Essays
‘The National Imagination’
While the implied claim that there was once an authentic nationalism free of sentimental dross or ideological manipulation may be questionable, Anderson challenges those who would too easily see the bypassing of the nation-state as the long-awaited coming of the ‘open society’—liberal, tolerant and multicultural. It is argued that there are in fact limits to how ‘open’ society can be: beyond these limits the imagination and solidarity falters. Anderson began his book by contrasting cosmopolitan ideologies like liberalism and socia- lism with the elementary forms of social community. But these ideologies have always tacitly relied on an image of society as an ultimately finite association. The successes, failures and compromises of both traditions stem in large measure from the fact that these communities are imagined as nations in the modern world, and that the only versions of these creeds which have any measure of practical success are those which have tailored their message to the limited sympathies of nations. Will these ideologies then lose their lustre and points of contact with social reality, if the only large-scale community that people believe in passes into the dustbin?
‘Two on the Marble Cliffs’
One strand here is a search for authentic representations of evil, maps that emplot the brutal co-ordinates of existence in an era of total civil war. Hieronymous Bosch, Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville repeatedly come into consideration. Céline and Malraux figure as the latest representatives of the French moralist tradition, whose dispassionate literary pessimism is held superior to the German metaphysical variety of moralism and its obverse in Faustian amoralism. In these discussions, the heterodox Catholic fanatic Léon Bloy looms large—Schmitt introducing him as an antidote to Jünger’s Nietzschean understanding of nihilism.
‘From Florence to Moscow’
Machiavelli’s writings establish roles for potential actors on the political stage and interpellate subjects who will play out those roles. It is the presence of these empty spaces, to be read and occupied by anonymous partisan subjects, that make it so difficult to decipher the agendas lurking beneath his deceptively clear prose. This indeterminacy is constitutive and ineradicable. By way of para- bles, stories of the concrete, Machiavelli broke out of the generalizing format of the classical treatise, and invented the prototype of the manifesto. The rhetorical novelty of the latter is that it is a text which inserts itself into the space of agency that it has itself identified. Machiavelli, unlike Marx, leaves these spaces open: more cognizant of the aleatory dialectic of political conflict, he does not seal them with any ideological closure. Machiavelli addresses the masses via the sil- houette of a resolute ruler only because, conceived in that form, decisive action can begin at any time. The Prince, unlike the proletariat, is ‘the pure possibility of the event’, ‘agency out of the void’, ‘absolute new beginning’.
‘Virgilian Visions: Hardt and Negri’s Empire’
Empire, its authors insist, did not emerge out of the defeat of systemic challenges to capital. On the contrary, its existence stands as a resounding, if paradoxical, testimony to the heroic mass struggles that shattered the Eurocentric old regime of national states and colonialism. Running through the work is the fervent belief that contemporary capitalism, although seemingly impervious to anti-systemic challenge, is in fact vulnerable at all points to riot and rebellion. The increasing importance of immaterial, intellectual labour in high value-added sectors of the economy is shaping a collective labourer with heightened powers of subversion. An ineradicable plebeian desire for emancipation is stoked by the increasingly apparent malleability of all social relationships and permeability of all borders. This global multitude, embracing all those who work, or are just poor, from computer scientists in Palo Alto to slum-dwellers in São Paulo, no longer imagines communities as integral nations. But mere heteroglossia or hybridization offer no trenchant alternative. For the ideology of Empire has become a supple, multicultural aesthetic that deactivates the revolutionary possibilities of globalization. Far from being oppositional, academic enthusiasts for diversity articulate the inclusive logic of a spontaneous order that no longer depends upon a metaphysics of natural difference and hierarchy.
‘The Politics of Piety’
The multicultural schema transforms a whole gamut of inequities into mere demands for tolerance of difference. The binary oppositions of this discourse—universal/particular, majority/minority, closed/open, homogeneity/heterogeneity—cannot bring massive and growing inequality of wealth into conceptual, let alone political, focus. Its treacly pieties are incompatible with any polemical élan against the established order.
‘Among Enemies’ in Boston Review
Schmitt identified liberalism with the parliamentarist ideal of government by discussion. He held that classical liberalism conceived of parliament as occupying center stage in an enlightened public sphere. The influence of autonomous public opinion on legislation ensured that such legislation would be in conformity with reason—otherwise the rule of law would be little more than a cruel and empty phrase. The crisis of parliamentary government that Schmitt diagnosed was, then, a crisis of over-politicization—the collapse of consensus, under the impact of the intertwined struggles of classes, interest groups, and parties—which undermined the link between law and reasoned impartiality. By contrast, government by discussion languishes today under an unprecedented degree of consensus about the historical inevitability of a world market society, in which markets supplant reasoned discussion as a basis of social coordination. Some contemporary liberals object to this argument, embarrassed by the fact that they no longer believe in the possibility of an authentically enlightened public opinion, and have resigned themselves instead to a world of apathetic, atomized, and manipulated electorates.
