highways, maintaining and policing them, or the aircraft industry, with its fill of military contracts. Do the media wonder why America has no high speed railways? Such matters, despite their size and import, and tremendous moral implications, remain relatively hidden from public view, receiving little public analysis and oversight, and are not missed by a public fed fast food and professional sports, or working two jobs to keep afloat. Capitalism, which is to say capitalists, which is to say the rich and wealthy, always choose money over people or principle, regardless of the ethical–human cost. As long as they can buy and own liberal democracy, they support liberal democracy. But when social democracy threatens such political monopolization, and the rule of liberal democracy cannot and will not guarantee their disproportionate private wealth, then the capitalists, or we should say the plutocracy has few qualms about jumping ship, and historically has jumped ship, choosing the willful power of fascist dictatorship, however objectively irrational and unjust, over the legalities and moral niceties of 39  Aristotle, The Politics, Book IV, chapter 12 (1297a13), translation T. A. Sinclair, revised Trevor J. Saunders.

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democracy, liberal or social. Such is the threat and danger of fascism in our age of capitalism: money always prefers fascism to social democracy when the latter challenges  liberalism. Thus too fascism’s double punch, both punches coming from the right: to provoke crisis in liberalism, first, to create chaos, to exaggerate discontent and alienation, to trample on liberal legalisms; and second, to frighten Big Money with the terrifying specter of what would be even worse, alas, a social democratic alternative demonized as taking away liberal freedoms, but far more importantly, as threatening to appropriate and terminate private property. Faced with a collapsing and ineffectual liberalism, which after all is but a façade, faced with crisis, and frightened by the threat of a rising socialism, Big Money chooses fascism, backs the Leader and his Party, principles and public be damned. Such is how fascism takes power. Thus stripped of its pretenses does vast private wealth join its financial might to political might against right.40 Our second question or issue is closely related, having to do with liberalism, with its changing historical fate. While liberalism arrived on the scene of world history as a progressive indeed revolutionary force, a force of justice, in opposition to tyranny and privilege, through its own success, a success implicitly allied to the success of a rising capitalist elite, it eventually succumbed to its economic base and turned into a regressive or reactionary force. Now a conservative rallying cry and dogma, now “neo-liberalism,” a force of reaction and injustice, it is no longer directed against the real injustice of past feudalism but against what it sees as the horror, the injustice (by liberal lights) of a future socialism. Is it correct to say, then, that it is the “same” liberalism that was once progressive and is now reactionary? Only if we remove it from time. And this is precisely what its contemporary defenders insist upon, conflating a politics of liberal rights with a politics of human nature. Neo-liberalism is no longer liberalism. Liberalism aims for justice, for rule of law and equality before the law, for human rights, freedom of choice, of speech, of assembly, and so on, which are arguably components of justice for all time. Yet time does not stop, and liberalism, exclusively attached to these very components of justice, is now exposed as needing material supplementation. To remain just these rights must be augmented with public provision of their material conditions, such as 40  For an illuminating popular article illustrating how some ostensibly “right thinking” wealthy Americans recently deserted liberalism for right wing authoritarianism, see, Evan Osnos, “How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump,” in The New Yorker, May 11, 2020.

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health care, education, affordable housing, and their like. Which means also and concretely that the hegemonic influence and power of the rich must be broken. Instead the neo-liberals insist on the finality, the perfection, the “natural right” of the human rights of liberalism, such that any changes, are denigrated as their perversion and corruption rather than their enhancement. Thus liberalism—now neo-liberalism—becomes a bludgeon to block any progress forward to greater justice. Thus, neo-liberalism, timelessly pretending to the same past as original liberalism, has converted liberalism from the cutting edge of justice into an ideological tool, a seductive but diverting and rationalizing mask, using legalism and democratic institutions to cover over the real rule of money, the greed and rapacity of the wealthy, their secrecy and dirty dealings, indeed all the vicious self-serving privileges of the monied power elite. How did this happen? What is its meaning? Times have changed, as they always do. Liberalism both contributed to these changes and was itself changed by them. The justice of liberalism— human rights, rule by law, democratic sovereignty—was genuinely progressive, as we have said, when it fought to overcome the arbitrary privileges of feudalism. But the same liberal justice, taken for eternal, became both a hollow legalism and an obstacle when its beneficiaries refuse—as they refuse today—to see that justice requires that the guarantee of legal rights is accomplished not merely by regulation, law and constitution, however well-conceived and enforced by the power of the state, but require also the guarantee and support of appropriate social conditions, the material conditions which make such legalities realizable and real in fact. Freedom of speech is indeed far superior to arbitrarily enforced silencing and censorship. But if only guaranteed by law, it remains a hollow freedom for the ill who need healthcare, the hungry who seek food, the unemployed who cannot afford life’s necessities, the underpaid who must work day and night,  and the uneducated who are duped and misinformed. As we saw with fascism’s position vis-à-vis liberalism and socialism, we must pay close attention to the difference between revolutionary liberalism when it began as a political force of justice, and conservative “neo-liberalism” today which masks the privileges and injustices of the monied elite. The political success of liberalism, of the propertied classes who overthrew hereditary privileges, produces its own inadequacy. Hence liberalism, while remaining the same in certain formal properties, is no longer the same in reality, in concrete historical reality.  It no longer has the same valence. What was once just becomes unjust, if one is to hold to the deepest telos of the political, which

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is not power but empowering justice. In the opening up of novel horizons through historical development, what was better back then, even revolutionary, by its own success becomes worse now, worse because of the very progress it once made possible. Such a development, where the better becomes worse, is not a sophism but the very dialectic or development of political history: history making itself, as people remake themselves across time, as Kant had already glimpsed. Owing to the directionality and import of time, to the novelty of the future, in the time of history change for the better produces and requires new possibilities of betterment, unforeseen opportunities, unreal and unrealistic once upon a time but pressing and exigent today. Such is the dialectic: we built the road upon which we travel. We have not arrived from nowhere, de novo, but the path ahead, the open horizon, has never been travelled before. History is not adoration of the real, but its creation. The footpath becomes a road, the road becomes a highway, which becomes paved, an airport, a launching pad, or something else altogether unanticipated but better. It is not just technology that changes, but we too, the quality of the justice that unites or divides us. Time, change, creativity, repetition, steps forward, steps backward, renewal, like aging, do not leave us untouched, immaculate, pure souls from another dimension, even and especially insofar as the goal of justice beckons continually from far above and far ahead. The road to justice, the human exodus from slavery to freedom, is a long journey, but most worthwhile. More must be said about the stagnation contemporary liberalism represents in the larger and longer quest for justice, words responsive to the rise of capitalism and the transformation of liberal democracy into plutocracy. The very freedoms in whose name liberalism proclaimed justice and revolution, upon closer inspection turn out to be encumbered with the limitations of their early advocates, the limitations, that is to say, of the bourgeoisie—white propertied men, primarily—and a then emerging free market capitalism. While the material success of the bourgeois gave them both motivation and means, which in ideological alliance with “the people” was able to overthrow the privileges of the past, at the same time it colored and limited their vision of the nature of the freedom and justice they achieved. We have said they interpreted it as “eternal,” as “human nature” rather than the historical accomplishment it was, a step forward, but by no means the end of the road. Why did they stop? Why did liberalism become self-satisfied, turned from a historical movement into an eternal verity? Answer: private property. Instead of a movement for justice, it became a protection of private property, of contract law, of the means to gain, hold

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and accumulate private property, of “life, liberty and property,” in short, the “free market.” What counted even in its revolutionary talk of democracy was not the empowering of justice, that is, justice for all the people, democratic justice, but the empowering of the wealthy, of protecting wealth, business, finance, money. Rule of law provided such protections, but it must not do more, must not also threaten private property. Thus democracy, rule “of the people by the people for the people,” which was supposed to have come to fruition with liberal democracy, in truth became a front— an ideology—for plutocracy, the rule of the wealthy by the wealthy for the wealthy. Such is the reality of liberal democracy today, hiding behind the ideology of liberalism and its earlier revolutionary incarnationss. Hence today’s elevation of a legalistic liberalism, the liberalism of “law and order” which conflates lawfulness with justice, as if we had all reached the end of time and our present laws were written in stone. But in truth the privileged rule of money—regardless of justice—is now the dirty little secret, not so little and not so secret, of liberalism. Today a more genuine democracy represents a threat to money, which is to say, to the very small class of billionaires, who will never of themselves constitute a majority to win a democratic election. Thus, we see before our eyes today democratically elected legislatures and governing officials passing laws not to extend the voting franchise, but to restrict it. Today the rich, the truly rich, whose resources are immeasurably greater than shopkeepers, small businesspersons and workers, the super-rich who have materially benefited the most from liberalism, this coterie of power and privilege has finally recognized that they have nothing more to gain from democracy, that it has served its purpose, and now represents a potential threat to their continued hegemony. Having served to rally forces sufficient to batter the walls of feudal privilege, the forces of genuine democracy now look to batter the privileges of Wall Street. Under the aegis of liberal democracy, capitalism has also undergone a radical  transformation, from its early entrepreneurial and competitive beginnings to its current monopoly and financial stage. Wealth has consolidated, big money has become bigger, its grip on power more pervasive, indeed, hegemonic. And so too along the way the ideal of democracy has inspired developments in the instauration of justice which is the telos and struggle of politics. Erupting in the many uprisings of 1848 in Europe, followed by the brief, radically innovative and brutally suppressed Paris Commune of 1871, running through the ideas and deeds of the revolutionary and revisionary socialists of Poland, Russia and Germany, indeed throughout Europe, and Mexico, leading to revolutions in Mexico,  Russia, China, Cuba and

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elsewhere, a new political path, a new conception of justice, of social democracy, has become a real force with which wealthy “liberals” are confronted. It is not a history that can be summed up in a few sentences. The point is that along with the historical development, the maturation and transformation of capitalism, from competition to monopoly, from industry to finance, and their parallel developments in its plutocratic appropriation of liberal democracy, there is as well an accompanying, indeed another integral historical development, namely, the maturation and dissemination of critical self-­consciousness, critical precisely of the intolerable injustices of the alliance of big money with the abstract legalism of liberal ideology.41 A short excursus into the political thought of Thomas Hill Green, who lectured at Balliol College, Oxford, in the late nineteenth century, will help us see with nuance and perhaps more quietly, as it were, than might be found in other more celebrated contemporary political pamphlets, the outing of this shift in the significance of liberalism in relation to justice. In his Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation,42 published posthumously in 1886, Green raised the question of the “Grounds of Political Obligation,” and more specifically, the question of the function and justification of law as such. The issue is whether the law functions only negatively, to protect the individual’s private sphere of liberty, as liberals and now neo-liberals insist, or positively as well, to promote the social good, as 41  Georg Lukacs identifies the turnaround in liberal thinking with the June Revolution of 1848 in France: “The battle of June had already revealed the bourgeoisie’s new and true adversary, the proletariat, in armed combat, thereby causing the bourgeoisie to betray its own revolution. … from now on, bourgeois philosophy was no longer fighting against the remnants of feudal thinking and for the establishment of a bourgeois society purged of such remnants. Instead it allied itself to all reactionary forces in order to suppress the revolutionary working class.” Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, 405. This same turnaround explains why when the going gets rough the capitalist ruling class, the plutocrats, desert liberalism for fascism, to better secure their wealth. Marx and Engels saw this right away, in The Communist Manifesto, 1848. Rosa Luxemburg half a century later in 1900 exposes “the bourgeois desertion of democracy,” to argue that “the fate of democracy is bound with the socialist movement.” Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, 48. Of all the world’s leading socialists perhaps she saw and articulated best the threat to democracy represented by liberalism’s cannibalization by the wealthy. Against populist-authoritarian-fascist anti-democracy, we too link the future of democracy not with liberalism, with its increasingly hollow legalisms, but with social democracy, attending to humanity’s real conditions–health care, education, environmental sustainability, culture—as the future of justice. 42  Thomas Hill Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, in The Works of Thomas Hill Green, Volume 2: Philosophical Works, ed. R.  L. Nettleship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 335–549.

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Green argues, as social democrats argue as well (and in their own fashion, that is, by substituting “will” for “good,” as do fascists no less). Green raises the question of law and morality, of the justification for law, after having invoked Britain’s controversial “Poor Laws” (1834), which were intended, however ill advisedly, to provide positive material support for Britain’s destitute. Laws of this kind [like the Poor Laws] have often been objected to on the strength of a one-sided view of the function of laws; the view, viz., that its only business is to prevent interference with the liberty of the individual. And this view has gained undue favour on account of the real reforms to which it has led. The laws which it has helped to get rid of were really mischievous, but mischievous for further reasons than those conceived of by the supporters of this theory. Having done its work, the theory now tends to become obstructive, because in fact advancing civilization brings with it more and more interference with the liberty of the individual to do as he likes, and this theory affords reason for resisting all positive reforms, all reforms which involve an action of the state in the way of promoting conditions favourable to moral life. … The true grounds of objection to ‘paternal government’ is not that it violates the ‘laissez faire’ principle and conceives that its office to make people good, to promote morality, but that it rests on a misconception of morality.43

Green rightly realizes that the struggle of neo-liberalism, insisting exclusively on a purely negative definition of freedom (non-interference with the individual will), against the social welfare concerns of social democracy, which demand a positive conception of law to include providing for the common good, is a conflict, first, of liberalism’s self-interpretation of its past victories over “mischievous” privileges, that is, feudalism, guilds, and their like, as a still valid justification for its present “obstructive” rejection, as “paternalism,” of the state’s intervention in the social and material welfare of its citizens for the common good; and second, that this conflict is fundamental, hinging on the very nature of morality, which is to say, on justice and politics, a clash of political worldviews, liberalism basing itself in atomic, private and possessive individualism, social democracy on social community and the complex interactions and inter-relationships upon which human civilization and human flourishing depend.

 Ibid., 345.

