Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics 9780300146660

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Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics

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TOTALITARIANISM AND THE

MODERN CONCEPTION OF POLITICS MICHAEL HALBERSTAM

Yale University Press

New Haven and London

Published with the assistance of the Ernst Cassirer Publications Fund. Copyright © 1999 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Caslon type by Tseng Information Systems, Durham, North Carolina. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Halberstam, Michael, 1963Totalitarianism and the modern conception of politics / Michael Halberstam. p. cm. "This book grew out of my dissertation work with Karsten Harries at Yale University"—Acknowledgments. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-300-07180-9 (alk. paper) i. Totalitarianism. I. Title. jC48o.H35 1999 32I.9-DC2I 99-34499 CIP A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. IQ 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my parents, Rachel Inge and Arthur Halberstam, and to Lou Brettschneider

To neglect the field of political thought because its unstable subject-matter, with its blurred edges, is not to be caught by fixed concepts, abstract models, and fine instruments suitable to logic or to linguistic analysis—to demand a unity of method in philosophy, and reject whatever the method cannot successfully manage—is merely to allow oneself to remain at the mercy of primitive and uncriticized political beliefs. It is only a very vulgar historical materialism that denies the power of ideas, and says that ideals are material interests in disguise. —Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty The fact that reconciliation is inherent in understanding has given rise to the popular misrepresentation tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. Yet forgiving has so little to do with understanding that it is neither its condition nor its consequence. Forgiving (certainly one of the greatest human capacities and perhaps the boldest of human actions insofar as it tries the seemingly impossible, to undo what has been done, and succeeds in making a new beginning where everything seemed to have come to an end) is a single action and culminates in a single act. Understanding is unending and therefore cannot produce final results. It is the specifically human way of being alive, for every single person needs to be reconciled to a world into which he was born a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness, he always remains a stranger. Understanding begins with birth and ends with death. To the extent that the rise of totalitarianism is the central event of our world, to understand totalitarianism is not to condone anything, but to reconcile ourselves to a world in which such things are possible at all. —Hannah Arendt, Understanding and Politics

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / ix Introduction /1

PART O N E Modern Emancipation and the Problem of Meaning CHAPTER I

Society as Artifact / 15 CHAPTER 2

Social Reconstruction and the Problem of Meaning / 27 CHAPTER 3 Liberalism versus Totalitarianism / 36

PART Two Questioning the Self-Understanding of Liberalism CHAPTER 4

Freedom, Common Sense, and the Limited Reach of Reason / 59 CHAPTER 5

The Indeterminacy of Kant's Rational Reason and the Intervention of Taste / 71 CHAPTER 6

Totalitarianism as the Liberal Nightmare / 113

vii

PART T H R E E Hannah Arendt on Modernity and the Experience of Totalitarianism CHAPTER 7 Modernity and the Loss of World /133 CHAPTER 8

Terrible Freedom /169 Conclusion / 204 Notes / 211 Index / 279

viii/Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book grows out of my dissertation work with Karsten Harries at Yale University. I have had the great privilege of working with him. His influence on this book is apparent on virtually every page. I wish to express my deep gratitude to Louis Dupré, to Michael Holquist, and to John E. Smith. Their influence has shaped my thinking tremendously. Seyla Benhabib and Tracy B. Strong were kind enough to take an interest in my work. They gave me valuable criticism and much-needed support during the past few years. My special thanks go to Meili Steele; this book has benefitted tremendously from our ongoing conversation. Elizabeth Brient and Ron Katwan have been two of my best readers. Brient's extensive comments on the manuscript, and especially on my reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment, prompted me to rewrite an entire portion of this book. My many conversations with Katwan helped shape the overall structure of my work. Daniel Halberstam, Igal Halfin, Jochen Hellbeck, and Peter Holquist read the original manuscript and provided me with invaluable comments. For extremely helpful comments and conversations I am grateful to Brad Bassler, Davis Baird, Fred Beiser, Kate Brown, Katerina Clarke, Dan Cook, Martin Donougho, Alessandro Ferrara, Joy Gordon, Jeremiah Hackett, Cara Hood, R. L G. Hughes, Hagi Kenaan, Vered Kenaan, Irad Kimhi, George Khushf, Rudolf Makkreel, Bob Mulvaney, Ed Munn, Erik Ringmar, Mick Skolnick, John Spackman, Chris Tollefsen, Victoria Vbytko, Jerry Wallulis, ix

and Marianne Ward. I ask for forgiveness from anyone whose name I may have left out. I would like to thank my colleagues in the Philosophy Department at the University of South Carolina for the many philosophical conversations I have had with each of them. I am grateful to the participants of the Political Theory Workshop at the University of South Carolina—Amittai Aviram, Roxanne Euben, Ashlie Lancaster, Alfred Nordmann, Dan Sabia, Keith Topper, Ed Wingenbach, and many others—for ongoing discussions and especially for their insightful comments on the last chapter of this book, which I presented in that forum. I want to express my appreciation to Otto Bohlmann, Eliza Childs, Chuck Grench, and others at Yale University Press for the gracious way in which they have advanced this project. Joan Spencer-Amado and Barabara Delaney at the University of South Carolina Philosophy Department deserve special thanks for their daily contributions to sustaining our research environment. Several people have contributed immeasurably to this book in very different ways: Jane Dorlester, Aron Halberstam, Mimi Halberstam, Anny Kantlehner, Dieter Kantlehner, Katrin Kantlehner, and Matthew H. Erdelyi. Portions of the first and second part of this book appeared as part of an article entitled "Totalitarianism as a Problem for the Modern Conception of Politics," in Political Theory 26, no. 4 (August 1998). I want to thank the Research and Productive Scholarship Program of the University of South Carolina for its generous financial support.

x/Acknowledgments

Introduction

In his classic work on totalitarianism, J. L. Talmon refers to a famous remark by Alexis de Tocqueville on a new and unprecedented species of oppression that arises with the democratic form of society. "I think . . . that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate; the thing itself is new and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it."1 Talmon takes Tocqueville's remarks as evidence for the astonishing prescience of this foremost theorist of modern democratic culture in predicting the cataclysmic events in twentieth-century European politics.2 Whether Tocqueville could have anticipated the forms of oppression the totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century would put into practice is a question I will leave aside here.3 What is significant is that Talmon relates the emergence of totalitarianism to the tradition of modern democratic thought. Talmon's thesis gives expression to a profound uneasiness about the modern ideal of political self-determination and emancipation. Instead of dismissing totalitarian movements as a resurgence of a barbarism associated with the past ages of religious warfare, Talmon traces their origins to the social, psychological, and intellectual foundations of modern democratic society. Moreover, by citing Tocqueville's analysis of American civil society as his inspira-

i

tion, Talmon implicates the very practice of democratic popular culture.4 Without defending Talmon's thesis as such, I suggest that totalitarianism haunts the modern ideal of political emancipation. The idea of totalitarianism conjures up the image of the sorcerer's apprentice, of social and political forces spinning out of control, of a world gone awry just when it was thought that humanity had made great strides toward political maturity and intellectual independence, had begun finally to liberate itself from the idols of the past and was ready to assume responsibility for its own destiny.5 It is arguable that totalitarian movements arose in connection with an unprecedented popular political emancipation. The Weimar Republic, which deteriorated into the Third Reich, represented the first genuinely pluralistic political system in German history. And in Russia, the Bolshevik takeover followed on the heels of the liberation of the Russian people from the feudal domination of the czarist regime and the establishment of the liberal Provisional Government that shared power for a few brief months with councils composed of worker and soldier deputies.6 But I do not merely want to establish a historical connection between totalitarianism on one hand and the development of modern emancipation and democratic selfdetermination on the other. The logic of totalitarianism, I want to argue, is related to the logic of the modern ideal of emancipation. In spite of the frequent rejection of the simply negative thesis that "totalitarianism is what democracy is not" by postwar theorists of democracy,71 maintain that the idea of totalitarianism provides postwar liberal democratic thought with its most significant antithesis. "Since the term totalitarian came into existence in 1923," the author of a recent study points out, "it has helped focus public debate in Germany, England, France, 2 /Introduction

and the United States on the most central political issues of the century."8 Totalitarianism, taken as a concept of liberal consciousness, provides the latter with its other. According to G. W. F. Hegel, a form of self-consciousness is not something that is self-contained, but rather defines itself in relation to an other. To understand a form of self-consciousness is therefore to understand it in relation to its other. Consciously adopting a somewhat qualified Hegelian method in the development of the idea of totalitarianism and the problematic it harbors, I intend to show that neither liberalism nor totalitarianism can be understood without the other. This has been clearly grasped by European Marxist critics and other contemporary critics of American liberal democratic theory, who have sought, in the true sense of the word, to deconstruct the idea of totalitarianism and thereby to call into question one of the contemporary foundations of liberal democratic self-understanding.9 Similarly, the totalitarian conception of the state was recognized by its earliest critics to depend on a conception of the liberal state in opposition to which it defined its own aspirations.10 In other words, to take totalitarianism seriously is to take liberal democratic thought seriously.11 The idea of totalitarian politics plays a constant but theoretically unarticulated role in contemporary discussions of politics and society. It marks a poorly articulated limit in political and social thought. This relation has not been clearly spelled out, partly, I think, because the philosophical issues raised by the idea of totalitarianism have been left aside or deliberately purged from its conceptual treatments as the theory of totalitarianism was developed in a descriptive manner by American political science12 and appropriated as a partisan battle cry by cold war politics.13 To agree to the charge that the term totalitarianism has, for both of these reasons, become devoid of intelligible content altogether is to submit uncritically to a simIntroduction/3