“The Oracle of Post-Democracy’
Tocqueville’s American admirers have understandably always been discomfited by his claim that there was no country in the world where there was less intellectual independence and freedom of discussion than in the United States. His gaze as he contemplated oncoming American centuries was often less than serene, as if he saw something extremely disturbing on the horizon. Wolin’s portrait vividly recaptures his mood as he looked to the future: tense, foreboding, living in anticipation of a spiritually catastrophic defeat. In that sense, he can be read—so Wolin suggests—as an unreconciled critic of the foreclosure of political alternatives in the neutralizing ambience of consumer capitalism.
‘The Age of Identity?’
Niethammer’s latest enterprise is a sprawling genealogy of a term which, by contrast, designates no coherent theme: ‘collective identity’, traced from its obscure origins to its present status as the signature master category of our times. The initial focus is on a cluster of writings from the first half of the twentieth century. Niethammer’s methodological premise here is that ‘collective identity’ eludes any stringent conceptual determination: prevailing definitions, invariably vague, oscillate meaninglessly between essentialism and constructivism, alleged facts and spurious norms. The conventional methods of the historian cannot take us into the murky underside of intellectual life where this floating signifier acquired its first, sundry meanings; here, research has to take its cue from shrewd guesswork and quirky intuitions. For Niethammer the original locutions of ‘identity’ in the works of some of the leading intellectuals of this period are to be read as symptoms of an attempt to conceal an uncanny alterity haunting their life projects. This traumatic layer of experience running through their works can be brought to light only by psychoanalysing their politico-intellectual commitments.
‘Overcoming Emancipation’
Unleashed, uncomprehended money appears to be cancelling the autonomy of the state, and overwhelming one outpost of the life-world after another. Do we now move from Talcott Parsons back to Karl Marx? Not at all. For the time being, there is no political solution to our predicament. Certainly no nationalist closure or secession from the world market can be considered, but seen in the light of 20th century attempts to exercise this option, that is nothing to regret. For according to Habermas modernity is precisely this process of periodic ‘expansion’ of the life-world through waves of creative destruction. We stand in the midst of another Great Transformation, and like the one that unfolded from the mid-19th century to the Belle Époque, it is reshaping the social order through the unregulated agency of money so rapidly that only those riding in the fiery chariots of world finance have the wind in their banners.
‘Algorithms of War’
For at the very hour of its triumph, the bell was tolling for the liberal-democratic nation-state. An entirely new political form, the market-state, has since arisen to supplant it. Bobbitt underscores the drastic nature of this mutation, expressing the difference between the two in the simple, icy formula: the market-state ceases to base its legitimacy on improving the welfare of its people.
Instead this new form of polity simply offers to maximize opportunities—to ‘make the world available’ to those with the skills or luck to take advantage of it. ‘Largely indifferent to the norms of justice, or for that matter to any particular set of moral values so long as law does not act as an impediment to economic competition’, the market-state is defined by three paradoxes. Government becomes more centralized, yet weaker; citizens increasingly become spectators; welfare is retrenched, but security and surveillance systems expand. Bobbitt etches the consequences imperturbably.
‘The Age of Warring States’
The conclusion to the millennial story Teschke tells strongly implies that the withdrawal of coercion from the internal sphere of economic relations resulted in the withering away of the apparatus of externally directed coercion—but this, of course, never happened. How then can the social-property relations of capitalism explain the persistence of war as a recognized means of settlement between states, long after it has ceased to be a systemic means of accumulation? Recognizing the problem that his conception of capitalism raises, he hesitantly offers the long-term forecast that ‘since capitalism is not predicated on the logic of domestic political accumulation, we should expect it to bring about the decline of external geo-political accumulation that defined the war-driven international conduct of the feudal and absolutist ages’. But no account that raises such expectations without even addressing the historical record can be considered adequate.
‘Future Unknown’
As Rousseau, one of Machiavelli’s most astute readers, put it: ‘He who dares to undertake the establishment of a people should feel that he is, so to speak, in a position to change human nature’.footnote13 In a work ostensibly devoted to the study of republics, the provisional legitimation of such methods explosively broadens the scope of what is thinkable beyond the limits set by the prevailing conventions of civic discourse. Could such a figure of absolute radical agency come into existence today? The answer must take into account an immense variability in the potency and knowledge of men in different times and places: ‘the weakness of men at present, caused by their weak education and their slight knowledge of things, makes them judge ancient judgements in part inhuman, in part impossible.’