43

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What this exposes is that today’s neo-liberalism, far from being a defense of justice, as was liberalism originally, is a defense of Big Money, of so-­ called “free” market economy, under the guise, of course, of “small business” enterprise and competition, pretending it includes and cares about those whom Marx identified as the “petty bourgeois.” But these two cows—“liberalism” and the billionaire class—are one cow: liberalism serving money as an ideology of rugged individualism serves to diverts attention from the reality of the hegemony of monopoly finance capitalism. Big Money in fact abhors competition and could not care less about the suffering of the small businesses it puts out of business. Thus, the significance of liberalism has changed, from revolutionary to reactionary, to reflect changes in the nature and status of the capitalism to which it was always subservient. In this historical drama of several acts it is capitalism and not liberalism that plays the leading role. Therein we also find the source of a double or two-sided and mutually reinforcing “double-speak”: (1) political, liberalism as ideology of political freedom, masking the monied elite; and (2) economic, competitive “free market” capitalism as the ideology masking the political and economic hegemony of monopoly finance capitalism, the rule of the billionaire class. Having exposed this complex structure of duplicity and the role time as history plays in its unfolding, it behooves us now to turn from liberalism to fascism, because the political movement that thrives from capitalist double double-speak is not liberalism, whose commitment to human rights, rule of law, and democracy, can never be made fully compatible with its greedy self-serving prevarications and deceptions, but rather fascism, which lies and steals and rules by arbitrary will, that is, peremptorily, with a clear conscience, indeed without conscience, unabashedly, shamelessly, because in the service of power it rejects truth—rejects free speech, free press, free assembly—as well as morality, rights and justice.

Furious Fascism What are we to make of the fact that fascists, like social democrats, also attack liberalism and liberal democracy? Of course, fascists also attack socialism and social democracy. Both are disturbed by the abstractness, alienation, dehumanization which come from liberal legalism detached from concrete human realities, from personal needs, desires and passions, from families, localities, churches, regional traditions and a larger social solidarity which unlike legal contracts are not rationally chosen or

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legislated in or out of existence, nor reducible to extensions of self-interest narrowly conceived. Despite this apparent similarity, we must nonetheless distinguish fascist attack from social-democratic criticism, even when the latter, in its most radical forms, advocates violent revolution. That is to say, for social democracy it is reason and justice which motivate its criticisms: the problem with liberal legalism is that it is not sufficiently reasonable and not sufficiently just, precisely because its legalism ignores the finite human needs and desires whose satisfaction conditions the exercise of rights, law and democracy. Fascists, on the contrary, adopting a Hobbesian worldview of the supremacy of power, dismiss such motivations as superficial, as mere verbiage, chatter, of empty words such as “rights,” “law” and “democracy,” whose truth is simply power and in any event are only as effective as their power and force, the coercive strength of will backed by the power of arms which fascists exalt. Fascism adopts violence as violence for violence. Violence is not instrumental, a weapon of last resort, but ubiquitous, inescapable, glorious. Indeed, violence is everything, so that winning is everything. The world is made up of friends, that is, supporters, loyalists, and enemies, that is, those who are opposed, traitors, with no one and nothing in between or otherwise. For this reason, fascists are actually more opposed in practice to social democracy than to liberalism because in liberalism fascists sees ineffectual intellectuals and talkers, while in social democrats they recognize reality, power, a genuine competitor in the struggle for the obedience of humankind. This is a correct assessment inasmuch as social democracy, unlike liberalism, is rooted in the concrete, in material conditions, though without eschewing reason and justice—which further angers fascists, who see in this ethical adherence only lying and deception, a mask of power because it is only as power that discourse functions in the fascist arsenal. It is true that social democrats appeal to mind and body and fascists appeal to body alone, to passion, and that the clash of bodies is the more immediate and bloodier, even if, as has oft been repeated, ideas have greater consequences, and the “pen is mightier than the sword.” But the latter requires the long run, which is of no concern to fascists, as we shall see. Fascists recognize their most immediate enemies in opponents who also have strength, of will, numbers, organization, and the like. So, upon taking power in 1933, Hitler first destroyed the German Communist Party, because he feared its real power, the workers’ numbers, solidarity and street fighting ways. Nazis also attack the niceties of law, rights, independent judiciary, democratic institutions, and all of liberalism’s legalism, because they are

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completely contrary and alien to fascist power, power for its own sake, the united will of Leader and masses. For fascism law serves the will, not right or reason. It is ultimately nothing more than a tool of power. Fascists attack social democrats, however, as competitors. Though blind to the import of reason and justice, except as tools of propaganda for the duped, fascists are awakened, alert, impassioned, armed and aggressive on the battlefield of coercive political power—and here they must destroy the social democrats, whose opposed power they fear the most. Liberals are chatterboxes, weaklings; workers are fighters.  In sum, for fascists liberal democrats are fundamentally deluded about politics; they fundamentally misunderstand and misrepresent its true nature because reason and justice never limit power, because only greater power limits lesser power. Big fish eat little fish, the story of nature is the story of humankind as well. Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film of Hitler and the Nazi’s triumphant self-congratulatory Nuremberg Rally of 1934 is not by accident entitled “Triumph of the Will”—because fascism represents the victory, success, triumph of will over reason, power over justice, winning over truth. And let us add, of money over liberty, equality and fraternity. That the capitalist power elite, the plutocracy of which liberal democracy provided a popular façade, that they always choose fascism over socialism, that like fascists they are most threatened by socialism, if and when liberalism is endangered, because fascism has no second thoughts about destroying socialism—Leon Trotsky had warned of this eventuality in the face of Mussolini’s fascists and Hitler’s Nazis in the early 1930s, though his warnings were received like those of Cassandra.44 But it was not merely back then, in the early and mid-twentieth century, when fascism first arose and was then decisively defeated in World War II, but today as well, that we live in a world triangulated between liberal democracy, social democracy and fascism  (which latter masquarades behind  more seductive names). Furthermore, the tensions of this triangulation, the struggles, have become exacerbated in magnitude as technologies of production, transportation and communication, of capital accumulation and concentration, have multiplied the resources of the three struggling contenders; exponentially larger, wider and swifter, as well as more easily masked and more profoundly consequential.

44  See, especially, chapter 10, “Europe: 1923–1940,” in The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology, ed. Isaac Deutscher (New York: Dell Publishing, 1964), 163–195.

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Because of the sharp spiritual divide separating fascism from both liberal and social democracy, its exaltation of power and denigration of reason and justice, a difference, let us say, of good and evil, a differentiation coupled with the historical divide, in the twentieth century, between the recognized horrors of mass murder, rapacity and mendacity, coupled with the devastations perpetrated and the total defeats which discredited the original fascisms of Italy and Germany and their allies (to say nothing of the horrors of Stalinism), we must not be deceived into thinking that fascism, like feudalism, is finished, archaic, its historical time past. Though sometimes labelled with questionably more palatable monikers such as “populism” and “authoritarianism,” a glance at the contemporary realities of politics today is sufficient to dispel the wishful thinking of such an illusion. The mass appeal of fascism continues to this day. Hence, justice and reason demand  we that we  must continue to keep it in view, to better understand it and to be unrelenting in our opposition to it. No doubt its advocates are deplorable, but they are deplorable because of their unreason and injustice. Eschewing reason, dissmissive of causality and deliberation, they open society and politics to the demonic influence of myth idolatry and conspiracy, indeed to any speculative fancy, however simplistic, bizarre, unrealistic, stereotyped or dangerous. Fascism replaces thinking and justice with slogans and sloganeering. It fears and prevents thinking, and above all criticism. In truth it substitutes chatter for reason, hollow pronouncements for convictions. Its proper mode, then, is mass delirium stoked by fury, whining, complaint, a spiritual and material discontent and violence crystallized and legitimized by its Leader, the Strong Man, infallible, unquestioned, brooking no dissent. In one word, it is irresponsibility raised to a political virtue.  A politics of immaturity.  Lacking rational or ethical standards, the positivity, as it were, of fascism is its consummate negativity—everything is wrong, nothing is right, except what Leader and Mass say and do today. It tears down without building up, blames without fixing, hates without mercy or forgiveness, and so on. Will is supreme, but not to will this or that, but just to will, a will to will, without wherefore. Like money its willing is a pure means, without content or character, stimulating itself and others by unrelenting violation and violence, permanent iconoclasm. The fascist will is not universal, therefore, but total, encompassing everything, exploding everything, without foundation or stability. Fascism hates liberalism and socialism because its hates any taking of responsibility, for anything, for truth and for justice above all. Endless destruction. 

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Responsibility, in contrast, is singularizing, incumbent upon each person, obligation, and as justice constructive, enduring, generational. Fascism must be a mass movement, each fascist indistinguishable from another, a mass man, submerging distinctive identity through conformity—voluntary or enforced—to the Leader’s will. It is uniform and uniformity, comformity, to lose itself in the hypnotic steps of parades and marches. It hates and destroys nothing more than the principled individual and justice, since it senses both as its antitheses. As the tyrant Creon tells Antigone before executing her: “These stout spirits are the first to fall. The strongest iron, hardened in the fire, most often ends in scraps and shatterings.” Despite its talk of will, strength and honor, in fact fascism rewards the weak-willed, the sycophant, the pliable, the compliant and complacent—“Slave to his neighbor, who can think of pride?”45 It rewards obedience and calls it loyalty, to the Leader’s will, today, delineating “us” and “them,” follower and traitor, from day to day. We are the obedient, the faithful, the patriots; you are the disloyal, the disobedient, enemies of the state. Carl Schmitt, Nazi jurist, realized that fascist sovereignty, to which he was himself unwaveringly obedient, was nothing other than the power of the Leader to decide who is friend and who is enemy.46 No moral standards for guidance. Fascism is the exception, to everything, exception totalized, constant mobilization. Like the shark it cannot rest. What its exceptionality really means, however, is nothing special but rather an entirely and ever more voracious and parasitical negativity, the destruction of human rights, law, parliament, the enslaving and killing of excluded people and peoples, an unending war for always more territory, and so on. It is the insatiable as politics. A politics of delirium, self-indulgence, resentment unleashed, lacking conscience, lacking memory, its time is a present without history, four years, twelve years or one thousand years, it makes no difference, 45  Sophocles, Antigone, 472–479; in Greek Tragedies, Volume I, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 196–197. 46  See, Richard A. Cohen, “The Power of Carl Schmitt: Fascism, Dualism and Justice,” in Religions, Volume 10, issue 1.7 (2019), special issue on “Levinas and the Political,” eds. Richard A.  Cohen and Jolanta Saldukaityte. See also, Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, transl. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), originally published in 1932; “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (26); and Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, transl. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), originally published 1923; “The masses are won over through a propaganda apparatus whose maximum effect relies on an appeal to immediate interests and passions. Argument in the real sense that is characteristic for genuine discussion ceases” (6).

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because always living in the same unending orgy of feelings, the same delusions of self-exaltation, an interminable because timeless disindividuating frenzy,47 fireworks every day, every night, hic et nunc, detached from yesterday or tomorrow, self-medicated by constant excitation, permanent exhilaration, expansion without end—it is decadence unabashed… until the balloon bursts, as it must. Its sounds are fury, for nothing, are indistinguishable from the wallowing and squealing of pigs in a mud sty—as it destroys the very humanity of the human. Frenzy, fury and fascism, it is a revealing brew, a movement without aim, direction, or continuity, pure movement for movement’s sake—we have named it delirium. Like an oxymoron, a dulled excitement, a mobility that goes nowhere, a distraction from everything, at once stimulant and depressant. Fascists cannot take even their own myths seriously, as Mussolini explicitly admitted, as did the upper echelons of Nazi apparatchiks, like the fake wrestling matches of World Wrestling Entertainment, except that real people are beaten up, tortured and murdered. It has no past but what it invents, its mythic “history,” and no future except fantastic impossible wishes, which always end in self-destruction. Without heritage or prospect, without past or future, it is a politics of the present, of excitation, destroying both past and future: its carpe diem is the extravagance of “Après moi le deluge!” Mussolini did not even bother to create a powerful army, because pretending and declaring he had one was equal to having one (and less expensive and arduous). Hitler, the more fascist of the two, produced a real army, indeed a very powerful one, but only in order to lead Germany to an apocalyptic Götterdämmerung.48 Fascist 47  See, Edwin Rohde, Psyche, Volume II, transl. W. B. Hillis (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Speaking of the dis-individualizing “frenzy,” “enthusiasm,” “ecstasies,” madness,” “delirium,” of the ancient Thracian cult which antedated the cult of Dionysus in ancient Greece, Rohde reflects it is an “impulse that is to be found all over the earth, and which breaks out in every stage of civilization.” (261). I argue that such deindividualization lies at the heart of the fascist mass man, who sacrifices himself not for the other but for the Leader, a deindividualization which I characterize not as some noble religious exaltation but as the murderous irresponsibility of evil and injustice. 48  See, Johann Chapoutot, Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past, transl. Richard R. Nybakken (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), especially chapter 9, “The Choreography of the End: Aestheticism, Nihilism, and the Staging of the Final Catastrophe.” Despite “moments of complete irrationality,” Chapoutot argues that “Hitler possessed a clear-sighted awareness of Germany’s inevitable defeat” (371), and, even if one argued that he initially harbored illusions in this regard, that he certainly knew after Stalingrad.

