Radical Philosophy 116, 2002

CONTENTS
R A D I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y
a j o u r n a l o f s o c i a l i s t a n d f e m i n i s t p h i l o s o p h y
116
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002
Radical Philosophy Ltd
Editorial collective
Caroline Bassett, Andrew Chitty, Howard
Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie,
Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark
Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford,
Alessandra Tanesini
Contributors
Lynne Segal is Professor of Psychology
and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College,
University of London. She is a member
of Jews for Justice for Palestinians (www.
jfjfp.org/campaigns.htm).
Chris Thornhill teaches German Studies
at Kings College, University of London.
He is the author of Karl Jaspers: Politics
and Metaphysics (Routledge, 2002).
Harry Harootunian is Director of
the Program in East Asian Studies
and Professor of History at New York
University. His books include Historys
Disquiet: Modernity and Everyday Life
(Columbia University Press, 2000) and
Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture
and Community in Interwar Japan
(Princeton University Press, 2000).
Bruce Robbins is Professor of English
and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University, New York. His books include
Feeling Global: Internationalism in
Distress (New York University Press,
1999).
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Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
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COMMENTARY
Jews in the Culture Wars
Lynne Segal ..................................................................................................... 2
ARTICLES
Systems Theory and Legal Theory: Luhmann, Heidegger
and the False Ends of Metaphysics
Chris Thornhill ................................................................................................. 7
Quartering the Millennium
Harry Harootunian ........................................................................................ 21
Whats Left of Cosmopolitanism?
Bruce Robbins ............................................................................................... 30
REVIEWS
Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the
Dialectic in Hegel and Marx
Ben Watson ................................................................................................... 38
Onora ONeill, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics
Onora ONeill, A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002
Joseph McCarney ......................................................................................... 41
Phillip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety
Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives
from Kant to Derrida
Andrew McGettigan ..................................................................................... 43
Dave Beech, John Roberts, eds, The Philistine Controversy
Michael Sperlinger ....................................................................................... 46
Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual:
Bergson and the Time of Life
Henri Bergson: Key Writings
Margarita Karkayanni ................................................................................... 48
Gilles Deleuze, Lle deserte et autres textes
David Reggio ................................................................................................. 51
Carl Cohen and Tom Regan, The Animal Rights Debate
Phillip Cole .................................................................................................... 53
CONFERENCE REPORT
Siegfried Kracauer, University of Birmingham, 1314 September 2002
Esther Leslie .................................................................................................. 55
2 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 11 6 ( N o v e m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 2 )
COMMENTARY
Jews in the culture
wars
Lynne Segal
W
hat will it take to unite the intellectual Left? After decades of internal
academic strife on the Left, the moral dilemmas currently faced by Jewish
academics have thrown up some unexpected alliances. The 1980s and 1990s
were embattled decades in the universities, especially in North America. These were
the decades in which women, ethnic minorities and other dissident voices hitherto
largely excluded from elite institutions of knowledge began to clamber into academic
jobs in the wake of the new social movements of the previous decade. They challenged
traditional canons, insisting upon their own distinctive cultural and research agendas,
beyond the contours of existing disciplines. In the beginning the battles were waged
between those defending traditional perspectives and the new recruits eager for change,
but they soon widened.
The growth of Womens Studies, for example, with its ever more sophisticated
analytics of gender, provoked dispute from both without and within. Fights between
feminists came to a head at the Politics of Sexuality conference in New York at
Barnard College in 1982, inaugurating the so-called Sex Wars, with women against
pornography confronting other feminists (such as the conference organizers) who
criticized their tactics of censoring degrading sexual images. The organizers were
denounced, their employers were contacted and in some cases careers were put in
jeopardy. The saddest spectacle here was that the metaphorical terrain was, vividly, the
body of feminism itself and, not coincidentally, just when the Reagan ascendancy had
begun the long assault on so many of feminisms initial gains, especially for poorer
women from state-funded abortion to the derailing of the Equal Rights Amendment
and the dismantling of welfare.
But disagreements in and around feminism provided only one strand of what soon
became known as the Culture Wars, with conservative scholars and media voices
denouncing the new radicals for all manner of social harms: undermining the prestige
and privileges of traditional domestic arrangements, encouraging the dependency
cultures of welfare, offering false dreams of equality and prosperity for all. In the
1990s a new row came to the fore around the authority of science. Seen as the motor of
a knowledge-driven economy, scientic research was attracting more money than ever
from governments and industry. Yet some leading scientic spokesmen insisted that
science was not being treated with proper respect by a self-serving, anti-Enlightenment
cultural elite, said to be dominating the universities.
However, like the Sex Wars a decade earlier, the Science Wars also divided leftists
and other movement radicals in a very public and little understood battle over the
nature of science, the importance of culture and the role of the Left. Notoriously, a
member of the old Marxist New Left, physicist Alan Sokal decided to expose the
errors and obscurantism of a trendy new cultural Left which he saw as undermining
the strength of an older class-based Left, more respectful of science. He was assisted
by two feminist scholars, Barbara Epstein and Ruth Rosen, angry at the glamour
surrounding feminist cultural theorists within the academy and the neglect of womens
activism outside it. Sokal placed a hoax article in the Left cultural journal Social Text
in their special edition on the Science Wars, edited by two other New York academ-
ics, Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins. The next day, this academic turf war exploded
into the mainstream media, which Sokal used to expose his parody, subsequently
going onto the Internet to keep it alive. (See Peter Osborne, Friendly Fire, RP 81,
JanuaryFebruary 1997).
Sokal clearly had a serious agenda for his painstaking staging of a full-on feud
within the Left supposedly, to reform and strengthen it against those who were sub-
stituting arcane activities within the academy for broader political agendas. Yet Sokal
chose the wrong target and the wrong issue for parodying the exasperating opacity
and conceit of some putative postmodern prose. In my view, it is both analytically and
strategically unwise to play off class against cultural identications, or to try to evade
the problematic nature of notions of truth and certainty. The other essays in the contro-
versial issue of Social Text actually took the nature of science very seriously, building
complex arguments about the hopes and hazards of scientic research.
The worst aspect of the affair was that it delighted the conservative media to see the
Left at odds with itself, unable to nd issues around which to unify despite the ascend-
ancy of a corporate Right in control of the most economically globalized, awesomely
militarized, imperial power the world has ever known. But that failure is not something
primarily, or even tangentially, generated from inside the academy. It has everything to
do with the collapse of progressive radical movements outside it, whether class-based or
not. In such threatening times as these, in the face of increasingly global warfare and
rising religious, ethnic and market-driven fundamentalisms, all forms of progressive
alliance need to be fostered.
Jews make friends
Are you sure its not a hoax?, friends teased Robbins when, to his surprise, he was
asked by Sokal to co-sponsor an appeal by American Jews for peace in the Middle
East. Sokal and Robbins have re-entered the mainstream media together. They have
again achieved remarkable success, but this time as allies, nding an issue to unite
them and a positive goal. The physicist and the literary scholar have bonded, as Jewish
Leftists, to work for peace in the Middle East. They have been stung into action to
build opposition to the near-daily military invasions, massive devastation, deprivations
and humiliations visited on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza almost 80 per
cent of whom are living in severe poverty, lacking the resources for even the most basic
amenities. Justied in the name of resisting terrorism and the horror of the atavistic
resort to the suicide bombing of civilians by Palestinian ghters, Israels current
military aggression has met little criticism in the USA, its paramount backer. This is
despite the ever more rapid expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the Palestinian
West Bank and Gaza (now over 400,000 settlers), in deliberate deance of Oslo and
other accords.
Sokal and Robbins began collecting signatures from American Jews to demand an
end to US support for Israel, which, in direct grants and tax exemptions, is equivalent
to 30 per cent of the US foreign aid budget. A full-page Open Letter from American
Jews in the New York Times on 17 July 2002, carrying 965 signatures, urged that US
support for Israel be made conditional on its acceptance of a two-state solution, with
Israel returning to its pre-1967 borders and the evacuation of all Jewish settlements
in the occupied region. The letter received favourable coverage on CNN, signatories
quickly jumped to over 3,000, and groups elsewhere sponsored publication in their
local newspapers.
No longer self-destructing in a hail of friendly re, Sokal and Robbins now con-
front foes as indubitable as they are formidable Western and Israeli military hawks.
The Palestinian issue is uniting old feminist antagonists as well. One of the handful
who helped to edit Sokals Open Letter was another favourite target in academic turf
wars, the doyenne of feminist and queer scholarship, Judith Butler. Mimicking Sokal,
Martha Nussbaum had laid into The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler: Professor of
Parody, to defend a supposedly real Left against a phoney cultural Left in 1999,
on the conservative platform offered by the New Republic. A convert to Judaism via
marriage, and having recently visited Israel, Nussbaum signed up to the letter that her
adversary helped to draft. Elsewhere, Butler has written recently of the need to nd
a basis for building a community of resistance to violence on the international stage,
suggesting that this might begin from acceptance of our shared bodily vulnerabilities
and our awareness that, from the beginning, any form of psychic identity or subjectiv-
ity is dependent upon the recognition of others.
In the UK as well, old academic antagonists have united in condemnation of
Sharons policies. Some months ago, Stephen Rose, Richard Dawkins and Colin
Blakemore, well-known biologists ercely critical of each other over the legacy of
Darwin, signed a letter in the Guardian urging a moratorium on all European funds
to Israeli academic institutions until Israel begins serious peace initiatives. Signed by
Jewish and non-Jewish academics, the letter received much critical re from other,
predominantly Jewish, academics.
Contingent identities
Indeed, it has been raining Jews, as many of us in academia, in the USA and else-
where, discovered almost for the rst time a strategic political value to a culture
that some, such as myself, had previously not seen as a particularly vital part of our
sense of self. (To the surprise of many, another early signatory of the Open Letter
from American Jews was the other leading target of Sokals hoax, Andrew Ross.
Renowned for his Burns Night perorations, and previously thought of as vigorously
Scottish, Ross now materialized as half-Jewish.) It is indicative of the aw of posing
economic and material issues against the merely cultural when proclaiming political
priorities that left academic antagonists in the USA have made peace with each other
and been spurred into political work through bonding around an identity. However,
the politics attaching to such identications depend upon agendas that are usually
quite independent of them.
There is, of course, the very best of reasons for Jews to invoke a group identity
when afrming opposition to the policies of Israel. After all, it is in our name that
Israel allows, indeed encourages, Jews to leave their homes elsewhere and emigrate
to Israel. It is we who may move to Israel (aliyah), even as that state denies the right
of return to the tens of thousands of Palestinians and their children forced out of the
only homes they had ever possessed with its foundation in 1948, while withhold-
ing equal citizenship from those who remain within Israel. It has to date prevented
Palestinians from forming a state of their own in their small residual base in Gaza
and the West Bank. This denies them the kind of institutional foundations and
legitimacy that could foster alternative forms of political struggle, even combat, which
would not automatically be deemed terrorist and which would have the authority
to thwart the appalling suicide bombing of Israeli civilians now pursued by some
militant Palestinian factions.
However, the clear strategic point of using a Jewish identity to call for Justice for
Palestinians does not eliminate the usual paradoxes attending identity claims. The
overwhelming pressure to essentialize identity, to downplay differences and proclaim
ineluctably shared individual interests, attachments and belongings remains paramount.
Indeed, overall, Jews have never before been so identied with support for the state
of Israel as they are today, when tens of thousands have rallied, as in Washington and
London, to assert the merging of Jewishness with Zionism. Those of us currently using
a Jewish identity to oppose the military might of Israel and the injustices it has for so
many years inicted upon Palestinians are immediately declared anti-Semitic, along
with other anti-Zionists, and derided as self-hating Jews.
Yet, the Jewish Diaspora has never been united in relation to Israel. From the founda-
tion of Theordor Herzls World Zionist Organization in the late nineteenth century,
devoted to the resettlement of Jews in a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland, many
Jews opposed it. Some were actively anti-Zionist, worried about the fate of the Arab
Palestinians, while Zionism itself had differing strands. Alongside Herzls dream (seen
primarily as a solution to the problem of anti-semitism, especially in Eastern Europe)
was that of Ahad Haam, who was critical of a political Zionism, wanting to preserve
Jewish culture and foster a revival of the Hebrew language as part a secular national
culture. Still others were left political Zionists, committed to offering equal rights to
Palestinians. After the U.N. ratied the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1947,
Jewish anti-Zionism subsided. However, while in principle supporting Israel, in actuality
many Jews gave it little thought. (The main dispersal of Jews from Israel began in the
eighth century BC, with the bulk of Jewish people living outside its locality for over
2,000 years.) For some, both liberal and orthodox, the Diaspora could not end with
the creation of Israel, but only after all the problems of the world had been healed,
expressed in Hebrew as tikkun olam. Despite its strategic function, it is thus paradoxical
for Jews who have always objected to the equation of Jewishness with Zionism (and
indeed questioned the existence of any specic Jewish identity) to nd ourselves now
objecting as Jews to Ariel Sharons military manoeuvres of vengeance and expansion-
ism. Without intending it, we are ensnared in a new cultural war over the nature of
Jewish identity. We assert a Jewish identity only to nd ourselves accused by other Jews
of having already lost it; indeed, of failing to acknowledge or respect our Jewish
heritage of exile, discrimination and the long historical persecution and attempted
annihilation of our race.
I cannot hope to encompass the complexity of that heritage here. But let me
conclude with a brief example from the history of Jews in Australia. Today the
Zionist movement plays a dominant role in Jewish culture and identity in Australia.
Historically, however, the Anglo-Jewry there was overwhelmingly anti-Zionist. One of
its leading voices, all but erased in contemporary memory, came from my own grand-
father, Alfred Harris, the founder of the Australian Hebrew Standard, and its editor for
nearly forty years from 1895 until his death in 1944. A dedicated idealist and human-
ist, he turned one of only two Jewish papers in New South Wales into an anti-Zionist
platform, consistently opposing the creation of the state of Israel as undemocratic.
Yet his paper was working To perpetuate Judaism. To hasten the brotherhood of man
by developing a better understanding, goodwill and friendship between people of all
creeds to banish bigotry, ignorance and intolerance. His sentiments were echoed
by his friend and mentor, the most prominent Jew in Australia, the governor general,
Sir Isaac Isaacs, who worried that Arabs in Palestine would not be treated fairly under
political Zionism, which he saw as undemocratic, unjust and dangerous.
Views such as these form part of the Jewish heritage. As Naomi Scheman has
recently recalled from her childhood in the USA, [we] were raised with a strong
cultural identication with Jewishness, which in our family centered on commitment to
ghting so that others might be liberated, as Jews had been, from the various tyrannies
that had enslaved us and continued to enslave others. She writes of how natural it
seemed over a generation ago for Jews to participate indeed to risk their lives in
the civil rights movement in solidarity with Black Americans (in Lisa Tessman and
Bat-Ami Bar On, eds, Jewish Locations, Rowman & Littleeld, 2001). Such commit-
ment provides a stark contrast with one prominent expression of Jewish identity today.
No longer identifying with those who are most oppressed, or seeking to confront the
powerful, there has emerged a new model of the tough Jew, which still insists upon
its own overriding status as universal victim. The military success of Israel, so rmly
backed by the US government (and the Christian Right within it) hones the image.
In their long history Jews have often been victims, some have tried to be saviours,
and many, at least till recently, have attempted to be allies of those most in need of
compassion and justice. But we have no unique claims on any of these identities.
Oddly, to mobilize for peace and justice for both Jews and Palestinians, as Jews, might
seem to justify the worst of the fears expressed by traditional leftists (such as Sokal),
that it is no longer possible to agitate and organize on behalf of universal calls for
justice, but only to do so as an expression of particular interests and attachments. I
think that we not only can, but must, do both. Sensitive to the historical weight and
contradictions of our own ctitious unities, we can learn to live with and explore the
paradoxes we encounter. This is what feminism, at its most vibrant, did in relation to
gender, observing the ambiguities of our identities and attachments as women, espe-
cially if and when we use them to forge visions of a fairer world.
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The political reception of Niklas Luhmann in the
English-speaking world is still localized. His death in
1998 triggered a wider general interest in his work,
and its susceptibility to reception in cultural theory
has been clearly registered.
1
However, political debate
on his writings is still largely conned to the theoreti-
cally tuned regions of legal sociology, and there have
been few attempts in English to examine his sociology
as a philosophy of politics.
2
In certain respects this is
hardly surprising, as Luhmann distances himself from
common denitions of both philosophy and politics.
3

Nonetheless, his work continues a distinct tradition of
German political theory, and his thought is inuenced
by the political conceptions of Georg Simmel, Hans
Freyer, Arnold Gehlen and Helmut Schelsky. His
debates with such theorists thus place him close to
the centre of widespread discussions on the nature of
politics, on political legitimacy and the law, and on
the theoretical preconditions of political humanism.
Against this background, this essay has three primary
intentions. First, it seeks to give an account of the
political-philosophical foundations of systems theory.
Second, it critically scrutinizes Luhmanns position in
wider debates on political philosophy. Finally, it focuses
on the relation of politics to law in his sociology, and in
this respect it connects his work both conceptually and
politically with the treatment of law and legitimacy
in the writings of Martin Heidegger.
Underlying Luhmanns sociology is a critique of
metaphysics. In his own words, his theory of social
systems abandons the domain of metaphysics in the
classical sense, and it also renounces modern subject-
metaphysics.
4
His sociology, in consequence, is premis-
sed in a resolutely anti-foundational conception of social
being, and it refuses to acknowledge the existence of any
essential structures of meaning, value or agency existing
Systems theory and
legal theory
Luhmann, Heidegger and the
false ends of metaphysics
Chris Thornhill
prior to the positive facts of societal communication.
Against classical metaphysics, he dismisses all claims
that a structure can be imputed to human society
which is not autonomously produced by the evolu-
tion of the particular systems that form society.
5

Against the metaphysics of the subject, he opposes
all reconstructions of metaphysics as an account of
original faculties of human cognition or existence.
Like Foucault, therefore, he rejects all attempts to
dene invariable attributes of human reason or char-
acter which might explain, or even prescribe, the
characteristics of social reality. In short, he opposes
all attempts to interpret modern social systems in
light of causes, values or attributes which can in
any way be stabilized or universalized in contrast
to the temporary emergence of these systems. Most
especially, however, he sets himself against all vari-
ants on the original metaphysical claim that there is
a distinct underlying order to events in society, and
that this order can be isolated in the form of law
(either causal or moral).
6

This theoretical underpinning has direct con-
sequences for the ethical and cognitive components
of Luhmanns sociology. His theory of social systems
hinges on the argument that each system of society is
a closed or autopoietic unity of operations, and that no
system is permeable to normative perspectives from
outside it. Each system obtains a code, which enables
it to differentiate itself from its environment, and to
develop its own operations as an autonomous unity
of self-referential, entirely contingent sense. The legal
system, for example, differentiates itself from other
systems by developing the code lawful/non-lawful,
through which it selects information relevant to it.
The political system constitutes itself by developing
the code of power, and then by applying this to themes
which are relevant to power. No system can formulate
its relation to its environment, or react to problems in
its environment, except in the binary options of its own
internal code. This is not to say that systems have no
means of learning about their environment. Contrary
to cruder renditions of his sociology, Luhmann clearly
states that each system possesses facilities for learning,
which allow it to register malfunctioning in its relation
to the environment, and, where necessary, to alter
the applications of its code. However, learning within
a social system can only occur through the options
which that system incorporates, and it cannot result
from externally deduced information or instruction.
7