plistic conventionalism.14 While meaning may be defined by use, it is also frequently obscured by use. Even die-hard nominalists have to concede as much if they want to maintain that there are usages that are, in fact, meaningless. It is, in other words, the idea of totalitarianism in which I am interested and not the word itself. Moreover, the failure of the idea of totalitarianism as a descriptive tool in political science by itself does not call the meaning of the term into question. It is rather the case that the very nature of this failure provides us with a clue to the real significance of the idea of totalitarianism. Empirically oriented social science takes a descriptive approach to the forms of human sociability. Society is thereby made into an object of investigation and studied from the outside, so to speak. Such a scientific approach thus places a "sovereign distance between the subject and the social."15 It presupposes that society can be studied apart from the self-understanding by which it is constituted, or conversely that the self-understanding of a society— that is, its "ideology"—can become an object of descriptive investigation like any other set of empirical circumstances.16 In an important sense, this approach effaces the relation between the subject and the social. The question of the relation between the self-understanding of the member of society and the forms of social life which he or she inhabits, as a relation of meaning, is simply bracketed, because it is a correlation that cannot be established scientifically with any degree of reliability.17 Although the empirical approach of social science has an explanatory power of its own that I do not intend to call into question, the very limitations of its approach are exemplified by its treatment of the idea of totalitarianism. It is precisely toward the establishment of a meaningful relation between the subject and the world to which historical totalitarian movements have addressed themselves. And it is just such a concern with the 4 /Introduction

meaning of liberal democracy itself that the idea of totalitarianism raises for the liberal democratic consciousness.18 The idea of totalitarianism as a marker for delimiting the boundaries of acceptable social organization, as defining the very manner in which liberal democracy conceives of the political, has to be understood as itself posited by a political consciousness that seeks to define its own location in history, its standards for judging what is right, and what is the right way of judging. The thesis of this book is that the idea of totalitarianism is intricately related to the self-understanding of liberalism and the Enlightenment conception of emancipation from which liberalism has emerged as its major representative in the twentieth century. The idea of totalitarianism, as I hope to show, harbors within itself fundamental problems inherent in the modern Enlightenment tradition and,, by implication, in the liberal idea of politics. It is the purpose of this work to examine the philosophical questions that the idea raises for the liberal conception of the political community; the conception of the individual on which the liberal conception of politics depends; and the modern conception of a historically grounded, or rather historically conditioned political judgment, which liberalism both endorses and repudiates. In my treatment of the idea of totalitarianism I distinguish between two significantly different approaches. The first approach, the liberal one, views totalitarianism as its own antithesis.19 According to this view, (i) Totalitarianism is rule by force not by consent. Totalitarianism eradicates political freedom, democratic process, and legality as such, by setting up the daily pronouncements of the ruler and of the party as an omnipotent force with unchecked powers to exercise control over the institutions of the state as well as all other social institutions. (2) Totalitarianism violates the freedom of conscience. Totalitarianism forcibly disseminates an ideology that is total and Introduction/5

claims to be authoritative for all areas of individual consciousness. (3) Totalitarianism violates the boundaries between the public and the private spheres by politicizing all areas of the life of the community, including those that, according to liberalism, are relegated to the private sphere and regarded as the domain of individual freedom of choice. (4) Totalitarian rule is both irrational rule and overly rational rule. Irrational in the sense that it appeals to quasi-religious sentiment to rouse mass support for policies contrary to the considered interests of individuals as well as to the interests of the community as a whole. Rational in the sense of both the scientific methods of propaganda and population control it deploys in its efforts to maintain power and the logicality and internal coherence of its doctrines. The second theoretical approach to totalitarianism views totalitarianism as an outgrowth of modernity. I take Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism as well as her critique of modernity advanced in The Human Condition as paradigmatic for this kind of a position.20 It regards totalitarianism as the culmination of a crisis of modernity. A simple reassertion of the Enlightenment project therefore cannot address the threat of totalitarianism because totalitarianism arises, if not as a direct product, then at least in response to this tradition itself, (i) Totalitarianism is the consequence of a "loss of world" occasioned by the critical project of emancipation, by the modern rationalization and instrumentalization of culture and society, by the democratic massification of society, by the modern secularization of life, or what have you. (There are different versions of this theory of loss of world that place the burden on different failings of modernity, namely, religious, political, ontological, scientific, and so on.)21 (2) This loss of world leaves human beings without a meaningful world picture or worldview, and therefore without an identity or place of belonging. (3) Totalitarian movements, in reaction to this 6 / Introduction

loss of world, seek to restore meaning to the world artificially, or at least they appear to have this aim. They claim to do so by way of providing a new shared experience as well as constructing a new shared consciousness in support of these new social forms. (4) The tremendous mord failure of totalitarian movements raises a dilemma. On one hand the modern loss of world threatens to provoke a totalitarian response on the part of the alienated, on the other hand meaning cannot be restored without reneging on the modern commitment to the freedom and self-determination of the individual in the private sphere and in matters of conscience. The predicament that arises out of this historical condition for a postmodern politics is how to restore a sense of value, spirituality, or meaningfulness to the world without succumbing to totalitarian tendencies.22 The second approach to the idea of totalitarianism takes a phenomenological perspective by placing at the center of its concern the way in which the person stands in a meaningful relation to the world as it appears to him or her in everyday experience.23 The idea is here taken seriously that politics cannot be reduced to a mechanism for regulating economic affairs, for addressing the practical problems of a just distribution of income, or for preventing the exploitation of the weak by the strong. The concrete historical community and its practices are understood as constituting the identity of the particular human subject from which the individual cannot extricate herself in any comprehensive sense, or from which it is not desirable that the individual extricate herself, because such an abstraction would bring about a comprehensive loss of world. Moreover, the world, as a cosmos or order in which things and persons have their proper place, is also not thought of as given independently of the life of the particular historical community. The political community is here viewed as a human, or historical, artifact that supports and is in turn supported by a world Introduction / 7

picture. Because the life of the community serves a reality or world integrating function, politics is to create or to maintain the community as an embodiment of shared meanings, as a bearer of culture. In contemporary philosophy this kind of an approach to politics (but not necessarily the critique of totalitarianism that I have traced back to this position) is frequently associated with the term communitarianism2* A paradigmatic formulation of this conception of politics, however, is already to be found in the pro to-Romantic work of Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man.25 In a critique of the single-mindedness of the Enlightenment project of emancipation Schiller argues that the temporal, particular forms of life have to be recognized as the aesthetic ground, or common sense of value, that every community requires for its continued existence.26 Moreover, the aesthetic dimension is privileged as the only possible foundation for a state that aspires toward genuine human freedom and the full self-development and self-expression of its human subjects.27 Schiller's (and the Romantics') turn toward the aesthetic dimension is intended as a critique of the attempt to place the political community on purely formal, universal, or rational foundations.28 Aesthetic judgment is capable of making distinctions and establishing similarities where reason, in its widest sense, fails us. Taste operates within the field of possibility. The differences and similarities it discovers or establishes are not necessary ones, but are nevertheless substantial. The aesthetic experience is a complex experience of value, which discloses the world and, upon reflection, our selves to us in a mode that is fundamentally different from the rational. Moreover, it does not merely apprehend passively but draws the things and persons encountered in experience together into a world that depends for its unity on an essentially human,

8 / Introduction

world-immanent, nontranscendent, and therefore historical act of synthesis.29 This act of synthesis is represented, and according to Schiller, can only be represented, in the form of an aesthetic ideal.30 In this work I propose to take seriously what I call the aesthetic approach to politics as a modern alternative to the liberal conception of the individual, of the community, and most important, of the ground of political judgment. Although I take it that those who seek to hark back to the significance of an Aristotelian conception of phronesis in contemporary political thought are essentially interested in bringing to the fore the same kinds of problems I intend to develop, the return to an aesthetic approach, rather than to an Aristotelian approach to politics based on a conception of phronesis?1 is crucial for an understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics. The Aristotelian conception of politics lacks several fundamental categories of the modern self-understanding: the modern idea of the self-defining subject32 and the modern idea of history,33 to name just two of the most obvious deficiencies of Aristotelian philosophy. In this sense a revival of the Aristotelian conception of phronesis cannot address the problem of modern politics or give us a deeper appreciation of its complexities.34 The danger of such an approach to politics is evident. It legitimates a reaction to the Enlightenment that has been widely perceived as the forerunner of totalitarian politics.35 From the point of view of liberalism, its particularism and irrationalism would seem to do away with any universal conception of right or culturally independent perspective from which to assess the merits of a given political regime. Its holistic bias extends the political realm to include the whole person under its jurisdiction.36 And instead of basing the organization of society