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“justice” is simply resentment combined with vengeance, against whatever is “not us,” declared enemies, immigrants, communists, coastal elites, Jews, Hispanics, whomever, without rhyme or reason. Without causality and logic, fantastic convoluted invented victimized conspiracy theories fill in the gaping breaches of its mentality. At the heart of fascism is the Leader, the Strong Man. Indeed, in a certain sense, because it has no grip on reality except through violence, the Leader is everything to fascism. A servile unquestioning obedience of the masses is solicited and directed by his will, always virile, never faltering, never mistaken, a will never weak or fallible, regardless of how ridiculous, or dangerous or evil it really is. Nothing unites the fascist state except the fascist Leader. It is cult. The will of the Leader and the will of his obedient masses are one will, one passion, such is the notorious servility of the “mass” man.49 The Nazi regime, unlike any political party before or since was wildly popular in Nazi Germany.50 Fascism is ahistorical as it is amoral, which is to say its historical time is the present detached from past and future, and its morality is evil, destructive of morality itself. Like the theology of “continuous creation,” whereby God recreates the world vertically, as it were, from moment to moment because the world lacks sufficient reality, laterally, as it were, for causality. Every moment, therefore, comes as if ex nihilo, like the stops of clock time, disconnected, discontinuous, held together by the will of the Leader alone, a will held together by nothing other or more than negation, by whimsy, fancy, delusional self-exaltation. Thus fascism is at bottom anarchy, its bureaucracy the simulacrum of legalism, obedience to orders for no reason other than to obey, orders which change from day to day, hour to hour,  agitation for its own sake, again, delirium.51 From a genuinely 49  Already in 1929, witness to Italian Fascism and the rising Nazi movement in Germany, Thomas Mann depicted this phenomenon in his anti-fascist story, “Mario and the Magician,” whose narrator observes: “Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle … as people and leader were comprehended in one another.” Thomas Mann, “Mario and the Magician,” in Thomas Mann, Stories of Three Decades, transl. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), 553. 50  See, Gilbert Allardyce, ed., The Place of Fascism in European History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 2. 51  Arguing that Mussolini’s fascism was neither socialist nor nationalist but anarchist in Max Stirner’s egoistic sense, G. A. Borgese also reveals its atemporality and ahistoricity; citing an editorial by Mussolini published in Popolo d’Italia (April 6, 1920): “I start from the individual and strike at the state. Down with the state in all is forms and incarnations! The state of yesterday, of today, and of tomorrow. The bourgeois state, and the socialist state. In

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political perspective, one concerned with justice, fascism is pure violence, evil and injustice, viciousness, destructiveness, destroying the heritage of the past and the prospects of a better future, both at the personal–social level (destroying integrity, good character, responsibility, honor) and the historical–political level (destroying accomplishment as such, hence destroying conservatism and progressivism). It is thereby fundamentally antithetical to the future, the future as prospect, because it is antithetical to justice, which opens the very horizon of the futurity. Many social commentators of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century wrote about and worried about a mostly undefined, difuse but unhinging profound, new and widespread turn for the worse, a broad social, political and cultural “degeneration,” as the culture critic Max Nordau among others named it in 1892.52 They no doubt sensed and gave voice to the radical impact of capitalism, its universal commodification of things and people, which finally became horrifically obvious in the protracted mass, mechanical and completely inglorious slaughters of World War I, in contrast to all previous military adventures. Writers, poets, artists and thinkers all over Europe and elsewhere sensed that the world had radically changed, that something human was slipping away, to be lost forever. This new outlook, or perhaps “stance” is the better term, this break with the continuities and long-admired responsibilities of civilization, was identified in 1930 by Ortega in The Revolt of the Masses (1930)53 with the followers of the then rising fascist movements of Europe. “The mass-man,” Ortega wrote, “believes that the civilization into which he was born and which he makes use of, is as spontaneous and self-producing as Nature, and ipso facto he is changed into primitive man.”54 No work, no effort, no sacrifice is required for the upkeep and advance of a civilization and forms of governance which apparently grow by themselves like trees. No doubt this instantiation, and correlated passivity, resulted also from the greater complexities of modern science, technology and industry, whose workings increasingly surpassed the common sense and intelligence the gloom of today and the darkness of tomorrow the only faith with remains to us individualists destined to die is the at present absurd but ever-consoling religion of anarchy.” G. A. Borgese, Goliath: The March of Fascism (New York: The Viking Press, 1938), 224. 52  See, Max Nordau, Degeneration, transl. unidentified (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 53   Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, transl. unidentified (New York: W. W. Norton, 1957). 54  Ibid., 89.

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of ordinary persons. Fascism capitalizes on this alienation and its untimeliness, Ortega’s “primitive,” releasing its followers from all genuine responsibilities for social and political life, responsibility, that is to say, for “the little humanity that adorns the world,”55 to invoke Levinas’s expression. Fascism will ensure that the mass has no interest or time for such things. Convenience, immediacy, the here and now are promoted, overruling the “delayed gratification” which is the hallmark of civilization, the “discontent”—the disciplines of morality and justice—which Freud had identified as its price. Fascism disburdens humanity from such cares—no wonder its popularity. Many commentators, Walter Benjamin foremost, have noted the aestheticism of fascism, the handsome uniforms, the marching formations, like a ballet, the orchestrated mass rallies, and the like, beautiful if regimented disciplines, but not ethical ones.56 Like an adolescent the mass experiences all discipline and restraint as burdensome, not realizing how truly precious and precarious are the accomplishments of civilization, its rules and laws, its institutions and protocols. Fascism exploits this irresponsibility, allowing it, channeling it, indeed fueling and aggravating it through the Leader’s irresponsibility. Recall the early Italian fascist slogan: “Me ne frego!” “I don’t give a damn!”57 “Whatever.”  The contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whatever his intent, has provided a conceptualization of this wanton self-abdication as “delirium,” a term which we have already utilized. In place of reason, causality, argument, conversation and deliberation, the illogic of delirium is inventive, fantastic, haphazard, contradictory, subterranean, conspiratorial, “rhizomatic,” sparks, vibrations, lines of excitations and ephemeral alliances, random associations, constant reconfiguration, ultimately a private language, asocial and incommunicable, a Pure Immanence,58 to invoke the title of one of Deleuze’s books. If modernity means the replacement of Providence by history as our fundamental  Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 185.  See, Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 219–253; see, also, Martin Jay, “‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology; Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?”, in Cultural Critique, No. 21 (Spring 1992), University of Minnesota Press, 41–61. 57  Christopher Hibbert, Benito Mussolini: A Biography (Bungay, UK: The Reprint Society, 1962), 85. 58  Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, transl. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2005). 55 56

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paradigm of intelligibility, then the shift represented by fascism is the subversion of modernity, i.e., of history for a discontinuous present of passion and excitation. To grasp its atemporality, we return to Karl Mannheim, who also recognized what he called the “a-historical spirit of fascism.”59 “A class which has already risen in the social scale tends to conceive of history in terms of unrelated, isolated events. … The consequence is that in place of a view of the whole … there appears a picture of the world composed of mere immediate events and discrete facts.” The temporal pointillism of fascism reflects its attachment to passion rather than mind. It rejects the fundamental bond uniting intelligibility and communicability, in what it exalts as the “deed,” but what in fact is delirious. Again, Mannheim: “The idea of history as an intelligible scheme disappears in the face of the irrationality of the fascist apotheosis of the deed. … Fascism regards every interpretation of history as a mere fictive construction destined to disappear before the deed of the moment as it breaks through the temporal pattern of history.”60 It is delirious, to be sure, living for the moment in the moment, from moment to moment, detached from past and future, oblivious to time and history because  oblivious to responsibility. But a delirium with blood on its hands. Justice, building on the guilt of an immemorial past has a better future, of more justice, of the justice that is outstanding, to better rectify the ethical deficiencies of the past and present, to better include the excluded, to better provide for the dispossessed, to better alleviate suffering. “Justice,” Levinas has taughts, “remains justice only in a society where there is no distinction between those close and those far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest.”61 Including generations not yet born.

References Arendt, H. (1963). Between Past and Future. World Publishing Company. Aristotle. (2011). Nicomachean Ethics (Robert C.  Bartlett & Susan D.  Collins. Trans.). University of Chicago Press.

 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 146.  Ibid., 137. 61  Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 159. 59 60

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Lukacs, Georg. (2017). The Destruction of Reason (Peter Palmer, Trans.). Aakar Books. Luxemburg, Rosa. (1978). Reform or Revolution (Integer, Trans.). Pathfinder Press. Macpherson, C. B. (2011). The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford University Press. Mann, Thomas. (1936). Stories of Three Decades (H.  T. Lowe-Porter, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf, Mannheim, Karl. (1936). Ideology and Utopia (Louis Wirth & Edward Shills, Trans.). : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1974). Manifesto of the Communist Party. In K. Marx & F. Engels (Eds.), Selected Works in One Volume. International Publishers. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1967). Walter Kaufmann (Ed.), The Will to Power (Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Random House. Nordau. (1993). Degeneration (Unidentified, Trans.). University of Nebraska Press. Plato: The Collected Dialogues. (1966). Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (Eds.). Random House, Polanyi, K. (2001). The Great Transformation (2nd ed.). Beacon Press. Rohde, Edwin. (1966). Psyche, Vol. 2 (W. B. Hillis, Trans.). Harper & Row. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1998). The Social Contract (H.  J. Tozer, Trans.). Wordsworth Editions. Schmitt, Carl.(1988). The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Ellen Kennedy, Trans.). MIT Press Schmitt, Carl. (2007). The Concept of the Political (Georg Schwab, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Spinoza, Baruch. (1992). Ethics, ed. Seymour Feldman (Samuel Shirley, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company. Sugarman, R. (2019). Levinas and the Torah: A Phenomenological Approach. State University of New York Press. Sutzkever, Avrom. (2019). The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever (Richard J. Fein, Ed. and Trans.). Albany, State University of New York Press. Trotsky, L. (1964). I.  Deutscher (Ed.), The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology. Dell Publishing.

CHAPTER 8

What Is Radically Wrong? Tito Marci

Introduction How should we consider radicalism today? How should it be dealt with? Who is the ‘radical’ subject, whether a single person or an entire community? We can start by saying that a radical is someone who does not share the common values of the free market, or, better, someone who does not recognize his relative position within a common symbolic system of plurality and differences. Anyway, before facing this problem, which no doubt needs greater understanding, it could be useful, from a sociological point of view, to retrace the conceptual path that has contributed to the rise of the principle of (economic) exchange to the rank of an absolute value of the cultural and political system of modern multi-ethnic societies. First of all, we can say that ‘radicalism’ is a ‘relative concept’ (as well as a relative consideration), which cannot be seen in absolute terms. As every notion expressing a relative value, its specific sense depends on the semantic framework within which this concept takes on meaning. So, from this point of view, we can state that the concept of ‘radicalism’ takes its current

T. Marci (*) Department of Political Sciences, University of Rome – La Sapienza, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_8

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meaning (especially in socio-political field) in relation to the cultural and political assets that have become predominant and hegemonic in modern western and global contemporary societies. And it is not by chances that this meaning ended up coinciding, over the recent years, with the notion of ‘fundamentalism’. It is indeed only in the last century that the two concepts have substantially overlapped each other, somehow taking on the same meaning. Moreover, it is agreed that ‘fundamentalism’ is a modern word that actually came into use first in the United States in the 1920s, in the aftermath of the First World War, when it referred to some Protestant religious movements based (in opposition to liberalism and modernism) on strict adherence to certain dogmas held to be fundamental to the Christian faith. Subsequently, especially from the 1980s onwards, the term has been used with reference to other religions as well, most frequently in regard to Islam, or at least in regard to any other belief laid claim to exclusive possession of ‘the truth’, to mean a strict adherence to ‘radical’ doctrines, with no concessions to modern developments in thought or customs (this is, in fact, the prevalent meaning nowadays). As suggested, this specific meaning has strengthened in respect to (and against) the dominant emergence of the global ‘free trade’ society, with the consequent neoliberalism, hard-line ideology, or, better, in relation to the further intensification of the process of rationalization of economic, political and social life. On the basis of this perspective, in this chapter we will try to briefly revisit Max Weber’s theory of instrumental-rational social action (1) to reconsider the deregulation process of the current extra-national capitalism (2) and to rethink the growing importance of the economic exchange as a general and universal paradigm of social relations (3) in order to clarify the intended meaning of ‘radicalism’ today, especially from the sociopolitical field.

The Primacy of Instrumental-Rational Action Over Other Ways to Act in Modern Society Max Weber conceived of sociology as a comprehensive science of social action. His primary focus was on the subjective meanings that human actors attach to their actions in their mutual orientations within specific socio-historical contexts. From this point of view, the forms of

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instrumental-­rational action can be used for the elaboration of the Weber’s characteristic of the modernity. According to Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (published posthumously in 1922), we can identify four ‘ideal types’ of social actions (Weber, 1922a): traditional social action (actions controlled by traditions), affective social action (actions determined by one’s specific affections and emotional state, for which one does not think about the consequences), value rational social action (actions that are determined by a conscious belief in the inherent value of a type of behaviour, example religion) and finally instrumental-­rational social action (actions that are carried out to achieve a certain goal, actions taken to do something because it leads to a result). As we know, Max Weber stated that the last ‘ideal type’ of social action, the instrumental-rational social action, is the one that is tending to take precedence in modern societies obsessed with teleological efficiency, rational calculation and control, and it is because of this that the modernization process ends up leaving aside the other types of social actions (traditional, affective or guided by values, be they ethical or religious). With Weber and beyond Weber, we can also state—and that is what we are concerned with right now—that precisely and only as of this moment, wherein the instrumental-­rational social action prevails over other weakened ways of acting, every action that is determined by a conscious belief in the inherent value of a type of behaviour (like the religious one) is regarded as ‘radical’, ‘extremist’ or rather, at the religious level, as ‘fundamentalist’. And not because it is ‘radical’ in itself, but because it appears ‘radical’ in relation to the subjectively rational instrumental action that could be defined in terms of expected utility or, better yet, in terms of expected interests and economic exchange. From another perspective, we could also arrive at the same conclusions by retracing Albert O.  Hirschman’s reconstruction of the ideological transformation occurred between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein the pursuit of material interests was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man, or better wherein the order of passions capitulated in favour of the system of the harmless, if one-dimensional, interests of commercial life (Hirschman, 1977). Also from this point of view, we can see how a ‘passionate’ behaviour could be regarded as a ‘radical’, ‘extremist’ or ‘fundamentalist’ behaviour. So, in other words, what we would like to stress is that as soon as the rationalization of the social life become hegemonic in the modern capitalistic society, the kind of activities that, from a specific socio-­historical

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context, were regarded as coherent behaviour that conformed with the shared values of ordinary people ends up taking on meanings that are significantly divergent from those they originally held. For instance, attitudes about values that previously used to be considered as a kind of religious experience today are often viewed as ‘radical’, ‘extremist’ and ‘fundamental’ manifestations. But either way, the point to which I’d like to draw particular attention to is that behind this game of refraction, there lies a fundamental principle that is far more drastic and radical: the Principle of (economic) Exchange that in modern (globalized) societies has become, consciously or unconsciously, our fundamental value and at the same time the prominent social value; a principle that has become ‘absolute’ as a general and universal (mercantile and monetary) ‘equivalent’ of each transaction; a principle that transcends the universal nature of social relations.