Consequently, Luhmanns theory of systems devel-
ops an advanced position in the critique of meta-
physical ethics. He rejects normative sociological or
political perspectives, which argue that social agency
can be regulated by theoretically sustainable moral
axioms, and which place ethics externally to the local
composition of meanings and expectations.
8
In its
cognitive implications, his theory indicates that each
system of society generates motivations for those social
agents who are its addressees, and that the rationality
of these motivations cannot be questioned either from
inside or outside the system.
9
A system is rational
if it can stabilize its own contingent reality against
the complexity of its environment. This rationality,
however, is never determined by criteria not produced
in the system itself.
10
Claims from outside a system
(sometimes known as protest) that a system is in
some way untrue or irrational are at most systemic
self-descriptions, through which a system might gain
information about slight frictions in its relation to the
environment.
11
In the rationality of a system, more-
over, truth and ideology are indistinguishable, and
there is no mode of human consciousness which might
hold a measure of true validity against the opera-
tions of a social system. The truth of a system is
merely a variable in its functional rationality, and the
functional rationality of a system is always assessed
by the extent to which it successfully realizes itself
as contingency against external or environmental
realities.
At the heart of Luhmanns cognitive, ethical and
political perspectives is therefore a claim for a unity of
theory and praxis which attempts to dismantle all foun-
dational epistemology.
12
Cognitively, Luhmann asserts
that theory has no dignity against praxis: human con-
sciousness cannot extrapolate itself from the operations
of the systems which it inhabits in order to criticize
its objective conditions. In his political ethics, like-
wise, he claims that political legitimacy, and above all
legitimacy in law, does not result from theories about
right order. Rather, the legitimacy of political authority
is obtained where the systems and subsystems which
form politics demonstrate that they can practically
manage the complexity (perhaps communicated as
public opinion) which is their environment, and if
they can generate or manipulate symbolic consensus
on that basis.
13
Legitimacy in politics is therefore the
form in which the political system accepts its own con-
tingency:
14
it is the systems representation of its own
realized unity, and it does not imply congruence with
founding norms. Theoretical reection on legitimacy
is in fact likely to undermine the legitimacy of the
political system. The thematization of legitimation,
he states, does not have a neutral effect as far as
the politics of legitimation is concerned, but tends to
greater delegitimation.
15
It is in his reections on law, however, that Luhmann
develops his most far-reaching assault on residually
metaphysical assumptions. Legal theory, he intimates,
is the most common bearer of quasi-metaphysical
misconceptions. Indeed, legal theory is the habitual
heir to the illusions of metaphysics, as it tends to echo
the metaphysical conception that the world possesses
an underlying universal order, and that this order can
be theoretically reected in law. This is apparent above
all in its tendency to detach law from social facticity,
and then to burden it with the expectation that it
might impose invariable norms and values (justice,
equality etc.) on this facticity. In fact, however, law is
simply a self-reproducing complex of norms, which has
assumed positive functional autonomy in the course
of the evolutionary development(s) of modern society.
Modern law is a medium that allows distinct systems
(and especially the political system) autonomously to
formalize their relations to their environments, and
thus to gain positive, contingent legitimacy for them-
selves. The legitimacy of law does not derive from any
source outside law itself: it does not depend on laws
correspondence with broadly mediated social contracts,
on its relation to rational-subjective prescriptions, or
on any extra-legal principle or fact. Legal legitimacy
derives merely from the success with which it secures
acceptance for itself.
16
The foundation of legitimate
law, therefore, is simply its own recursive positivity,
and any attempt to make legal normativity reliant on
extra-legal reections threatens its legitimacy. Politi-
cal legitimacy, consequently, is the ongoing reality of
a political system, in which the legitimacy of pure
legality nds recognition and in which, through the
positivization of law, legitimate legal validity can be
claimed for any content.
17

Luhmann always distinguishes between the legal
system and the political system. The legal system,
he argues, only operates effectively because it is not
political.
18
The political system can only function
because it mobilizes processes of legislation, through
which law provides a medium in which politics can
confer acceptable form on its policies.
19
Close to the
early theorists of the legal state (Rechtsstaat), in fact,
Luhmann sees politics and law as invariably separate
and invariably interdependent systems. Politics needs
law to transform its decisions into generalizable media;
to obtain this, however, it must also cede power to the
legal system, as the legal system necessarily second-
codes power in accordance with its own code of
lawful/non-lawful. Power and law are held together in
a differentiated interdependence of second-coding, in
which law derives content from power, yet in which
law also formally limits power, or opposes its own
counter-power (Gegenmacht) to the power communi-
cated by politics.
20

In short, Luhmann sees legislation as a neutral
process of transmission that communicates in the form
of law the decisions which the political system pro-
duces, but for whose processing politics on its own does
not possess adequate resources. Legislation is thus the
moment in the decision-making of the political system
which connects politics to its addressees (the public),
which externalizes the relation of the political system
to its public, and through which the political system
secures its own long-term legitimacy. Signicantly,
Luhmann does not view legislation as the exclusive
premiss of elected legislatures or representative bodies
(normally dened as parliaments). Instead, legislation
is a complex process of systemic self-stabilization, in
which the political system secures its own legitimacy
through administration.
21
Legislation can be the func-
tional province of bureaucratic planning apparatuses,
of discussion groups, of round tables between govern-
ment and organized labour, of strategically created
sub-executives, or, equally plausibly, of MPs appointed
by popular election. Legislation is simply that multi-
formed process which occurs wherever administration
picks up decisions made in politics, and confers on
these a medium (law), which might be recognized
and accepted by the public. The public, then, will
or will not re-endorse (through elections, complaints
to the press, or common shows of acclamation) the
government that rst drafted the policies. Luhmanns
political theory is especially suited to neo-corporat-
ist theories of government, which identify legislation
as a predominantly bureaucratic activity, and which
reject the primacy given to the elected legislature in
classical or normative liberal theory.
22
In any case, it
is in laws made by the administration that politics
preserves its legitimacy and creates the probability of
further legitimacy.
Running through all these reproaches against the
metaphysical legacies in modern social theory is an
attack on humanism, or philosophical anthropology.
Indeed, Luhmann implies that the root cause of the
major errors in modern social theory is the enduring
focusing of reection on human beings, as centres
of needs and values distinct from the systems of
social communication. The social world in all its
complexity and contingency is, he indicates, only ever
falsely construed by theories which make the human
being, dened as a unique source of accountability and
causation, the point of departure for their inquiries.
Sociology, he indicates, must always be something
quite radically different from anthropology.
23
The
social systems of modern society, he states, do not
operate in accordance with human needs, and the
laws which regulate these social systems do not have
their origins in integral people. The widespread belief
that this is the case is merely one last, most fateful
trace of metaphysics, which transfers the original
illusion of ontological order (or heteronomy) into an
equally simplistic model of a world revolving around
the autonomous legislative person. Congruence with
formally measurable or legally determinable human
needs cannot, however, be invoked as a measure for
the legitimacy of modern systems. In fact, the modern
legal and political systems become legitimate precisely
in the process through which they decouple themselves
from reection on human attributes or interests.
A human law?
In these reections, Luhmann places himself in direct
opposition to the theoretical backbone of post-meta-
physical debate in modern political theory, especially
in the German tradition. Very summarily, it might
be argued that, from Kant to the present, the main
preoccupation of political reection in Germany is
to account for the anthropological source of legiti-
mate political order. The major political perspectives
since Kant most obviously, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche,
Weber, Simmel, Schmitt and Habermas all indicate
(albeit in very diverse terms) that legitimate political
order must be anchored in a particular conception
of the human person, and that the laws of legitimate
politics must publicly re-present the essentially human
structure of legal subjects. At the foundation of modern
German political philosophy, in consequence, is a
coupling of anthropology and representation, which
separates out the human being from all previous meta-
physical or theological models of political legitimism
and causality, and which posits the law-giving person,
free of heteronomous determination, as the legal origin
of legitimate order.
24
Of greatest importance, however, is the fact that
the most inuential attempts to account for the non-
metaphysical foundations of legality and legitimacy
never nally abandon the terrain of metaphysics. Kant
denes legitimate law as the objective expression of
the quintessentially human capacities for reason and
autonomy. Indeed, he conceives of human reason itself
as intrinsically legislative, and views legitimate power
as the objective form of such reason. However, Kants
metaphysical debts in this conception are quite mani-
fest. He founds legitimate politics in the self-legislating
legal subject but the laws prescribed by this subject
can only exist as an illusion, whose transcendental
conditions are prior to all practical and historical expe-
rience.
25
Following Kant, Fichte and Hegel also give
essentialist-anthropological accounts of law. Fichte
sees legitimate law as the practical self-positing of
human reason, and Hegel sees it as the historical reali-
zation of the innate idea of human freedom. However,
both Fichte and Hegel still only manage to explain
laws legitimacy as the manifestation of attributes
of human reason, which are metaphysically prior to
human practical life itself.
26

Subsequently, Nietzsche criticized the Kantian
legal subject as a malign distillation of economic
calculation, and he imagined true existence beyond
formal-metaphysical laws, which suppress vital exist-
ence. Yet Nietzsche himself merely replaced formal
values with an essentialist construct of decisionistic
self-authorization, and paradoxically reintroduced the
idea of willing self-legislation as the expression of
humanitys founding substance.
27
Following Nietzsche,
Weber argues that legitimacy in law emerges from
truly human political responsibility, through which
charismatic legislators infuse contents into law which
are distinct from solely functional modes of legal-
ity. Simmel, too, views legitimate law as a medium
in which human existence can decisively articulate
its most unconditioned imperatives. Carl Schmitt,
although (like Nietzsche) not obviously a theorist of
the legal subject, conceives legitimate law either as the
expression of the historically cemented consciousness
of the people, or as the re-presentation of ethical ideas,
through which humans dene themselves as other
than functional or economic agents.
28
Nonetheless,
Weber, Simmel and Schmitt only manage to account
for the human legitimacy of law by positing a prior
typology of character, which asserts that certain types
of people and certain types of interaction are more
equipped to produce legitimate laws than others.
29

Analogously, Habermas describes legitimate law as
an order of value-rational norms in which the human
orientation towards rational agreement is given objec-
tive public form,
30
and through which privately free
citizens rationally authorize their political obligations.
Yet Habermas only succeeds in envisaging legitimate
law because he pre-denes certain modes of human
interaction (discourse) as invariably oriented towards
the production of universalizable laws.
31
Even Marx,
who expressly depreciates law as a medium of pos-
sible freedom, might also be seen to envision the
emancipation of labour as the fullment of certain
prior criteria of justice, which are always already
inscribed in labour.
32

Each of these key theoretical positions, therefore,
makes a very specic claim for law: namely, that
human practical self-realization occurs through law,
that law gives objectively adequate form to the found-
ations of the human, and that political life obtains
legitimacy in so far as it is representatively transparent
to the legislative substructure of the human being, as
some variant on the legal subject. In each of these
perspectives we encounter diverse types of legal anthro-
pology, which explain the underlying composition of
humanity as an independent capacity for obtaining law,
and for grounding legitimacy on that original founda-
tion. Yet each of these arguments still contains half-
suppressed metaphysical elements and is ultimately
unable to explain the production of legitimate law as a
consistently post-metaphysical operation. In producing
law as an autonomous legal subject, humanity simply
elaborates its own prior orientation towards legislation.
The original autonomy or humanity which founds the
laws, therefore, is still metaphysical. In each of these
instances the shift from metaphysical to anthropologi-
cal conceptions of legitimacy is not conclusive, and
political legitimacy is obtained by faculties of reason
or character, whose existence is always conceived as a
prior component of the human constitution itself.
33

Luhmanns systems-theoretical conception of law
stands at the end of this tradition, and it directly sub-
verts all humanist or residually metaphysical aspects
of reection on legality and legitimacy. The legitimacy
of the political system is not an anthropologically
meaningful condition, and it does not reect any
human experience of free self-legislation. Legitimate
law is nothing more and nothing less than the con-
tingent form of the legal system, and the contingent
form of the political system as it externalizes its
internal boundary-relation to citizens (its environ-
ment). Political legitimacy, therefore, is the systems
own experience of self-legislation: it is a radically
autonomous occurrence (Ereignis) of order,
34
in which
the communications which form politics perpetuate
their own reproduction, free of all obligation to cat-
egorically enduring laws. Indeed, where positive law is
recognized and accepted as legitimate law, Luhmann
explains, in a central question of human co-existence
arbitrariness becomes an institution.
35
This position
has very close afnities with that other most inuential
attempt to dismantle the neo-metaphysical legacy in
political thought: the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
Indeed, in the debate on legality, and on the legitimacy
of legality, Heideggers work is directly relevant for
functionalist theory, and Luhmann might easily be
viewed as the major political inheritor of Heideggers
theoretical lineage.
36

Time, not law
Like Luhmann after him, Heideggers thought has its
critical centre in a debate with the legal-anthropological
views in modern German philosophy, especially those
deriving from Kant. Receptions of Heidegger have been
badly affected by the early existential misreadings
of his work, which take their lead from his concept
of Eigentlichkeit, widely and mistakenly translated
as authenticity. Referring to this term, a view on
Heidegger still persists (even amongst avowed-ly anti-
existential philosophers) that sees him as a theorist of
transformative subjective exper-ience, and so as a covert
anthropological or even quasi-humanist philosopher.
37

Such interpretations, however, usually fail to appreciate
Heideggers debate with Kant,
and, by distortedly stressing
one aspect of his philosophy,
they omit to notice the extent
to which his thought hinges
on a practical-historical recon-
struction of Kants legislative
concepts of human subjectivity
and validity. At the heart of
Heideggers work is the argu-
ment that in Kantian ethics
and epistemology the residues
of Platonist metaphysics have
been remodelled into a concep-
tion of being, which formal-
izes the human person as the
exclusive measure of moral
and cognitive validity. This
conception, for Heidegger,
reies the human against his-
torical phenomena, and is unable to account for being
(and also for human-being) in the full breadth of its
occurring plurality. For this reason, Heidegger implies
that, for all Kants epoch-making endeavour to cut
away the superstructure of classical metaphysics and
so to account for human freedom and independence, he
only succeeds in reorganizing metaphysics as a science
of humanity (an anthropology), which transposes the
primary legal order of metaphysics onto the human
legal subject. This subject, then, as a ghostly universal
legislator, is called upon to regulate the conditions for
all possible knowledge.
38
Above all, on Heideggers view, Kant is only able
to conceive of the human (and of human freedom) on
the foundation of law. His idealism reduces human
being to an empty series of legislative operations, in
which pure reason regulates the extent of its cognitive
validity, and in which practical reason regulates the
conditions of ethical autonomy. His transcendental
legal subject, thus, can only give the most impover-
ished description of human knowledge as the result
of a reied or juridied unity of consciousness, and it
can provide only the most depleted reection of human
freedom as an abstract moment of self-construction in
the medium of formal right.
39
Kants idealism, simply,
cannot understand the complex and changing reality
of the world: this is because it is still metaphysical,
and because it desperately imputes a founding legal
order to the complex realities which it encounters. In
many respects, Heideggers entire philosophical project
might be viewed as an endeavour, after metaphysics,
to liberate the human (and its freedom) from juridical
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categorizations, and thus, contra Kant, phenomeno-
logically to account for the limitless temporal plural-
ity of human life-contexts, and of the innitely diverse
and truly autonomous meanings that compose these.
Opposing Kant, Heidegger gives an account of
human cognitive existence in which human thinking is
not the operation of a pre-stabilized legislating centre,
but a practical process of interpretation, in which
understanding is locally and eetingly determined by
the social and historical nexus in which it occurs.
40