Introduction/9

on the consent of its individual members, it would seem to prescribe concrete ends to individuals couched in the form of aesthetic ideals, which are placed beyond the reach of reason. I cannot hope to address these objections in the space of this introduction. And yet, precisely because of its commitments, the aesthetic approach to politics provides us with a perspective that the liberal conception of totalitarianism cannot accommodate. The liberal view of totalitarianism does not consider the aspirations of totalitarian movements themselves but describes them from the outside. The aesthetic approach, however, takes seriously the problem of the loss of shared understandings, specifically in answer to a perceived failure of liberalism in this respect. It therefore sensitizes us to the nature of totalitarian politics and brings into view the threat that this conception of politics harbors for modern politics. In developing an understanding of totalitarianism from the point of view of an aesthetic approach to politics, I rely heavily on Hannah Arendt's analysis of totalitarian movements. Although this may strike the historian as objectionable—because of the mixed reception of Arendt's views in that field—there are several good reasons for placing an emphasis on Arendt's treatment of totalitarianism. Arendt's theory of totalitarianism is not satisfied with a descriptive approach to totalitarian regimes. Her interest is rather in the "origins" of totalitarianism within the modern Western tradition. Arendt also relates her critique of totalitarianism to a development of the conception of the political. According to Arendt, philosophers have not sufficiently recognized the significance of the political in the constitution of shared understandings. And totalitarianism represents the culmination of a modern historical trend toward the elimination of the political. Moreover, Arendt's political philosophy, until recently largely disregarded in American philosophy and frequently derided by historians, has been seminal io /Introduction

for the European interpretation of totalitarianism, especially for the French philosophical tradition. This work benefits from the development of Arendt's ideas by French and other European thinkers, but it does not represent a study of these thinkers or a study of the development of Arendt's thought in that tradition. It is intended to develop and reconstruct some of the central philosophical insights that Arendt's work shares with them. In my own philosophical development of the aesthetic approach to politics I move beyond Arendt's attempt to defend systematically her own approach in her notes on the political implications of Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment.37 This work can therefore be read in several different ways: as an attempt to understand the significance of the idea of totalitarianism for the liberal and, more generally, the modern conception of the political; as a reading of totalitarianism itself; and as a work that sets Hannah Arendt's political philosophy into the context of a neglected, but resurgent, modern tradition of thought that seeks to provide an alternative to the narrow liberal conception of the political and makes sense of much that has been misunderstood in the work of this, until very recently, academically marginalized yet extraordinarily influential political thinker. In this book I shall therefore examine the constitution of the political. My premise is that the idea of totalitarianism significantly contributes to the postmodern conception of the political. In other words, totalitarianism is not merely a form of political organization to be described empirically and added to the list of different types of government.38 The idea of totalitarianism represents a limit to the political as such.39 It therefore brings into view the conditions of possibility for the modern political.

Introduction /n

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PART ONE MODERN EMANCIPATION AND THE PROBLEM OF M E A N I N G

In that dark night which shrouds from our eyes the most remote antiquity y a light appears which cannot lead us astray; I speak of this incontestable truth: the social world is certainly the work of men; and it follows that one can and should find its principles in the modifications of the human intelligence itself. — Giambattista Vico, The New Science

I

Society as Artifact SOCIETY AS ARTIFACT AND THE MODERN ETHOS OF EMANCIPATION One of the central ideas of modern political and social thought is the idea that society is an artifact. From Hobbes to Marx, the idea of a man-made society is inseparable from the modern political tradition and its ethos of emancipation. Because of its radical departure from tradition in advancing the doctrine that the commonwealth is a product of human construction, Hobbes's Leviathan can be regarded as the founding document of modern politics and emancipation— despite its defense of absolutism.1 NATURE (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Hearty but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and ihejoynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONIS

WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Sovereignty is an Artificiall Souly as giving life and motion to the whole body.2 Liberal, socialist and communist doctrines of emancipation all begin with the notion that the present social order is neither established according to a divine plan nor given ahistorically in the natural order of things, but that it is subject to change and that such change is dependent on human action. Man is the measure for the organization of society. Society is for the sake of human, not divine ends. Social ends are human ends. And society does not have a telos that is independent of the goals and aspirations of its members. Society as artifact does not deny that man is a social animal, that it is necessary for human beings to live in a society. But it rejects the idea that the social order that is inherited is a necessary order.3 The modern ideal of emancipation, inspired by the Enlightenment, goes hand in hand with the notion of society as artifact.4 The possible freedom of the individual and the individual's potential for rational self-determination are the central presuppositions of the notion of emancipation. Neither can be exercised if those social and political structures that have subjected individuals to the arbitrary will of others to begin with are not open to reconstruction. The idea of emancipation implies that we are somehow constrained by conditions over which we are potentially able to assume control.5 Augustine's utterly nonpolitical plea, "God, deliver me of my necessities," provides the stark counterpoint to the modern self-assertion of man.6 Emancipation rejects the notion that the only relation individuals can assume with regard to society as a whole is i6/Modern Emancipation

one of passively suffering the station in life to which they are assigned.7 The question of human suffering and human aspirations is thus brought into the center of the political concern.8 The idea of emancipation has both a practical side and an intellectual side. It seeks to remove existing structures of political and social oppression. And it seeks to refashion our self-understanding for the sake of liberating ourselves from the ideological structures of oppression. Such emancipation thus involves the criticism and unmasking as illegitimate ideas that propagate existing power relations.9 By undermining false prejudices and confusions about human nature and the nature of human society, emancipation implies a movement not just toward freedom but also toward truth, It uncovers false preconceptions about the way in which things have to be while at the same time holding up the possibility of the way things could be. The idea of society as artifact has been advanced in conjunction with the idea of human emancipation as a sober departure from the mystifications of religion and the objectification of power structures masking as universal truths.10 The modern conception of society as artifact has also frequently been understood as an outgrowth of the epistemological revolution of the seventeenth century. The rise of a modern self-defining subject that aspires to take control of its own social relationships—rather than leaving these structures shaping its everyday existence to the authority of tradition— is related by many different schools of European thought to man's increasing confidence in his ability to manipulate and control the natural world.11 Their claim is that the rise and success of the New Science made Bacon's dream of the mastery and control of nature ever more compelling with its stricture to emancipate human thought from self-imposed idols that systematically cloud the mind's capacity to comprehend the natural world. The intellectual reorientation required by the Society as Artifact/17

New Science was part and parcel of a shift in the understanding of human subjectivity and its relation to the world.12 This shift is characterized by Charles Taylor as an "emancipation from meaning," which he regards as a corollary to the modern notion of the self-defining subject.13 "Full self-possession," Taylor argues, "requires that we free ourselves from the projections of meanings onto things, that we be able to draw back from the world, and concentrate purely on our own processes of observation and thought about things."14 It is this new notion of the self as the only ground of certainty that goes together with "a view of the world not as a locus of meanings, but rather of contingent, de facto correlations." Descartes's ego, which is grounded solely within its own conscious thought process and stands over and against the material world of extended, material substance, provides the paradigm for modern self-possession, as well as the epistemological foundation for the New Science. "Manipulability of the world," Taylor suggests, "confirms the new self-defining identity, as it were: the proper relation of man to a meaningful order is to put himself into tune with it; by contrast nothing sets the seal more clearly on the rejection of this vision than successfully treating the world as object of control."15 Put in a slightly different way, Louis Dupré, whose account of the passage to modernity places an emphasis on the prehistory of the New Science, understands the self-world relation emerging in the seventeenth century in terms of the expansion of human worldly possibility: "The actualization of a freedom conceived in this manner requires a certain indeterminacy of its external environment. A totally predefined and predictable universe severely restricts self-determination. The more open the universe, the more creative freedom is allowed to be. Giordano Bruno concluded that an infinite universe infinitely expanded the realm of human freedom."16 And Hannah Arendt develops much the same idea when she writes that iS/Modern Emancipation

"With Galileo already, certainly since Newton, the word 'universal' has begun to acquire a very specific meaning indeed; it means Valid beyond our solar system/ . . . Philosophically it seems that man's ability to take this cosmic, universal standpoint without changing his location is the clearest possible indication of his universal origin, as it were. It is as though we no longer needed theology to tell us that man is not, cannot possibly be, of this world even though he spends his life here."17 The modern approach to politics and to the ordering of society is regarded by both critics and defenders of modernity as an outgrowth of the shift in the conception of human subjectivity and its relation to the world that is attendant upon the rise of the scientific worldview.18 "The strange pathos of novelty, so characteristic of the modern age," writes Hannah Arendt, "needed almost two hundred years to leave the relative seclusion of scientific and philosophic thought and to reach the realm of politics. (In the words of Robespierre: 'Tout a changé dans Tordre physique; et tout doit changer dans Tordre moral et politique/)"19