‘States of War’
The narrower security concepts of Realpolitik cannot explain the historical pattern of this transformative and expansionary agenda. The attempt to account for the change was the rational kernel of Hardt and Negri’s conception of Empire as an open polity transcending the coordinates of closed sovereign states. It could be said that the us differs from other states, because it is the paradigmatic capitalist regime, geared, like the system it promotes, for unlimited expansion. In contrast to the authors of Empire, the Retort collective seems more cognizant of the fact that the American Republic is still very much a particular state, vigilantly pursuing its particular strategic interests, while articulating these interests within a wider project of universalizing capitalism by enabling regime changes, from gunboat and dollar diplomacy to shock therapy in both core and periphery. ‘Each military intervention is intended to serve an overall strategic project of pressing American power—and the potential for Western capital entrenchment in “emerging markets”—ever further into vital regions of the globe.’9 Although Afflicted Powers pays little attention to the structure of the inter-state system, its general line of argument allows for an explanation of why the latter has undergone a series of substantive transformations even as the nominal form of an older sovereignty principle has been preserved and generalized.
‘The Role of Force in History’
The final volume of The History of Military Thought offers a lively portrait of the geo-political, economic and intellectual landscape in the age of fully mechanized war, culminating in reconsiderations of the work of the British Mosleyite J. F. C. Fuller and his erstwhile disciple, the military journalist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart.footnote8 A phantasmagoric vitalism infused Fuller’s vision of a military overcoming of the industrialized slaughter of the trenches; his Tanks in the Great War foresaw a sweeping mechanization of armies led by vanguards of highly mobile tank squads, in a new age of specialized military elites. Ideas such as these were more avidly embraced in Weimar and Nazi-era Germany than on the home front, but could inspire all those who dreamt of cleaner, more focused battles. Liberals as well as fascists were determined to prevent the repetition of a world war that would seal the fate of the West. Gat’s final chapters narrate the passage of Liddell Hart from disciple of the fascist Fuller to unofficial strategist of a liberal imperialism now wavering before the mounting threat of the Third Reich.
‘Speculations on the Stationary State’
In the 1920s and 30s contemporaries of varying political persuasions had concluded that capitalism was coming to an end, and were surprised by its stupendous post-wwii recovery. This great come-back discouraged the more prudent from thereafter contemplating a capitalist crisis deep and long enough to put a question mark over the future of the system. Today, so soon after its late 20th-century triumphs, it might seem incredible that anyone would seriously call into question capitalism’s historical viability. The matter was supposedly resolved circa 1989. Departing from this consensus, I propose that the coming era of socio-economic shake-out and contraction—the harvest of unresolved economic problems going back to the 1970s—is being compounded by a drift in the economically most advanced regions towards a stationary condition.
‘Sermons on the Present Age’
The Irony of American History argues that, for all these advantages, the uswas now on the defensive in the realm of ideological warfare, saddled with a self-righteous Yankee mentality repellent to educated opinion in both Europe and Asia. Niebuhr’s plea for irony was clearly pitched as an attempt not just to console and instruct a disoriented liberal elite, but to clarify what distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ in a context in which Communism’s promise of an emancipation from material want seemed quite plausible to many. In what way then were we essentially different from our radical brother? Niebuhr could not assume that ironic reflexivity could stand guard over the Republic’s destiny, for its constituency would be small in a polity divided between a paranoiac conservatism and a liberalism whose optimistic pragmatism was now mutating into a wide-eyed faith in social engineering. American social science and behavioural psychology were as deterministic as Soviet Marxism, and led to the same deadening, bureaucratic voluntarism. Deweyan pragmatism was one of the main local variants of an insidious modern drive to abolish suffering, finitude and the need for spiritual consolation. Niebuhr was well aware of a European sentiment captured in Heidegger’s claim that Bolshevism and Americanism were two sides of the same spiritual coin: ‘In its most pessimistic moods European neutralism charges, in the words of Le Monde, that we are a “technocracy” not too sharply distinguished from the Russian attempt to bring all of life under technical control.
‘The Coming Contradiction’
The dominant ideology of the times is simply a cynical reason embedded in the media-saturated life routines of the current form of capitalism, dulcified by bouts of philanthropy for certain designated categories of victims.
The complacency of this moral universe cannot be ruffled by exposés of sweatshop exploitation, human-rights abuse, or the wretchedness of conditions at home or abroad. What is required in this context, Jameson argues, is a demonstration of the historical transience of this mode of life, taking the form of an unbending logic of reversal that comes to disclose vast unincorporated multitudes whose very existence makes palpable the force of some of its untranscendable structural limits. Anagnorisis is ‘the stripping away of layers of ideological concealment and occultation, to offer a terrifying glimpse of the historically Real.’