Moreover, he proposes a model of ethical life in which
human action obtains contextual legitimacy and is
not validated by the prescription of prior conditions
of right. He thus interprets human existence, and the
historical concretions of human-being, as practically
engendered arenas of validity, whose endlessly evolv-
ing structures are centred neither in essential-anthro-
pological foundations, nor in quasi-metaphysical forms
of cognitive or ethical justication.
41
Importantly, in his early lectures Heidegger also
gives an account of world-formation (Weltbildung)
as the constitutive activity of human cognitive and
ethical being. The construction of world, he explains,
is the gradual historical establishment of common
orientations for human communication. By forming
a world, particular historical agents create meanings
in time; these enable the reliable co-ordination of
action, stabilize social expectations, and cement his-
torically and plurally normative orders of obligation.
The world, in consequence, is the horizon of reality
in which human-being interprets its simultaneous
relation to, and difference from, Being (Sein) itself.
The constitution of the world is an event of social
formation, in which theory and praxis are not anti-
nomically distinct elements, but in which reection,
action and communication all combine to produce the
dense fabric of terms, around which human beings
give some kind of mediated foundation to their lives.
The communicatively structured forms of the world
are ever-changing, as they are not anchored in invari-
ably valid prescriptions. There is no gauge of good
praxis outside the world, or outside the local orders
of meaning within it: the world, therefore, is both
the shared reality and the shared fate of those people
whose beginnings and ends are inscribed in it.
42
This opposition to the juridically reied structure
of human consciousness in Kantian and post-Kantian
political theory is the premiss for Heideggers political
thought.
43
Consciousness which is reied as a formal
centre of reection cannot, he intimates, produce
political order as anything other than law: it can
only generate political order as set of immutable
conditions imposed on the otherwise constantly shifting
circumstances of historical being. Reied conscious-
ness, therefore, can only give rise to political order as
metaphysics, anthropologically transcribed into laws
(this is close to Heideggers understanding of liberal-
ism). Such order can never be truly legitimate, for at
its core is a violent (legal/metaphysical) reduction of
being itself. In a genuinely legitimate political order,
in contrast, human historical consciousness would no
longer formally extrapolate itself from being into uni-
versal ethical standards or values, but would endlessly
produce practical forms adequate to its own conditions.
The constitution of genuinely legitimate political order,
Heidegger consequently implies, depends upon the end
of the reication of consciousness, and so upon the
end of law or at least on the end of law as an
antinomically deduced set of postulates, intelligibly
placed on being by a legal subject. Legitimate political
order occurs where human historical consciousness
realizes itself in appropriate objective forms, against
which no abstract theoretical measure (laws) can be
mobilized. The legitimacy of historical or political form
is for Heidegger, in short, a condition which cannot be
predicated on particular or reasoning human beings. It
emerges only as the particular or reasoning authorship
of law and power recedes, and where this is replaced
by commonly mediated, yet substantially relative forms
of worldliness, as Dasein.
In their responses to the political legacies of meta-
physics and metaphysical anthropology, Luhmann and
Heidegger evidently have a great deal in common. Both
assert that the processes of sense-composition in society
have no discernible origin in the particular person, or
in particular reason. The modes of local and practical
co-ordination which build the world (Heidegger), or
the self-referential communications which occur in
systems (Luhmann), constitute an entire truthful reality,
against which no external criterion can be invoked,
and whose validity cannot be assessed by any recourse
to static human essence. Common to both Heidegger
and Luhmann is thus an anti-humanist hermeneutic,
which suggests that the human mind cannot reexively
deduce or stipulate the dening terms of its existence,
and that the plural events of human-being and human
freedom can only be understood if they are detached
from all anthropologizing foundation in right. Social
realities, they thus suggest, generate and justify them-
selves not through juridically sanctioned principles of
legal subjects, but merely through their own objective
contingency.
In their common decoupling of human being from
metaphysical and juridical form, both Heidegger and
Luhmann view time, not law, as the modality in
which human life structures itself most adequately.
For Heidegger, the world is the concrete form of con-
tingency, in which human relations are eetingly yet
authoritatively inscribed in time as action-orientations.
The world does not result from any timeless human
preconditions; most especially, it does not arise from
the temporally unvaried encasing of human essence in
law. The world is merely the formed order of being-
in-time, in its contingent self-differentiation from
the innite chaos of possible meanings, which are
outside of it.
44
It is a practical reality, in which human
interpretation produces its own meaningful time, in
contradistinction to the unstructured time elsewhere.
Similarly, Luhmann identies the genetic origin of
social systems in the moment of reected contingency,
in which communications are co-ordinated (in double
contingency) around multilaterally accepted sense or
codes. Through such double-contingency, systems
generate reliable expectations (or expectation-expecta-
tions), which give a temporal horizon of predictability
to human operations.
45
Systems thus have the function
of time-binding: they stabilize counterfactual norms
against the complex temporal reality outside them,
and so allow people to invest trust in the functions of
a system, and to entertain even highly uncertain and
alarming futures by reducing, or counterbalancing, the
indeterminacy of the developing environment. Like
Heideggers world, therefore, the system is a place
of sense, which detaches human meaning from the
forms (cognitive or moral laws) that found timeless
validity, and which creates time through its own self-
organization as contingency.
46
A direct parallel might also be drawn here between
the relation of Dasein to Being (Sein) in Heideggers
fundamental ontology and the relation of system to
environment in Luhmanns functionalism. Heidegger
argues that human practical life, as Dasein, creates
regions of meaning, which possess their own inner-
temporal validity, but which are always different from
Being itself. However, in its contingent self-differen-
tiation from Being, Dasein is also always related to
Being: it is only through the difference of the mean-
ings which constitute the world of Dasein that any
knowledge of Being itself is obtainable.
47
Similarly,
Luhmann echoes this view by explaining the construc-
tion of social or systemic sense as a process through
which reality is differentiated from truth. No system,
he explains, can have knowledge about the truth of
its functions in relation to its environment, except in
the codes which it produces through its autopoiesis.
A system, therefore, can only gain information about
its environment (and itself) by generating a contingent
horizon of internally valid references, through which
it negates, selects and constitutes its own outer reality.
In this respect, both Heidegger and Luhmann concur
quite fundamentally in the insight that no positive-
ontological claim can be made about the conditions
of Being. Being itself can only be addressed through
processes of communication, which compose their
own temporal reality as an innite and paradoxical
difference against their environment(s), and against
Being itself.
48
The political implications of these last points also
warrant direct critical comparison. Both Heidegger and
Luhmann imply that human order, either as Dasein
or as system, can only ever give to itself a temporal
reality of legitimacy, as difference: its legitimacy is
this temporal reality. If a precise doctrine of legitimacy
can be extracted from Heideggers philosophy, he
might be seen to suggest that a political order obtains
legitimacy where, free of law, it develops a historical
form, in which it both accepts and paradoxically denies
the contingency (difference) of its relation to Being.
49

The legitimate act that founds a political state, he
explains, anchors the political order in that revelatory
moment in which truth comes to shine forth. How-
ever, this originary founding truth of the polity only
actually discloses itself through entities in the world,
and so as difference against truth, or as the shine of
truth the shine of legitimacy.
50
Luhmann echoes this
by indicating that the legitimacy of the modern politi-
cal order relies on its ability to propose paradoxes (in
the semantic sense of the state or of sovereignty or
even of values), which, both admitting and denying
the fundamental contingency of the state, stabilize
order as an unconditionally accepted and reected
temporal paradox.
51
Legitimation is, Luhmann states,
mirroring Heidegger, the transformation of the absent
into presence, as values.
52
On this basis, Heidegger and Luhmann endorse
a political ethic which insists that there is no dem-
onstrable alternative to the objectively formed life
of the polity at any given moment in its emergence
and evolution. The polity, both imply, is contingent
and paradoxical, and it offers no rm standards by
which it might be criticized. Indeed, in so far as either
Heidegger or Luhmann subscribes to any clear political
world-view, both might be seen to endorse a political
reality which (however ironically) combines aspects of
pluralism and authoritarianism. Heideggers ability to
combine a theory of the plural formation of meaning
with an enthusiasm for extreme political authoritarian-
ism has been extensively documented. This is not
the place to reconstruct the now almost impossibly
ramied debates on Heideggers involvement with the
National Socialists, or on the extent to which this
was or was not founded in the conceptual base of his
philosophy.
53
It might simply be observed, however,
that at the core of his political theory is the intimation
that the worldly reality of Dasein constructs itself
plurally and free of law, but that it lastly also pre-
scribes itself, as law, to those whose particular being
falls into it. Dasein, as the historically differentiated
form of Being, cannot be other than legitimate, and
its conditions must be accepted as such.
54

The pluralist intention in Luhmanns sociology is
also clear enough, as he obviously reects (and perhaps
advocates) a modern social order which is organized
around constantly proliferating centres of sense. If
Luhmann has a specic blueprint of political order in
mind, in fact, he might be seen to support a politically
diffuse and decentred society, in which the subsystems
of politics generate legitimacy by differentiating them-
selves from, and ceding power to, the other systems
and partial systems with which they interact. Political
power itself, he claims, is a recursive resource in all
the codes and decisions by which the political system
stabilizes itself, and it can only be ctitiously attached
to persons or identiable foci of coercion.
55
Despite
this, however, Luhmanns sociology also contains clear
elements of aggressive anti-socialism and anti-consen-
sual democratic minimalism.
Autopoietic legislation
Luhmann cannot be seamlessly aligned to mainstream
reactionary political thought, and he has little attach-
ment to the characteristic perspectives of European
conservatism. He does not ascribe any degree of formal
dignity to the state as a guarantor of integrative order,
and he clearly emphasizes the limitations of politics
and of political power, and their restriction by other
social media. Quite manifestly, therefore, Luhmann
has no axe to grind with political modernity, or with
political post-modernity. Indeed, it might plausibly
be claimed that he is closest to a post-anthropologi-
cal form of liberalism. At the heart of his sociology
is an implicit insistence on the political value of
the conditions of social plurality, differentiation and
autonomy which have resulted from the functional
de-centration of modern society, and he clearly resists
attempts to recentre society on the monistic power of
the political system.
Despite this, however, much of Luhmanns work
can also be linked to the liberal-conservative back-
lash of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He is, for
instance, extremely critical of the models of welfare
democracy and participatory democracy propagated
through the 1960s and 1970s, and is very close to
the deregulation theorists who inuenced the early
ReaganThatcherKohl era. In Political Theory in
the Welfare State (published in 1981) he strategi-
cally distances himself from fashionable conservative
anxieties about ungovernability and the crisis of
state in the Keynesian welfare systems of Western
Europe after the oil crises. However, his demand
there for the adoption of a more restrictive concep-
tion of politics surely belongs to the critical debates
on welfare and economic steering which characterize
neo-conservative thought in this period.
56
Following
this work, his hostility to welfare democracy became
more pronounced through the 1980s, culminating in
his characterization of plans to regulate economic
interaction as potentially disastrous programmes of
difference-minimization. Welfare-democratic models
of governance and legislation, he states at this point,
are invariably based on the erroneous assumption that
government can deploy power in the form of law to
solve problems which are relevant only to the medium
of money.
57
Whenever such solutions are attempted,
government alters the self-regulating mechanisms of
the economy. When it does this, government creates
instabilities in the economy, for which it is then called
to account; these instabilities are then repoliticized,
and they ultimately overtax the functional efcacy
(legitimacy) of the political system itself. Political
intervention in the economy, therefore, is invariably
detrimental to both the economic and the political
system.
However, Luhmanns specic type of liberal/con-
servative perspective is again most obvious in his
functional theories of legality and legislative reason.
58

Like other thinkers on the postwar right in the Federal
Republic of Germany (FRG),

he argues that the con-
stitutionally enshrined separation of powers in the
modern democratic state is not a framework for
enabling popular legislative inuence. It is, rather,
a technical arrangement, which enables executive
and legislature to operate as functionally distinct sub-
systems, each following its own rationality criteria.
59

Whenever excessive demands are made for popular
participation in politics, however, or whenever exces-
sive social responsibilities are imputed to the state, the
functional limits of legislation become blurred, and
law begins to conate its objectives with functions
properly belonging to the executive. The legitimacy
of legislation thus relies not on its communication of
universal norms of reason, but on the protection of
the legislature from social overburdening, and on its
functional restriction to those minimal tasks which
can be securely accomplished through law.
This theory of the legislature touches on two espe-
cially sensitive points in the theoretical history of
the FRG. First, theorists on the left and liberal left,
most obviously Habermas, have repeatedly diagnosed
the traditional weakness of the legislature as the key
source of the legitimatory decits in the German
political system,

and they have developed theoretical
models for increasing the openness of the legislature,
and for enabling law to channel broad-based consensus
into the executive.
60
Second, theorists in this line have
also attempted to reinterpret the Basic Law of the FRG
to include democratic rights of social participation
in legislation, especially in questions of economic
administration.
61
On both these points, however, Luh-
manns position is quite clear: he is directly opposed
to all radical-democratic conceptions of legislation
as an expression of popular will-formation and to
all social-democratic conceptions of legislation as a
process of consensual distribution.

More pointedly,
in fact, he indicates that political democracy cannot
coexist with radical democracy or with social democ-
racy, and that excessive concern with social issues
(rights of participation, material equality, equality of
opportunity, etc.) dissolves com-petence
in legislation, and erodes political legiti-
macy.

Consequently, those people who
misrecognize the limits of law, and who
attempt to transmit alternatives to power
through law, do little more than cause
damage.

Such people succeed at most in
institution-alizing annoying types of bad
behaviour within the networks in which
power and law are transmitted.

In short,
therefore, although Luhmann is outside
more conventional lines of reactionary
political theory, the plural foundation of
his conception of politics merely culmi-
nates in the view that there are many
different ways in which citizens must
accept bureaucratic rulings and decisions
(laws), and that laws power to change
power is very limited.
62
In these issues, more generally, we
encounter an issue of fundamental
importance for post- or anti-metaphysical
political theory. In the work of Heidegger
and Luhmann, the revolt against meta-
physics, or against its juridical traces
in epistemology and anthropology, is a
move towards a plural conception of human validity,
which interprets the legitimacy of human-being as
internal to its particular locus of temporal operation,
and which seeks to detach conceptions of true human
reality from all prior juridical formation. Despite this,
however, their perspectives might in some respects
also be viewed as concluding positions in the cri-
tique of legal-metaphysical heteronomy, which was
rst programmatically formulated by Kant. Kants
critique of heteronomy premisses personal autonomy
(and therefore political legitimacy) in the timeless legal
subject, possessed with universal legislative faculties.
Heidegger and Luhmann both argue that this legal
subject cannot account for the manifold and evolving
reality of autonomy and legitimacy. Consequently, they
correct Kantian political philosophy by developing
a conception of socio-historical autonomy which is
no longer centred in the legal subject, and in which
legitimacy in law is the expression of objectively and
temporally realized contingency. Thus, whilst Kant
replaces metaphysical heteronomy with a juridical
model, which denes human reason as the autonomous
author of legitimate law, Heidegger and Luhmann
also replace metaphysical heteronomy with a juridi-
cal model: but this juridical model views legitimate
law as its own autonomous author, and such law
forms a reality in which the human subject can no
longer legislatively participate. If Kant endeavoured
to translocate the origin of law from a classical-meta-
physical superstructure into the autonomous realm
of human reason, Heidegger and Luhmann actually
paradoxically continue and radicalize this primary
quest. Here, however, legislative autonomy (or legiti-
macy) is an unfounded condition, in which the sporadic
arenas of human meaning authorize and valorize them-
selves. As a result, the forms of worldliness in which
human actions and communications are ordered gain
autonomy against human beings. These forms then,
in an endless plurality of autonomous self-produced
operations, perpetuate their own laws, which have no
origin in anything other than the contingency of their
reality, but which must nonetheless be accepted as
valid by their addressees.
63
This unfounded condition
of autonomy and legitimacy is the ironic apotheosis
of Kants rst anti-metaphysical dream of autonomy:
now, the realized autonomy of laws authorship nally
obscures the subject of autonomy itself (the human
being), which was initially proposed by Kant as the
reason for rejecting metaphysics.
On these grounds, it might be asked whether the
attempt to eliminate all metaphysical residues from the
conception of political legitimacy does not almost nec-
essarily recreate metaphysics, as a this-worldly order
of heteronomy. If the major post-Kantian reections
on legality and legitimacy only supersede classical
metaphysics by deploying a secondary metaphysics
of the human person to explain the origin of law,
it might equally be argued that the extreme oppo-
sition to the anthropological/metaphysical founding of
legal philosophy also fails to surmount metaphysics.
This latter view simply reconstitutes metaphysics as
metaphysics of order, in which law is organized as
a system of recursive prescriptions, whose source is
separated out from the particular places of human
life and experience. Luhmann always sees law as
the externalized set of terms in which the political
system decides over its relation to people,

and in which
it institutes role-playing procedures (trials, tribunals,
hearings etc.), so that citizens become accustomed to
showing obedience.
64
In distant analogy, Heidegger
sees law as the form in which Being manifests itself
as fate (Schicksal): law is the amalgam of obligations
which weigh upon historical agents in so far as they
are formed from the reexes of a national history.
65

To conclude, therefore, the pluralist or contingent
critique of metaphysics, exemplied by Heidegger and
Luhmann, only redesigns metaphysics as this-worldly
coercion or this-worldly heteronomy. Indeed, for all
their rejection of timeless juridical epistemologies and
anthropologies, it might be argued that the theoretical
turn instigated by Heidegger and Luhmann actually
still leaves the temporal conditions of human-being
centred on law. Law, now, is no longer the term through
which human reason subjectively articulates its own
capacities. Yet it is still, in objective enforcement, the
medium which structures the temporal expectations
of human-being, and which denes the conditions
of human freedom, accountability and legitimacy.
From Kant onward, the anthropological critique of
metaphysics transposes law onto foundations of human
determinacy, which are expressed in legislative reason
or political ethics. However, this post-metaphysical
critique ultimately turns full, paradoxical circle in
the works of Heidegger and Luhmann, who disengage
law from all statically timeless organizations of the
human being, yet in fact merely re-propose political
legitimacy as the empty, repetitive time of objective
heteronomy. Time, therefore, becomes the law, and so
reintroduces the original problem of metaphysics.
Beyond the law
Theorists working in purely normative lines of phil-
osophy might claim that it is naive to be surprised at
this underhand reconstruction of metaphysics in such
thinking. On a purely normative view, clearly, the
renunciation of all concepts of human endowment as
the base of political order must necessarily lead to
an endorsement of Hobbesian modes of governance.
However, it might be pointed out that both Heidegger
and Luhmann are quite emphatic in their claim that
the problem with modern reason is that, as covert
metaphysics, it cannot reect the intensely diverse and
unnervingly variable forms of independence, autonomy
and contingency in which modern social agents exist.
66

On their own terms both believe that their anti-meta-
physical theories help in accounting for the plurality of
social being, and both envision truthful human reality
as a condition of interpretive freedom and diversity,
independent of all distortedly juridical conceptions
of cause, essence and obligation. It is against this
pluralizing theoretical intention, consequently, that it is
most appropriate to measure and criticize the political
content of their work.
The key question which arises from this debate
is thus whether it is possible to describe the non-
metaphysical conditions of human autonomy and
political legitimacy without reproducing metaphysical
preconditions. It is beyond the scope of this article
to give an extensive account of possible responses
to this question. However, the observation that the
attempt to conceive of legality and legitimacy as
non-metaphysical realities either remains metaphys-
ics or becomes metaphysics once again might at least
provide an occasion for reconsidering metaphysics,
and its relation to politics. Indeed, it might be noted
here that there are other moments in recent German
philosophy which, mirroring Heidegger and Luhmann,
oppose the Kantian incarceration of human existence
in the timeless juridical-anthropological structure of
legal subjects, but which also discuss the conditions
of legitimate being without sanctioning law in its
evolving positivity. It is notable, though, that examples
of such philosophy, found for instance in the works of
Theodor Adorno and Karl Jaspers, are set quite ada-
mantly against Kants rst expulsion of metaphysics
from reason and politics, in the name of autonomy.
These thinkers share the anti-Kantian conviction held
by both Heidegger and Luhmann: namely, that human
truthfulness cannot be dened by prior categories, and
that human reality is falsely construed if conceived
on a legal foundation. However, the problem of the
juridication of human being, they suggest, is not
caused by a persistence of metaphysics in modern
reason. Rather, such juridication actually results
from the fact that reason has resolved to eradicate
all metaphysical traces from its activities, and can
thus only realize itself in ongoing innerworldly self-
regulation.
67
On the (otherwise very diverse) views
of Adorno and Jaspers, in fact, the destruction of
Kantian legal anthropology attempted by Heidegger
is not a destruction at all, but a simple inversion
and objective reinforcement of the tendency towards
juridication which inevitably results from the ideal-
ist rejection of metaphysics.
68
This argument might
equally be extended to include Luhmann, who also
never nally escapes the juridical problems of ideal-
ism in the manner in which he claims.
On this last view, truly temporal, truly post-juridical
consciousness would require an altogether different
consideration of metaphysics than that countenanced
by Kant and his adversarial successors. Indeed, whilst
other thinkers addressed here wish to ban metaphysical
contents from human reality, and imagine legitimate
humanity only at the end of metaphysics, Adorno and
Jaspers imply that the echo in metaphysics of a reality
which human-being cannot positively or autonomously
produce always provides the dialectical condition for
imagining the legitimacy of the human beyond the
law. Existence which negates both its subjective and
its objective reduction to law might call, therefore, on
the dialectical traces of precisely that alterity against
which post-metaphysical reason, under the banner of
freedom, originally rebelled.
69