TOTALITARIANISM AND THE RADICAL CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIETY The very idea of an artificial construction of society is also one of the central premises of totalitarianism. Totalitarian politics represent a radicalization of the aspiration to reconstruct society artificially. Buchheim states this view most succinctly: "Totalitarian rule . . . is the claim transformed into political action that the world and social life are changeable without limit."20 Other theorists describe the totalitarian project as one of "radical social engineering,"21 as a "transvaluation of all values,"22 as a politics of "social planning,"23 and so forth.24 "This element," writes Abbott Gleason in his recent history of Society as Artifact/19

the idea, "—the state's remaking of its citizens and their whole world—has remained central to the term's meaning until this day."25 The extreme social transformations pursued by totalitarian movements do not attempt a reactionary return to past social and political structures, nor a simple coup d'état, but express the aspiration toward a complete and unprecedented reconstruction of society. Moreover, totalitarian movements share in the belief—which is implicit in the ideal of emancipation—that the intellectual context legitimizing a particular social order can be determined by conscious construction as well. They take the idea of an intellectual reconstruction of the ideological basis of society to its extreme. Totalitarian movements propagate an ideology and produce it in the form of propaganda, with the intention of galvanizing the intellectual climate of public discourse to such an extent that all outside reference points disappear.26 Rousseau's penchant for totalitarianism, for example, is linked to statements like the one in the Social Contract that "everything which disrupts the social bond of unity is valueless."27 Accordingly, totalitarianism regimes are thought to view the human subject as fully inscribable by the ideas and practices that reflect their particular social organization. The threat of totalitarianism is understood as a fundamental threat to the autonomy and self-determination of the individual, to the capacity to "think for oneself," championed by the Enlightenment.28 In an article in The Listener published in June 1941, George Orwell gives expression to this picture: "Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extent unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realize that its control of thought is not only negative but positive. It not only forbids you to express—even to think—certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it 20 /Modern Emancipation

tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison. The totalitarian state tries, at any rate, to control the thoughts and emotions of its subjects at least as completely as it controls their actions."29 A question that presents itself in light of this relation between totalitarianism and the modern project of emancipation is whether the radicalizaron of social reconstruction is not somehow implicit within these modern commitments from the start? There appears to be a systematic tendency toward a radicalization of the demand for the artificial construction of society wherever the idea of emancipation is taken seriously. The commitment to extreme social transformation on the part of totalitarian movements is not an attempt at a reactionary return to past social and political structures, as already stated, but the aspiration toward a complete and unprecedented reconstruction of society. Sigmund Neumann describes the aim as institutionalizing revolution and calls totalitarianism a political movement of permanent revolution. For Neumann, "it is one of the major tenets of totalitarianism that man is manageable and that the whole problem of modern society thus boils down to a question of techniques and strategies for maintaining the 'human material/ "30 And in the preface to her seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism^ Hannah Arendt links the extreme political degradation of human beings in the early twentieth century to the belief in the limitless potential for an artificial creation of society: "It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives."31 Totalitarian movements are thought to adhere not just to the Society as Artifact/21

view that society is a human construction, but also to the belief that the ideological structures legitimizing a particular social order can be determined by conscious construction as well. Totalitarian regimes, for example, therefore reject the notion of z jus naturale in the traditional sense, that is, of a right which is independent of the positive laws of any given particular community.32 Reality is first of all accorded to the social group as the subject of transformation. Totalitarian movements refuse to recognize the individual underneath the group determinations. They view the individual as a subject fully inscribable by the ideas and practices that reflect the particular social organization. In order for us to call a movement totalitarian, it is not enough that it attempt to set up alternative political and social institutions thereby replacing the old order. Totalitarian movements are thought to aim at creating their own social reality and at reeducating the citizen, or rather the entire human being, to a consciousness that reflects the aspirations of the movement. They thus violate individual freedom of conscience or will, regarded by the Enlightenment as the defining characteristic of the human subject. It is this feature of totalitarian movements that Buchheim condemns when he remarks that "the particular criterion of totalitarian rule is the creeping rape of man by the perversion of his thoughts and his social life."33 In Me in Kampf, Adolf Hitler explicitly reveals these totalitarian presuppositions: "The man who is exposed to grave tribulations, as the first advocate of a new doctrine in his factory or workshop, needs that strengthening that lies in the conviction of being a member . . . in a great, comprehensive body. And he obtains an impression of this body for the first time in the mass demonstration. . . . [W]hen as a seeker he is swept away by three or four thousand others into the mighty effect of suggestive intoxication and enthusiasm, . . . then he himself has succumbed to the magic influence of what we 22/Modern Emancipation

designate mass suggestion."34 A totalitarian regime recognizes nothing outside of the space of intelligibility sanctioned by the political movement.35 In light of this relation between totalitarianism and the modern ethos of emancipation, it appears that the radicalization of social reconstruction poses a threat to the social and political conditions of individual self-expression and self-determination.36 Liberal politics, like socialism and communism, traditionally has sought to emancipate the individual from the constraints of an inherited culture and the power structures propagated by it. And liberalism has also rejected the ontological status accorded to values in traditional and religious societies by placing emancipation and equality at the heart of its political project. But liberalism has also explicitly recognized the radicalization of social reconstruction as a threat to individual self-determination and self-expression itself. Nevertheless, the demand for the radicalization of social reconstruction persists wherever the idea of emancipation is taken seriously. This is borne out by the persistent recurrence of this theme even in contemporary social and political theory. THE RADICALIZATION OF "SOCIETY AS ARTIFACT" IN CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT Roberto M. Unger's Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory serves as just one example of this disposition toward a radicalization of social reconstruction in contemporary thought. Linger introduces his work in critical social theory with a strong commitment to the idea of society as artifact. "Modern social thought," Unger writes, "was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order. This insight inspired the great secular doctrines of emancipation: liberalism, socialSociety as Artifact/23

ism, and communism."37 In order to understand the situation and task of modern social theory it is essential to appreciate the special and far-reaching implications of this idea. "In one way or another," Unger insists, "all these doctrines held out the promise of building a society in which we may be individually and collectively empowered to disengage our practical and passionate relations from rigid roles and hierarchies. If society is indeed ours to reinvent, we can carry forward the liberal and leftist aim of cleansing from our forms of practical collaboration or passionate attachment the taint of dependence and domination. We can advance the modernist goal of freeing subjective experience more fully from a prewritten and imposed script."38 According to Unger society as artifact has been shortchanged by the post-Enlightenment tradition. Even Marxism, the most radical modern proponent of this new vision, has tried to counterbalance this notion with a science of history, with a structure that is necessary and given rather than constructed.39 And the social sciences, instead of rejecting the objectification of false intellectual constraints on the possible reconstruction of society, have gone further in the direction of abandoning this ideal. They have turned social science into a positivist, empirical enterprise that takes the existing structures of society for granted and confers on them an added aspect of legitimacy and necessity by virtue of the presumed scientific nature of its findings.40 By radicalizing the idea of society as artifact, Unger hopes to give voice to a "greater ambition" that seeks to "make our societies more responsive to that within us which ultimately rejects these limited experiments in humanity and says that they are not enough."41 "No one," claims Unger, "has ever taken the idea of society as artifact to the hilt."42 Unger's politics of transformation therefore takes the idea of society as artifact very seriously and sees it as expressing in a fundamental way the modern ethos of emancipation. 24 /Modern Emancipation

Like many other theorists of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt brings totalitarian politics into a relation with the very ideas Unger would champion. Arendt understands the totalitarian "escape into fiction," its "inaccessibility to experience and argument," and finally its crimes against the background of its conviction that "everything is possible, if only one knows how to organize the masses for it."43 Her remarks are ominous precisely because we have the sense that it might after all not be so bad if everything were possible. If everything were possible in the domain of politics we would in fact, as Unger bids us to hope, be able to "affirm our transcendence over the confining and belittling worlds in which we find ourselves."44 Unger 's impatience with the "limited experiments of humanity" strikes a deep chord within us that is tied to that complex desire for a richer, fuller life of society that might be achieved by transcending our present condition within the world and taking charge of our social existence. This desire lies at the heart of the Enlightenment project. Enlightenment spells out the hope for a radical renewal that is too impatient to wait for the rearticulation of traditional models for guidance but strikes out self-confidently on its own. Is Unger riot fundamentally correct when he maintains that the dominant modern ethos, the ethos of the Enlightenment, is this hope for a progress of all of humanity that is self-fashioned, that does not depend on the gods but on human knowledge for the shaping of our destiny? Our understanding of totalitarianism is bound up with our understanding of the Enlightenment. And it depends, moreover, on the position we take regarding the Enlightenment project of emancipation. Unger argues that liberalism suppresses social change and any genuine movement toward emancipation. Liberalism fixes structures, stagnates, and decays. Liberals, in contract, would object that Unger's political position is a dangerous and potentially totalitarian one. Without pursuing Society as Artifact/25

Unger's arguments any further, I suggest that this opposition expresses a dilemma inherent in modern politics. Is liberalism not indeed thwarting human possibilities and reneging on the Enlightenment project of emancipation? Is the strong commitment to emancipation on the part of more radical reconstructionists not indeed always threatening to deteriorate into totalitarianism?

26/Modern Emancipation

2

Social Reconstruction and the Problem of Meaning

SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE METAPHORICS OF PRODUCTION As noted in chapter i, there is a tendency toward the radicalization of social reconstruction where the idea of emancipation is taken seriously. But how is this tendency inherent in the emancipatory project? In order to examine more closely what the idea of emancipation commits itself to by adhering to the view of society as artifact, I would like to bring out the implications of this model, using an Aristotelian framework and the basic experience ofpoesis, or making, upon which this framework relies, (i) The model of artificial creation implies a separation of the maker from that which is made. For example, when the craftsman makes a statue he is creating something that is outside himself. In Aristotle 's language, he is thereby imposing form onto matter. With this example, the matter is something that is independent of the human subject, and the final product—the statue—is an independent being. (2) The matter itself is not created by the artist or artisan but is given. It is appropriated by the artisan or rather appropriated in the actualization of the form. (3) The process is end-directed. It reaches its conclusion in the actualization of the idea of the thing. The process can be aborted or carried out in a haphazard and thus incomplete manner. But the idea of such a production is that a fulfillment or completion is reached in a final product.