The Process of Legal Deregulation and Contemporary Society Before addressing this problem, which no doubt can be subjected to varying, often mutually contradictory, interpretations, we believe that it would be of interest to go back to Max Weber again, in particular, to his studies on the genesis of the Western Capitalism. At the beginning of the fourth chapter of the Wirtschaftsgeschichte, dedicated to “the origin of modern Capitalism”, Max Weber indicated “the rational, that is calculable, right” as one of the foundations of the capitalist economy of the modern world. He observed that if “the capitalistic enterprise must behave in a rational way, it has to be judged and administered in a calculable way” (Weber, 1922b). In other words, Weber suggests a link or better, a mutual dependency between modern capitalism, modern state and rational and formal rights, considered as an element and, at the same time, a product of the typical political development of the modern West. Today, as we know, the new capitalism with its financial aspect has completely different characteristics from the spirit of capitalism that Weber analysed more than 100 years ago. At the same time, the ‘globalization’ of the economy is fragmenting more and more the ‘rational and legal’ state that, according to the German sociologist, had centralized in its hands all the power to establish norms in society.

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Effectively, with the influence of economic relationships on the law of the state, the new rights of the economy tend to have an ‘extra-legislative’ face. We assist continuously in the production of new legal rules and in the emergence of different actors in the legal process. Today, the old conception of law is in crisis, and with it, the traditional sources of rights. New rights coexist with the official rights of the state, and there are new legal institutes more capable of running the new economy. This is the so-called legal globalization. States are no longer the only source of rights: other forces, even private ones, participate in the production of rights. And this is because today the race to create new laws is defined by the economic agenda and does not come from the normative powers of states. In other words, the market gives rise to new forms of law, in addition to the traditional state legal measures that no longer have a predetermined character but assume rather adaptive modalities, following the markets in their various needs. They don’t run economic relations; they merely contribute to developing them in a flexible way. It’s clear that this calls for a new analysis of the transformation of not only the public rights and the private rights, but also the rights of workers. This analysis seems even more important if we consider that the new capitalism, which is more and more at the service of technological power, does not tend so much to rationalize as to deregulate. But this doesn’t force us to reformulate, as it could be thought, an idea of ‘anomie’ (of absence of norms, of lack of rules), because capitalism itself, today more than ever, through deregulation, intends to impose its norms, which, although different from political-legal norms, tries to regulate social life in hegemonic way. Before confronting this issue it is worthwhile to briefly recall the transformation capitalism underwent beginning at the end of the 1970s, at the moment in which the American economy, opening its ports to international markets and globalization, transformed the old democratic capitalism into super capitalism (Reich, 2007). From then on, the process of deregulation of markets corroded many democratic institutions. This was led mainly by the lobby power of multinational corporations capable of influencing governments to legislate in their favour while disregarding the common good. Salaries decreased and the rights of citizens, such as those introduced in defence of workers in the nineteenth century, weakened. In other words, the citizen lost a great deal of power to the investor and the consumer, who benefitted from the overall decrease in prices. All of this leads inevitably to a deficit of democracy. This deficit

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grew with the establishment of the ‘lex mercatoria’ by the multinationals, their lawyers and their private courts, and it has surpassed more and more the norms established by legislators. As we know, this situation weakened not only democracy but also the modern nation-state that up until then had been its primary protector. With the crisis of the state, we became a part of what today many call the process of de-codification. In the opinion of many experts, the current delocalization of the economy seems to undermine the traditional relationship between rights and the idea of national boundaries and territorial laws. In other words, under the pressure of these new capitalist forces, rights are becoming more and more transnational. Private systems of regulation which are no longer an expression of the state are spreading, and private arbitration is becoming the most practical and efficient means of resolving conflicts and disputes. It seems that civil rights are returning to their original status of being independent of the state. On this premise, we can underline three fundamental aspects of the relationship between rights and the new forms of capitalism. The first regards the sharp decrease in legislation of issues related to the economy. This is the phenomenon of de-codification, mentioned earlier. The second regards the role of the state. It renounces its function of public intervention and becomes like a private enterprise itself: an entrepreneur state that is subject to the ‘lex mercatoria’. The third involves the weakening of social rights and in particular those related to workers. Today we can clearly see how, in many cases, economic relationships are far more important than the laws of the state. If on one hand, the myriad of non-governmental organizations establishing social norms represent a new legal pluralism, on the other, they make society more complex and complicated from a legal point of view. With the wave of new technology promoted by capitalism, the concept of the network takes on a new legal meaning beyond the two traditional pillars of the state and the individual. This doesn’t escape the attention of the so-called modern man. Behind the globalized social networks that define the new world society, the modern man becomes aware of the constitution of a new normative reality. In order to define this reality, Gunther Teubner, a sociologist of contemporary rights, pointed out the emergence of the ‘civil constitutions’ of society. Not political constitutions in the traditional sense, but constitutions emerging from civil society capable of creating laws and regulating independent of any national or international body (Teubner, 2003).

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Of course, these networks form the fabric of international trade. The economy, unlike politics, cannot be closed or limited. It cannot tolerate boundaries and will always find more open and global environments in which to thrive. In fact, globalization is driven primarily by the economy. However, it also has far-reaching consequences for civil rights as rights begin to become separate from the state. As a result, the pyramid apparatus of power (the sovereign states) give way to private legal channels no longer governed in a hierarchical way but by flexible, adaptable rules conceived according to the nature of the market. These rules make up an extended network of unofficial laws established independently of any state but which are nonetheless applied in society. Today, people refer more and more to the image of a net to identify this intricate interconnection of pseudo laws that it actually takes on a legal meaning. Therefore, it’s necessary to understand the structure of this network and the interconnections within it which are capable of acquiring a legal value behind the hierarchical structure of the state. In strictly legal terms, it’s a progressive dissolution of the traditional sources of law which are still based on a written constitution and identifiable with an authority that promotes it. From here, we can define the network in the context of law as the development of a legal system, which transcends written law and cannot be identified with a single text but rather with a vast array of independent texts. This system tends towards governance rather than government. This implies that the economy and society in general regulate themselves with flexible laws rather than being regulated from above by an authority following a set of fixed permanent laws. Let us consider, for example, the laws of the European Community following the Maastricht accords. The hierarchical distinction of the texts was irreparably damaged by the directive. As a format common to all member states and as an instrument which could potentially be adopted by an unlimited number of legislatures, the directive doesn’t posses the characteristics necessary to be applied but only to be transposed inside other texts (laws and conventions). Although these texts draw their legal strength from a single state, they take their legal meaning from the European Community (Supiot, 2005). In other words, the governments of the European states are urged to help realize elaborate international programmes to which they are not forced to adhere. In this sense, the European Union has elaborated new methods of governance in which the member states agree on some common guidelines developed by the commission to direct politics on the

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national level. The ‘dura lex’ of ancient Roman law gives way to the loose international conventions that rule the freedom guaranteed to member states to establish their own laws. The result is that the individual states can pursue the objectives they have agreed upon as they see fit. However, their progress towards those goals is judged on the basis of technical criteria by authorities such as the European Commission and the European Bank. Thus, instead of government, we have a governance of states with its typical normative apparatus: the neutral indicators of performance, freedom and the expert authorities appointed to oversee the progress towards the established goals. A system which presupposes a perfect world free of social conflict and one which can be easily controlled with an effective management of the proposed objectives. As mentioned earlier, to fully understand the transformations produced by the diffusion of this system of governance by way of the network, we must consider above all the rights of workers. Those rights, asserted in the industrial era, developed around three institutional figures that correspond to three fundamental concepts. They are the figure of the legislator, the employer and the wage worker corresponding to the concepts of the social state, the enterprise and the personal obligation, respectively. The deterioration of these three figures coincides very closely with the transformation of production methods underwent by the majority of large companies towards the end of the 1970s. A transformation that signalled the transition from a hierarchical pyramid model to the more flexible network mentioned earlier. This led to great difficulty for the rights of workers: the difficulty in identifying the representation of the workers, in establishing the boundaries of free enterprise and in defining subcontracting and de-localization of work in legal terms. The integrated system of labour management organized and developed along with the introduction of mass production techniques collapsed. As Richard Sennet explained, when groups of workers need to get fast and flexible results, it’s necessary to grant them a certain autonomy (Sennet, 1998). Companies try to encourage this autonomy by creating internal markets. Groups of workers compete whenever a computer programme needs to be written, a product needs to be designed or money needs to be procured. The conditions of this competition are laid out by the workers themselves. In this new, more flexible system, emphasis is placed on finding the best solutions in the least possible time. This essential standard of efficiency overturns the old system of mass production associated with factories of the industrial era. It provides a way for the labour force to

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regulate itself in a way that mirrors the concept of governance. We shift from a direct government of men to a management of things. This means a different way of exploiting human resources. From a legal point of view, this transition was brought about by the substitution of conventions based on legal precedents for actual laws. In this way, laws are reduced to technical nonsense, having nothing to do with values that can be judged exclusively on the basis of their effectiveness. Today, the new forms of organization of corporate labour seem to cause the re-emergence of old, long-forgotten models. With this new system, we could risk the re-emergence of a social structure that, albeit in a different form, strongly resembles that of the feudal system: the bond of servitude that places the free man in the service of the nobility. It doesn’t require the subordination of workers. On the contrary, the necessity of producing high-quality goods and minimizing costs induce the workers to behave as subjects on their own while maintaining their independence. The focus is shifted from a direct supervision of the workers to the greater attention paid to the quality of products. If the weakening of this degree of subordination has allowed many workers to enjoy relative freedom, it is because the new organization of labour doesn’t oversee the workers directly, but rather the objectives reached according to a well-defined standard of quality and productivity. Thus, the worker is no longer responsible for a strictly imposed set of personal duties but rather to a set of goals generally defined by the company. This means that the supervision and evaluation of workers is carried out in an objective way independent of the arbitrary will of a superior. Even the entrepreneur, by immersing himself in a network of companies and contracts that limit more and more his economic freedom, progressively loses his independence and his ability to command. He is subject to the collective rules of the market. This introduces a new form of subordination. The standardization of techniques (in particular, private companies resorting to quality criteria and certification procedures) tends to substitute product management for legal considerations. This creates a very different notion of the subordination associated with a work contract. Today, workers under contract are subjected to objective criteria of evaluation which allow the company to control them without having to give them specific orders. Here, we encounter a new form of objectification or, in the language of Marxism, alienation. The objectified worker placed under an anonymous set of goals that he must reach loses that last element of subjectivity that was represented by his personal relationship with his boss.

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The standardization of movement, typical of the Taylorist model, is replaced by the standardization of people. If the objective is the health and success of the company, the workers become merely an instrument to achieve the results that it lays out. In the past, in exchange for their salary, workers had to dedicate a limited amount of their time to the company and obey orders exactly as they received them. Today, they must give the best of themselves with the aim of maximizing profits. They must behave as though they were independent. Ideally they should spontaneously conform to the needs of the company. Instead of direct supervision of workers the modern enterprise supervises their overall progress towards their objectives. Due to these dramatic changes the distinction between dependent and independent work, which has until now characterized the rights of workers, no longer exists and the traditional idea of legal subordination, implicit in a work contract, is replaced by the idea of the integration of an organization: workers are free when it comes to the methods they use to reach their objectives but at the same time they are bound to those objectives. These reflections on the changes that have taken place in the rights of workers allow us to understand how behind the process of legal deregulation the new global capitalism is giving rise to a new type of technical regulation based on the idea of governance. If before the rights of the workers were, for better or worse, guaranteed and protected by the laws of the state, today, with the new global criteria for the organization of labour (that reduce guarantees on social rights), the providers of those rights find themselves more and more exposed to the new normative techniques that these protections and guarantees tend to weaken. In this respect, these brief considerations allow us to understand how behind the process of legal deregulation, the new global capitalism is giving rise to a new type of technical regulation based on the idea of governance, but even more—and now I’m referring back to where I started my paper—we can understand how this kind of capitalism (to which the ‘neo-­ liberalism’ ideology relates) is giving rise to a global system based on the universal principle of (economic) exchange. Those who can’t incorporate themselves into this properly functioning economic and legal system, those who won’t acknowledge or accept this general scheme (based on the ‘universal’ system of exchanges), become immediately ‘radicals’ or ‘fundamentalists’ in relation to the current predominate thought.