Notes
1. See: Frdric Vandenberghe, Systemic Supertheorist
of the Social: Niklas Luhmann, 19271998, Radical
Philosophy 94, 1999, pp. 546; Art & Language, Roma
Reason: Luhmanns Art as a Social System, Radical
Philosophy 109, 2001, pp. 1421.
2. For a recent informative overview of Luhmann reception
in Britain and the USA, see Michael King, The Con-
struction and the Demolition of the Luhmann Heresy,
Law and Critique 12, 2001, pp. 132. Harro Mller
touches on the political implications of Luhmanns anti-
foundationalism in Luhmanns Systems Theory as a
Theory of Modernity, New German Critique 61, 1994,
pp. 3954; 40.
3. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz, Jr
with D. Baecker, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
1995, p. 101.
4. Ibid.
5. Niklas Luhmann, Soziologie des politischen Systems,
in Soziologische Aufklrung. Aufstze zur Theorie
sozialer Systeme, 4th edn, vol. 1, Westdeutscher Verlag,
Opladen, 1970, pp. 15473; 158.
6. Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklrung, Soziale
Welt 18, 1967, pp. 97123; 108.
7. Niklas Luhmann, A Sociological Theory of Law, ed.
M. Albrow, trans. E. King and M. Albrow, Routledge,
London, 1985, p. 201.
8. Niklas Luhmann, Komplexitt und Demokratie, Poli-
tische Vierteljahresschrift, vol. 10, no. 23, 1969, pp.
31425; 314.
9. Niklas Luhmann,Wahrheit und Ideologie, in Sozio-
logische Aufklrung, vol. 1, pp. 5465; 64.
10. Niklas Luhmann, Politische Planung, Jahrbuch fr
Sozialwissenschaft, vol. 17, no. 3, 1966, pp. 27196;
283.
11. The communication of protest occurs in society,
otherwise it would not be communication, but as if it
were from outside (Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1997, p. 853). The
idea that protest might be able to confront society with
fundamental truths about itself neglects to consider the
fact that all communication occurs within society, as
a complex self-description of all social functions, and
that there is no privileged position of observation out-
side these. Luhmann also construes civil society, the
founding bastion of modern liberal conceptions of anti-
systemic or anti-organizational agency (protest), as a
largely meaningless term (ibid., pp. 8445).
12. Niklas Luhmann, Die Praxis der Theorie, in Sozio-
logische Aufklrung, vol. 1, pp. 2537; 262.
13. Niklas Luhmann, Selbslegitimation des Staates, in
Archiv fr Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie Beiheft, Le-
gitimation des modernen Staates (1981) pp. 6583; 76,
81.
14. Niklas Luhmann, Die Unbeliebtheit der Parteien, Die
politische Meinung 37, 1992, pp. 511; 11.
15. Niklas Luhmann, Participation and Legitimation: The
Ideas and the Experiences, in Political Theory in the
Welfare State, trans. and introd. J. Bednarz Jr, de Gru-
yter, Berlin and New York, 1990, pp. 21930; 226.
16. Niklas Luhmann, Legitimation durch Verfahren,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1983, p. 120.
17. Luhmann, Soziologie des politischen Systems, p. 167;
Positives Recht und Ideologie, in Soziologische Aufk-
lrung, vol. 1, pp. 178203; 180.
18. What happens in the legal system is never simply the
implementation of political programmes, and it is to-
tally and absolutely impossible to present political
problems to the legal system and to expect it to solve
them (Niklas Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1993, pp. 41819).
19. Ibid., p. 425. It is in fact a specic characteristic of dem-
ocratic systems that they need alleviation of this kind,
that they refer decisions to valid law, and that law can
withdraw decision-premises and decisions from their
long-term problematization (Machtkreislauf und Recht
in Demokratien, in Zeitschrift fr Rechtssoziologie 2,
1981, pp. 15867; 166).
20. Niklas Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt am Main, 2000, p. 390; Widerstandsrecht und
politische Gewalt, Zeitschrift fr Rechtssoziologie 5
(1984) pp. 3645; 40; Political Theory in the Welfare
State, p. 49.
21. Luhmann, Selbstlegitimation des Staates, p. 76; Macht-
kreislauf und Recht in Demokratien, p. 164.
22. Luhmann emphatically endorses the organized deputa-
tion of interests as an alternative to participatory democ-
racy, and he clearly conceives his triadic differentiation
of politics in terms which are expressly open to a neo-
corporate reconstruction. In its differentiated form, he
explains, the administration cannot execute its deci-
sions if organizations, citizens initiatives, and the local
press do not help it out by communicating acceptance
or resistance of its decisions (Selbstlegitimation des
Staates, p. 74). In his posthumously published work
on politics, Societys Politics, he again speaks enthusi-
astically about the theory of neo-corporatism and its
understanding of communication, based in organiza-
tions, which represents systems (Die Politik der Ges-
ellschaft, p. 242).
23. He describes his approach as that of a radically anti-
humanist, radically anti-regionalist and radically con-
structivist theorist (Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft,
p. 35).
24. It would be a gross simplication to argue that the entire
history of post-renaissance European political thought
seeks to install the person as the author of law, without
theological or metaphysical addition. During the ex-
tended fragmentation of late-medieval scholasticism, a
number of positions obtained inuence which cannot be
assimilated to this model. The moral perfectionism of
Leibniz belongs, in part at least, outside this line. More
strikingly still, Spinozas political philosophy directly
opposes purely anthropocentric conceptions of auton-
omy and political right, and it makes human freedom
and harmony contingent upon a divine-natural order, of
which human beings gain knowledge through rational
wisdom (see Wolfgang Bartuschat, Spinozas Theorie des
Menschen, Meiner, Hamburg, 1992, pp. 1830; Baruch
Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G.H.R. Parkinson, Ox-
ford University Press, Oxford, 2000, pp. 31011). The
political works of Schelling and, later, of Ernst Bloch,
also testify to the survival of classical metaphysics, and
even of natural metaphysics, in modern political thought.
Nonetheless, from Kant onward the insistence that politi-
cal debate should be anthropologically focused, and that
the legitimacy of power depends on its representation of
autonomous human capacities for legislation, assumes a
dominant role. Note the opposition here to Ian Hunters
recent view on Kant, in his Rival Enlightenments: Civil
and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Ger-
many, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001,
p. 282.
25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed.
P. Guyer and A.W. Wood, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1998, pp. 678, 699, 546.
26. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right,
According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre,
ed. F. Neuhouser, trans. M. Bauer, Cambridge, Cam-
bridge University Press, 2000, p. 39; G.W.F. Hegel, Ele-
ments of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A.W. Wood, trans.
H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1991, pp. 589.
27. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed.
K. Ansell-Pearson, trans. C. Dietme, Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 43, 126, 128.
28. Max Weber, The Profession and Vocation of Politics,
in Political Writings, ed. and trans. P. Lassman and R.
Speirs, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994,
pp. 30969; 367; Georg Simmel, Das individuelle Ge-
setz. Philosophische Exkurse, ed. and introd. Michael
Landmann, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1968, p. 226;
Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, Duncker & Humblot,
Berlin, 1928, p. 209.
29. Weber, The Profession and Vocation of Politics p.
353; Carl Schmitt, Legalitt und Legitimitt, Duncker
& Humblot, Berlin, 1932, p. 81.
30. Jrgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Pub-
lic Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,
trans. T. Burger, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 162;
Jrgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contri-
butions to a Discourse Theory of Law, trans. W. Rehg,
Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 73.
31. Ibid., p. 227.
32. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, in Early Political
Writings, ed. and trans. J. OMalley and R.A. Davis,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp.
2857; 447. Even in his later works, Marx interprets
the expropriation of the proletariat in the production
process as the alienation of species-being, and thus as
the illegitimate separation of people from fundamental
entitlements. See Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, introd.
E. Mandel, trans. B. Fowkes, Penguin, Harmondsworth,
1976, p. 171.
33. For a much more comprehensive treatment of this con-
densed argument, see Chris Thornhill, Politics and Meta-
physics: A Problem in German Philosophy, Studies in
Social and Political Thought 5, 2001, pp. 334.
34. Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 48.
35. Luhmann, Soziologie des politischen Systems, p.
167.
36. Many recent inuential categorizations of Heideggers
work as proto-pragmatism (see Carl Friedrich Geth-
mann, Dasein, Erkennen und Handeln. Heidegger
im phnomenologischen Kontext, de Gruyter, Berlin,
1993, esp. p. 319), or as post-theistic existential theo-
logy (see Herman Philipse, Heideggers Philosophy of
Being: A Critical Interpretation, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 1998, pp. 1823; Theodore Kisiel, The
Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1995, pp. 42144) have
tended to obscure the fact that his political reections
coincide closely with the early functionalist line of po-
litical theory. Earlier readings of Heidegger often accen-
tuated the functionalist components in his philosophy.
Hannah Arendt, tellingly, warns expressly that behind
Heideggers ontological approach there is a hidden func-
tionalism, which is not dissimilar to Hobbess realism
(Hannah Arendt, Was ist Existenz-Philosophie?, in
Arendt, Sechs Essays, Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg,
1948, pp. 4880; 689). Heideggers association with
functionalist theorists, including Hans Freyer, Arnold
Gehlen and Helmut Schelsky, was thus quite widespread
at one stage in the reception of his thought. Luhmann
often disavowed his own attachment to the main line of
functionalist anthropology in Germany. See his obitu-
ary for Schelsky, Helmut Schelsky zum Gedenken,
Zeitschrift fr Rechtssoziologie 5, 1984, p. 1. However,
his debts to Freyers doctrine of objective form, to Geh-
lens concept of alleviation, and to Schelskys functional
conception of juridical reason, are almost impossible to
ignore.
37. See Jacques Derrida, The Ends of Man, Margins
of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass, Chicago University
Press, Chicago, 1984, pp. 10936. Derridas reading
of Heidegger is in some respects close to that set out
here, but Derrida, despite recognizing the contingency
of meaning in Heidegger, still overemphasizes the trans-
formative aspect of Eigentlichkeit (p. 133).
38. Martin Heidegger, Phnomenologie des religisen Leb-
ens, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 60, ed. M. von Jung et al.,
Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1995, p. 49; Kant
and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th edn, trans. R.
Taft, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, p.
30; Phenomenological Interpretation of Kants Critique
of Pure Reason, trans. P. Emad and K. Maly, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 1997, pp. 478.
39. On Heideggers view, Kant is not able to imagine human
liberty except as submitting-to-myself, which occurs
in the self-legislation of reason (Kant and the Problem
of Metaphysics, p. 111).
40. See Hans Sachsse, Was ist Metaphysik? berlegungen
zur Antrittsvorlesung von M. Heidegger, in Zeitschrift
fr philosophische Forschung 28, 1974, pp. 6793;
72. Also Philipse, Heideggers Philosophy of Being, p.
146.
41. Heidegger, Phnomenologie des religisen Lebens, pp.
49, 80, 115. Heidegger repeatedly distances his thought
from anthropological preconditions. See especially Mar-
tin Heidegger, Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers Psy-
chologie der Weltanschauungen, in Hans Saner, ed.,
Karl Jaspers in der Diskussion, Piper, Munich, 1973,
pp. 70100; 97.
42. Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kants
Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 1318; The Fundamen-
tal Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude,
trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker, Indiana University
Press, Bloomington, 1995, pp. 3045; The Origin of
the Work of Art, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.
and introd. A. Hofstadter, Harper & Row, New York and
London, 1971, pp. 1588; 77.
43. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Phil-
osophie, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 22, ed. Fr. K. Brust,
Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1993, pp. 1467.
44. Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, p. 74.
45. Luhmann, A Sociological Theory of Law, pp. 2431.
Luhmann describes this temporal horizon as a dimen-
sion of order for complexity (ibid., p. 91).
46. Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 222; Vertrauen. Ein Mechan-
ismus der Reduktion sozialer Komplexitt, Enke, Stutt-
gart, 1973, p. 13.
47. Heidegger states: In so far as Dasein is its disclosedness
essentially it is essentially true (Being and Time,
trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, London, SCM
Press, 1962, p. 263).
48. Luhmanns debt to Heidegger in this respect is quite
clear. World, Luhmann explains, arises from mean-
ing-constituted boundaries between system and envi-
ronment. Understood in this way, the world is the
correlate of meanings identity; it is co-implied in every
meaning element. This abandons, but does not simply
dismiss, the traditional constitution [should read centra-
tion CT] of the world around a center or a subject.
The center is replaced by the pivot on difference, or,
more precisely, on system/environment differences that
are differentiated in the world and that thereby constitute
the world. Systems theory begins with the unity of
the difference between system and environment (So-
cial Systems, pp. 20712). In his posthumous work,
Luhmann also mirrors Heideggers initial insight into the
contingent constitution of sense, claiming that systems
theory breaks with all positive-ontological conceptions
of power. If, he claims, it is in any way possible to de-
termine a metaphysical moment in political reality, this
resides only in the differentiations by which modes of
systemic operation determine how experience and action
should be organized (Die Politik der Gesellschaft pp.
289).
49. This is generally the case for the arenas of meaning
occurring as Dasein. In Dasein, the truth of Being is
always both closed and disclosed. Indeed, both the dis-
closure and the closure of Being are identical in the fac-
ticity of Daseins everydayness. The integrity of Dasein
thus also arises from its difference against Being. See
Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und
Heidegger, de Gruyter, Berlin, 1967, p. 304.
50. Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, pp. 623.
51. The political system, Luhmann states, allows the
paradoxical character of its code to culminate in the
formula of sovereignty, nally in the formula of popular
sovereignty. Through this process, the concept of the
people transfers the paradox onto a sovereign which can-
not even decide (Das Recht der Gesellschaft, p. 418).
This commonly leads to a misleading localization of
sovereignty in the popular deputation (Die Wirtschaft
der Gesellschaft, p. 142). Elsewhere, Luhmann talks
of the importance of values in the creation of political
legitimacy. Values, however, do not account for substan-
tial goods, to which order might be obligated. They are
merely the other-reference of the political system, for
they offer a medium for the ltration of information.
At the same time, however, they are also the self-refer-
ence of the political system, as the ability of the politi-
cal system to introduce policies under cover provided
by values creates freedoms for decision-making, in
which policies are legitimized by apparent value-based
concerns (Die Politik der Gesellschaft, p. 362).
52. Ibid., p. 47.
53. See Peter Osborne, Tactics, Ethics or Temporality:
Heideggers Politics Reviewed, Radical Philosophy
70, MarchApril 1995, pp. 1628.
55. Luhmann, Political Theory in the Welfare State, pp. 46
8; Macht, Enke, Stuttgart, 1975, p. 78. Luhmann states:
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that today we are
no longer ruled by persons, but by codes (Widerstands-
recht und politische Gewalt, p. 44).
56. Niklas Luhmann, Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat,
Gnter Olzog, Munich and Vienna, 1981, p. 156. This
section is not included in the altered and abridged trans-
lation.
57. Luhmann, Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft, pp. 342,
325.
58. In this functional conception of the legislature, Luhmann
recognizes his debt to theorists on the far right, especially
Ernst Fortshoff. See Der Wohlfahrtsstaat zwischen Evo-
lution und Rationalitt, in Soziologische Aufklrung,
vol. 4, pp. 10416; 112.
59. Formative for this argument, from the 1950s, is Ernst For-
sthoff, Begriff und Wesen des sozialen Rechtsstaates,
in Rechtsstaat im Wandel. Verfassungsrechtliche Abhan-
dlungen 19501964, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1964, pp.
2756; 5051. Exemplary of the developing scepticism
about the linkage of welfare and political democracy in
the 1970s is Wilhelm Hennis, Vom gewaltenteilenden
Rechtsstaat zum teleokratischen Programmstaat. Zur
lebenden Verfassung der Bundesrepublik, in Politik
und praktische Philosophie. Schriften zur politischen
Theorie, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1977, pp. 24374. See
also Helmut Schelsky, Mehr Demokratie oder mehr
Freiheit? Der Grundsatzkonikt der Polarisierung in
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in Systemberwind-
ung Demokratisierung Gewaltenteilung, Beck, Mu-
nich, 1973, pp. 4182.
60. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere, p. 221; Between Facts and Norms, p. 356.
61. Jrgen Seifert, Grundgesetz und Restauration.
Verfassungsrechtliche Analyse und dokumentarische Dar-
stellung des Textes des Grundgesetzes mit smtlichen
nderungen, 3rd edn, Luchterhand, Neuwied, 1977,
pp. 579. For a seminal theory of the constitution as
a framework enabling participation and co-possession,
see Wolfgang Abendroth, Zum Begriff des demokra-
tischen und sozialen Rechtsstaates im Grundgesetz der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in Antagonistische Ges-
ellschaft und politische Demokratie: Aufstze zur poli-
tischen Soziologie, Luchterhand, Neuwied and Berlin,
1967, pp. 10938.
62. Luhmann, Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 342;
Widerstandsrecht und politische Gewalt, p. 45; Par-
ticipation and Legitimation, p. 219; Widerstandsrecht
und politische Gewalt, p. 40. Luhmann has naturally
been the object of erce criticism from the sociologi-
cal and political-theoretical Left in the Federal Repub-
lic, although these debates cannot be exhaustively re-
constructed here. Arguments against him have included
the accusation that he is a post-Schmittian technocrat,
that his positivism precludes reasoned social altera-
tion, and that his neutralization of society as a distinct
arena of human interaction serves only to concoct a
covert brand of politically intransigent statism. Most
inuential for this line of critique are Frieder Naschold,
Demokratie und Komplexitt: Thesen und Illustratio-
nen zur Theoriediskussion in der Politikwissenschaft,
in Politische Vierteljahresschrift, vol. 9, no. 4, 1968, pp.
494519; and Jrgen Habermas, Theorie der Gesells-
chaft oder Sozialtechnologie? Eine Auseinandersetzung
mit Niklas Luhmann, in Jrgen Habermas and Niklas
Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtech-
nologie Was leistet die Systemforschung?, Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt am Main, 1975, pp. 142290. In a brief sur-
vey of arguments against Luhmann from the Left, how-
ever, the most accurate perspective is surely that set out
by Peter Nahamowitz, who clearly identies Luhmann
as a deregulation-theorist, as an advocate of economic
non-interventionism, and as a spokesperson for the neo-
conservative wave culminating in the mid-1980s. Peter
Nahamowitz, Autopoiesis oder konomischer Staats-
interventionismus?, in Zeitschrift fr Rechtssoziologie,
vol. 9, no. 1, 1988, pp. 3673.
63. Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft p. 45. Law,
Luhmann argues, is valid qua decision. As a uid
set of decisions, it makes its alterability available for
regulatory tasks (ibid., pp. 389).
64. Niklas Luhmann, Die Paradoxie des Entscheidens, in
Verwaltungsarchiv 84, 1993, pp. 287310; 291. Proce-
dural legitimation is not real consensus or communal
harmony. It is merely a restructuration of legal expec-
tations, which is largely indifferent to the question
of whether the person who has to change his or her
opinions agrees or not (Legitimation durch Verfahren,
p. 119).
66. This seems to be the ground for the approving com-
ments on Luhmann in the article in Radical Philosophy
109, SeptemberOctober 2001, by Art & Language (see
esp. p. 19).
67. See especially Theodor W. Adorno, Kants Critique of
Pure Reason, ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. R. Livingstone,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2001, pp. 1789.
68. Both Jaspers and Adorno make it quite clear that they
consider Heidegger to be a Kantian who has not over-
come the legal formalization of reason in Kantianism.
See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans.
E.B. Ashton, Routledge, London, 1973, p. 131. See also
Chris Thornhill, Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphys-
ics, Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 11213.
69. See Michael Theunissen, Kritische Theorie der Gesells-
chaft. Zwei Studien, 2nd edn, de Gruyter, Berlin, 1969,
p. 53.
Despite recent reassurances that we have never been
modern, owing to a conception of the modern based
on the separation of nature from the order of society
that has never functioned strictly according to the rules
of its constitution, it is, nevertheless, this capacity
to think the modern as temporally different from
its antecedents that has permitted the installation
of a great divide between here and there, now and
then, however indistinct and wobbly its borders are
in reality.
1
Notwithstanding Bruno Latours rearguard
action to reduce the putative separation of knowledge
and power to the famous debate of seventeenth-century
England between Boyle and Hobbes, prompting him
to declare that we as moderns have never truly
known an order founded on such a division between
mediation (or translation) and purication, he has,
I suspect, overstated the case and delivered yester-
days news as if it were todays. Latour has simply
resuscitated the tenets of Parsonian modernization
theory and announced, like the historian Franois
Furet before him, that continuities do exist, the old is
already new and the new is always mediated by the
old as part of an evolutionary process. But to drama-
tize this coupling of past and present in the cause of
continuity, it was necessary to exaggerate its opposite
as a theory of change based on conict, rupture and
revolution namely Marxism as it was commonly
understood in the Cold War epoch. In any event, it is
equally possible, if not more correct, to say that we
have always been modern. The divide identied by
Latour was actually conceptualized by Max Weber
(and the early Marx), who, rejecting what he imagined
and feared as the ruptural consequences provoked by
capitalism in European life, transmuted a qualitative
break in the line into a quantitative (and geopolitical)
cleft that separated the West both spatially and
temporally from the so-called Non-West. Weber, it
should be recalled, was able to realize this conjuration
by seeing capitalism as a product of a continuous
cultural endowment whose enabling elements were
absent in Asia and Africa. This is a view which went
on to become the staple of social science.
Fortunately, no such assurances are claimed by the
editors of the journal Public Culture. Since the 1980s,
Public Culture has increasingly expanded the forum
for the discussion of the modern in a transcultural
setting and it has gradually evolved a position that has
overcome both a social science and a practice of area
studies in the USA based on the very theory of modern-
ization that Latour, Furet and company have recently
revived after decades of dormancy, when it was nearly
forgotten in the English-speaking world. What Public
Culture aimed to elucidate was, in fact, ways to think
the relationship between parts and whole, the singular-
ity of societies and the larger worlds they inhabited
a problem that characterized the modern, perhaps, as
much as its temporal consciousness, and one that never
really bothered Latours prescient premoderns very
much. Moreover, this vocation to examine the relation-
ship between the local and the global the particular
and the universal was very much a part of an agenda
that anthropology had aspired to realize, and which has
informed much of the work of those who founded the
journal and its contributors. In many ways this link
between anthropology and area studies has enlivened
both and expanded their respective compasses. Even
though this early anthropological impulse has now
fused with Cultural Studies, there are still echoes of
its previous kinship with functionalist social science
in the form of modernization theory.
To commemorate this work, the editors of Public
Culture decided to produce a special quartet of issues
in the year 2000,
*
marking the millennium, although it
is not always clear in the assembled papers (over fty
Quartering the millennium
Harry Harootunian
* The Millennial Quartet: 1, Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameswar Gaonkar, Public Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 1999;
2, Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 1, Winter 2000; 3, Millennial Capitalism and NeoLiberal
Culture, ed. Jean and John L. Comaroff, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 2, Spring 2000; 4, Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol A. Bre-
ckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 3, Fall 2000.
essays) if it is the one that just ended or the one that
is beginning. While the time-line of the quartet is the
contemporary, each volume is devoted to pursuing the
project of relating the particular to the general from
different totalizing perspectives. Thus we have Alter-
native Modernities, Globalization, Millennial Capital-
ism and NeoLiberal Culture and Cosmopolitanism:
four movements of a single quartet or four different
moments of the current situation. Yet, it is not certain
if these totalizations, through which the particular
manages to nd larger meaning, are mutually exclusive
domains of the now or different surfaces of a quadrate
hermeneutic; whether, in fact, each constitutes a total-
izing option or that they all, somehow, cohere to form
an aggregate whole.
The category of alternative modernities reects
the effort of anthropologist Arjun Appudurai (who
apparently coined the term but who has replaced it
with modernity at large in a recent book
2
) to envisage
a way to articulate a relationship between the local
world of the neighbourhood and village and the larger
structures of the modern present (aspirations of both
anthropology and area studies, even though the latter
rarely acknowledged this goal and worked to fetishize
the region into a ghetto). Through this articulation
both levels would acquire new, mutually negotiated
meaning, out of the relationship of particular and
universal and thus supply identity to those regions of
modern Asia, Africa and Latin America which had
always remained as vague silhouettes shadowed by
the glare of Euro-America, lands of eternal lack, an
invisible outside to a visible inside. The intent of this
strategy is thus to free the modernizing experiences of
these regions from carceral categories like imitation
and modular supremacy, original and copy in order to
demonstrate the achievement of equivalence but with
a difference.
With globalization, there is the implicit pre-
sumption of a dominant capitalist process which has
today burst forth from its national fetters to ow freely
across borders and barriers to become, in the words
of Appadurai, both an optical challenge (by which
he means the recognition of a disjuncture between the
globalization of knowledge and the knowledge of
globalization) and a new charge to area studies which
demands moving from trait to process geographies
that is, geographies of scale and shift (Globalization,
p. 7). As for cosmopolitanism, we have a recycling of
a much older form of totalization and its reincarnation
into the gure of a multicultural and hybridized world,
mirroring on a global scale the historical model of the
cosmopolitan city inspired by capitalist modernization
(even though its editors and contributors never make
this connection) the magnet that drew, and still
draws, workers: diasporic migrations pouring in from
either the countryside or the colonies or simply other
societies and their diverse cultures to inhabit and
intermingle in the place of production.
When we look at these three gures of totalization
it is striking how they all, in their own way, signal a
form of utopian aspiration and desire to nd shelter
or a sense of belonging in a heartless and indifferent
world a longing that is plainly absent in the totality
that names and describes millennial capitalism and
its neoliberal culture. Above all else, the rst three
share a common ambition to base their respective
positivities on the principle of difference usually
cultural, subdivided further into categories of gender,
sexuality, race and even youth, but rarely class that
will supply and mobilize group identity, often xing it
in a specic location or in the in-between world now
associated with hybridities and diasporas. This inter-
est in difference and the promise of identity reects
an effort to resolve the discrepancy (or asymmetry)
between culture and politics by constructing a cultural
politics that Appadurai has named culturalist but that
actually works to dilute politics into what Jacques
Rancire has called consensus democracy. What this
identitarian impulse seeks to promote, whether named
cosmopolitanism, alternative modernity, or global-
ization, is a politics of consensual community: the
wish to place and count each identity; to secure not
a democratic politics as such, but a post-democracy
where nothing is left over, where the victims of
modernity (refugees, diasporic groups, migrants and
exiles who are supposed to represent the spirit of the
new community) are nally assimilated to their proper
place and all are included and accounted for. In the
name of a democratic polity serving late capitalism
and its neoliberal avatar it authorizes the primacy of
claiming cultural diversity or difference as a candidate
for a universal, regulative idea like global law or
human rights. But its political form never exceeds the
so-called consensus system, where community is an
organized body afrming difference(s) on the basis
of an acknowledged contingency identical to itself,
with nothing left over.
3

