Haunted By Hobbes and Reckoning with Rome

Reading Hannah Arendt's On Revolution today, I was struck by her insight. I'd been turned on to the book by David Depew and a simple phenomenal chapter written by Andreas Kalyvas in his incredible book Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary. Arendt's book valorizes the revolutionary Americans while condemning Robespierre and his French ilk. Kalyvas follows this argument down the line to forward the notion that revolutions which maintain some sort of continuity with the existing system are less likely to end in a violent Jacobin terror.

What interests me is something Kalyvas addresses somewhat, and the rhetorical tradition as a whole seems very well suited to examining. Arendt argues that Rousseau's failing (and that of the French revolutionaries) was to decide that the major guiding principle of the revolution should be the general will: the "best interest" of "the people" (or le peuple, for those scoring at home with their constitutive rhetoric texts). Because there was no means for this idea of "the people" to be broken up, fractured, and fragmented within the French context, breaks between what "the people" wanted and what the government actually did could not be found--instead you had only a perpetual Terror, performed in the name of the people.

Here in America we have a republican tradition. That is to say, the government is understood to be elected by the people but not to always act in manners and means coterminus with "the people". I know this is a gross, gross oversimplification. Yet, I venture to make the claim that the contemporary emergence of the New Right (in the form of the Tea Partiers) is at least in part the result of a conflict between what is entailed by the discursive committment to democracy as an ideal (focusing on the "by the people" part of our hallowed refrain, and within a milieu saturated by what remains a fundamentally Hobbesian understanding of the necessity of sovereignty) and the abiding notion of Republicanism that informs the structure and institutions of this country. I'll attempt to explain and unpack this.


For Arendt, a major difference between the French tradition and the American one lies in the American committment to a notion of separation of powers.* That is to say, in the American tradition brakes on the power of the general will are built forcefully into the system. This is to be contrasted with the French notion of freedom, which Arendt finds anchored in something like a pseudo-pure Rousseauian idea of the "general will". The problem in the latter situation is well framed by this Arendtian quote: "Power under the condition of human plurality can never amount to omnipotence, and laws residing on human power can never be absolute". The problem, as you can probably see, is that humans tend to want to understand things in terms of absolutes. Ulrich Beck (and countless theorists of argumentation) have eloquently made this point elsewhere in arguments about risk assessment--humans want to deal in absolutes and certains, even when uncertainty is the name of the game.

A layered or textured understanding of democracy does not tend to resonate in the imaginary. Such matters much be simplified to make the enormous mass of a nation state reduceable/representable (think Burke here). For example, we imagine national borders in strict inside/outside logics (little room for flexible borders in the demos--just ask Arizona, and any number of democrats that successfully campaign on outsourcing). Similarly, we tend to conceive of any loss of democratic power as total and incredible, rather than temporary and partial. This is, I think, especially true when it comes to the Presidency, which seems to exercise a disproportionately powerful hold on the public imagination. We imagine the President as the center of the government, even though in many ways the Congress and Supreme Courts are just as, if not more, powerful. Chalk it up to the human need to simplify--singular human embodiment of the state is a neat and nifty tradition. Also divine right still haunts us--signifiers of authority ain't that far adrift.

In general, we need to deny that our system is Republican for another reason--one needs a Republican system because "the people" are untrustworthy. Otherwise we'd just let the general will run free, like some sort of junkyard dog of democracy. Essentially, the Constitution talks down to the American people. "We think you're pretty awesome...except when you're not." There are LOTS of mechanisms in place to make sure that the government does not equal the people--the Supreme Court, the electoral college, the non-proportional representation provided by the Senate--yet when we SAY we are a democracy, we think more of the Greeks than the Roman.

But never far from our thoughts is the lurking Hobbesian narrative about the state of nature. With total risk nearby, we need a total sovereign to secure ourselves from a life that would otherwise be "nasty, poor, brutish, and short." In the face of such danger, suspicions of republicanism are understandable, because republicanism mediates rather than constitutes the will of the people, especially if this will be for a strong sort of decisionism.

The Tea Party wants to "take the government back." The problem, of course, is that they want "the people" in charge, in a place that will forever be occupied by republican representatives of the people. The pure general will will not occupy the seat of power. But Arendt is right--the Tea Party does not seek a true revolution in her sense, just different representation. The virtue of a republican system is that it allows any faults in the government to be identified with the representatives, rather than finding members of the polis lacking in their committment to the general will, which necessitates purges. I suppose I'm rather more sanguine about what the Tea Party aims at after writing this post.

*Which, if violated, would leave us very much as we would be in the case of the use of nuclear weapons, in a situation where we wouldn't want to say "I told you so".