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The Principle of General Exchange For the sake of simplification and brevity, we are now going to focus our attention on two different interpretations of society which have been a basic feature of western rationalist thought, and which have directly or indirectly offered an ideological basis for different ways of perceiving the problem of social inclusion. The two interpretations mentioned earlier refer to two historical formulations of European political thought, one of which goes back to Aristotle (whose political philosophy, from its rediscovery in the twelfth century, had enormous influence on European medieval thought) and the other to the modern doctrine of natural law (from which the rationalist system of modern philosophical, political and juridical ideas can be traced). Two different viewpoints, from two different time periods and forms of society that followed one after the other, the first of which, to put it simply, gave prominence to the idea of the ‘community’, and the second to that of the ‘individual’; viewpoints which underlie two of the most influential contemporary conceptions of the problem of social inclusion: ‘communitarianism’ and ‘individualism’.1 Aristotle, in the first book of Politics, held that the origins of the polis did not derive from some rationalist construction, but from a ‘natural’ reality that was ordered according to a graded set of stages (family, village, political community) which succeeded each other until the perfect self-­ sufficient society, the ‘state’, was achieved. This model lasted from the rediscovery of Aristotle throughout the Middle Ages until the beginnings of the modern age, or rather, until the rationalist construction was formulated by the doctrine of natural law. It was at this point, in fact, that the 1  In a different way, with reference to other traditions of thought, we can find a similar dichotomy in the ‘classical’ polarizations, which, although somewhat differently, were a feature of juridical and sociological speculation in modern times. One needs only to think of the distinction made by Henry Summer Maine (in his famous Ancient Law of 1861) between societies founded on status (on social position, like in archaic forms of society) and those based on contract (progressive societies based on free agreement between individuals) (Maine, 1931); one thinks of Durkheim’s De la division du travail social, where a distinction is made between ‘mechanical solidarity’ (as a form of community typical of pre-modern societies) and ‘organic solidarity’ (as a form of social inclusion between individuals typical of modern industrial societies) (Durkheim, 1893), or of the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft established by Tönnies to distinguish social relations of a community nature (typical of pre-modern communal groupings) from exchange relations between separate individuals (typical of modern capitalist societies) (Tönnies, 1887).

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rationalist paradigm based on individual rights replaced the ‘gradualist’ traditional (and feudal) paradigm; the point, in other words, where one no longer needed to have recourse to the idea of an original ‘natural’ society to explain the principle of the state (and the political community in general), or to the family (as a physical, historically determined form of human society) as the initial stage of a continuous progression leading up to the ultimate perfect society (the state), but to the abstract idea of the individual (shorn of any form of social ties) and to the ‘social contract’ as a voluntary and artificial artefact created by free and equal persons. This was the point, therefore, when the rationalist, individualistic and contractual theory of the modern state came into conflict with the naturalistic, organic and ‘historical-sociological’ conception of the political community.2 We shall extrapolate the ideological premises of these two differing doctrines from their historical contexts in order to identify in the abstract two ideas that will be useful in defining two distinct models of social inclusion: one which gives political pride of place to the ‘communitarian’ person and basically reduces the problem to one of ethnic, political, cultural, religious ‘belonging’, and the other which gives pre-eminence to the ‘individual’ person and delegates the relationship between persons who are free of any pre-existing bonds to the ‘contractual’ level of exchange. On the one hand, therefore, we have the extension of the factor of ‘identity’ as an essential measure of belonging to a community, which tends to favour strategies of inclusion based on the relation of inclusion/ exclusion and assimilation/rejection; on the other hand, an emphasis of the ‘universalist’ nature of the exchange, which appears to encourage strategies that regulate the relationships between individuals by means of processes of aggregation/approval and equality/differentiation. In other words, in one case, the relationship between the community and its members with outsiders (often seen as enemies) is strengthened, and in the other, value is placed on the relationships between individuals based on the universal (and absolute) principle of exchange. If we frame the question in terms of this distinction, we can immediately see that the social inclusion of outsiders forms an anthropological and social substratum which can in no way be disregarded; it is anthropological in that it goes 2  For a description of this moment of change, see the essay by Norberto Bobbio, Natural Law, included in the first book of the fourth volume of History of political, economic and social ideas, edited by L. Firpo (Bobbio, 1980, pp. 491–558).

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back to the roots of human society and our first expressions of civilization, but it is also decidedly social in that it involves social relationships which, to a certain extent, and especially today, have been made independent by man himself. It is no accident that Karl Polanyi, a prominent twentieth-century economist, turned to economic anthropology to point out the historical distinction between different systems of economic transaction and social inclusion, and also the peculiar, unique nature of systems of exchange based on a self-regulating market economy (Polany, 1944, 1968). In fact, according to Polanyi, it is just such a market economy that has given rise to the “great economic transformation” which has historically brought about a crucial change in how we perceive and formulate social inclusion. Since the nineteenth century (under the stimulus of an increasingly well-­ established capitalist system and the idea of laissez-faire), the exchange market as an integral form of transaction in the western economy has replaced the systems of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘redistribution’, which are typically models of pre-modern societies. This has led to a change in the relationship between economy and society, in the way it was conceived and developed in primitive, archaic and generally pre-capitalist systems. In Polanyi’s historical comparison, in primitive and archaic economies, the systems by which goods were produced and distributed were incorporated into social institutions (through family, political and religious obligations). Goods were not only commodities that could be bought and sold, but elements in a larger social relationship that could be allocated according to the rights and duties of kinship or political or tribal ties. Polanyi’s reconstruction is obviously based, for the most part, on the historical demarcation between pre-modern communities and societies of individuals which heavily influenced the social science of his day, and which was especially dominated by Maine’s distinction between (primitive) societies organized according to status and (modern) societies organized by contract, as well as the contrast made by Tönnies between community and society (Tönnies, 1887). In describing the form of primitive economic transaction which conformed to a model of social inclusion based on “reciprocity”, Polanyi essentially reproduced the anthropological studies of Malinowski on the trading habits of the ‘Kula ring’ (based on a system of gifts and counter-­ gifts) (Malinowski, 1922) and the system of ‘reciprocal provisions’ analysed by Mauss in his famous essay on gift-giving (Mauss, 1968–69). It is clear that Polanyi’s research (especially in the fields of economic anthropology and ancient economic history) has contributed significantly

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to the analysis of the problem of social inclusion, in that they succeeded in clarifying the difference between socioeconomic transaction systems based on ‘reciprocity’ (the general category of socially obligatory gift-giving) or on ‘redistribution’ (obligatory payment to a central political or religious authority, which uses it for its own upkeep or for providing services to the community), both systems typical of pre-modern societies, and the system of exchange market transactions typical of industrialized societies. In our economies, in fact, mercantile exchange has become the predominant means of transaction, and the fact that it is not an expression of social obligations renders it specifically ‘economic’ (even if, in modern capitalist economies which are alleviated by the welfare state, where ‘reciprocal’ and ‘redistributive’ transactions to a certain extent have a socially integrated role, not all transactions can be seen as market exchanges). In other words, according to Polanyi, the modern western world has achieved something exceptional in the field of economics: we have managed to extrapolate economic events from their wider social context and turn them into a separate system of their own. If his reconstruction is accurate, there is no doubt that, if we want to effectively understand the specific problem of social inclusion as it occurs in our capitalist societies, we should focus our attention on the integrative function of markets and the idea of exchange as a typical form of socioeconomic transaction untrammelled by the network of social obligations. It should be stressed that today, in our complex multi-ethnic society, we should be studying not only the problem of economic inclusion, but also that of the political, cultural and social inclusion of ‘migrants’ belonging to different cultural contexts (which recall examples that can be, on the whole, ascribed to the level of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘redistribution’) within the area of exchange relationships which foreshadow the supremacy of the ‘global’ market. Never before today, in fact, has exchange assumed equal value not only of goods, but also of social relationships. It is exchange that defines values by measuring social relations; in fact, it is itself the value, and not only the object, of reciprocal relations. This presupposes that there are individuals who are formally equal to one another; that there are, therefore, equivalent and separate individualities that are functionally interchangeable. This principle (or expression of dogma) appears to be now almost universally accepted, or rather, it appears that the absolute principle of exchange, as a value capable of organizing and regulating social relations with outsiders, can now find only a few out and out opponents; here, in principle, it is the key by which it would appear to be

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actually possible to re-examine a basic assumption underlying our global civilization. Today, the universal idea of exchange (a result, to be sure, of the ideological dominance of western culture) is faced with almost no opponents, and this, generally speaking, is the clearest revelation of the phenomenon of globalization: the idea of the world being united by the universal use of exchange, the principle of transcendent ‘identity’ that bridges differences, setting out their formal equivalence on the plane of calculation and the rationality of trade. A calculating rationality, therefore, is based on the exchange value being carried to extremes and which has its general symbolic equivalent (as an abstract intermediary of the market) in money (as we learn, for example, from Simmel). In a conversation in 1965, Arnold Gehlen and Theodor W. Adorno, each held to their own convictions but agreed with what Max Scheler had written in Der Mensch im Zeitalter des Ausgleichs on the idea of ‘levelling’, which is progressively erasing the qualitative differences within our society by favouring a growing quantification (Adorno & Gehlen, 1965). Adorno went even further: this tendency, he maintained, is implicit “in a principle linked to the organisation of relationships within society, in other words with the principle of exchange. The universal principle of exchange  – which is dominant to an extent never before seen in the world, or in any case in our western world – does not take into consideration the qualities or specific properties of the goods to be exchanged, nor the specific forms of the work of the producers or the specific needs of the receivers. It is here that this idea of levelling is implicit” (Ibid). Here we have the problem: the ‘levelling’ of life, fed by the process of economic rationalization, typical of the modern industrialized society, tends to induce an abstract uniformity in society and a subsequent homogeneity in social relations: everything in circulation is ordered by units of calculation, and, inversely, only what is calculated in this way can circulate. Only when the principle of exchange has become universal and absolute can goods circulate completely freely and absolute reciprocity of social relations occur, provided that the qualitative aspect of the basic differences is resolved numerically in quantity. This resolution creates a paradox which Alain Badiou has recently pointed out: “In times of generalised movement and the illusion of instantaneous cultural communication, the laws and regulations prohibiting the movement of people are everywhere multiplied” (Badiou, 1997); the free movement, therefore, can only apply to the movement of the calculable, the movement of products and goods

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because people are in fact ‘infinitely incalculable’. If everything becomes orderable within the economy of generalized exchange, everything becomes equalized and equivalent; everything becomes ‘relative’ with reference to the universal absolute exchange (or to the absolute intermediation of the principle of exchange). In fact, if there is ‘cultural relativity’, it is because the principle of absolute exchange is predominant. If our world accepts reciprocal recognition of different cultures, it is because, primarily, it predicates the dominance (and the ‘radicalization’) of universal exchange. In this way we move from the regime of original otherness to the principle of functional diversity. It is at this point that otherness is reduced to difference, when the other becomes ‘unlike’ according to a generalized equivalence. It is here that the immeasurable and irreducible nature of the other vanishes within the symbolic system of differences created by the market. It is here, paradoxically, that the other becomes the identical. And it is here, finally, that the one who refers his actions to other values (be they ethical, cultural, religious, etc.) that are not exchangeable within the framework defined by the ‘universal’ system of exchanges is considered to be a ‘radical’ or a ‘fundamentalist’ person, and therefore a potential (or real) dangerous member of society, someone who cannot be included or integrated in the symbolic system of functional differences related to the absolute paradigm of exchange. In other words, we can attest in this respect that instead of a competition between our ‘relativistic system’ and other absolute (authoritarian, theocratic, etc.) forms of power, there is a conflict between two different and specific aspects of the same ‘absolute’ position, both of these radical in some way. Behind the relativity that is now a feature of our world, there lies, though we refuse to admit it, the unqualified radicalization of the ‘absolute’ principle of exchange as a general universal (mercantile and monetary) ‘equivalent’; a principle that transcends the universal nature of social relations, which is ab-solutus since it does not form part of the order of reciprocity that it itself sets up. Everything can be exchanged, everything can be quantified (people as well as things), except the principle of exchange which controls the whole system. Here is the paradoxical injustice inherent in exchange: the fact that it equi-valates, it gives equal value to things that are different (in that they are not the same as each other), and here is its inner contradiction: inequality, which is apparently denied in abstract formal relations between equals, paradoxically derives from an equivalence that drives the different (since it

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is other) towards the same. The general expression of exchange in the concrete form in the global market system leads, especially in our societies, to its assuming an aspect that cannot be disregarded: exchange, or rather the Principle of Exchange, becomes our radical fundamental value and thus at the same time an important social value. This value (as Adam Smith stated) belongs to the idea, in modern society, of a man as a single individual who, in his own interest and for his own gain, creates wealth working for the common good. There is no exchange, in fact, in its modern sense, if there is no society of autonomous rational individuals (potentially and formally equal) who are prepared to trade with each other and are capable of exchange. The modern ideology is individualistic (Dumont, 1983); as is the culture in its widest sense, insofar as individualism, as Durkheim already pointed out at the beginning of the twentieth century, is seen as a shared social value—a ‘value’ that derives partially, as we mentioned earlier, from the establishment of the doctrine of natural law as a legal theory that no longer regards people as ‘social beings’ (in the Aristotelian sense) but as individuals who are self-sufficient persons, independent and rational, with no social and political ties whatsoever. It is here that the idea of the nation as “the realm of individualism considered as a value” (Ibid.) finds its historical and ideological justification; the nation, in fact, can be regarded not only as a global society made of people who consider themselves individuals, but also is itself the ultimate in individuality. The point of departure of the natural law position is no longer the whole of humanity, but the sovereign state, which is individual and self-sufficient, founded on the union—established by natural Law—of individual men who are essentially ‘non-social’. It goes without saying that, on the basis of this conception, within the political, social and economic spheres of the modern state, an idea of social inclusion has progressively asserted itself (between individuals who are formally equal, autonomous and self-sufficient) based for the most part on a functionalist model. Sociologists, with Durkheim in the forefront, have reconstructed the characteristic form of this model by analysing the social processes which, in industrial society, have been typical of the growing complexity of the division of labour (Durkheim, 1893). As regards the division and differentiation of labour and the spread of specialization in production, social inclusion, according to Durkheim, should be measured by means of the ‘organic solidarity’ model, as a form of cohesion based on exchange relations or rather as a functional interdependence of individuals in relational systems involving reciprocal exchange. In these conditions, individuals