‘The Abolitionist I’
What follows here, specifically, is an account of the socio-juridical and economic assumptions underlying Marx’s first articulation of historical materialism. These underpin a conception of the state, the nature of classes and the trajectory of their struggle that differs fundamentally from that in his later theorization. The intellectual-historical challenge is to explain and not just describe the unifying pattern of the development of Marx’s thought across a decade from 1842 to 1852. I treat his texts from those years as a single conceptual bloc. Although this involves registering shifts of position in alignment to a succession of primary influences—from Bruno Bauer to Ludwig Feuerbach, from Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say to Ricardo and beyond—the emphasis is on the continuity of a single problematic, requiring departure from a conventional chronological sequence. Although the content of Marx’s theorizations cannot be reduced to the formal conceptual pattern of his inversions, the latter structured Marx’s critique of the imaginary self-determination of society through the form of the state, his first critique of the purported laws of political economy as a mystification of the brutal anarchy of competition, and the ingenious synthesis of these two critiques articulated in his conception of a pattern of historical development leading to communism.
‘The Abolitionist II’
Marx’s method of criticism inverted Hegel’s order of determination and thereby transformed the content of the determinations themselves. The best form of state defined its essence not by specifying the necessarily contradictory conditions of its reproduction, but rather those of its full-blown realization through dynamics that would lead to its abolition. From 1843 onwards, the dialectic of state and civil society passed through a sequence of transformations in the constitutional division of powers, unfolding as a struggle between executive and legislature. The victory of the latter over the former turned it into an open stage of class war. The pure legislative form of state could therefore only be a transitional phase thrown up in the aftermath of the elimination of the executive–legislative dualism of constitutional monarchy. Either it would be the framework for an advance towards the emancipation of the proletariat, or society would be subjected to a new form of executive domination.
‘Counterstike West’
In the tumultuous European aftermath of the First World War, the breakthroughs of mass democracy confronted a right-wing backlash that came to adopt anti-status quo pretentions historically identified with the left. The spectacle of industrial warfare was felt to have possessed a higher world-historical significance, cruelly travestied by post-war upsurges of subaltern classes demanding social reforms bordering on revolution. In post-war Italy and Germany, the armed exploits of demobilized veterans and patriotic volunteers offered a bonding experience of collective violence, celebrated in a discourse of heroic resistance to governments of national humiliation. Spengler’s assessment of this outcome expressed the exasperation felt by men of property and education: ‘The Labour leader won the War. That which in every country is called the Labour Party and the trade union, but is in reality the trade union of party officials, the bureaucracy of the Revolution, gained the mastery and is now ruling over Western Civilization.’footnote1 A miscellany of opposition to the welfare state, godless Marxism and a more nebulously conceived cultural levelling, the ‘revolution from the right’ was essentially a call to true elites to stand their ground against a world-wide revolt of the masses.
‘Swan Song of the Ultarleft’ in Sublation Magazine
Visions of a social struggle purified of all adulterating political mediation have a long history and express a justified contempt for what Lenin called “parliamentary cretinism.” In another era, George Sorel sought to imagine a revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois society that would not depend on the seizure of power by a Jacobin-style party, but would rather take the form of a General Strike, a Napoleonic battle in which the enemy would be defeated in a single blow. Sorel conceived of this prospect of pure, apolitical form of working-class agency as a “social myth.” It is a characteristic of our own time that such once compelling collective fantasies have lost their mobilizing power, erased from the consciousness of workers the world around. No wonder it’s become so hard to speak about revolutionary change without sounding like a fantasist.
Are there, then, any forms of struggle against the rule of capital by which radical reforms and perhaps even revolutions might once again become conceivable?
‘The Resignation of the Proletariat’ in Sublation Magazine
Where is the locus of this transformative collective agency within the capitalist totality? Classical Marxists assumed that it took shape in a political sphere that formed between the coercive core of the state apparatus and a class-divided, capitalist economic order, a zone of the transubstantiation of social fractures into political struggles. What were the main topological features of this sphere? At its center was an electoral regime of party competition, but the representative institution was surrounded a wider political sphere of mobilizable opinion where otherwise atomized members of the opposing classes articulated their real and perceived shared interests, their grievances and hopes. (The sheer existence of a capitalist state effectively secures the interests of the propertied, thereby obviating the necessity of their having to control government policy directly, though this doesn’t prevent them from trying.) It is only through this transformation of interest groups into representable political subjects that large scale class consciousness and an enduring capacity for collective action was thought to be possible. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, politics in the core of the world system was penetrated by international ideological conflicts that inspired new forms of class mobilization eventually even in societies without institutionalized parliamentary arenas. With the possible exception of Gramsci, Marxists failed to theorize the historically unique conditions of the existence of this Kampfplatz mainly because most of them assumed that this arena of politico-intellectual contention was a permanent feature of the capitalist epoch.