This community of difference, as we shall see, is
identical to a global order devoted to consumption.
Yet, underlying this transnational utopia lurks the
unnished business that had once driven postcolonial
discourse to close off sharply the memory of earlier
debates directly related to the political and social
projects prompted by decolonization and foreclose
the very grain of politics which todays cultur-
alism suppresses.
4
In the wake of this attempt to
repress the memory of a lost vocation, the turn to
poststructuralist anxieties concerning difference(s),
unleashing multiple identities and unxing subject
positions, reected an immense disappointment with,
if not a disavowal of, precisely those political and
social projects embraced by new nation-states as they
tried to grapple with and overcome the consequences
of a colonial past in the moment of decolonization.
Here, an elastic culturalism has managed to further
depoliticize what once were extraordinarily invested
political movements which, through violence, aimed to
establish new cultural formations capable of mirroring
these decolonized political programmes. Only a few
of the essays Achille Mbembe on Africa, Fernando
Coronil and Walter Mignolo on the Latin American
world manage to reverberate with memories of these
missed opportunities.
While it is the apparent intention of each volumes
editor(s), and no doubt many of the contributors, to
refer to and employ these totalizing gures as analytic
and even historicized concepts, capable of capturing
and organizing the various inections of contemporary
modernity and investing their experiences with larger
meaning, their interpretative powers are often dulled
by a failure either to ground them in specic, ongoing
histories (there are, of course, exceptions) or to acknowl-
edge that too often it is not yet possible (if it ever will
be) to dene their claims to specicity. Sometimes they
appear as labels thrown around a number of essays to
package them into a loosely tied bundle; at other times
their utopian aims get in the way of their analytic
instrumentality. At one level these totalizations appear
as forms of universalism that offer modes of relating
the global to the local; at another level these universals
steeped in a theoretical discourse, autonomized in
ideology and thus represent(ing) subjects and objects
induced by the circulation of commodities share a
general form inasmuch as each invariably projects a
ctional nature that individually must deny historical
time, or simply extracts itself from it as a condition
of its own authority and effectivity.
5

Cosmopolitan cities, colonial modernity
For example, the editors of the volume on cosmo-
politanism confess to their hesitation to say exactly
what the phenomenon is and where in todays world
we might expect to nd it, apart from the predict-
able appeals to hybridities and multiculturalism, as if
mixing were all there was to realizing human improve-
ment. To be sure, one of them, Sheldon Pollock, seeks
to provide a comparative long-durational account of
cosmopolitanism throughout the Sanscritic and Latin
worlds of earlier centuries, and the way each of these
culturally hegemonic languages morphed into vernacu-
lar languages and literatures, marking, no doubt, the
momentous political passage from the imperial to
nation form and regional cultures in Europe and Asia.
Unfortunately, this kind of macro-history lacks the
organizing and explanatory power of either Brau-
dels Mediterranean subject/agent or those historical
examples of cosmopolitan formation that accompanied
the capitalist modernization of cities like Paris, New
York, London, Bombay, Shanghai and Tokyo. Pollocks
description of this shift in the continental cultural
plates of East and West before capitalism, a division of
labour from classic to vernacular literatures, remains
as timeless and static as any ideal-typical cultural
typology and weakens its own utility by bracketing
the political, economic and social forces attending this
world historical transformation. For this reason alone,
he risks recuperating, if not reafrming, the truth of
the Gramscian observation that cosmo-politanism was
originally associated with empires and the language of
its elites removed from the speech of everyday life.
Closer to the point, perhaps, is Leo Lees explora-
tion of Shanghai Modern during the interwar years.
Lee illustrates the formation of a rich and variegated
vernacular urban environment that inected, like
Tokyo and Singapore in the same period, the con-
junctural transformations in mass material culture
in Asian cities situated on the periphery of the then-
dominant capitalist countries of Euro-America. This
was dynamically reected in the appearance of a new
cosmopolitan everydayness that stood out more sharply
there than in the older urban centres of the industrial
West. Lees sense of scale (Shanghai) and temporality
(the moment of interwar capitalist modernization in
Republican China) is a far more apposite, if not useful,
historical template for grasping the formation of cos-
mopolitanism than Pollocks lifeless typological grand
narrative of premodernity and its presumed genealogi-
cal connection to a later and vastly different history.
But while Lee acknowledges the crucial role played
by Western imperialism in transforming China into
a semi-colony and Shanghai into a worldly modern
urbanscape a determinate history absent in Pollocks
account of the classical worlds of Asia and the West
he retreats from this observation, persuaded by a
nagging suspicion of the totalizing intent of this line
and a conviction that it is more important to emphasize
precisely those emblems that announced Chinas new
modernity (Alternative, p. 76). Historically, cities like
Shanghai, Bombay and Tokyo were reconstituted into
immense cosmopolitan sites virtually overnight in the
interwar period, because of the force of capitalism and
its co-dependent imperialism and colonialism, either
directly or indirectly. They thus stood to receive those
signs of modernity contemporaries would apotheosize
in key terms, often newly coined, that denoted light,
heat and power (Shanghai) or speed (Tokyo). Moder-
nity, so understood by those who lived this experience
in cities like Shanghai or Tokyo, was neither qualied
as an alternative or diminished as a retroactive
imitation of an original, but was usually identied
with the texture of cosmopolitanism in industrial cities
everywhere. In fact, outside of Euro-America there
could be no other marker of modernity than the cos-
mopolitan city. Fernando Coronil reminds us of the
virtual impossibility of thinking of capitalism without
simultaneously considering colonialism (Millennial,
pp. 35174) an argument made earlier by Enrique
Dussel and re-endorsed by Walter Mignolos concep-
tion of capitalisms dark side (Cosmopolitanism, p.
723). For such writers this bonding occurred in the
same, immanent time frame and showed neither the
primacy of a prior model and its subsequent pirat-
ing, as suggested by Benedict Anderson, nor the
possibility of consciously envisaging alternatives to it
(what this it is is never addressed) but only a mutu-
ally constitutive and constituting modernity. Only
when the category of modernity was strategically
employed by a functionalist social science and an
all-too-cooperative area studies (playing the role of a
sorcerers apprentice) to displace both capitalism and
the reproduction of accumulation and colonialism was
the door opened to pluralizing the modern.
With cosmopolitanism, it is interesting to note
how so many of the essays feel they must make an
obligatory gesture to the by-now-tattered meditations
of Immanuel Kant in order to re-envisage a new pro-
gramme for a cosmopolitan imaginary that adequately
catches something of our need to ground our sense
of mutability in conditions of mutuality, and to learn
to live tenaciously in terrains of historic and cultural
transition. It is doubtful if Kant went so far as to envi-
sion cosmopolitanism as a permanent transition on a
terrain lived tenaciously, rather than a desired state not
yet realized. But transition, according to the editors,
promises relief from a neoliberal cosmopolitanism
caught in conformist conceptions of personhood as
negotiable units of cultural exchange, regured into
the shape of a minoritarian modernity launched in
transdisciplinary knowledges (Cosmopolitanism,
pp. 58081). These have now abandoned the self-
fullling dialectic of the general and the particular
for its timely reversal in what can only be described
as a second coming called the provincializing of
Europe and a genealogy derived from elsewhere, on
no other ground of privilege than the demand for
equal air time, the desire, as Rancire has insisted, to
be counted and assimilated to the consensual order.
What this minoritarian modernity seems to authorize
is what tienne Balibar, writing on Marxs conception
of temporality, describes as a permanent or endless
transition marking the modern moment that manages
to congure, and thus house, multiple and multiplying
subjectivities and claims to identity (reproducing the
poststructuralist phobia of xed subject positions) that
are all counted and placed, so to speak, in the interest
of realizing a new understanding of cosmopolitanism,
which resembles a consensual democracy virtually
indistinguishable from simple pluralism.
This is hardly an improvement on Kant, whose
vision of a cosmopolitan order remained blurred by an
astigmatic racism and the conceits of a specic cul-
tural and historical endowment, which were precisely
these presumptions that enabled Max Weber later to
construct the great geocultural divide separating Asia
from the modern West. Here, we might recall David
Harveys unfailingly heroic attempt to promote the
acquisition of broader geographical knowledge as a
fundamental condition of any proper understanding
because cosmopolitanism, in short, is empty without
its cosmos. Harvey reminds us that Kant not only
envisaged philosophically a cosmopolitan programme;
he taught and wrote about geography and anthro-
pology. And while Harvey refuses to blink at Kants
racism and culturalism, he is persuaded that a cosmo-
politanism lacking geographical specicity remains
mired in abstracted and alienated reason (Millennial,
pp. 551, 557).
Yet despite Harveys advice, Kant is still invoked
by philosophers like Thomas McCarthy and Jrgen
Habermas who are willing to bracket the conceits of
racial and cultural superiority found in the geographical
and anthropological texts to justify a cosmopolitan
project for our present. What interests McCarthy most
as a framing question is whether any conception of
nationhood is compatible with cosmopolitanism, if
the former conforms to the protocols of cosmopolitan
justice under a global rule of law (Alternative, p. 175).
To put it more bluntly, his interests lie in the accom-
modation of nationalism and liberalism, a historical
partnership now, apparently, elevated to the status of
a regulative relationship. His solution is to offer a new
distention of this relationship called liberal cosmopoli-
tanism that exchanges ethnic nationalism for a civic
variant by transmuting a constructed we of the nation
into a liberal world community Kants civil units now
situated within the constraints of cultural diversity. Yet
in its historical manifestation liberal nationalism had
tried to defuse ethnicity by harnessing it to civic and
humanistic values which undoubtedly failed to curb
its excesses. But Kants problem becomes McCarthys
dilemma since the good intention of opposing colo-
nialism even in the eighteenth century simply could
not, even then, be made to appear compatible with
a belief in the natural inferiority of some races and
their incapacity for scientic and moral achievement
commensurate to the aspirations of cosmopolitan
community. Whether it is Habermass penchant to
privilege a regulative/normative principle and update
Kants cosmopolitan civil units, or Rawlss ction of
an overlapping consensus (both of which McCarthy
rightly rejects), or even Charles Taylors astonishing
retrieval (in his essay in Alternative Modernities) of
the older Hegelian binary between the West and the
Rest (now dressed up in the fantasy of two theories
of modernity that still look like the old coupling of
West and Non-West of modernization theory, a view
for which McCarthy curiously shows sympathy), all
of these philosophical models are seen as important
ways to think through the aporia of unity and diversity
and recognize the manifest modes with which to make
global law converge with the claims of unregulated
and divergent cultural differences. But this discus-
sion belongs entirely to a political philosophy with a
Kantian desire to speak to a world without actually
listening to it. Cosmopolitanism, in this understanding,
dangerously approaches Rancires conception of con-
sensual democracy, now transformed into the global
and transnational post-democracy.
Two histories, or one?
Dipesh Chakrabarty tries to put a different face on
this problematic by appealing to the coexistence of
a universalism and a concealed sense of belong-
ing in the logic of capital by demonstrating how
that logic is rent by a tension between universalism
(abstract labour) and historical difference (the irreduc-
ible remainder of labour or a mode of existence that
manages to live outside of capital and its history).
In this project, he is preceded by other searchers for
the middle ground who have given it names like
strategic essentialism, hybridity, and cosmopolitan-
ism. Chakrabarty moves to distinguish from capitals
well-known disposition toward universalism, invested
in categories like abstract labour, a coextensive space
for historical difference that has nothing to do with
capitalism, as such, in order to make room for another
form of existence which has escaped the abstracting
propensities and their necessity to reproduce the logic
of capital. Hence, he seeks to tease out from the
logic of abstract labour an indeterminate moment, free
from the incessant process of accumulation, that con-
forms to an unassimilated residue akin to Heideggers
primordial everydayness of Being. This moment is
neither prior to capital nor counted among its historical
preconditions but rather appears coextensive with it.
Chakrabarty calls it History 2 as against the History
1 associated with the universalism of capital. While
it is possible to question the logic that leads to this
reading of Marx, the desire propelling the search
for a place for difference (home) the insurmountable
yearning for the security of belongingness (reminiscent
of that Weimar anxiety which Heidegger sought to
quell in Sein und Zeit) would have required a fuller
account of the status of subject and subjectivity in
Marx than is attempted in this essay. But it should
be said that the only subject Marx speaks about, in
contrast to Chakrabartys reading of capital and its
logic, is capital itself, which is practical, not conscious
of itself a non-subject, as Balibar described it and
refers only to those activities of production, exchange
and consumption which are seen by each person as a
natural property of things.
6