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genuinely integrate through exchange, by means of what makes them similar in the differences in their respective functions, as is established by the division of labour. At a later point in time, in a socioeconomic environment which has altered its structure by giving prime place to property (possession, the substance of ownership) instead of function (work, production, individual abilities and attitudes), inclusion between individuals results for the most part from trading transactions and the mobility of capital. Today, it is no wonder that the problem of social inclusion is almost unthinkingly seen in the light of economic exchange and trading transactions, especially at a time when modern nation-states seem to be shrinking in importance in the face of the growing globalization of markets. It is in fact in this very period, when the sovereignty of territorial states is at a crisis point, that the question of inclusion more and more exposed to the complicated dynamics of migration, becomes a problem that is increasingly difficult to address. If, in fact, up until some years ago, the notions of exchange and of the individual were the ideological premises on which the modern ideas of the market and the nation were based, then, as we noted earlier, it is also true that alongside the same ‘individualist’ principle that underlay such institutions, there were certain ‘pre-­ modern’, more or less general, elements that still survived (e.g., the family). As Luis Dumont justly pointed out, this application of individualistic values sparked off a complicated debate, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, in which combinations were invented where these values were subtly blended with their opposites, in vastly dissimilar domains (Dumont, 1983). Karl Polanyi has also expertly substantiated this change in views by showing how, in the field of socioeconomics, the application of the individualistic principle—‘free trade’— was forced to introduce social safety measures (signs of which can still be seen in contemporary ‘neoliberalism’) that could lead to the creation of a welfare state as an organism that tended to ‘re-incorporate’ the economy into society by means of control of markets, by granting political rights to those with minimal incomes and by widening the area of redistribution of the economy through providing social services based on criteria that were different from those of the market. As one can realize, with the crisis affecting the Welfare State and the decline of national sovereignty in the face of the recent surge towards the globalization of markets, the most important guarantee of this “self-­ defence of society” (in Polanyi’s words) is today beginning to waver. To

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put it another way, the ‘individual’ is more and more exposed, without protection or guarantees (we need only to think of the field of employment), to the world of generalized exchange, or rather to the dominion of autonomous market transactions, almost all of which are now free of any political control and no longer bound by the ties that traditionally linked them to the rest of society; in other words: communication without inclusion, exchange without social relations, interest without relationships. Within the boundaries of this ‘de-socialisation’ of economic relations, of this deprivation that reveals to the individual his own vulnerability, the precariousness of his existence, that consigns him hopelessly to the state of social ‘alienation’, it is here that the problem of radicalism is increasingly seen to emerge as a phenomenon that more than any other involves those who are forced to accept ‘alienation’ as symbols and as a ‘stigma’ of their social identity, as well as an absolute fact of their existence. From a certain point of view, we can state that, to some extent, the social phenomena of political, religious or cultural radicalization of individuals or groups could be also considered as an effect (a product of) or as a form of reaction to the radicalization of the economic exchange as absolute paradigm of social integration. Today, everything seems to be ordered in terms of exchange, which, by reducing people to the status of commodities, to depersonalized entities (again using Marxist terminology), is indifferent to the conditions (and places) in which people find themselves when they exchange or are forced to exchange with one another. However, the effects of this sort of reasoning, which are most plainly to be seen in the case of radicalization of individuals or communities, can rapidly highlight the fact that this condition is also ‘our’ condition in a world that, with the extension on a global scale of the economic logic of exchange, reminds us that we are all engaged in some sort of ‘absolute value’, be it explicitly political, cultural, religious or disguised, and hide behind the mask of the ‘economic relativism’ supported by the general paradigm of the exchange.

References Adorno, T. W., & Gehlen, A. (1965). Is Sociology a Human Science? A Dispute. In F.  Grenz (Ed.), Adornos Philosophie in Grundbegriffen. Auflösung einiger Deutungsprobleme. Suhrkamp, 1974. Badiou, A. (1997). Saint Paul. La fondation de l’universalisme. Presses Universitaires de France.

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Bobbio, N. (1980). Il Giusnaturalismo. In Storia delle idee politiche economiche e sociali (diretta da L. Firpo, Vol. IVa, pp. 491–558). UTET, Torino. Dumont, L. (1983). Essais sur l’individualisme. Éditions du Seuil. Durkheim, E. (1893). De la division du travail social. F. Alcan. Hirschman, A. O. (1977). The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. Princeton University Press. Maine, H. S. (1931). Ancient Law (1861). Oxford University Press. Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Routledge/Kegan. Mauss, M. (1968–69). Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaiques (1923–24). In Oeuvres (3 Vol.). Minuit. Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. Reinehart & Winston Inc. Polanyi, K. (1968). Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies. Doubleday & Company, Inc. Reich, R. B. (2007). Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Alfred A. Knopf. Sennet, R. (1998). The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. Norton & Company. Supiot, A. (2005). Homo Juridicus. Seuil. Teubner, G. (2003). Globale Zivilverfassungen: Alternativen zur staatszentrirten Verfassungstheorie. Zitschrift für ausländisches öfflentliches Recht und Völkerrecht, 63, 1–28. Tönnies, F. (1887). Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. O. R. Reislad. Weber, M. (1922a). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Mohr. Weber, M. (1922b). Wirtschaftsgeschichte, in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Mohr.

CHAPTER 9

Totalitarianism, State and Civil Society: The Case of Hong Kong David T. L. Cheung

Introduction In March 2015, about fours months after the Umbrella Movement, a commentator wrote the following in an online news media: In a totalitarian system, there are no such things as neutral, fair, well-­ recognized professional organizations and therefore no civil society. Because the ruling party, especially the communist party, does not believe that such organizations exist. It often sees them with suspicion, and even makes use of them as a means for political power struggle, so that they degenerate and lose their credibility. The Nazis called this process Gleichschaltung, meaning to tune civil societies into harmony with the ruling party. The communist party, on the other hand, takes one step further by infiltrating and splitting those organizations which can be infiltrated, and for those which it cannot, they will set up doppelganger organizations (e.g. Federation of Education Workers vs. Professional Teachers’ Union), in order to offset and dilute their influence, or even to use them as camouflage to cover their underground activities, or finally to ban all these organizations by legal means, so as to achieve the final purpose of control-

D. T. L. Cheung (*) Baptist University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_9

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ling the entire society and every aspects of people’s lives. When there are no more objective, fair civil society organizations, there is also no trust among the people, and what remain are only naked struggle, treachery and violence. The moral corruption in present day China is not only the result of Cultural Revolution, but also the failure or even withering of the civil society for a long period of time. For the foundation of a moral community is achieved not merely by the writings of one or two moral philosophers, but by a long process of social practice. A large amount of neutral and professional organizations like boards of trade, professional bodies, religious organizations, and even big and small societies like football clubs, chess clubs, bodies which seem to be remotely related to politics, stipulate their own code of conduct for their members, and therefore, turning abstract moral norms into practical guidelines for their members’ behaviour. Without being interfered by politics, they grow on their own like different plants in a garden, and therefore gradually build up public credibility. Once this credibility is destroyed, it needs decades to rebuild. However, totalitarian regimes attempt to replace this feasible moral practice by abstract moral doctrines which they have invented out of the blue, and then destroy all these civil society bodies. Yet, these regimes are often not serious about what they advocate, and thus contradict themselves from one day to another due to political reasons or power struggle. When the people realised that they have been fooled all along, they cannot return to the moral pillars they have built up. The destruction of morality and trust in a society is therefore accomplished. Sadly, this process is happening in Hong Kong now. Police, ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption), Law Society, teachers union, parents union…. none of them can evade the fate of being used for political purpose. Because totalitarian regimes care only about their own survival, and cannot care less about the credibility of these societies. The police, which has taken a clear political stand, cracks down on the protesters with enthusiastic ferocity, without knowing that one day they too will be brushed aside like stinky boots. Therefore, the present struggle in Hong Kong is not only about whether we will have democracy, but whether the coming generations can live in a society where people can have basic trust with each other. If it fails, the consequences will be borne by generations for a long period of time.1

With this concern in mind, the paper analyses the relation between totalitarianism, state and civil society. It will be divided into three parts. The first part will argue that totalitarianism is essentially a form of nihilism, nihilism in the Nietzschean sense that “the highest value devalues itself”. Second, it will investigate the question of whether civil society is the 1

 thestandnews.com. (March 02, 2015).

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foundation of the state or vice versa, with reference to Hegel’s discussion of the nature of human political community. Finally, it will argue that totalitarian systems are not sustainable. By usurping the role of civil society in providing moral foundation of a political community, it erodes its very foundation. Yet we should take care this process will not drag us into an abyss.

Totalitarianism as Nihilism First we want to argue that among the two forms of totalitarianism, communism is more “total” than fascism. The obvious reason is the abolition of private property under communism, and therefore the disappearance of any form of resistance against the state founded on private ownership of wealth. Moreover, we should also note that first totalitarian regime in history was founded in 1917 by the Bolshevist Revolution, while Fascism and Nazism are to a great extent movements reacting against it in the 1920s and 30s. Arendt even argues that Nazism had learned a lot from the Russians, while it despised the Italian Fascist movement as superficial but fell short of saying it openly due to ideological reasons.2 Second, we want to argue that communist totalitarianism is a form of nihilism in the Nietzschean sense, that “the highest values devalues itself”, or even perhaps “the question, ‘why?’ has no answer”.3 Nietzsche’s formulation is based on his critique of Judeo-Christian religion and Platonism. Since their highest values are founded in the other-world, they devalue what are valuable in the present world. This logic can easily be found in the theories of communist revolution. The second part of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, for example, is essentially a programme via negativa: abolition of everything related to the present form of bourgeois society: private property, free trade, class system, the state, family and also religion. It says, “The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas”.4 The only thing it does not abolish, only for the time being, is the state. On the contrary,  Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism, (San Diego: Harcourt, 1968), p. 309.  KSA 12, 9 [35], (27), p. 350. 4  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), part II: Proletarians and Communists, p. 237 in: McLellan, David ed. Karl Marx: Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 221–247. 2 3

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a form of “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which should confiscate all private property and then redistribute everything “according to his needs”, will come to be, but should then “whither away” when classes have ceased to exist. But the big question is, how the state, having gained unprecedented power, a Leviathan “non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei” in the truest sense of the words, can be made to disappear by another bigger power? How will such a monster, which devours everything, will ever obliterate itself? Marx speaks of “free state” in his Critique of Gotha Programme, “freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it”. But how will that happen? Marx’ answer is, again, “a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”5 His failure to offer us the spell to recall the Golem he himself has conjured up laid down the foundation of twentieth-century totalitarian terror, a monstrous hybrid of nihilism and statism. Third, as Arendt has argued, both communist and fascist movements have been very obscure about what their ultimate goals are, and even if they do spell out their goals in concrete terms, they often change with time. Hitler, for example, had jettisoned the burden of the promises of the early years of the National Socialist Movement by simply not mentioning them again, while Lenin and Stalin confused their followers by constant new re-interpretation of the ultimate goal of the Communist Party. These are also familiar to anyone who studies the history of Chinese communism. Arendt famously explains this as the “perpetual-motion mania of totalitarian movements which can remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion.”6 She falls short of explaining the origin of this mania. My answer is the nihilistic character of totalitarianism, “the highest value devalues itself”, that its ideal is founded on the denial of the value of the present state of existence. More to that, since the totalitarian state has to justify its existence rather than “wither away”, it has to constantly create its enemies, first the class enemy from outside, then the enemy within, until it devours its own children. In practice, this nihilistic tendency is given further impetus by the nineteenth-­century Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev (1847–1882), whose idea of professional revolutionary inspired Lenin and Stalin. His 5  Marx, Karl. Critique of Gotha Programme, p.  564, 565, in: McLellan, David ed. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, pp. 564–570. 6  Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976), p. 306.

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notorious Catechism of a Revolutionary, a key text in understanding the mentality and behaviour of the members of Communist Parties, especially the Chinese expression “only the party, no humanity” (有黨性, 無人性), contains lines such as: The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.” “The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, …, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily.” “The revolutionary despises public opinion. He despises and hates the existing social morality in all its manifestations.” “All the gentle and enervating sentiments of kinship, love, friendship, gratitude, and even honor, must be suppressed in him and give place to the cold and single-minded passion for revolution. …. Night and day he must have but one thought, one aim – merciless destruction”, “The nature of the true revolutionary excludes all sentimentality, romanticism, infatuation, and exaltation. All private hatred and revenge must also be excluded. Revolutionary passion, practiced at every moment of the day until it becomes a habit, is to be employed with cold calculation.” “The revolutionary enters the world of the State, of the privileged classes, of the so-called civilization, and he lives in this world only for the purpose of bringing about its speedy and total destruction.7

What we see here is not only a Machiavellian “end justifies means”, but a cool and calculated hatred and destruction of the “filthy social order” for an utopian purpose which not only tramples any moral principles under its feet, but even makes use of such principles to achieve its purpose. This explains why totalitarian revolutionary parties, Communist Parties in particular, are never serious about their promises, and if they make a promise, it is not meant to be kept, but only a strategy to buy time until they gain absolute power. For credibility is, according to Nechayev, only an expression of the “morality of the existing filthy social order”. The same goes for the promise “One Country Two Systems”.