27

When this model of artificial creation is transposed onto the organization of society several difficulties arise. I develop these in the following, in accordance with its three aspects outlined above. 1. For the proponent of emancipation, the reconstruction of that social space within which the human subject moves about cannot be seen as the creation of something that is separate or independent of the maker or makers. If it is true that social change has to go together with changes in the intelligible structures that accompany and sustain social structures, then it follows that structures are here changed which are themselves constitutive of those who are changing them. Although we are perhaps not accustomed to developing these implications from this point of view, they do accord with our general intuitions: there is a strong element of self-determination or self-fashioning implicit in the concept of human emancipation. One might refer to this as the problem of the mutually influential relationship between theory and practice. If the metaphor of the artifact is fully extended to our conception of the subject—as a cultural product, for example— then we are moving within a closed circle when we advocate the human construction of the social conditions of human existence. If the individual is infinitely malleable, constraints on the construction of society are thereby removed. If, in contrast, human nature is relatively stable, then either the project of emancipation stops short of reaching down and changing the individual subject's self-understanding, or the subject's selfunderstanding or consciousness is relatively independent of the subject's identity. Neither of these latter two possibilities following from the existence of a relatively stable human nature are in accord with the ideal of emancipation. 2. What is the "matter" of social organization? Society as a whole? Specific social institutions? Or human beings and their 28VModern Emancipation

behavior themselves? Moreover, in what: sense is this "matter" to be taken as a given? How malleable is society as a whole, how malleable are social institutions or individuals?1 If we follow Hobbes in regarding the human subject as the matter of social reconstruction,2 it is highly relevant what conception of matter we are working with. If the subject is thought of analogously to the atom, then a limit is thereby placed on the possibility of social reconstruction.3 Atoms—in the original sense of the word—are unchangeable and follow definite laws of motion. They are not reconstituted by any force acting from without. On this mechanistic model, subjects are simply moved around and brought into different mutual relationships. But they do not themselves change. Moreover they are not defined in relation to the social body as a whole, as parts that acquire meaning through their relation to this larger structure. What therefore changes, is the organization of society as a whole, not the consciousness of individuals that partake in this organization. This analysis accords with Hobbes 's own explicit avowals that "whosoever looketh into himself, and considereth what he doth, when he does think, opine, reason, hope,feare, &c, and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, and Passions of all other men, upon the like occasions."4 The limits within which society can be changed, are, on this view, circumscribed by the characteristic patterns of human behavior considered to be essentially pregiven. And yet, as mentioned above, the idea of emancipation demands not merely a transformation of social institutions and values, but also a corresponding change in the self-understanding of the individual subject. The idea of emancipation therefore would seem to involve the reconstruction of both the self and its social context. The power of the idea of emancipation stems from its explicit recognition of their interdependence. Emancipation implies a "coming into one's own," a liberation Social Reconstruction /2c

from "Unmündigkeityn the ability to speak for oneself, to be able to exercise one's judgment. Emancipation, as has already been said, promises a movement of the individual subject toward freedom and truth; simultaneously with the setting free of the self it therefore would also appear to require the formation of the self. In the view of the German Enlightenment, for example, the emancipation of the subject calls for education not just on a professional or practical level, but education in the sense of Bildung.5 Again, the question that arises in connection with this idea is to what extent the particular forms of human (social) life (or history) can, do, or ought to condition the human subject by conditioning the space of intelligibility within which it moves.6 One way of posing this question is in terms of the opposition between "nature" and "nurture"; another is in terms of the relation between theory and practice. If the project of emancipation therefore demands that the human subject, as the matter of social construction, be regarded as malleable and capable of taking on different forms, the scope of possible social change is drastically expanded. 3. The view of social change as a species of making suggests that social reconstruction is purposive and works toward some form of completion or fulfillment of the promise with which such reconstruction was undertaken. It therefore raises the demand for a relatively concrete idea of the shape of future society.7 Here we might distinguish between two kinds of makings, artistic and technical, that display two different kinds of purposiveness, immanent versus transcendent. On both models the artifact achieves a kind of completion with the actualization of the structure projected by the idea of the maker, but we cannot properly speak of a ideological purposiveness in the case of the work of art. Technical production pursues a transcendent purjo /Modern Emancipation

pose in the sense that the purpose of the artifact lies outside of the artifact itself. A saw, for example, is good for the activity of sawing and this is what determines whether or not a saw is a good saw. The rules for constructing a good saw are derived from this purpose external to the saw itself, that is, from the activity of sawing. With artistic production it is different. The purpose of a work of art is, according to an aesthetic approach, not definable in terms of an external purpose.8 According to Kant, the work of art has a "purposiveness without a purpose." The purpose of the work of art is also not commensurate with the intention of the artist. The work of art has an internal purposiveness, a completion that manifests itself in the unity and perfection of the work of art. If, on one hand, the social artifact is understood to serve no transcendent goals, no end apart from the life of the whole, this means that it is understood very much like a work of art. If, on the other hand, society is understood to serve a purpose or purposes that are not immanent to the life of society as such, then it is conceived along the lines of a technical product.9 Presumably, the view that the social order serves a technical purpose, for example, to safeguard individual rights or to provide for the greatest economic well-being for the least advantaged groups in society, would place greater constraints on the organization of society. Both paradigms are to be found within the modern tradition. Whereas Rousseau's idea of society is subject to different readings, his idea of the general will in the Social Contract is that of an end in itself which constitutes the social order. For Rousseau, "the City is a moral person" that derives its unity from its own will. Hobbes, in contrast, regards the state as a machine that is to serve the purpose of protecting the individual from the violence of his or her neighbors. Hobbes, of course, also regards the state as analogous to a person. Only he conceives of Social Reconstruction/'31

the human being as a machine and not as a self-determining being for the sake of this analogy with the state. In these several ways then, the metaphorics of society as artifact, taken in conjunction with the Enlightenment ideal of emancipation, seem to promote a radicalization of social reconstruction. To follow the combined logic of the two ideas is to conceive of a politics that advocates, and hence conceives as possible, the social construction of meaning and identities. The model of an artificial construction of the social conditions of human existence implies the possibility of a radical reconstruction of meanings and identities, as Unger has already suggested. It appears to unhinge all real and existing constraints on what is politically achievable. In order to avoid the troubling "totalitarian" features of this constellation of modern commitments, we seem to have to retreat from one or another of its aspects.

EMANCIPATION AND THE GAP OF MEANING The idea that our social life brings with it and is dependent upon a certain intellectual context inspires the idea of emancipation, but it also raises a challenge for that notion. As soon as it is recognized that emancipation involves an intellectual dimension, an engagement with the ideas attached to a particular form of social life, the problem of social reconstruction takes on a troubling dimension. When considered against the background of this problem of the mutual relation between theory and practice, the project of emancipation opens up an intellectual space, a space of meanings, which seeks to be filled or structured. i. What are the standards upon which we can legitimately base our judgments of emancipation? If social reconstruction demands the reconstruction of shared meanings and beliefs, as was recognized by the Enlightenment, then the question of the j2 /Modern Emancipation

Standards for such a reconstruction of meanings presents itself. If there is no natural or divine order with which we seek a realignment of our communal life, or some other standard apart from the prevailing conceptions of the current social order, then it would seem that the project of emancipation is akin to pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. The very idea of an artifact implies that something is brought into being in accordance with a human preconception, in accordance with an idea. This idea provides the model for the thing that is to be brought into existence. The artist or artisan can either depend on memory for the reconstruction of a thing according to a model of something that is real or has already been realized,10 or they can depend on the imagination for the presentation of a model that has no precedent in the world. The logic of the emancipatory project, its comprehensive "prejudice against prejudice," pushes it into the direction of the second option. If emancipation demands an intellectual reorientation as well, then it would seem that it cannot draw upon ideas from the past, which are heavily implicated in obfuscations of power relations and distortions of real social aspirations. And if the old standards are applied, and these old standards are part and parcel of the old order, then how can there be hope for genuine social change? The social reconstruction demanded by movements of emancipation would therefore have to find its measure in imagined communities.11 According to this analysis it appears justified to claim that social reconstruction (that subscribes to the idea of emancipation) always has the air of irreality about it. And it is this irreality that haunts the movement toward social emancipation. Built into the practice of social emancipation is therefore this fundamental uncertainty about the ground of judgment, which is not the case where social structures are taken as given. The demand that must arise out of this "negative dialectic" of social Social Reconstruction /jj

and intellectual change is the demand for a greater specification of the content or shape of the future social construction. 2. A related, but different problem that arises when considering the project of social reconstruction in light of the mutually influential relation between theory and practice is what structures are to take the place of the traditional meanings that are to be discharged? This is the question raised by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France^ by the British Empiricists, and by the German Romantics in reaction to the French Enlightenment's social revolution. (i) and (2) are related but not the same. One might insist on the untenability of a prevailing set of institutions without necessarily being able to provide a replacement. If such meanings are merely regarded as so much excess curtailing the individual's exercise of his freedom, then their disappearance will not be considered problematic. In his essay "What Is Enlightenment?" Kant, who greatly sympathized with the French Revolution, takes this kind of a position. "That the step to competence," he writes, "is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind . . . is seen to by those guardians who have so kindly assumed superintendence over them. After the guardians have first made their domestic cattle dumb and have made sure that these placid creatures will not dare take a single step without the harness of the cart to which they are tethered, the guardians then show them the danger which threatens if they try to go alone. Actually, however, this danger is not so great, for by falling a few times they would finally learn to walk alone."12 Louis Althusser's interpretation of Marxism, for example, follows this approach as well, that is, that structures have to fall and that the collapse of prevailing structures will release the potential of human subjects for selfexpression and self-objectification. Conversely one might hold that one is in possession of a stan34/Modern Emancipation