In Capital, Marx identied value and its capacity
for splitting as the subject of a process that assumes
the form of money and commodities, but still manages
to change its magnitude to valorize itself. It dif-
ferentiates itself, he writes, just as God the father
differentiates himself from the son, although both are
of the same age and form, in fact one single person.
7

In this regard, Moishe Postone has proposed that
capital constitutes a historical self-moving subject,
that is thus both subject and object. To be sure, this
anonymous non-subject or complex of activities both
produces objects that are social and representable and
constitutes subjects that are no less real than things,
alongside and in relation to them. However, even if
we accept Chakrabartys argument that the factory
creates ways of being human who act out in a manner
unrelated to the logic of reproduction (the German
historian of everyday life Alf Luedtke has called
this eigensinn a form of horse play on the shop
oor, perhaps the relief of momentary forgetting), we
must recognize that these subjects are not constitu-
ent but constituted. And it is precisely this kind of
misrecognition that has enabled the guration (and
conjuration) of totalizations like cosmopolitanism,
globalization and alternative modernities.
Chakrabartys effort to see capitals logic as an
unintentional place-holder for another kind of exist-
ence that has nothing to do with the regimes and
history of capitalism and the reproduction of accumu-
lation provides the theoretical underpinning of the
category of alternative modernity. Even though its
adherents imply that modernity and universalism are
associated with capitalism, they effectively want to
have it both ways by proposing that capitalism itself
falls short of realizing its universalistic aspiration and
is thus undermined by its own incapacity to foreclose
the particularisms of historical difference the pro-
duction of coexisting forms of life that humans are able
to live outside of its regime. This place of historical
difference is unlike the residue presented by everyday
life under capitalism, in so far as it authorizes both a
sanctuary that houses another kind of non-capitalistic
existence and a way to think through the coordinates
of an alternative modernity whose model derives from
subaltern historiography. Under these circumstances
it can be nothing more than an irreducible cultural
habitus xed in a timeless geographical zone that
regulates the reproductive rhythms of its fundamen-
tally unchanging everyday.
Despite his best efforts, it is precisely this subdued
afrmation of authenticity that hounds D.P. Gaonkars
account of alternative modernities. Much like Chakra-
bartys desire to extract an historically different pre-
cinct that belongs less to time than to space, Gaonkar
seeks to distinguish societal (or Taylors acultural)
modernity bourgeois and EuroAmerican from
cultural modernity, which is intimately associated with
place. By the same token, Gaonkar must acknowledge,
again like Chakrabarty, that an alternative modernity
requires thinking it against the grain of the tradition
of Western discourse, since modernity has travelled
the long road from the West to the rest of the world.
Prewar Japanese thinker Watsuji Tetsuro and writer
Yokomitsu Riichi each recommended travelling this
route backward, which led to a return to Japan. But
an alternative, so imagined, rests upon a site specic
location, as its angle of interrogation, rather than a
putative Olympian perspective masking a particular-
istic platform, as with Max Weber. The problem with
this move is that the decision to gure an alternative
immediately calls attention to a prior form, which risks
making the results of the site-specic examination
appear as copies of a modular original and, worse,
unintentionally transmuting a quantitative gap into
a qualitative time lag. Gaonkars site of alternatives
also resembles Arjun Appadurais defence of cultural-
ism as a means of mobilizing group identity based
on difference and its articulation for national and
transnational politics. Signicantly, neither writer has
bothered to relieve the concept of its baneful histori-
cal associations with fascisms in the interwar period
and the celebration of eternal and essential values
embraced rst by the middle classes and then the folk,
now made to do the labour of guring the content of
the globalization form.
8
Capitalisms second coming
This is, in fact, how Appadurai sees globalization
(apart from its heuristic potential): as the emergent
domain of cultural heterogeneity rather than a homo-
genizing process propelled by American economic
hegemony. If earlier modernization was promoted
by state-sponsored forms of development exporting
basically American capitalism to maintain the free
world, globalization continues this process but is less
constrained in its transnational reach since it no
longer is accountable to Cold War strategies aimed
at winning the hearts and minds of the nonaligned.
But modernization theory was based on the regime of
production, whereas the new world of globalization
afrms, according to Jean and John Comaroff, the
order of consumption. Despite the apparent enthusiasm
of its proponents and even their willingness still to
recognize the disjunctive ows attending the process
(a displacement of temporal and spatial unevenness),
the understanding of globalization must be squared
with a prior view rst expressed by Marx that saw
in the world (or global) market the true space for the
realization of the commodity relation, the arena of
continuing capitalist expansion and consumption, now
allied with the production of those multiple identites
that globalization has valorized as its principal voca-
tion. But this appeal to globalization with its capacity
for housing cultural difference and group identities is
really another name for millennial capitalism and its
neoliberal culture of conjurations, as Anna Tsing has
described such operations exemplied by goldmine
scams in Indonesia (Globalization, pp. 11542).
Nowhere is this yoking of commodity relations and
dispersed plural subjects (difference, to misquote the
song by Kris Kristopherson, is just another word for
nothing left to lose) manifestly more evident than in
Comaroff and Comaroffs magisterial discussion of the
millenarian dimensions of late global capitalism: its
guration of a culture in which everything including
body parts and frozen DNA is sold and bought and
where the revenants and ghostly reminders repressed
by an earlier modernization driven by the privilege
of production now reappear as reications serving
an insatiable market for consuming signs of generic
authenticity and vanished auras (Povinelli, Millen-
nial, pp. 50128; Alternative, pp. 1947). Moreover,
their essay, providing both a penetrating analysis of
the current situation and a new mapping for area
studies, makes the obsessive desire for historical dif-
ference life lived off the capitalist page resemble
nothing more than a culturalist inversion of a history
properly devoted to the differential. This properly his-
torical sense of the differential is Balibars attempt to
emphasize the specic forces in play at any particular
moment, determining the direction of the historical
graph. It refers to the acceleration effect signifying
the route of advance and thus to the way labour power,
both individually and collectively, manages to resist
and even elude its assigned status as pure commodity
imposed by capitals logic.
9
In sharp contrast to the inordinate privilege accorded
to the spatial realm and cultural analysis that informs
so many of the essays of the Quartet that seek to
delineate the domain of difference(s), the Comaroffs
decision to turn to temporal imagining and examine
the possible apocalyptic fallout of this second coming
of capitalism strongly implies that culturalism itself
may well be the symptom of a neoliberal formation
they wish to put into question. In their argument, the
millennial moment of global capital marks the current
conjuncture of change and crisis, overwhelming the
modern politics of the nation-state and producing a sal-
vationist doctrine that envisages a capitalism that
is invested with the capacity to (magically) transform
the universe of the marginalized and disempowered
(Millennial, p. 297). Behind their move to identify
economies with the magical and occult (made also in
the articles by Robert Weller on Taiwan, Millennial,
pp. 47748, and Rosalind Morris on mediumship and
economy in Thailand, pp. 45775) is the dismissal of a
reigning social science practice long rooted in a view
that saw modernization (rationalization) as a force
of increasing disenchantment what Weber actually
called demagication (Entzauberung) in the cause
of progressive human achievement. Yet this magical
capitalism is not just restricted to the victims of
modernity or even the wretched of the earth but
has already effectively invaded the gated national
communities of industrial societies everywhere to
induce new forms of unevenness in registers and on
a scale never before imagined. Above all else, it is
unmistakably apparent in the proliferation of what the
Comaroffs call occult economies which enthusiasti-
cally embrace strategies of magic and conjuration to
generate wealth at the precise historical moment the
state is held accountable for its failure to guarantee the
citizens of the nation a regular income and is charged
with failure to maintain public safety and safeguard
the well off.
Under these circumstances, when the nation is
thrown into disarray, the state turns to new magic-
alities and fetishes to rectify the damages caused
by punctual ruptures in the fabric of political order.
(Even the resurgence of civil society must be seen
as a symptom of this growing disaggregation.) Often
the search for a solution spurs the proliferation of
identities which nominally share a common national
citizenship but progressively favour associations based
on other more concrete and immediate interests that
work against the fantasy of national unity. The subse-
quent appeal to magical and other occult devices (in
the USA, including everything from elaborate Ponzi
schemes, the putative rationality of market behaviour
and its stockholding participants to state-sanctioned
lotteries, church bingo nights and gambling casinos
on reservations) aims to make nationhood work, when
nothing else succeeds, even though at an elevated
and abstract level. As a result states everywhere (the
Comaroffs often restrict their examples to the former
Third World) increasingly depend upon orchestrating
quotidinal ceremonies extravagant and improvis-
ational expenditures in order to elicit the complicity
of the citizenry. But these efforts to transmute the
everyday into permanent sites of magical performance
risk robbing the public of any politicality and reduce
the formal agencies of state to devising policies of
conjuration and scam or, at least, protecting the
practice of fraud in both public and private spheres.
Accordingly, these state rituals, using magic and
spectacle to accommodate different interests and iden-
tities designed to hold the people in the thrall of a
momentary unifying embrace, reveal the very fragility
of the political body they supposedly serve. In addition
to resorting to ritual, the nation-states devotion to
business and economic interest has accelerated both
the privilege accorded to contractual culture and fetish-
ized the law as the enchanted promise to produce
social harmony, reecting perhaps the extent to which
the domain for realizing the commodity relation has
blurred the boundary between nation and globe. If
this scenario has come to dominate newer states in
Africa, it is conrmed everywhere else the nation-state
has been observed relying on the implementation of
manipulative programmes that promise the prospect of
get rich quick schemes. In the contemporary USA,
the stock market was democratized after the spectacu-
lar looting of savings and loans associations in order
to reinforce nationhood by identifying the status of
citizen with stockholder, national unity with populist
capitalism and the assurance of realizing rapid wealth,
and giving new and enlarged meaning today to the
term voodoo capitalism, used years ago to disparage
the policies of Ronald Reagan. Perhaps Comaroff
and Comaroff, by appealing to the example of the
disempowered, are able to delineate more clearly what
historically will happen to all in the second coming.
But whether speaking of magical practices in emergent
states (zombie slave labour) or the voodoo eco-
nomics of the contemporary United States, we have a
description in a different register of how the strategies
of historical fascism and its fascination with spectacle,
scam and even magic were mobilized to remove social
conict and produce harmony but retain capitalism.
The failure of states during the age of what might be
called the rst coming of capitalism already showed
how trickery and deception were utilized to undermine
economies and lead to tragically disastrous realign-
ments of politics and culture to control the damage.
What the concept of a second coming of capitalism
lacks is a theory of historical repetition that sees it
the second coming as both an overlay of a rst
coming, the coordinates of which still lter through as
signposts for the present and a reinscription that need
not be bonded to the familiar narrative from tragedy to
comedy. This model of historical repetition is, in fact,
already implied by Achille Mbembe in his illuminat-
ing essay that proposes the necessity for any attempt
to understand the current situation to take into account
the multiple geneses of contemporary boundaries
in Africa and how they still reect pre-colonial and
colonial arrangements (Globalization, pp. 25984).
Consuming traces
Prior to the second coming and the states role
in recharging enchantment, it had always been the
nations purpose to materialize a spiritual essence
capable of securing national unity through a number
of ceremonial devices and practices supplementing the
obligation to provide welfare and order. The nation
half of the hyphen always aimed to make visible in
diverse practices its concealed, mystical side, while
the state apparatus was initially pledged to furnish
efciency in the name of rationalizing the domina-
tion of everyday life and progressive disenchantment.
In this regard, the nation form came to resemble the
commodity in both appearance and performance. The
subsequent delinking of the two sides of the hyphen-
ated nation-state, perhaps more sharply manifest in the
policies of emergent countries but evident everywhere
today, means only that trickery, scam and magic are
increasingly employed to stand in for an absented
efciency. Even more important, we should recall that
capitalism itself inaugurally connected magic to the
generation of wealth when it linked the commodity
relation to enchantment. When Marx saw the world of
commodities through the optic of perceiving sensuous
things which are at the same time supersensible, he
had already appreciated the intimate and necessary
relationship between the uncanny coexistence of the
natural and the supernatural. Hence, the commodity
appeared as a mystical object, shot through with
theological and metaphysical niceties that rmly
established a lasting relationship between economic
language and religio-magical discourse. Capitalist mod-
ernity was enchanted from its beginnings and has
continued to be so precisely because it is a world popu-
lated by objects of value and objectied values.
10

And the subsequent history of capitalist modernization
everywhere has been marked by ceaseless enchantment
acting in concert with commodication and consump-
tion to ensure the smooth reproduction of accumulation
and the ction of rationalizing means and ends.
If an older liberalism in the age of the rst coming
once appealed to culture and religion (as different sides
of enchantment) in the hope of nding the reservoir
of true (class based) value, the neoliberalism of today
supplies enchantment with newer forms of magic to
enable economies to perform and create objectied
values. In a society still dominated by production it
appeared reasonable to associate true and eternal value
with cultural artefacts whose conditions of making
were disappearing (or had disappeared) to make them
appear as scarce and imperishable traces of a lost
past. By the same measure, in a social formation
driven by consumption, determining value according
to scarcity probably counts for less, since what is
required is the attribution of price to experiences or
objects regardless of age which become the marks
of its value. Even though the desire for authentic values
still persists in this time of the second coming, the
difference from the earlier moment is one between
production and consumption. Elizabeth Povinelli, in
two essays, demonstrates the possibility for imagin-
ing this doubling in an account of how Australian
Aboriginals have been constituted as the sign of
authentic experience by white middle-class tourists,
undoubtedly descendants of earlier settlers, willing
to pay for the opportunity to consume Geist, in her
words, to purchase the spirit, the authentic experience
of Beings existence, as envisaged by Heidegger. The
same operation presumably occurs with the production
of Aboriginal art, which conforms to the mediations
of a different market. Recalling an earlier history,
however, invests this contemporary episode in consum-
ing cultural essence with larger meaning in a repetitive
history with difference.
Throughout the semi-colonized and emergent
national societies before World War II that encountered
the force of capitalism and its destruction of received
cultures of reference, thoughtful people were moved to
resuscitate what was being lost traces of an authenti-
cally different national life derived from remote
antiquity and which were made to anchor identity in
the modernizing maelstrom. Where these bourgeois
intellectuals sought to preserve emblems from their
own culture, Povinellis white middle-class tourists,
who probably have no memory of a culture of refer-
ence, now seek to consume what might be called a
generic experience of primordial Being-ness enacted
by Australian Aboriginals under the sign of authen-
ticity. While the activities of earlier preservationists
constitute no less an attempt to valorize experience, its
cultural horizon belongs to their national community,
whereas in the more recent case no such constraints
exist to encumber the tourist seeker of the real. What
seems to have happened (apart from the move from
Heidegger 1 to Heidegger 2, ontology to ideology) is
a change already pregured in an earlier moment of
capitalism, before the globe offered the nal and true
space for the realization of the commodity relation,
where reifying ones cultural difference as priceless
value (intangible national treasures, as the Japanese
and others named this heritage) is now made available
to all and anybody who can afford the price.
Notes
1. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Cath-
erine Porter, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA,
1993, pp. 143.
2. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimen-
sions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2000.
3. Jacques Rancire, Disagreement, trans. Julie Rose,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999, pp.
1023.
4. Aijaz Ahmad, Postcolonialism: Whats in a Name?,
in Romn De La Campa and E. Ann Kaplan, eds, Late
Imperial Culture, Verso, London, 1995, p. 1. See also
Neil Larsen, Determinations: Essays on Theory, Nar-
rative and the Nation in the Americas, Verso, London,
2001, pp. 327, for an account of the relational incidence
of poststructuralist strategies and the retreat from new
nation-state after decolonization.
5. tienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Karl Marx, trans.
Chris Turner, Verso, London, 1995, pp. 8081.
6. Ibid., p. 62.
7. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Pen-
guin Books, London, 1976, pp. 2556.
8. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 1516.
9. Balibar, The Philosophy of Karl Marx, pp. 1012.
10. Ibid., pp. 5960. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p. 171.
Over the past few decades, most Western democracies
which contain national minorities have offered them
a degree of cultural and in some cases territorial
autonomy. In Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported?
*

the Canadian political theorist Will Kymlicka lays out
principles that justify this unusually happy experience
after the fact. Then he considers whether the experi-
ence and the principles are also applicable to the
countries of Eastern Europe. His answer is yes: liberal
pluralism can be exported. There are differences, of
course Eastern Europes history of alien imperial
occupation, the fragility of its democratic structures
and traditions, the threat many feel from neighbouring
states tugging on the loyalties of kin minorities, and
so on but he concludes that these differences are
not sufcient. And, for reasons that might give one
pause, Kymlicka gets considerable sympathy from the
fteen respondents, occupying the centre of the book,
who might have been expected to give more weight to
the differences. On the whole, they put up only weak
barriers to this new liberal pluralist import. The books
atmosphere is strongly anti-protectionist.
Though he is not even faintly alarmed by the titles
free trade metaphor, Kymlicka is not uncritical of
the Western democracies. On the contrary, much of
his quarrel is with them perhaps as much as with
the Eastern Europeans. Western liberals believe that
they have kept culture out of the public realm, using
the public/private line so as not to take sides for or
against any one culture. Kymlicka calls this belief the
myth of ethnocultural neutrality. He demonstrates that
the so-called secular or civic nation has never been
free of ethnic partisanship. Culturally speaking, thin
versions of national identity have always been thick
with hidden privileges for the majority culture. And
if majority culture has always received public support,
he argues, then there are no grounds for relegating
endangered minority cultures to the private sphere.
The state can no longer be indifferent to the ability
of ethnocultural groups to reproduce themselves over
time (16).
Kymlicka wants his argument with liberalism to
be explicitly philosophical. He notes that the theory
of liberal democracy presented at the philosophical
level does not clearly defend, or even allow for, the
sorts of minority rights being pushed at the political
level (xiii). His aim is to bring the two levels back
into sync by adjusting the philosophical level to the
facts on the ground. Yet the book gives a great deal
of weightmore than it recognizes to the facts on
the ground, to actuality, and thus indirectly to the
powers that have produced and continue to produce
that actuality. One might describe it as more pragmatic
than philosophical. Or one might say that it poses some
surprisingly interesting questions about the relation
between philosophy and actuality, or philosophy and
power.
If one admits that liberalism has in fact privileged
the majority culture, what follows? For Kymlicka, it
follows that minorities should have the same powers
of nation-building as the majority, subject to the
same liberal limitations (27). The limitations are
that minorities must be held to the same standards
as majorities: there can be no tolerating of intoler-
ance. The positive part of the equation is less clear.
Kymlicka suggests that minority and majority nation-
building powers parallel each other at different scales
but do not collide, even though both sets of powers
are being exercised within the same nation-state. Yet
there are obviously certain powers for example, over
foreign policy that the minority can enjoy only if
the majority gives them up, and vice versa. So the real
Whats left of
cosmopolitanism?
Bruce Robbins
* Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski, eds, Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations
in Eastern Europe, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2002. 458 pp., 45.00 hb., 0 19 924063 9. Page numbers
in brackets in the text refer to this volume.
issue is which rights and powers are meant. Kymlickas
prime examples are cultural rights control over place
names, the language and content of schooling and
local media, and so on. Cultural rights are both clearly
desirable and compared to what minorities might be
asking relatively unthreatening. When he talks about
culture, his paradigm seems to be a language rather
than, say, a religion: a necessary means of self-expres-
sion rather than an optional apparatus of obfuscation
and oppression. His minorities are almost all model
minorities. They are interested in autonomy, but they
are emphatically not interested in secession.
Shaken by the results of the break-up of the former
Yugoslavia, nearly everyone today is terried by the
prospect of secession and thus unwilling to question
national borders. Yet it is no secret that many borders
now treated as sacrosanct and not merely those
drawn up after World War II by the colonial powers
were imposed from without, arbitrarily and unjustly.
Kymlickas respect for existing borders which, like
much of the book, seems eminently reasonable but of
course restricts in advance what can be done for trans-
national minorities is only one of the ways in which
this volume quietly abstains from protest against those
who exercise power now and have exercised it in the
past. Another is the quiet consensus among the East
European respondents that the pressure on them to
respond is not obnoxious intervention and is no cause
of legitimate resentment. They seem to share the con-
viction that the fate of their countries depends in large
part on their eventual admission to the EU, and that
admission to the EU depends on looking presentable
with regard to minorities. Romanias political class,
we are told, accepted new standards for minority
protection sometimes against their personal beliefs,
because NATO and the EU regarded the resolution
of minority problems as a compulsory criterion for
integration (275). Kymlicka offers no objection to
NATO and the EU (or for that matter the World Bank,
which has decided to make respect for minority rights
a criterion in evaluating development projects) using
the leverage that the current balance of power has
bestowed upon them.
Contemplating Kymlickas acceptance of power
inequalities like these, one might conclude that he has
abandoned the ethical ground from which to condemn
inequalities of cultural power. Is the preference given
to majority culture within a nation, to which he objects,
any more scandalous than the present economic and
political dominance of Western over Eastern Europe
or the past dominance that allowed those same powers
in 1918 and 1945 to draw borders wherever they liked,
ignoring local populations? How can he object to the
rst point and not to the latter two? But Kymlickas
position becomes more coherent if we think of it as
rst and foremost an attempt to defend the Western
nation-state. He appears to have decided, like most
European states themselves, that it is only by con-
ceding minority rights that they can save themselves
from more serious ethnic fragmentation and disorder.
From this perspective, the protection of the existing
nation-state is not an added benet of the protection
of minorities; its the point of the whole exercise.
Hence the refusal to see any scandal in the exceptional
powers the Western democracies jointly had and have
that is, the international order in which Western
nation-states presently ourish. But this is a problem.
As Francis Mulhern notes in his essay on Tom Nairn,
any appeal to nationality is always a coded declaration
for, or against, a substantive social state of affairs.
1