7  Marxist Internet Archive, Sergey Nechayev, “Catechism of a Revolutionary”, https:// www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/nechayev/catechism.htm

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State and Civil Society The purpose of the following section is to show that totalitarianism, by means that the state usurps the role of the civil society, is basically undermining the very own foundation necessary for all human society and political community, and is therefore digging its own grave. Totalitarian states are not sustainable in the long run. Our proposition is that a moral society can only be sustained by the coexistence of different moral values like love, family, knowledge, friendship, justice and so forth. These values should not be reducible to each other, nor should they even be able to measure one according to another. In daily life moral practice and decision-making we may have to make moral choice decisions by weighing one value against another, but in a society we should avoid situation where one value becomes the absolute value over all the other, while political and religious extremism is born from such unbalance. Any form of absolutization will eventually defeat its own purpose. For example, the purpose of justice and equality is the happiness of the people. But if equality is pursued at the expense of all other values including happiness, people will not be happy even they have equality. On top of this, the malady of totalitarianism is not only that one supreme value overrides all other values, but this supreme value itself is empty. As argued earlier, the formation of a moral society is not accomplished by the words of a philosopher, be he Confucius, Mencius, Aristotle or Kant, but through long-term moral practice through different communities, groups and organizations, with each organization having its own paramount value: faith of a religious organizations, professional ethics for a professional society, even loyalty for organized crime and so forth. Civil society is founded on the coexistence of these organizations and their respective values. Now the problem with totalitarianism is that when the state usurps the role of civil society, it therefore brings out the philosophical question of which is the foundation of which: civil society is the foundation of the state, or vice versa? Pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong always emphasize the state, “one country is bigger than two systems” (一 國大於兩制), “If there is no country (state), how can there be families?” (沒有國, 哪有家?). It is our task to argue the contrary. The basic proposition of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is how the state comes to be from the individual consciousness of right (Recht), the right to his person, his body, his will, his property and his consciousness of

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freedom. His conclusion is, however, similar to Aristotle’s. While the latter says that the highest form of community is the polis and because public life is far more virtuous than the private as men are “political animals”, Hegel famously says that in the state we see the highest form of freedom, that an individual is nothing outside the state, leading many critics accusing him of proposing statism or even totalitarianism. But the fact is that Hegel devotes about 70% of his book talking about civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), although what he means by it is not entirely identical with what we understand as civil society today. Yet the main point is that the civil society plays the role of mediation between individuals and the state. While the relation between individuals is based on morality (Moralität), that between individuals and the state is based on Sittlichkeit or ethical life. The former is the expression of personal freedom, conscience, his ability to distinguish good and evil, while the latter is the expression of objective spirit, which overcomes the possible one-sidedness of the former, and therefore becomes universal reason.8 Totalitarianism reverses this relation by making Sittlichkeit one-sided, while it stifles the spontaneous moral conscience of its people. The civil society mediates between individual and the state because the individual only cares about his freedom. The problem is that an isolated individual cannot survive on his own, and the society also has to guarantee that one’s freedom will not infringe that of another individual. Family is therefore born from these needs, and it is bounded by something called love, which is contradictory by nature. “Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my self-consciousness only as the renunciation of my independence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. Love, however, is feeling, i.e. ethical life in the form of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there we are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational and known to us. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction”.9 While the purpose of love is to preserve the individual, the complete union of one individual with another means also the cancellation of his individuality and therefore renders the love and union with this particular person meaningless. Therefore, family as a component of the civil society should be based 8  Hegel, G.W.F. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaft, in: Hegel: Werke in 20 Bänden, bd. 10, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), § 503, 513, pp. 312–3, 317–8. 9  Hegel, G.W.F. Philosophy of Right, §158, tr. S.W. Dyde (New York: Dover, 2005).

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on love which “is by its very nature a feeling for actual living individuals, not for an abstraction”.10 In the state, on the other hand, everything is done according to law and universal reason. The state regards individuals as enjoying equal right and freedom, irrespective of whether it loves him as an individual or not. There should be no place for personal feeling and inclination. Now imagine that the state replaces the family by taking up the task of raising children, as Karl Marx propagates in Communist Manifesto, which has also been practised in some communist countries. Even if the state is so powerful and resourceful that it can satisfy all the needs of all the children from the cradle to the grave, the result would defeat its very purpose: the state, by regarding all children as the same, renders the individuals as only parts of a big whole without character or individual purpose of life. Such an individual does not need love, for it does not need another individual to make up what he does not have. The strength of the state means the death of individual. The same goes for corporations, which play the role like a second family. While membership is not entirely open, by limiting its size it can take good care of the well-being of its member. The force driving this is not love as in family, but, in the case of a professional body, the sense of honour, for example, codes of conduct of a particular profession. Corporations take care of the needs which cannot be taken care of by the family, and they are therefore the major pillars of the civil society. Therefore, a more sensible reading of Hegel is that even if the state is the “final” stage of his deduction, it does not mean that the preceding moments in the process of his sublation (Aufhebung) can be cancelled, but they must be preserved to resolve all the possible contradictions that arise in the process. Or to put it more simply, if we have only the state but no family, corporations, civil society in the middle, only power and law but no love, care, honour, even if we have a perfect state machine, it is constructed on a fragile foundation, with an all-powerful state on the top and isolated and egoistic individuals at the bottom. Arendt’s explanation for the origins of totalitarian movement is the collapse of class structure in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rendering the people into atomized individuals. An alliance between revolutionary elites and the masses is

 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §180.

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formed, so that they despise bourgeois moral values like humanism. A radical revolution with destructive consequences becomes possible.11 One important function of civil society is that it is like a glue in a community by providing “irrational” moral forces like love, amity, conscience, comradeship and collegiality within an organization. Examples are like amity within an association of fellows of the same ancestral home, alumni association, members of an organization which shares the same aspiration, forces which cannot be provided by the state. A political community needs two kinds of moral forces, active moral force and negative moral force. While the latter forbids us to do evil things, the former drives us to care for other people and help the weak. No society can sustain by the latter alone, as much as someone cannot be a good person simply by not doing bad deeds. Some moral doctrine may even stand between these two forces, for example, “trust”. It may mean we should not betray friends, but it also means that we can trust a stranger for his help when we have an accident, or what we call “civil courage” when we become victims of crime in a public space. Trust means here simply “I can count on your help”. Civil society further signifies the maturity of moral consciousness of its citizens in that they are fully aware of their positive and negative freedom. For example, members of a professional association join an organization freely and voluntarily with the aim of, on the one hand, regulating and restricting his own and his fellow members’ behaviour, but on the other hand, to foster the well-being of the profession. Rather than achieving its purpose by coercion as the state does, this active self-restriction of one’s own freedom and spontaneity means that the members are aware what everybody’s “common good” is. The power of a totalitarian state strangulates this active moral force, and therefore drives the entire society into a vicious cycle. Because the law of the state is rationalistic and non-affective, it is a difficult, if not impossible, if it intends to use laws to promote such moral force. It then resorts to campaigns and political movements, but as argued earlier, such campaigns are often driven by political motives and therefore end in failure. It then again resorts to all sorts of monitoring, coercion and punishment. In communist China, for example, first there was “The Three-anti and Five-­ anti Campaigns” in the 1950s, “Learn from Lei Feng Campaign” in the 1960s, “Anti Spiritual Pollution Campaign” in the 1980s, then “Eight Honours and Eight Shames” in 2000s and so forth. Now they have social  Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 326–340.

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credit system, facial recognition systems, video surveillance and so forth, or what is called “digital Leninism”. Once the intervention of the state has suffocated the active moral force of its citizens, it has to intervene even more because it has, by way of this intervention, stifled the people’s initiatives as spontaneous moral agents. The state will eventually play the role of moral police to the point of micro-management, like warning children against playing online games for too long. People will live in mutual distrust and fear, while the society is made up of arid and fracturing concrete pieces which would crumble into smithereens once the coercion of the state disappears. Hegel’s argument is that the emergence of the state is the product of maturity of consciousness on three levels: one’s body, freedom of the will, private property. Totalitarian state, we argue, stifles personal freedom, so that the people have a crippled sense of freedom and will sort to satisfy or express their freedom by materialistic satisfaction. This is reflected by the controversy of the behaviour of Chinese students and tourists overseas. They often cheat in examinations, but when they are specifically warned against it, they accuse the university of racial discrimination.12 A group of Chinese tourists threw a tantrum after being denied entry to a hotel in Sweden because they were allegedly checking-in on a wrong date, but the Chinese embassy responded by accusing the Swedish police of human right abuse.13 Things like these force us to ponder how this behaviour and mentality come about. Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature, of bellum omnium contra omnes, becomes a real possibility, not because of the absence of the state, but because of the very existence of the states as a Leviathan: a war of all against all not only in the form of people against each other, but also the state against its people, and one against the other among the ruling class within the state. What Hegel says here sounds like the diagnosis of the present-day China and the future of Hong Kong. “Particularity by itself, given free rein in every direction to satisfy its needs, accidental caprices, and subjective desires, destroys itself and its substantive concept in this process of gratification. At the same time, the satisfaction of need, necessary and accidental alike, is accidental because it breeds new desires without end, is in thoroughgoing dependence on caprice and external 12  “Racism row: British university apologises to Chinese students for exam cheating warning”, South China Morning Post (16 Jan, 2019); “When US universities stop admitting subpar Chinese students, the cheating will end too”, South China Morning Post, (18 Mar, 2019). 13  “Why Sweden and China have fallen out so badly”, BBC News, (26 September 2018).

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accident, and is held in check by the power of universality. In these contrasts and their complexity, civil society affords a spectacle of extravagance and want as well as of the physical and ethical degeneration common to them both”.14 His point is that personal desire and state power are two extremes of spurious infinity (schlechte Unendlichkeit): infinite desire, infinite power. The interesting thing is that in the present-day China, these two extremes become close allies: the state can freely and arbitrarily infringe citizens’ right as long as it can satisfy their material desire. Between these extremes, there is a vacuum left by the civil society.

Post-totalitarianism Hong Kong certainly is not (or not yet) a totalitarian state, but the irony is, while it is often hailed as a free society and the freest economy in the world, it is at the same time under the sovereignty of the largest remaining totalitarian state. We can borrow Vaclav Havel’s term “post-­totalitarianism” for describing China and its relation with Hong Kong. In one sense, China is no longer a totalitarian state in perpetual movement as in Mao’s time. Moreover, though China may want to control Hong Kong and thereby destroy its civil society in the process, it cannot directly apply the state machinery to achieve this purpose as it can do in the mainland. Yet China remains to be a perpetuum mobile in some sense. While its only remaining ideological appeal is nationalism, it is in constant search for its enemies, first anti-Japanese, then anti-American, anti-Korean, anti-Swedish, Italian, Taiwan and even anti-Hong Kong during the huge protest there in 2019. It always feels insulted, and its people’s feelings are always hurt by the slightest gesture, not because it has a very fragile “heart of glass” (玻璃 心), but because this perpetuum mobile is at work. Havel’s description of such a post-totalitarian state is relevant for China: “The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class;…. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no

 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 185.

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one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing”.15 Therefore, the method Chinese totalitarianism in Hong Kong is by using nationalism as an excuse, and subverting and confounding truth with lies—beautiful and ugly, right and wrong. The final purpose is to take back the power of defining these categories in its own hand. In the process, it will destroy the credibility of the civil society in Hong Kong, for the latter lives on its autonomous faculty in telling what is beautiful and ugly, truth and lie, right and wrong. It sets up camouflage organizations to counter-­ balance the truly independent ones, making it difficult for ordinary people to tell which is real and which is only a shadow. All these will eventually breed cynicism and political apathy, which, according to Arendt, is an ideal ally of totalitarianism.16 The challenge we are facing now is, therefore, how to sustain the passion for civil society and not fall prey to cynicism.

Civil Society as a Work of Art Finally, if we follow Nietzsche’s line of argument, the reconstruction of a civil society as bulwark against the totalitarian state should be based on some sort of “transvaluation of values”. The key hinges of on the idea of common good, the very foundation of any civil society. Generally, civil society in modern understanding is often seen as a counterpart to the state or government. However, Aristotle’s understanding of polis comprising of “zoon politikon” does separate the state from civil society, whether it is the family or the government. They are all part of the country, city-state and community of life. It is in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that the two are juxtaposed with each other. According to Hegel, the difference between civil society and the state lies in that people in the civil society speak about morality, conscience and care, or what we can say “with heart”. The government, on the other 15  Havel, Václav. The Power of the Powerless in Open Letters: Selected Writings: 1965–1990, tr. Paul Wilson. (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 131. 16  “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world  – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed”. Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 382–385.

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hand, is maintained by ethics (Sittlichkeit) and rationalized laws. The former involves the conscience of the heart, while the latter can be operated like a machine without involving many emotions. Therefore, the former is often a voluntary organization with free entry and exit, while the latter is bound to involve power and coercion (Zwang) so that people cannot choose their own country or withdraw from it. Aristotle, consistent with his moral philosophy, argues that people come together to build a community of political life for the good. Applying this argument to civil society, it means that people gather together to form civil society not just for personal profits as private companies do, but a for common good. For citizens should gather together in order to promote certain “good”, or arete, meaning not just morally good, but excellence of things. This “good” is not opposed to evil, but to bad, so it will not be contaminated by negative emotions such as jealousy, hatred or ressentiment. Its method of valuation should not be reactionary, not raising up himself by means of lowering the others as slave morality does by overturning values, turning arete into evil. Instead of creating a new standard of constant value, such a citizen is active and creates positive real value by fostering common good, whether it is health, artistic excellence, profession conduct or the like. Therefore, civil society should be made up of people “with heart”, that is, people who actively gather together for the common good. This common good does not necessarily refer to charity or philanthropism, but may also include religious groups or professional groups, the purpose of which is to maintain professional codes and win the trust of the public. Although it may ultimately be for their own benefit, at least the public interest is in the priority. They seem to be interested only in their narrowly defined group interest, but actually, by means of promoting this “good”, they are contributing to the bigger “common good”. When there is a conflict between public interest and private interest, these professional groups must stand up and preach justice for the public interest and condemn anyone who pursues merely private interests. The same goes for groups such as art companies, sports associations, astronomical societies and chess clubs or even political parties, which put forward their political ideology and platforms eventually aiming at certain “good” for the state at large. Therefore, civil society can be perceived as a work of art. While the state is a machine, the civil society is a group of organisms which are like plants in a garden growing naturally without artificial intervention from the state

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and its abstract, “heartless” laws and rationality. Unlike business organizations which compete for profit and survival, nor government agencies which have clear hierarchical and subordinate relationships, empowered by higher authority and law, these organizations should promote and foster each other like a symbiosis. They are not created top-­down from one to more, and have no subordinate relationship with each other, but grow independently. Although they sometimes compete with each other, they must put priority on the overall interest of the society at large. If public confidence in a particular profession drops, everyone in the entire profession will suffer. They should denounce the “black sheep” in the profession, because everyone understands that the goodness of the individual is equal to the goodness of the public. This idea concurs with the ideal of the aesthetic state in humanistic tradition since Kant and Schiller, namely freedom and self-discipline at the same time. Freedom lies in that citizens will strive, invent, create and share, while self-discipline is that they will not copy, plagiarize, steal and cheat. In such societies, people help and support each other in a way that sympathy, which Nietzsche criticizes as an expression of slave morality, can become a positive value as long as it helps to enhance the ability and value of the weak, but not to even out the strength of the strong.