dard that can serve as the basis for social reconstruction, but that this standard nevertheless cannot replace traditional meanings in a comprehensive fashion. This, perhaps somewhat more complicated position, is the one taken by Friedrich Schiller in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man.13 Once we follow Schiller in distinguishing between an ideal according to which society is to be organized—for example, the ideal of equality or individual freedom—and the everyday structures of life that persist in their meaning-giving function independently of such an ideal, the difference between (i) and (2) becomes apparent. The problem of meaning is therefore not merely confined to the irreality of the new standard, but also to the uncertainty of how this standard will translate into the life of the everyday. Again, here too the demand will be raised for a greater specification of the content or shape of the future society.14 Liberal and totalitarian politics of social reconstruction address the question of this "gap of meaning" in different ways. In this respect one might make a beginning at distinguishing and delimiting the two in opposition to one another.

Social Reconstruction /jj

3

Liberalism versus Totalitarianism

THE LIBERAL REJECTION OF RADICAL SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION Liberalism understands itself as a form of social coexistence that privileges the freedom of individuals to pursue their own conception of the good. While liberalism therefore rejects the idea that the community as a whole shares an end or telos in the traditional sense, it does regard freedom and the right to self-determination of all the members of the community as the standard for the organization of society. In its approach to politics, liberalism is the heir of the Enlightenment.1 Liberalism thus sets forth its own ideal measure that it derives from a view of human nature, as an essentially non-other-determined one. Although the idealization of nature as a source of human standards pervades the Enlightenment climate of opinion,2 a simple identification of human nature with the concept of "nature" advanced by the New Science is too reductionistic and does not do justice to the self-conscious ambiguity with which the idea of nature was deployed in political discourse. The premise of the idea of a social or political contract—upon which the political revolution of the eighteenth century rested—is precisely that society is not necessary or given, that it is not a state of nature, but that human beings are themselves active in the construction of society and that, as Rousseau remarks, they thereby elevate themselves to an altogether different level of being.3 The classical liberal answer to the problem of the constitution of values for a particular historical community is that these 36

meanings are to arise out of civil society instead of being prescribed via the political process. Liberalism can be said to reject a politics of meaning that seeks to fill this gap with a particular religion or aesthetic in a comprehensive and unity-promoting fashion. Instead, liberalism advances a set of formal standards, a politics of procedure, that provides the framework for meaning construction by civil society. John Locke's statement on the purpose of government in his Second Treatise provides as good an example as any of the liberal procedural approach: Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it. But because no political society can be, nor subsist, without having in itself the power to preserve the property, and in order thereunto punish the offences of all those of that society: there, and there only, is political society, where every one of the members hath quitted this natural power, resigned it up into the hands of the community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for protection to the law established by it. And thus all private judgement of every particular member being excluded, the community comes to be umpire, by Liberalism versus Totalitarianism/37

settled standing rules; indifferent, and the same to all parties: And by men having authority from the community for the execution of those rules, decides all the differences that may happen between any members of that society concerning any matter of right, and punishes those offences which any member hath committed against the society with such penalties as the law has established; whereby it is easy to discern who are, and who are not, in political society together. Those who are united into one body, and have a common established law and judicature to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies between them and punish offenders, are in civil society one with another; but those who have no such common appeal, I mean on earth, are still in the state of nature.4 Locke's conception of government as a procedure for negotiating conflict leaves aside (or treats as an afterthought) the question of the cultural production of shared meanings. Liberalism accepts this Lockean model. It views the political community not in terms of an inherited tradition of norms and practices, but as a set of institutions that establish a procedure for the peaceful negotiation of differences. And in adopting this model liberalism goes much further than Locke in that it treats customs and values as essentially interchangeable preferences. They are not understood as "truths" constituting a world, but as forms of life that can be chosen. Liberalism is therefore said to be neutral with regard to different conceptions of the good. Different values, religions, traditions, and customs are considered as equal by the political community, as long as they do not conflict with the basic ground rules for the procedures that have been established to 38/Modern Emancipation

make negotiation between competing forms of life possible, and as long as they do not conflict with the law that has been established by these procedures.5 Liberalism understands itself in opposition to a politics of culture and value that seeks to ground the life of the community via the political process. More sophisticated versions of liberalism take this agnosticism about values as their epistemological foundation. Liberalism thus becomes more than merely a theory about the unviability or social impracticality of a constant competition between different belief systems in the political sphere, where such competition is left unregulated by institutional procedures. In its more sophisticated form liberalism is rather a political theory rooted both in the metaphysical principle of the possibility of (rational) individual self-determination and in the epistemological principle of the limits of reason's capacity to discern what the natural interests of individuals are. Totalitarianism, taken as a concept of the liberal understanding, provides the latter with its antithesis. Totalitarian rule eradicates human freedom in all its dimensions. It categorically denies its subjects their right to self-determination. It seeks the total, unconditional control of a disenfranchised population. The totalitarian society is ruled by force, not by consent. Totalitarianism eradicates political freedom, democratic process and legality as such, by setting up the daily pronouncements of the ruler and the party as an omnipotent: force with unchecked powers to exercise control over the institutions of the state. Totalitarianism is, however, not simply tyranny or autocratic government.6 It is not satisfied with consolidating its power over the state in order to rule by decree for the benefit of those in power. Totalitarian politics are ideological politics. With the help of the state and police apparatus, and of a state-controlled mass media (over which it exercises monopolistic control), the totalitarian rulership forcibly disseminates an ideological creed Liberalism versus Totalitarianism/39

that claims authority for human life in all of its dimensions. By its very nature it therefore does not recognize any distinction between the public and the private. Every aspect of a person's life is politicized under totalitarian rule, whether this be in the area of science, economic activity, or family relationships. Nothing is left outside of the scope of politics. Finally, totalitarianism goes so far as to abolish the most basic human freedom, the freedom of thought.7 According to the liberal view, the very nature of the totalitarian project is to establish total control over every individual, in order to impose its singleminded truth on the world. Totalitarianism has no regard for individual freedom whatsoever. Indeed, it can not even be said to properly recognize individual human beings.

TOTALITARIAN ASPIRATIONS AND THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM Totalitarian movements respond to the temptation to fill the gap of meaning that is opened up by the project of emancipation. They deploy a comprehensive (totalist) system of ideas, or "ideology" (intended here in the neutral sense), that is specifically aimed at articulating the space of intelligibility with a view to promoting social unity and cohesion. The appeal of their extreme interventionism rests on the hope that they can provide individuals with a systematic foundation for judgment thereby replacing the cultural ideas that have been lost to social reconstruction. Because of its answer to this demand, totalitarian politics have frequently been described as a politics of myth or as ideological politics, while liberalism, by contrast, has often been viewed as value neutral or empirically oriented.8 Although the idea of liberalism's value neutrality has become increasingly controversial, the term is helpful here to bring out the difference between totalitarianism as a politics of meaning and liberto /Modern Emancipation

alism as a politics of procedure. Liberalism has traditionally been seen to exercise a kind of restraint with regard to refashioning the self-understanding of the community. It thwarts the temptation to make the community beautiful, to give substance to its models of a future society, to solve problems once and for all, and so on. This is so, because it rejects the idea that there can be a universal good for society as a whole. Totalitarian movements, in contrast, concretize the shape of future society and give a blueprint for a better world.9 They would therefore appear to follow through on the logic of social construction that is wedded to the project of emancipation by giving greater content to the shape of future society.10 Totalitarian movements seek to redress the sense of irreality that goes with social transformation. They address themselves to an anxiety about the reality of social existence and present themselves as a politics of substance that can make good on the fragmentation of society, which circumscribes the social relations human beings enter into with one another, and restores to the human subject a meaningful place in the order of things. When considered in this light the concrete and comprehensive ideologies of totalitarianism appear less ephemeral, less ideal, and more real than the abstract political principles of liberalism emphasizing the pragmatics of the political process and the variety and inscrutability of human ends. The totalitarian radicalization of social reconstruction is thus an attempt to restore a certain weight to the world, to give politics an authentic substance where the loss of traditional meanings lends a sense of artificiality to social life and the burden of providing meanings is understood to have fallen on those who have brought about a disenchantment with the past, namely, those critics who have brought the question of the legitimacy of the old order into the public sphere, into the sphere of politics. That this theoretical development of the project of emanciLiberalism versus Totalitarianism/41

pation is not mere theory but deeply reflects the attitudes of historical thinkers cannot be argued for in detail here.11 But as an example for this kind of a justification for a radical reconstruction of society one might turn to Karl Marx's essay on "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," where Marx chides the bourgeois revolution for its "imaginary" politics and criticizes its weakness precisely in terms of its essential inability to give substantial content to its social revolution. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonored disguise and this borrowed language. . . . Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in the peaceful struggle of competition, it [the bourgeois society] no longer comprehended that ghosts from the days of Rome had watched over its cradle. But unheroic as bourgeois society is, yet it had need of heroism, of sacrifice, of terror, of civil war and of national battles to bring it into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed 42 /Modern Emancipation