The Bush administrations mad unilateralist rampage
since September 2001, which has been carried out in
the name of Americas national sovereignty, does not
compel us to resist only by voluntarily giving up all
higher moral ground and restricting ourselves to the
same degraded talk of national self-defence. When
Kymlicka defends national sovereignty by urging stra-
tegic concessions to minorities, we are entitled to ask
what substantive state of affairs is furthered. If he is
interested in the rights of minorities largely because
they threaten the nation-state, by the same token he
seems uninterested in the rights of others who are not
minorities, and this because they do not threaten the
nation-state. Kymlicka denes national minorities as
groups that formed complete and functioning societies
on their historic homeland prior to being incorporated
into a larger state (23). This denition includes such
groups as, for example, the Qubecois in Canada and
indigenous peoples in general. It excludes, for example,
immigrants, refugees, guestworkers, the Romanies of
Eastern Europe (who are internationally recognized as
a minority), and (in the US context) African Ameri-
cans. The issue for these other groups, he says, is
greater ease of integration into the dominant society.
The issue for national minorities is the opposite: pro-
tecting them against the pressure to integrate. But
integration and autonomy do not exhaust the possible
issues for members of these groups. And, since Kym-
licka invites us to think pragmatically, let us add that
this strong distinction seems likely to divide these two
categories from each other politically, with disabling
consequences for movements seeking to draw members
from both sides of the line in a common pursuit of
social justice. Taken up as he is with the problematic
of cultural identity, Kymlicka shows no interest in
getting these collectivities together in a more inclusive,
less identitarian one.
Here we return to the titles complacency about free
trade. The other side of Kymlickas hypersensitivity to
culture is obliviousness to economics. Like Samuel
Huntington, Kymlicka sees culture both as irreducible
and if not granted the autonomy it deserves as the
prime source of the major clashes of the future. He
predicts condently that ethnocultural conict will
continue and increase in strength even when democracy
and economic prosperity have been achieved. Indeed,
he calls this the most important lesson that the West
has had to learn (84). Yet if the traditional liberal
argument that ethnocultural conict is a substitute for
modernization and economic well-being has not been
proven, as one of Kymlickas respondents notes, neither
has it been refuted, at least in Eastern Europe, since
the desired level of modernization and economic well-
being which could arguably stop mobilization on the
basis of ethnic afliation has not been achieved, and
is nowhere in sight (136). Kymlicka does not bring
it any closer when he denes the holders of minority
rights in such a way as to generate friction with others
who are also seeking economic well-being.
Yet this does not bring satisfactory clarity to the
politics of the international domain. That domain has
always been murky for Marxists, and recent events
have not made it less so. Consider the difculty of
assigning Kymlicka a political label. To Eastern
Europeans, his it-works-for-us-and-it-should-work-for-
you liberalism might well look like cosmopolitanism
in the pejorative sense. Sticking up for the rights of
minorities within the borders of another, weaker nation
is a classic means of overriding and undercutting
that nations sovereignty. Yet Kymlicka speaks against
cosmopolitanism, and his defence of national sover-
eignty would seem to claim the value that comes from
its (undeclared) resistance to the United States, seen
as cosmopolitanisms source. On this view, Kymlicka
would be joining together Canada and Eastern Europe,
which have national minorities, in a common and rep-
resentative antagonism to the superpower that denies
its own national minorities and instead sees itself
as a nation of immigrants. From this perspective,
American cosmopolitanism could almost be dened
by the erroneous assumption that the immigrant, who
has freely consented to leave his/her homeland behind,
can serve as an implicit universal subject. Yet domi-
nant opinion in the United States would surely back
Kymlickas effort to pressure the Eastern Europeans on
minority rights. And supposing that the United States
did put its power behind this effort, it would not have
been proven beyond any doubt that the Left should
oppose it. As we have seen, Kymlickas liberalism
by no means takes its political bearings from power,
supporting those and only those who set themselves
against it. Nor should it be encouraged to do so from
the left. Whatever a left counterpart to liberal cosmo-
politanism may be (if such a creature exists), it must
ee the self-sacricing romanticism of lost causes and
seek the power to implement its ideas.
Kinds of cosmopolitanism
The substantive issues in American debates about
cosmopolitanism are familiar: American cultural iden-
tity and the uses of American power. But there is a
surprise hidden away in these bland and unoriginal
phrases. They refer to two quite different and indeed, it
might seem, diametrically opposed versions of cosmo-
politanism. If one thinks of Martha Nussbaum, cosmo-
politanism will seem to signify a means of restraining
or perhaps redirecting Americas use of its political
and economic power. In her 1994 essay Patriotism
and Cosmopolitanism, Nussbaum responded to a call
by Richard Rorty for American academics to forget
their divisive insistence on racial and ethnic identity
and join together with their fellow Americans in an
emotion of national pride. Nussbaum asserted on
the contrary that our primary allegiance is to the
worldwide community of human beings. The problem
for her is not how little sense of unity Americans have
with each other, but how little sense of unity they have
with the rest of the world a world on which their
actions and inactions impinge violently and massively,
if mainly unconsciously. What are Americans to make
of the fact that the high living standard we enjoy is one
that very likely cannot be universalized, at least given
the present costs of pollution and the present economic
situation of developing nations, without ecological
disaster? If life-expectancy at birth is 78.2 years in
Sweden and 39 years in Sierra Leone, then we are all
going to have to do some tough thinking about the luck
of birth and the morality of transfers of wealth from
richer to poorer nations.
2
Moving from the economic
and environmental to the political, many of Nuss-
baums allies have enlisted her cosmopolitan standard
the good of the human species against Americas
history of abusive interventions in the affairs of other
countries. So, for example, in New Left Review Daniele
Archibugi has recently turned to cosmopolitanism in
an effort to nd moral and legal leverage that would
condemn the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia
and help stop future interventions of the same kind.
3

On the other hand, cosmopolitanism has also been
prescribed as an antidote to the racial and ethnic
divisiveness that Rorty associates with unpatriotic
intellectuals and that leads him to call for American
academics to express more patriotism. In this sense,
cosmopolitanism is presented as a benign form of
American patriotism. In the work of historian David
Hollinger and literary critic Ross Posnock, for example,
cosmopolitanism refers to a multicultural Americas
ability to wear its separate racial and ethnic identities
lightly and thus rise above them. In Postethnic America,
Hollinger argues his preference for a cosmopolitan
rather than a pluralist vision of multiculturalism, with
Kymlicka representing pluralism. Hollingers own
ideal is an America that, while appreciating diversity,
is willing to put the future of every culture at risk
through the sympathetic but critical scrutiny of other
cultures. In Color and Culture Posnock argues for a
deracialized culture, or what he calls, citing the politi-
cal philosopher Jeremy Waldron, the cosmopolitan
recognition that one lives as a mixed-up self in a
mixed-up world where ancestral imperatives do not
exert a preordained authority.
4

To use the language of geography, we could say
that here we see cosmopolitanism on two different
scales.
5
And since geography matters, we have in effect
two different cosmopolitanisms, the one national and
the other transnational, which despite their structural
resemblance cannot be asked the same questions or
judged by the same criteria. Indeed, with regard to
America, their political aims and effects might seem to
be almost antithetical: in the one case, cosmopolitan-
ism offers a check on and rebuke to American power;
in the other it offers a source of national unity and
pride. At any rate, the internal or domestic version of
cosmopolitanism has certainly been received as if it
were an expression of American nationalism, and in
the international context a dangerous one. In a retort
to Hollinger, Kymlicka argues that, however appropri-
ate to the United States, Hollingers open, uid, and
voluntary conception of American multiculturalism
has a pernicious inuence in other countries, coun-
tries to whose minority nationalisms, more deeply
rooted in history, it does not apply. Thus Hollingers
position is more accurately called pan-American
than cosmopolitan.
6
Somewhat less plausibly, this same charge is also
aimed at the transnational version of cosmopolitanism.
Whatever comes from America, it appears, is Ameri-
can imperialism. Indeed, these days this is also true for
cosmopolitan ideas that do not come from America.
Daniele Archibugi, as I said, offers cosmopolitanism as
a means of resisting the American-led bombing of the
former Yugoslavia. But what his critics see in him is
Americanism. According to Peter Gowan, also writing
in New Left Review, Archibugi and the other New
Liberal Cosmopolitans have repressed the central fact
of contemporary international relations, namely that
one country, the United States, has acquired absolute
military dominance over every other state or combi-
nation of states on the entire planet, a development
without precedent in world history. And in Gowans
view that fact returns from the repressed to take over
Archibugis argument: Any form of liberal cosmo-
politanism project for a new world order requires the
subordination of all states to some form of supra-state
planetary authority. We know who that authority is.
The various institutions of so-called global govern-
ance that already exist are merely lightly disguised
instruments of US policy. The international system
is built around American hegemony, and American
hegemony is what Archibugi ultimately expresses.
7
The
same sentiment is echoed by another New Left Review
critic, Timothy Brennan: if we wished to capture the
essence of cosmopolitanism in a single formula, it
would be this. It is a discourse of the universal that
is inherently local a locality that is always surrepti-
tiously imperial.
8
Cosmopolitanism is imperialism,
American imperialism, even when it is aimed against
American imperialism.
This is not quite as incoherent as it sounds. Those
who worry that human rights internationalism is being
used as a tool of American national interest have a
point. In the traditional American debate between
so-called isolationists and so-called internationalists,
Perry Anderson has recently observed, American
national interest is taken for granted as the proper
and inescapable criterion by both sides.
9
It is true that,
unlike such impetuous champions of human rights
as Michael Ignatieff and Samatha Power, Nussbaum
and Archibugi are properly cautious about bestow-
ing any special responsibility for action upon the
US government. Their hopes are pinned on NGOs
and international agencies like the United Nations.
I suppose that even Nussbaum could be accused of
unintentionally softening up public opinion for US
interventions that she herself might deplore. Still, it
does not follow that if a nation is sufciently domi-
nant, any cultural products or ideas emanating from
it can be labelled versions of its domination, which
is to say its nationalism. Even a superpower cannot
be permitted to ll up the entire landscape, obliterat-
ing all distinctions around it, making anti-American
indistinguishable from pro-American and leaving us
to wonder whether either of these epithets is specic
enough to do any real political work.
In a response to Kymlicka in the journal Constel-
lations, Hollinger offers a clever and attractive way of
dissipating this pervasive confusion. There are indeed
two kinds of cosmopolitanism, Hollinger says. But the
division is not between a larger transnational kind,
which is critical of the nation, and a smaller national
kind, which is uncritical of the nation and critical
instead of divisive identities within it. Hollinger draws
a line, rather, between a full and an empty cosmo-
politanism. On the empty side is the old, univer-
salist cosmopolitanism of Martha Nussbaum, which
demands primary allegiance at the level of the planet.
On the full side is a large and growing eld of what
Hollinger calls New Cosmopolitans. Though diverse,
all of these reject the absoluteness of Nussbaums
commitment to humanity as a whole and instead try
to ll cosmopolitanism with historical substance, or
in Hollingers words to bring cosmopolitanism down
to earth, to indicate that cosmopolitanism can deliver
some of the goods ostensibly provided by patriots,
provincials, parochials, populists, tribalists, and above
all nationalists. Those who have been qualifying cos-
mopolitanism with adjectives like rooted, vernacular,
critical, discrepant, comparative, and actually-existing
have been doing so, Hollinger argues, in order to load
up the otherwise empty concept with history, the
masses of mankind, the realities of power, and the
need for politically viable solidarities.
10
Of course, there is a price to pay for thus lowering
the concept into the actual, compromising with local,
national and nationalist attachments. It is unclear that
the politically viable solidarities that are now seen
as lling or embodying cosmopolitanism have acted
against the same targets that were designated by the
concept in its empty or radically critical guise. Once
this political energy is mobilized, to what extent is
it mobilized against aggressively national projects?
Cosmopolitanism would appear to belong, like Haber-
mass public sphere, to that intriguing and frustrating
set of terms it would be interesting to speculate
on whether or not they are restricted to the tradition
of Kant that seem perpetually torn between an
empirical dimension and a normative dimension. The
trade-off is familiar. To the extent that it seems to
oat outside or above social life, a normative concept
like cosmopolitanism will always be vulnerable to
charges like elitism and inefcacy. It can only live up
to its own critical and world-changing aspirations by
being grounded in a constituency or constituencies.
But to the extent that it is so grounded, becoming
the possession of actual social groups, it takes on
the less-than-ideal political characteristics of those
groups, each of which can of course be seen as less
than ideally cosmopolitan in its treatment of others.
What cosmopolitanism gains in empirical actuality
and forcefulness, it threatens to surrender in radical
normative edge.
It is to Hollingers credit that he claims no way out
of this dilemma, no possibility of simply choosing the
actual over the normative or the abstract. He is well
aware of the need to balance or negotiate commitments
to justice on a global scale against solidarity with the
most disadvantaged of ones fellow citizens, solidarity
that has found no better form for the moment than the
welfare state. Cosmopolitanism in Hollingers new
sense involves
respecting the instincts to give special treatment to
those with whom one is intimately connected and
by whom one is socially sustained, and respecting,
further, the honest difculties that even virtuous
people have in achieving solidarity with persons
they perceive as very different from themselves.
It is out of respect for these instincts and honest
difculties that the New Cosmopolitanism looks
towards nation-states, as well as towards trans-
national organizations, as potential instruments for
the support of the basic welfare and human rights of
as wide a circle of humanity as can be reached.
11
It is as sharers in these honest difculties, willing to
face rather than ignore the contradiction between the
needs of the ethnos and the needs of the species, that
Hollinger can suavely enlist most of Nussbaums sup-
posedly anti-cosmopolitan critics in the New Cosmo-
politans camp.
Hollingers New Cosmopolitans try to reconcile
cosmopolitanism, seen as an abstract standard of
planetary justice, with a need for belonging and
acting at levels smaller than the species as a whole.
Adding adjectives to cosmopolitanism, they try to
bring abstraction and actuality together. But this is
precisely what Martha Nussbaum is doing when she
drags emotion, time, imagination and institutions into
her version of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, she has been
doing this at least since her 1994 essay, which is an
eloquent brief for a cosmopolitan love that is not
directed at the near or the national. Though she does
not announce the modication with a catchy logo-style
adjective, she too is modifying cosmopolitanism. Thus
she cannot stand, as Hollinger proposes, for cosmo-
politanism, unmodied.
If Nussbaum does not stand to the universalist
left of Hollingers broadly consensual cosmopolitan-
ism, its also unclear that Kymlicka stands entirely
outside it on what Hollinger calls the pluralist right.
12