References Arendt, H. (1968). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt. Havel, V. (1992). The Power of the Powerless in Open Letters: Selected Writings: 1965–1990 (P. Wilson, Trans.). Vintage. Hegel, G. W. F. (1970). Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaft. In Hegel: Werke in 20 Bänden, band 10. Suhrkamp. Hegel, G. W. F. (2005). Philosophy of Right, §158 (S.W. Dyde, Trans.). Dover. Marx, K. (1990). Critique of Gotha Programme. In D. McLellan (Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (pp. 564–565). Oxford University Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1990). The Communist Manifesto (1848), Part II: “Proletarians and Communists”. In D.  McLellan (Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (pp. 221–247). Oxford University Press. Nechayev, S.  Catechism of a Revolutionary. Marxist Internet Archive. https:// www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/nechayev/catechism.htm Nietzsche, F. (1967). Nachlaß 1885–1887, Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) 12, 9 [35], (27) (G. Colli and M. Montinari, Ed.). de Gruyter.

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Racism Row: British University Apologises to Chinese Students for Exam Cheating Warning. South China Morning Post (2019, January 16). When US Universities Stop Admitting Subpar Chinese Students, the Cheating Will End Too. South China Morning Post (2019, March 18). Why Sweden and China have Fallen Out So Badly. BBC News (2018, September 26).

Correction to: Introduction: Politics, Humanity, Power and Justice Richard A. Cohen

Correction to: Chapter 1 in: R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_1 In chapter 1, page 9, line 12, the name of author was inadvertently mentioned as Wong instead of cheung. The correction chapter and the book have been updated with the change.

The updated version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­75957-­5_1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_10

C1

Index1

A Ability, 115, 116 Affectivity, 114, 117, 124, 129 Agamben, Giorgio, 142, 143 Alienness/alienation, 40–42, 46–48, 48n7, 50 Alterity, 2, 12, 13 American Revolution, 183 Annan, Kofi Atta, 89–91 Anti-semitism, 68 Appadurai, Arjun, 130 Arab Spring, 136 Arendt, Hannah, 69, 95, 96, 148, 149, 223, 224, 228, 232 Aristotle, 156, 158n6, 169, 172, 174, 182, 226, 227, 232, 233 Assimilation, 25, 32, 40, 48 Asylum, 136, 136n1, 136n2, 137, 140, 142, 146, 147 Asymmetrical wars, 83 Authoritarianism, 166, 168, 169, 183n40, 192

B Balkan Route, 146 Beck, Ulrich, 82–84, 94, 97n13, 100–102 Belonging, 145, 146 Benedikter, Roland, 135, 136, 136n1 Benevolence, 125, 127, 128 Benhabib, Seyla, 83, 95–98, 106, 106n24, 148 Bergson, Henri, 154, 159, 164, 165, 172, 173 Blair, Tony, 85–87 Body, 114–118, 122, 128, 130 Bohman, James, 96, 96n10, 104, 105 Bolshevik, 54, 55 Borders, 82, 84–86, 88, 94, 96, 106, 146, 147 Boundaries, 25, 26, 30, 31, 34, 43, 45, 49, 50 Budd, Billy, 70, 71, 72n33, 73, 74

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Politics of Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5

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INDEX

C Capitalism/capitalist economy, 157, 161–163, 171, 181–183, 185–187, 189, 196, 201, 204–206, 210 Category mistake, 16 Chandler, David, 102, 103 Christianity, 55, 67 Citizenship, 25–27, 29, 34, 35, 44 Claggart, John, 71–74, 72n33 Common good, 162, 162n8, 171, 179, 180, 188 Communitarianism.211 Community, 25, 27, 31, 35, 36, 40, 41, 44, 46, 47, 114, 116, 123–125, 127, 129, 130, 201, 207, 211–214, 211n1, 219 Confucius, 65, 67, 113–130, 226 Connection, 116, 117, 129, 130 Cosmopolitan, 54, 57, 58, 60, 65–71, 74–76, 78 Cosmopolitanism, 81, 94, 95, 98, 102, 104, 105 Cosmopolitanization, 81–106 Cosmopolitan right, 23–50 Crimes against humanity, 83, 93, 94 Crimes of solidarity, 148 Crisis, 3–6, 157n3, 161, 183 migrant crisis, 135, 137, 143–149 refugee crisis, 135, 137, 139, 139n10, 140, 144, 145 Cultivation, 126 D De Genova, Nicholas, 140, 142, 144, 144n12, 145 Decision/indecision, 135, 137, 140–143 Democide, 83 Democracy, 154, 156, 157, 157n3, 162, 168–171, 168n19, 178–192, 205, 206 Deregulation, 202, 204–210 Deterritorialization, 82

Diez, Georg, 144, 145 Difference, 32, 38, 40, 42, 46, 47, 49 Disability, 115 Disparities, 4, 6 Dublin Convention, 136, 136n2 Durkheim, Emile, 117–119, 121 Duties, 29–31, 34, 35, 43, 44, 49 E Ecology, 4 Economic exchange, 39, 201–204, 210, 218, 219 Enemy, 26, 29, 36, 41, 42, 49 Epicurean, 59 Equivalence, 46, 215, 216 Ethics, 23–50, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167–170, 174 Ethnic cleansing, 83, 93 European Community, 207 European Union, 135, 137n3, 145 Exclusion, 26, 31, 39, 40, 50 Extraneousness, 26–33, 38–50 F Face, 120–124, 126, 129 Fairness, 15 Fascism, 153–198 Flesh, 122, 125 Foreigner, 23–31, 36–39, 42, 48, 50 Fragile, 114, 116, 126 Free trade, 202, 218 French Revolution, 183 Friendship, 32, 49 Fundamentalism, 202 G Garelli, Glenda, 144n12 Generalized other, 96, 96n10, 104 Generosity, 12, 14, 15, 18 Genocide, 83, 87, 93, 94 Global, 2

 INDEX 

Global humanitarian regime, 100 Globalization, 54, 57, 58, 60, 75, 76, 81–106, 204, 205, 207, 215, 218 Global market, 50 Global politics, 82, 85, 89, 93, 94, 97, 106 Global society, 81, 96–98, 100, 102 Goodness, 6–8, 10, 12, 15, 18, 56, 60, 70–78 Governance, 207–210 Gramsci, Antonio, 63–67, 78 Green, T. H., 162, 187, 188 Guest, 29, 30, 32, 33, 42, 43, 45, 50 Gulf War, 85 H Habermas, Jürgen, 97, 98, 104 Havel, Vaclac, 87, 87n3, 88, 231 Hegel, G.W.F., 154, 158, 164, 165, 223, 226–228, 230, 232 Hegemony, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 114, 117, 159, 160, 173 Heine, Heinrich, 67–69, 78 Hineni, 57 Hitler, Adolf, 224 Hitler, Adolph, 170, 171, 190, 191, 194, 194n48 Hobbes, Thomas, 113, 114, 162, 170, 176, 230 Homologation, 39, 43, 49 Hong Kong, 221–234 Hospitality, 23–50, 123, 124, 126, 130 Hostility, 32, 34, 41–43, 49 Human, 24, 26, 30, 37, 38, 45 Humanitarian intervention, 83–85, 88–91, 94, 100, 101, 104, 104n23 Humanitarian turn, 81–106

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Humanity, 82–84, 87, 87n3, 90, 93, 94, 96, 100, 104, 105 Humanness, 96 Human rights, 2, 8, 9, 16, 17, 83, 84, 86–93, 87n3, 95n9, 96–99, 99n15, 101, 102, 105 Husserl, Edmund, 154, 159, 160, 173 I Identity, 24–28, 31, 32, 35, 41, 44, 46–49, 144, 145, 145n13, 212, 215, 219 Ikonnikov, 54–56, 60, 70 Imperialist, 2 Inclusion, 26, 31, 39–41, 46, 48–50 Individual, 24, 30, 32, 38, 39, 46–48, 50, 206, 208, 211, 211n1, 212, 214, 217–219 Individualism, 211, 217 Intentionality, 120, 124 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), 91–93 International law, 25, 29, 30, 37, 38, 45n5 International migrations, 83 International order, 81–84, 90, 91, 93, 97, 98 J Justice, 119, 122, 127, 153–198 K Kant, Immanuel, 98, 163–166, 177, 185, 226, 234 Karolewski, Pawel Ireneusz, 135, 136, 136n1

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INDEX

Kasparek, Bernd, 136n2 Kindness, 14 Knowledge, 5, 9, 10, 12–14, 17, 18 Koselleck, Reinhart, 141, 142, 145 Kosovo Crisis, 85 Kouchner, Bernard, 85 L Labour, 208–210, 217, 218 Leader, 6–8, 16 Legal cosmopolitanism, 95, 98 Legal globalization, 205 Legal system, 207, 210 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 224 Levinas, Emmanuel, 113–130, 158–161, 167, 173–178, 197, 198 Lex mercatoria, 206 Liberal democracy, 157n3, 162, 178–189, 191 Liberalism, 153–198 Living together, 114, 116–119, 124, 127–130 Locke, John, 15, 18 Lukacs, Georg, 157n3, 187n41 Luxemburg, Rosa, 19 M Machiavelli, 60 Macpherson, 18, 162 Mannheim, Karl, 165, 198 Marcuse, Herbert, 59 Marginalization, 49 Markets, 201, 205, 207–209, 213–219 Marx, Karl, 154, 157, 158, 162, 164, 167, 187n41, 189, 223, 224, 228 Marxism, 64, 65 Mass man, 193, 194n47, 195, 196 Mattei, Ugo, 101 Mead, George H., 96n10

Melville, Herman, 56n3, 67, 69–75, 78 Mencius, 127, 128, 226 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 125 Me voici, 57 Migration, 23, 34, 39, 40, 49, 50 Millennium Report, 90 Modern politics, 142 Moral cosmopolitanism, 94, 95n8, 104, 105 Mortality, 124 Multi-ethnic societies, 40, 214 Mundane life, 114, 116 Mussolini, Benito, 170, 191, 194, 195n51 N Nader, Laura, 101 Nation, 206, 217, 218 National, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32, 38, 46, 50 Nationalism, 144 National sovereignty, 218 NATO, 85, 88, 88n5 Natural law, 30, 45 Nazi, 54, 55, 65, 68 Nechayev, Sergey, 224 Neighborhood, 118, 124, 126, 127, 130 Neo-liberalism, 183, 184, 188, 189, 210 New wars, 85 NGOs, 148 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 157n3, 169, 222, 223, 232, 234 Nihilism, 222–225 Normality/Exception, 142, 143n11 Nuclear war, 4, 7 O Obedience, 6, 12, 17 Obligation, 54, 56n2

 INDEX 

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Ontology, 58 Orbán, Viktor, 146, 147 Orphan, 121, 122, 124, 127 Ortega, Gasset, 196, 197 Other, 23–26, 28–35, 38–49 Otherness, 23, 28, 31–34, 40–43, 46–50

Rights, 145, 148, 149, 156, 157, 161, 162, 170, 178–180, 182–184, 189, 190, 193, 204–208, 210, 212, 213, 218 Right to have rights, 95, 96, 105, 148, 149 Rwanda civil war, 85

P Panizza, Francesco, 145n13 Paris Commune, 186 People/Elites, 136, 138, 139, 139n8, 144, 145, 145n13, 146, 147, 149 Pericles, 62, 63 Philosophy, 1, 2, 10, 11 Pluralist, 2 Pogge, Thomas, 94, 95 Polanyi, Karl, 162 Politics, 1–19 Populism, 192 antihumanitarian populism, 135–149 anti-immigrant populism, 146 reactionary populism, 144 Postmodern, 57, 58, 61 Prophecy, 164

S Schmitt, Carl, 102, 104, 170, 171, 193 Schütz, Alfred, 119, 120 Sensibility, 122, 123, 125, 128 Singularity, 57, 67, 69, 76 Social conflict, 208 Social democracy, 168, 168n19, 178–192 Social inclusion, 211–214, 211n1, 217, 218 Socialism, 153–198 Social relations, 202, 204, 211n1, 213–216, 219 Sociology, 202 Socrates, 76–78 Solidarity, 37, 48 Somalian Civil War, 85 Soros, Georg, 147 Sovereignty, 85–92, 98, 99, 103, 104, 104n23, 105, 106n24 Stalin, Joseph, 224 Stalinism, 55, 65 State, 201–208, 210–212, 214, 217–219 ‘Stop Soros Package,’ 147 Sympathy, 130

R Radicalism, 201, 202, 219 Radicalization, 216, 219 Rationalization, 202, 203, 215 Realpolitik, 161, 168–170 Reason, 28, 30, 33, 34, 36, 38, 43, 45 Reciprocity, 213–216 Respect, 3, 8, 12 Responsibility, 53, 54, 57–60, 66, 67, 74–76, 122, 124 Responsibility to protect, 88–94, 98, 100, 105, 106

T Tazzioli, Martina, 139n10, 140, 144, 144n12, 148 Temporality, 114, 126, 127, 129, 154, 155, 160, 166, 167, 173

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INDEX

Thucydides, 170 Time, 153–198 Totalitarian, 9, 13, 16 Totalitarianism, 221–234 Transcendence, 57, 59 Trotsky, Leon, 191 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, 93 Tyranny, tyrant, 163, 183

U UN Charter, 84, 86, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100 UN General Assembly, 89, 93 UN Security Council, 84, 99 Utilitarian, 58, 85 Utopia, utopian, 165, 177

V Vere, Captain, 71–74 Vocation, 54, 76 Vulnerability, 13, 113–130 W Wall, 143, 146 War crimes, 83, 93, 94 Weber, Max, 119, 120 Westphalian order, 103 Widow, 121, 122, 124, 127 Y Yugoslavian Civil War, 87 Z Zeno, 158, 159