in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their passion at the height of the great historical tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution. When the real aim had been achieved, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk. The awakening of the dead in those revolutions therefore served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given tasks in imagination, not of taking flight from their solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not of making its ghost walk again The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself, before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required world-historical recollections in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase.12 Marx explicitly endorses the idea of society as artifact in the opening passage to "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." At first it appears as if Marx rejected the possibility of a Liberalism versus Totalitarianism /43

radical revolution, which could free itself from the implications and meanings of tradition. All conscious social transformation, according to Marx, is faced with the problem of being conditioned by the very ideas that it seeks to overcome and is in this sense unable to come to grips with its own reality. The very forms of social and cultural life within which the attempt at change is embedded thwart social transformation. The "nightmare" of the bourgeois revolution is that it undermines its own intentions. For lack of new meanings it is forced back into darkness, reaching for meanings that present themselves readymade. The bourgeois revolution, which stops short of a radical reconstruction of society, is suspect because it lacks a genuine content. And in order to bring about a revolution of those social conditions it found in place, it had to draw on heroes and battle cries from its story book of history, imitating an entire aesthetic of the past. The bourgeois revolution, according to Marx, has no vision or story of its own and loses the ground of current social reality in its flights into an imaginary Utopian aesthetic. It is against this half-baked state of affairs that radical social revolution reacts, not to impose an imaginary scheme, but to give real substance to social change, to reintroduce a measure of reality into the shadow play of bourgeois politics. Marxist political philosophy sometimes strikes the uninitiated as a formalistic jargon of abstractions quite different from the earthy "blood and soil" rhetoric of, for example, the National Socialists. Even theorists of totalitarianism speak of totalitarianism of the left as "rationalistic."13 Of course, Marxist writing in its rhetorical style is everything but abstract and detached and is in this sense idealistic and Utopian. The concrete historical and social nature of Marxist analysis constitutes much of its appeal and rests quite explicitly upon Marx's Hegelian theoretical foundations. The predicament of the bourgeois revolution, according to Marx, is that it lacks a 44 /Modern Emancipation

content, which it seeks to satisfy artificially by drawing on dead meanings that should be confined to the annals of history. It is precisely this artificiality and irreality by which the true revolutionary is disaffected. Marxist revolution opposes real content to empty phrases. Marxist revolution seeks a radical reconstruction not just of social conditions but of the intellectual space that conditions social reality, because it is self-consciously aware of the interrelation between the two. Therefore only a radical critique of all that has gone before can serve the purposes of genuine emancipation and deal with the new reality on its own terms.14

NEGATIVE VERSUS POSITIVE FREEDOM The idea of emancipation implies that we are socially conditioned beings. But it does not necessarily imply that we are exclusively so conditioned. Liberalism downplays the tightness of fit between the individual's self-understanding and the forms of life of the particular community within which he or she moves. Totalitarian movements of the right and of the left believe in the possibility of establishing a perfect correspondence between the two with the help of social revolution. The philosophical motivation for this aspiration can be understood in the following terms. Where the self-understanding of the individual reflects the nature of the community substantially, the individual is no longer constrained to obey an alien law but is free from such an imposition from without. From one point of view this (positive) freedom of the individual can be understood to depend upon his giving himself over to the universal. This is possible where the individual recognizes that his identity, his being, is defined by the life of the community. From another point of view, such a correspondence, between social practices and ideas on one hand and Liberalism versus Totalitarianism/45

individual self-understanding on the other hand, means that society is organized so as not to violate the individual. According to such an interpretation, the appeal of totalitarianism can be seen to lie in the creation of a society in which the individual is not alienated.15 Its promise can accordingly be understood as "bringing home" the individual to a community where life is not experienced as a lonely battle against a meaningless fate. The aspiration to overcome the alienation of the individual in society is shared by the ethos of emancipation. Moreover, if society and the space of intelligibility that we call "world" are codependent, that is, if we take an ideology (in the neutral sense of the term) to express a particular way of life, then we cannot exempt the individual's identity from a reconstruction of society.16 Liberalism believes in an openness of the individual, in self-determination, in the choice of one's own life plan, in the right of the individual to pursue her own conception of the good. Yet if individuals aren't genuinely free, and individual consciousness is determined by their particular historical community, an insistence on this freedom strikes one as artificial and naively unrealistic about the complexity of the human condition. Liberalism thus seeks to downplay the importance of socially prescribed meanings because this idea undermines the idea of the reality of individual freedom. For liberalism the standard for social construction is finally the freedom and self-determination of the individual, which goes hand in hand with the Enlightenment "prejudice against prejudice," or as Kant puts it, "that bare negative which properly constitutes enlightenment."17 This freedom can be understood only in a formal manner. Kant's phrase suggests as much. Society as a liberal artifact, therefore, has its purpose located outside of itself. The model of social construction that liberalism endorses is the model of the technical product. Society serves a purpose that is external to it. This purpose is the self46/Modern Emancipation

determination of the individual, which can be understood as a formal conception only, precisely because once this principle is cashed in in terms of a particular social location of a particular individual, it no longer can serve as a universal standard.18 For liberalism the location of the individual thus is accidental to who she or he is essentially from the point of view of social organization. By violating the sovereignty of the individual, totalitarianism violates the very standard of liberal reality. Though this standard is a formal, negative freedom, it provides an external theoretical standpoint from which to assess the validity of social construction. Liberalism thus frequently portrays totalitarianism as a "Leviathan of the machine" that turns the individual into matter for its alien purposes. Although the metaphor of a great machine that appropriates human beings as "human material" to be disposed of for whatever purposes the state sees fit is frequently used to describe totalitarianism,19 this metaphor misses a crucial dimension of the totalitarian ideal. When totalitarianism is likened to a great machine that appropriates its human "material" without regard for the person, we must not be deceived into assuming that this is the model upon which totalitarianism understands itself. Liberalism here is applying its own understanding of the social artifact to its critique of totalitarianism. The machine metaphor is a liberal metaphor that sees government as a device for the advancement of purposes external to it. In fact, totalitarianism sees itself as a reaction to the artificial, technical, or legalistic approach to government that turns individuals into lifeless material. Totalitarianism admits of no external standards for the construction of society. It aspires toward a society that is pregnant with meaning, a society that bears the plenitude of its own reality within itself. That is why totalitarianism is also, in the final analysis, so radically antireligious even when the reliLiberalism versus Totalitarianism /47

gious establishment is happy to play into its hands and deliver its converts over to the state. In fact, what might be said to distinguish totalitarian movements from other dictatorships is that there is no external criterion to which it appeals. Whereas a religious fundamentalist society might seek to glorify god and thus prescribe religious beliefs and a religious code of behavior to its members, it still can be challenged on the basis of the word of god, as long as god's word is not reduced to, or made synonymous with, the daily pronouncements of a ruler. A totalitarian regime appeals only to the good of the movement itself. Individuals need not look elsewhere, outside of their immediate social existence, for the reality of their being.20 The totalitarian movement thereby promises to give substance to the life of the individual. From the point of view of the totalitarian movement, the immediate social location of the individual is essential—not accidental—to who they are. The identity of the individual is inseparable from his or her social existence, and society is not a space of interaction among others, but man's and woman's place of belonging.21 Freedom is here understood as positive freedom, as a completely nonalienated existence. On one hand, society is here conceived as an organic whole, where each part serves a function. On the other hand, every individual is thought to represent the life of the community as a whole. The totalitarian model of the social artifact would therefore appear to be an aesthetic one. It appeals to a dimension of human sensibility that is free from a reality principle and has as its standard a general reconciliation of human desire with human experience. Instead of treating the human being as a citizen or as a laborer, as a subordinate or a general, totalitarian movements promise to eliminate such divisions within society and within the person herself and to "restore" a harmony of purposes to the social body and to the human being as a whole.