Another Democratic Paradox

Bonnie Honig's recent book Emergency Politics points to a logical problem that has plagued political theorists since Aristotle--if democracies produce good citizens and good citizens are needed to produce democracies, then we face something of a chicken/egg conundrum--which comes first, "the people" or the people? There is an indisputable gap between the "general will" in Rousseau's sense and the elected representatives of said will, not least because if the two were completely coterminus the display of unity would obviate the initial desire to have a split between "the people" and the government because aggregated interest would be a pure and properly total index rather than a partial snapshot of what "the people" want.

One popular move of late in political theory is to grab a Schmittian matrix and decide that some form of decisionism is inevitable, if not desirable, in politics. Following this tactic most visibly in the political tradition is Chantal Mouffe, whose book The Democratic Paradox seeks to resucitate some form of decisionism from postmodern indeterminacy while simutaneously refusing to engage in the sort of fascist violence the philosophy of Carl Schmitt typically produces. The solution is to think in terms of horizons rather then borders, in terms of agonism rather than antagonism, and to produce a shared space where friends and enemies share something like a mutual, begrudging respect the projects itself in some share conditions of intelligibility between arguments.

I routinely find these inside/outside explanations of political identity formation persuasive, not least because they seem to soundly explain certain recurrent political trends. One need look no further than two presidential terms each for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom parlayed rhetorics about existential threats into political power that persisted despite political decisionmaking that was certainly questionable, if not unpopular. Moreover, as Robert Ivie has neatly formulated in his book Democracy and America's War on Terror, these distinctions operate not merely external to the physical borders of a nation but also work in the national imaginary to produce individuals who might be cititzens of the nation from a formal standpoint who nevertheless constitute enemies to "democracy" for their refusal to support the troops, the war, or acts of civic protest.

What interests me is--how is the American population protected from confronting this paradox? I will look at the example the 1960's New Left. I've been reading several pieces on this subject (if you're interested, check out the work of Ken Cmiel, Michael Kazin, Robert Cathcart, and others) and what stands out to me the way in which violence and dissent are mostly framed in political discourse as irrational outbursts of unreason that refuse to submit or kowtow to dominant political and institutional logics. This evidence can be found in our contemporary political discourse--even conservatives wholeheartedly embrace the safe and hopeful rhetorics of MLK, while liberals and conservatives alike rushed to condemn the violence of the Weather Underground as Barack Obama struggled to distance himself from sixties radical Bill Ayres.

This point has been made well by Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples--the way in which violence's appearance in public is figured is an extremely important factor in determining how "public opinion" will come down on the side of a particular movement. After all, kids in school all read MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech while being consciously pushed away from considering say, Stokely Carmichael's speech at Berkeley that attacked the silence of white privilege. Ken Cmiel, in a sharp reading of the sit ins during the civil rights movement of the sixties, points to how the tactic was effective because it performed a form of civility instantly recognizable to a moderate audience, enabling the generation of a bond of sympathy between those protesting and a broader audience--because civility is the norm, they who are the most civil will draw the most love, and sympathy.

Violence can be viewed as legitimate, of course. The vast majority of Americans view the violence used by the American government of the Union in the Civil War as legitimate because it struck out against an illegitimate human monstrosity (slavery). The violence of the Revolutionary War was scene as necessary to counter the tyranny of the British, who sought to rule and control that which they had not properly mixed enough of their labor with. But of course, those acts seem more legitimate in hindsight because they helped to produce the modern polity that we currently reside in--a United States of America produced in opposition to Britain, and rebirthed in the wake of the Civil War, cleansed of the sin of the 3/5 clause.

So long as a vocal minority is seen to be illegitimately using violence or threats thereof, a democratic population is prevented from encountering the fact that what is produced politically reflects themselves. That is, it produces a distance between the population and the unruly "people" in need of democratic regulation. Therefore, those who were part of Richard Nixon's "silent majority" in favor of a continued presence in Vietnam were given a tactic to tell themselves that they were part of a democracy (participating in the civic process of voting, casting judgment upon the violent and unruly war protestors) while also asserting that they were the "right" part of the democratic population--the part that understood what being in a polity meant in terms of personal responsibility and knowing that what it DID NOT mean was the rioting and violence thought to characterize the New Left. So in at least this case, it seems like any encounter with Honig's civic paradox is prevented. Instead of being able to apprehend that they are part of "the people" and thus in need of regulation (justifying the split between the people and the government), "the people" are projected as being the unruly protesting political masses while the "silent majority" are those people who know what it means to be civic, and also do not need to be subject to the actions that the government may take.

On the other hand, if for example you find the activities of the Weather Underground to be legitimate, you are fully embracing the problem posed by Honig's paradox--you are pointing to how "the people" are untrustworthy, and demanding an escape hatch from the circular/tautological ring of people and government who are mutually producing violence and injustice in ways that are invisible to the dyad by virtue of the non-ironic or non-distanced relationship between people and government.