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TOTALITARIANISM AS THE LIBERAL NIGHTMARE The question I would raise is whether liberalism does not in fact share this sense of its own irreality, of its own lack of substance, with the radical reaction to its political project. Indeed, liberalism appears to always be on the verge of a nervous breakdown—to use a nineteenth-century phrase. On one hand it has to keep alienation in check in order to convince individuals to project themselves into the political sphere (and carry out their purposes legitimately). In order to do so, it has to forge some concrete sense of belonging so that individuals can recognize their own identity as somehow tied up with the life of the community as a whole. On the other hand, it has constantly to thwart the desire to articulate the whole, to produce a concrete philosophy or an aesthetic that could serve as a unifying force in the life of the community. This predicament of nonutopian liberal politics is exacerbated precisely when it is most successful in its emancipatory project, when it has called into question traditional structures of meaning and turned over responsibility for shaping their own lives to the members of the community themselves. What liberalism offers to replace selfunderstandings and world pictures overcome by emancipation is a skepticism about the objective status of values. The liberal revolution is a story without an end. Sigmund Neumann explicitly relates his concern with the problem of totalitarian dictatorship to the problem of the historical, and therefore transient, contingent and man-made nature of reality. In the introduction to his Permanent Revolution Neumann explains that totalitarianism raises a challenge for democracy because it undermines the very meanings on which the self-understanding of democracy depends. Historical reality often changes without having managed to create a new language. . . . Our politiLiberalism versus Totalitarianism/49

cal vocabulary is antiquated and thus by necessity full of misnomers. It has ceased to possess meaning. Basic concepts have "lost their spell." We must either acquire a new vocabulary or renew the old. This is of primary importance for the survival of democracy which, of all forms of society, is most dependent on "mutual understanding." It is in such a twilight zone that the stability of vital meanings is lost. Modern [totalitarian] dictatorships have capitalized on this intellectual vacuum, just as they have filled the social vacuum in which the crises strata of contemporary society have found themselves. . . . This usurpation, devaluation, and actual transformation resulting from the dictators' use have caused havoc in democracy's camp no less than dictatorial blitzkrieg tactics have destroyed democracy's ordered battle lines.22 Neumann's fear is that the shared understandings of democratic society are too thin to resist the totalitarian temptation and to provide a ground for democratic practices. What is at stake in democracy's contest with totalitarianism is the very "vocabulary" of the liberal democratic self-understanding. The rise of totalitarianism is somehow made possible or even promoted by a gap that has opened up between representation and reality. And totalitarian movements exploit this instability of vital meanings. It is in terms of this failure of representation or vital meanings that I want to understand the significance of the idea of totalitarianism for the liberal democratic consciousness. I suggest that from the perspective of liberalism, totalitarianism figures the "nightmare" of a "loss of reality."23 This loss of reality 50 /Modern Emancipation

arises, as I have shown in chapters 2 and 3, out of the dynamic engendered by the idea of emancipation. This dynamic cannot be called objective, that is, a process that: has occurred independently of the way in which historical subjects have consciously attempted to shape society and bring its institutions in accordance with certain values and forms of life. It arises out of the inner logic of the very way in which modern subjects conceive of themselves and of their relation to society. It is therefore possible to speak of a dialectic that is engendered by the idea of emancipation. The notion of a dialectic is especially appropriate because every modern political project is formulated against the background of a conception of historical change. The Enlightenment project of emancipation itself draws on a conception of history. Its idea of Progress as a continual movement toward freedom and truth is but one way of incorporating the background of history into a conception of politics.24 The view of history as Progress demands that we conceive of historical change as a smooth or gradual transition from a lower to a higher form of life.25 Taken in this sense the idea of Progress masks an important feature that is preserved and made apparent by the idea of a dialectical change., The view of historical change as dialectical represents the movement toward a different form of life not merely as a positive movement or a development of the early, problematic form, but also as a negation of a form of life and its characteristic self-world understanding. And it is precisely this negation that is overlooked or regarded as an afterthought by the Enlightenment project of emancipation.26 The idea of emancipation, moreover, is not one derived from experience, or logically deduced from a priori truths. Rather, it expresses a certain conception and draws on a certain experience of the human subject, of the world, and of the relationship Liberalism versus Totalitarianism/51

between the two. In chapter i I briefly introduced the claim that the Enlightenment and the liberal conception of the subject can be regarded as an outgrowth of the epistemological revolution of the seventeenth century and the correlative shift in the conception of the human subject and its relation to the world. This relationship is well developed in the thinkers that we take as defining the modern tradition. Kant's famous introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, speaks of this new relationship between the subject and the world in terms of a "Copernican Revolution." The very metaphor that Kant deploys to represent the new relationship between the human subject and the world—which also rationally grounds the freedom of the subject in the realm of practice—establishes its origin in the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined place; when Torricelli made the air carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equal to that of a definite volume of water ... a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. . . . Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this 52/Modern Emancipation

assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a prioriy determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus ' primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest.27 As is well known, Kant's prolegomena to any modern metaphysics consists in an injunction against all claims to know "things as they are in themselves." Inherent in this shift in perspective to a new conception of the relation between the human subject and the world, we might speak of a loss of reality. Human reason can become the measure of reality, insofar as it is self-consistent and can critically police itself; but only by recognizing the perspectival nature of their vision can human beings insert themselves into the world actively and construct a map of reality on their own terms, on the terms of their own intellectual and perceptual apparatus. They thereby become the ones who construct the world of appearances in its meaningful relationships. But what always reveals itself along with nature—to which we have no immediate access—are the structures and the "modifications of the human intelligence itself." What appears as a loss of reality; Kant argues, is in fact a gain. To be sure, the success of the scientific reconstruction of Liberalism versus Totalitarianism/53

nature according to the laws of reason, reveals the perspective of human reason to be privileged. This general movement of emancipation (from external meanings), when applied to the social and political domain, however, brings with it a loss of reality as well—though of a different nature. Man, writes Kant in the "Idea for a Universal History," must reside "entirely within his own work." If society as well as the intelligible world, which it supports and by which it is supported in turn, is understood as a human artifact subject to reconstruction by human reason, which now no longer takes its cues from a pre-given (human) nature, then it would appear that they have no measure other than perhaps the self-consistency and coherence of their representation. This is indeed the conception of society that is most adequate to the stance Kant recommends the subject take up in his or her relation to the world. [Kant's] more radical definition of freedom . . . rebels against nature as what is merely given, and demands that we find freedom in a life whose normative shape is somehow generated by rational activity. This idea has been a powerful, it is not overstated to say revolutionary, force in modern civilization. It seems to offer a prospect of pure self-activity, where my action is determined not by the merely given, the facts of nature (including inner nature), but ultimately by my own agency as a formulator of rational law. This is the point of the stream of modern thought, developing through Fichte, Hegel, and Marx, which refuses to accept the merely "positive," what history, or tradition, or nature offers as a guide to value or action, and insists on an autonomous generation of the forms we 54 /Modern Emancipation

live by. The aspiration is ultimately to a total liberation. . . . Kant's theory is really one of the most direct and uncompromising formulations of a modern stance.28 If we take Kant's position, then it would seem to follow that the total reconstruction of the intelligible space of a society becomes a possibility, so long as it is self-consistent or "rational." The idea of a total reconstruction of society thereby reveals itself as intimately tied up with the modern conception of freedom. In the following chapters I shall argue that, in the form of the idea of totalitarianism, the problem of the ground of its shared understandings reenters the liberal conception of politics—a problem that liberalism had thought it could exclude from the political altogether. The question that I shall be asking is whether the problem of the relation between representation and reality, which arises on my reading of the dialectic of emancipation, indeed presents a difficulty for the liberal democratic self-understanding. Can liberalism simply reassert the Enlightenment project? Or does the rise of totalitarian politics reflect the shadow that is cast by the modern project of emancipation?

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PART Two QUESTIONING THE

SELF-UNDERSTANDING OF L I B E R A L I S M

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4

Freedom, Common Sense, and the Limited Reach of Reason

SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SHARED UNDERSTANDINGS In part i I have argued that emancipation, due to its critical project, has to give rise to a demand for meaning. Totalitarian movements speak to the sense of a "loss of reality" or "loss of meaning" that accompanies the emancipatory project of social reconstruction. They have presented their project not as Utopian, but as giving concrete individuals a way of understanding their concrete lives. Liberals not only deny the legitimacy of calling upon the state to aid in, and force, a (cultural) construction of shared meanings, but also are predisposed to calling into question the very notion that the modern project of emancipation gives rise to something like a loss of reality or a loss of meanings. Liberals tend to view such a position as incoherent at best and as playing into the hands of totalitarian antiliberalism at worst.1 Pointing to community, tradition, culture, or aesthetic spheres as irreplaceable foundations for any political community is viewed as a "trap."2 As Stephen Holmes remarks in his Anatomy of Antiliberalism, "Members of Ku-Klux-Klan, too, have 'a commonality of shared self-understandings.' "3 For philosophical reasons it is difficult to speak about the loss of shared understandings or shared meanings. It can always be argued that any expression or way of life is "meaningful," and that therefore it makes no sense to speak about a loss of 59

meaning. This kind of a position is implicit in the liberal democratic bias toward what might be broadly termed a descriptive, scientific empiricism on one hand, and a rationalism on the other hand. In this and in chapter 5,1 shall examine the claim that liberal political self-understanding can largely do without a shared culture,4 or that the liberal society requires and ought to require only a minimal shared understanding that arises out of a fairly noncontroversial conception of the rational and autonomous person.5 Against totalitarianism, liberalism argues that individuals can (and should) develop a self-understanding and an understanding of their relation to society out of their own resources. For the purposes of political philosophy, liberalism treats individuals as if they substantially instituted their own ends and meanings.6 Shared understandings are, on this account, considered as somehow arising out of the interplay and plurality of individual expressions of ends and meanings. If the person could in principle never emancipate herself from meanings that are imposed from without, then it would not be possible to conceive of her as rationally self-determining. Liberalism therefore resists the idea that the identity of individuals are predetermined by their social situation or by any of their other empirical circumstances because this would undermine the idea of individuals having the capacity for choosing who they are.7 The problem of shared understandings, however, can only be reduced to a matter of choice where shared understandings are already given. Thus liberalism typically takes shared meanings for granted where they are not thought to be prescribed by our rational commitments.8 Yet this answer merely begs the question. To refer the question of shared meanings back to the individual, or to civil society, simply ignores the difficulty raised by the project of emancipation. Emancipation dismantles established practices and shared understandings, and