And if so I will say more about this in a moment
then it would appear that the lines separating the
New Cosmopolitans from its Others will not hold. In
which case we need some new and different lines. My
preference would be for lines that will split apart the
cosy collectivity of the New Cosmopolitans, restoring
some antagonism to a subject that notoriously lends
itself to painless pieties lines involving history and
economics, or time and money.
Laundering culture
Kymlickas version of the difference between his posi-
tion and that of cosmopolitans like Hollinger goes as
follows:
liberal nationalisms wish to become cosmopolitan in
practice, in the sense of embracing cultural inter-
change, without accepting the cosmopolitan ideol-
ogy which denies that people have any deep bond
to their own language and cultural community. (57)
The idea here seems to be that embracing cultural
exchange should not undercut, indeed should have
no effect upon, the deep bond to ones cultural com-
munity. Hollingers version of the difference between
his position and that of pluralists like Kymlicka goes
as follows:
Cosmopolitans are specialists in the creating of the
new, while cautious about destroying the old; plural-
ists are specialists in the conservation of the old
while cautious about creating the new.
13
By the new, Hollinger clearly means a new that
does destroy, undercut or move away from the old,
and by the old he seems to mean bonds to ones
cultural community. So both present the issue between
them as a cultures right to persist in time without
interference.
The temporal issue seems to divide Hollinger and
Kymlicka more thoroughly than the spatial issue of
whether cosmopolitanism is properly national or trans-
national. Hollinger is more reticent about according
special rights to national minorities, thereby weaken-
ing solidarity within the nation, but he and Kym-
licka would seem to agree about the unlikelihood of
achieving solidarity beyond the nation. Transnational
activism is a good thing, Kymlicka writes, as is the
exchange of information across borders, but the only
forum in which genuine democracy occurs is within
national boundaries. People belong to the same com-
munity of fate if they care about each others fate, and
want to share each others fate that is, want to meet
certain challenges together, so as to share each others
blessings and burdens.
14
But there is little evidence of
such feeling, he says, between Canadians, Mexicans
and Americans. I cannot imagine Hollinger seriously
dissenting from this.
Yet this empirical objection to a normative ideal,
which many people of otherwise different positions
might share, can also be expressed in terms of time.
It may seem like a small amendment to add that there
is as yet little evidence of transnational solidarity.
But to say as yet is to deny that what has been
in the past has authority over present conduct. This
denial would seem to be a distinguishing attribute
of both national and transnational cosmopolitanism.
Hollinger is trying to give cosmopolitanism a history,
but the concept would seem to be so refreshing to him
because it offers to liberate us from history, or from
the weight of historical identity and historical injustice.
In this sense the quintessential anti-cosmopolitan is
Samuel Huntington, whose view of the world dra-
matically overvalues the past, imagining that all the
forces determining the present course of history are
primal, archaic cultural identities.
15
By contrast, cosmo-
politanisms characteristic temporality is expressed
in a few words from Jeremy Waldron. Waldron has
been discussing indigenous communities in countries
like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand and how, like an individualist in a state of
nature, they may yearn for the days of their own self-
sufciency. Now, however, they nd themselves both
threatened and protected by larger political structures
on which they are dependent, structures whose relation
to them they must actively manage. Waldron writes:
Yet here we all are. Our lives or practices, whether
individual or communal, are in fact no longer self-
sufcient. Rather than the undeniable differences in
where we have come from, what matters is a shared
condition of interdependency here and now.
16
It is a short step from this pragmatic disqualication
of past injustice to an equally pragmatic disquali-
cation of present economic inequality. In his own
argument for cosmopolitanism and against articially
protecting cultures from the forces of change, Waldron
proposes, rightly I think, that people do not in fact
need a culture of the sort Kymlicka imagines when
he talks of belonging to a culture in other words,
culture seen as an integral whole. What people need
is cultural materials. And these cultural materials
can come to us from any number of diverse and
distant sources; indeed, like the other goods we use
every day, they can and do come from around the
world. As Waldron puts it, the materials are simply
available, from all corners of the world, as more or
less meaningful fragments, images, and snatches of
stories.
17
This is empirically true, and for the purposes
of his (empirical) argument about need, the point is
well taken. But the argument also has a hidden norma-
tive dimension. The model of cultural transmission that
it relies upon is that of the world capitalist system,
which not only provides cultural materials from all
corners of the world, but does so in precisely the
cosmopolitan spirit of here we all are. How and
where they are produced, and what inequalities and
injustices may have been involved in their production
none of this is judged to be relevant. What matters
simply is that here these materials are available. One
might say that cosmopolitanism has thus entered into
the business of laundering culture, washing the com-
modity clean of whatever sweatshop-style indignities
may have accompanied its emergence and distribution,
and allowing or enjoining us to look upon it here and
now as conveniently ready for our use.
The connection between cosmopolitanism and world
capitalism will be news to no one; it was announced in
1848 in the Communist Manifesto. But even for those
most eager to change the world, this connection can
be interpreted in various ways. As Marx and Engels
so strongly implied, historical forces that produce
the most appalling economic consequences can issue
in cultural consequences that are ambiguous or even
distinctly desirable. To see the connection through
the lens of cosmopolitan presentism, for example, is
to raise the question of whether there exists a more
eligible approach to past injustices, such as those
visited upon indigenous peoples, and if so what rela-
tion this approach might have to the rectifying of
present economic injustice. Even the most ecumenical
Left cannot be in favour of a temporal levelling-out
in which the oldest and the most recent suffering
count equally, time elapsed counting for nothing. (The
absence from left discourse of a temporal grid or layer-
ing is part of the problem with post-colonial studies.) I
can imagine no version of the Left in which distance
in time would not matter, in which there would be no
statute of limitations on past crimes, no provision for
forgetting as well as remembering, or for a passage
from remembering to forgetting.
Beyond welfare
If there is such a thing as a left-wing cosmopolitanism,
one would imagine it would collide with the liberal or
here we all are version on the grounds of economic
inequality. But this is by no means a straightfor-
ward matter. Kymlicka distinguishes between national
minorities and immigrants on the grounds of consent.
Immigrants have chosen to leave their country, and
thus can be assumed to have consented to the culture
of their new country. Indigenous peoples and national
minorities did not consent, but were colonized and
conquered.
18
These historical injustices render them
deserving of special rights and protections, Kymlicka
concludes, that should not be accorded to everyone. His
conclusion has been much contested. Even sympathetic
critics have replied that the class of people who never
consented to the majority culture is very much larger
than Kymlicka thinks. As Joseph Carens writes, Kym-
licka has been obliged to concede that refugees do not
come voluntarily and that the assumption that other
immigrants come voluntarily may be inappropriate
given the vast economic inequalities in the world.
19

Once the criterion of economic inequality has been
put in play, it is impossible to keep it in quarantine.
It is not merely the free consent of the immigrant
that is undermined by economic hardship. In a world
of nations that are so deeply divided between rich
and poor, economic inequality replaces freedom with
necessity almost everywhere one looks. How is it
possible to adapt to the injustices of conquest and
colonization, as Kymlicka does, but not do the same,
for example, for the fear of starvation?
Ignoring the economic inequalities and injustices
presumed by relations of free choice and consent is,
of course, a standard charge brought against liberalism
from the Left. As far as possible, I repeat it here in
an inquiring rather than a dogmatic spirit. Among
the ways of interpreting the connection between
cosmopolitanism and capitalism, it is conceivable that
in some sense the commodity has transcended the
political conditions of its own emergence and has now
become, by virtue of its openness to resignication,
a positive model of some use even to capitalisms
sternest critics. To make this proposal is not far from
the spirit of Waldrons cosmopolitanism, which shares
with Marxist dialectics an attention to the refunction-
ing of cultural materials, wrenching them away from
their original meanings.
The liberal cosmopolitan will perhaps be tempted
to offer such a critique of Kymlicka not as a basis
for demanding an end to economic inequality, but
merely as a way of discrediting Kymlickas special
pleading for national minorities as an exceptional
case. The liberal temptation is to treat everyone alike
as capable of free consent, regardless of their social
or economic location. And yet the temptation can be
and has been resisted. Liberal support for the welfare
state certainly the strongest part of the liberal case
for nationalism does make economic inequality into
an exceptional case.
20
So for the Left one touchstone
would seem to be how far that support goes, both
nancially and geographically. A left cosmopolitanism
would not depend on the capitalist system to undo the
enormous disparities of wealth and insecurity that
make welfare necessary. In the long term it would
look beyond welfare. And in the short term it would
insist that welfare tasks like providing a safety net and
redistributing wealth even to a limited degree form a
transnational rather than a merely national project.
Notes
1. Francis Mulhern, Britain after Nairn, New Left Review
NS 5, SeptemberOctober 2000, pp. 5366; 59.
2. Martha C. Nussbaum, Reply, in Martha C. Nuss-
baum and respondents, For Love of Country: Debating
the Limits of Patriotism, Beacon Press, Boston, 1996,
p. 135.
3. Daniele Archibugi, Cosmopolitical Democracy, New
Left Review, NS 4, JulyAugust 2000, pp. 13750.
4. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multi-
culturalism, revised and expanded edn, Basic Books,
New York, 2000; Ross Posnock, Color and Culture:
Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London,
1998. See also Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining
Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Belknap/Har-
vard, Cambridge MA, 2000.
5. Unfortunately, these two geographical scales of cosmo-
politanism do not necessarily correspond to two different
denitions of the nation, or two different moments in
time. The same country can have both internal national
solidarity and militaristic foreign policy, domestic wel-
fare and foreign aggression, at the same time, like the
Cold War USA or Bismarcks Germany; or, like the
USA now, can indulge in a certain multicultural cosmo-
politanism at home without this having any noticeable
effect on its behaviour towards other nations.
6. Will Kymlicka, American Multiculturalism in the Inter-
national Arena, Dissent, Fall 1998, pp. 739; 73, 78.
7. Peter Gowan, Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism, New Left
Review, NS 11, SeptemberOctober 2001, pp. 7993;
81, 83, 84, 93.
8. Cited by Gowan, ibid., p. 81.
9. Perry Anderson, Internationalism: A Breviary, New
Left Review, NS 14, MarchApril 2002, pp. 525.
10. David A. Hollinger, Not Pluralists, Not Universalists,
The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Way, Constel-
lations, June 2001, pp. 23648.
11. Ibid.
12. In a commentary on David Held, Kymlicka declares
himself in sympathy with Helds cosmopolitan efforts
to strengthen the international enforcement of human
rights as well as his demand that the recognition of
states should be contingent on democratic legitimation.
Will Kymlicka, Citizenship in an Era of Globalization:
Commentary on Held, in Ian Shapiro and Casiano
Hacker-Cordn, eds, Democracys Edges, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 11226. Like
Hollinger, Kymlicka rejects cosmopolitanism absolutely
only in its (supposed) absolutist variant. As an ideology,
cosmopolitanism rejects all forms of nationalism, and
opposes efforts by the state to protect national identi-
ties and cultures. It is clear that citizens of Western
democracies are not cosmopolitan in this sense (Can
Liberal Pluralism Be Exported, p. 57).
13. Hollinger, Not Pluralists, Not Universalists.
14. Citizenship, pp. 124, 115.
15. In comparison with Huntington, Kymlicka is too much
of a liberal (or a cosmopolitan) in spite of his brief for
minority rights, in the sense that he allows the concept
of consent to eradicate all injustices other than con-
quest and colonization, for example those that led to
immigration.
16. Jeremy Waldron, Minority Cultures and the Cosmo-
politan Alternative, in Will Kymlicka ed., The Rights of
Minority Cultures, Oxford University Press, New York,
1995, pp. 93119.
17. Ibid., pp. 1078.
18. This falls apart as soon as immigrants have offspring.
The children of immigrants have consented to nothing.
19. Joseph H. Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community:
A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 55n.
20. See, for example, Hollinger, Postethnic America, pp.
1489.
Born in the Ukraine in 1910, Raya Dunayesvskaya
emigrated to the United States in her teens. By the
age of twenty she was active on the American Left,
her ability to read Russian giving her an advantage in
interpreting the contradictory messages emerging from
revolutionary Russia. She served as Trotskys secretary
when the exiled Bolshevik arrived in America in
1937, but broke with him over the HitlerStalin pact
of 1939. Trotsky stuck to his analysis of Russia as a
degenerated workers state; Dunayesvkaya would not
swallow the idea that a workers state, however degener-
ate, could ally with a fascist one. Her subsequent
investigations revealed exploitation by the bureaucrats
and extraction of surplus value from labour; she and
her comrade C.L.R. James therefore dened the USSR
as state-capitalist. Having formed the ForestJohnson
Tendency, named after their clandestine pseudonyms
in the (American) Socialist Workers Party, they also
abandoned the Leninist concept of the vanguard party.
They then dissolved their Tendency, since tendencies
only have meaning within a partys factional ghts.
Dunayevskayas economic analyses of Soviet sta-
tistics about Five Year Plans in 1942 run parallel
to those circulated in 1948 by Tony Cliff, founder
of the (British) Socialist Workers Party. Both used
Marxist categories to diagnose capitalist relations of
exploitation in Russia. However, reacting against the
materialist economism of the Stalinists, Dunayev-
skaya argued her case by calling for a return to Marxs
philosophy. To distinguish it from both pre-1914 social
democracy and communism after Lenins death and
Trotskys defeat, Dunayesvkaya named her phil-
osophy Marxist-humanism. Lenin and the Russian
revolutionaries of 191723 were the sole exceptions in
her universal condemnation of post-Marx Marxists
(including Engels and Lukcs). Her involvement with
Hegels philosophy was not casual, and, despite harsh
words about academics, she spoke at Hegel confer-
ences and engaged non-Marxist Hegelians in lively
correspondence. Nevertheless, her conviction that no
one else had understood the last three syllogisms of
Science of Logic, and that these provide an opening
into a new epoch for humanity, can sound slightly
crackpot, especially when repeated (as here) in talk
after talk, letter after letter. Her revelation of 1953,
when she grasped the signicance of Hegels Absolute,
is returned to again and again with an obsessiveness
worthy of Philip K. Dick. But again like Dick this
obsessiveness is infectious, and at times moving.
Dunayevskayas belief that philosophy must step
out into the world unmediated by politics or con-
crete demands struck James as hopelessly unrealistic,
and they parted ways. What had been a weapon for
criticizing Stalinist residues in Trotskyism revival of
Hegelian dialectics now became the core of Dunay-
evskayas thought. Although inuential within the New
Left of the 1960s, she eschewed both academic and
party positions until her death in 1987. There are
tributes on the back of this volume from academics
such as Douglas Kellner and Susan Buck-Morss, but
she was proudest of her correspondence with worker-
militants like Charles Denby and Harry McShane. By
the 1980s her small circle of supporters resembled a
cult; but, cult or not, it has provided excellent editors
the introduction and footnotes here are wonderfully
informative, conscientious and accurate.
This collection allows us a glimpse of Dunayev-
skaya in action: how she attempted to communicate her
new philosophy without the usual Marxist mediations
of party, votes, leadership, theoretical journal, internal
bulletins, newspaper and propaganda. The idea of
taking Hegel straight to the masses is not as absurd as
it sounds. When she spoke to students, auto workers
and anti-war activists in Tokyo in January 1966, or
to a similar audience at the BlackRed Conference
in Detroit in January 1969, or after the Soweto revolt
in South Africa in December 1976, her words have a
conviction and clarity which is hair-raising. She may
not have cited facts and gures about overtime rates
and pay deals, which peppered the speeches Cliff gave
to mass meetings of workers in the early 1970s, but
she transmits an equally revolutionary message. Per-
REVIEWS
Mantra
Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, edited
and introduced by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, Lexington Books, Lanham MD, 2002. 386 pp., $100.00
hb., $24.95 pb., 0 7391 0266 4 hb., 0 7391 0267 2 pb.
haps the publishers were thinking of the anticapitalist
movement and the publishing success granted Naomi
Klein, Susan George and Toni Negri when they issued
this collection.
Like her classic Marxism and Freedom (1958),
this book is centred on Lenins aphorism that a
whole generation of Marxists had failed to under-
stand Capital because they hadnt understood Hegels
Science of Logic. Dunayevskaya then caps this with
the idea that Lenin himself hadnt gone far enough
into Hegel because he stopped at the transition of
Logic into Nature (Practice), rather than going on to
the Absolute Idea (Freedom). Unfortunately, such a
direct translation of philosophy into politics is only
likely to convince those who have already discovered
in Hegel and Marx a basis for collective political
action. Despite recent attempts by star intellectuals
such as Z
iek and Jameson, discussion of Lenin and

dialectics without the democracy and decision-making
of a Marxist party seems unreal and ungrounded. As
the meetings of her followers attest, Dunayevskayas
ideas are mainly attractive to ex-members of various
Marxist groups, united in their bitterness about past
attempts to lead and orient them in the struggle. In
other words, Dunayevskayas polemics rely upon the
very political practices and structures she declares she
has transcended.
Dunayevskaya traces the American roots of
Marxism, not to the General Congress of Labor in
Baltimore in 1866, but further back to the abolition-
ist movement and the slave revolts which led to the
Civil War. This is an excellent way of exploding
the reformist recuperation of Marxs writings on the
United States. However, despite a plethora of good
moments, the book as a whole lacks force. Away from
her factional ghts and debates, Dunayevskaya can
appear to lack a strategic vision of the object of attack.
Anticapitalism seems worlds away from her obsessive
readings of Hegel, and orthodox Trotskyism too small
and frail a boat already riddled with holes, shot from
both inside and outside to rock with revolutionary
conviction.
Nonetheless, Dunayevskayas reading of Hegel is
persuasive because it pours real history and political
experience back into his categories. The manner in
which she and C.L.R. James wrestled with Hegel was
a breakthrough for radical philosophy, rescuing some
of the most difcult texts in Western philosophy from
the professionals. Dunayevs-kaya argues that
the incomprehensibility of Hegel is political
in itself, due to his insistence that concepts are
not inert counters in an eternal game of logic,
but uid, self-moving notions with their own
tendencies. History and change are therefore
the substance of thought, not its corruption, as
Plato believed. Lenin made the point that this
uidity, when not sophistry and subjectivism
on the part of the thinker, results from the
fact that notions reect objective developments
in the world. The unabashed and exaggerated
manner in which Dunayevskaya revelled in
Hegelian philosophy has something of the poet
about it. Towards the end of her life, she used
phrases like the Idea itself thinking. This
echoes the idealist climaxes of Hegels great
works, which have the soaring self-congratula-
tion of prayers and wish-fullling dreams, a
vertigo eagerly sought by poets. Beginning
with Heine and on to Mayakovsky and Breton, authen-
tic Marxism has always had a fruitful relationship with
poets but it also has a tradition of criticizing such
formulations as idealist.
James and Dunayevskaya were correct to see that
disinterest in Lenins ruminations on the Greater Logic
were part of Stalinist suppression of the specula-
tive, subjective side of Marxism, and that this side is
crucial. Like Walter Benjamins image of ofcial com-
munisms historical materialism hiding away the
dwarf of theology inside a chess-playing robot the
claim that Marxism is positive science (economics)
rather than dialectical humanism has authoritarian
implications. It also means that religious or mystical
or idealist fads (psychotherapy, existentialism, Nietzsch-
eanism, cultural studies) come to occupy the soul
vacated by its soulless materialism. The relationship of
radical subjectivity and endless desire to capitalism is
a concrete issue that Marxism ignores at its peril. As
Dunayevskaya says, We can no longer, as did Lenin,
keep our philosophic notebooks private.
One frustration of Dunayevskayas thought is
that a certain puritanism always a curse of the
American Left appears to prevent her relating to
the French tradition of Charles Fourier, surrealism and
the Situationists. Like her, these revolutionaries also
talked about new passions, and the Situationists actu-
ally managed to turn Hegelian concepts into accessible
slogans. Such a tradition might help to translate the
extreme subjectivism of climactic Hegelian rhapsody
into more materialist, Marx-friendly terms. When
Hegel quotes Schiller at the end of Phenomenology
of Spirit (from the chalice of this realm of spirits/
foams forth for Him his own innitude), the Freudian
sees the autarchic sex act, or masturbation, but, unlike
the radical feminist or Stalinist politico, does not
immediately follow this up with moralistic outrage. In
his avant-pulp novels Stewart Home reminds readers
of the afnity between Sadeian sexual fantasy and
revolutionary thought. A Home-style sexual-reduction-
ist interpretation of transcendentalism not only bursts
the Hegelian religious afatus; it also begs questions
only pro-sex communism proletarian and feminist
can answer.
Rediscoveries are the wellspring of Marxism.
John Bellamy Foster recently made a strong case for
a socialist ecology by reviving Marxs doctoral dis-
sertation on Epicurus. Likewise, in order to do battle
with the post-Deleuzean philosophers of desire, the
new wave of punk writers represented by Home are
surely right to revive the scurrilous irreligion and
anti-moralism of The Holy Family and The German
Ideology (whose forgotten invective versus Max Stirn-
ers The Ego and Its Own now reads like a prophy-
lactic sally against Nietzsche and post-structuralism).
Dunayevskayas return to dialectics and subjectivity
was an essential contribution to the Marxist recovery
of the whole person travestied by the speciality of
thought. However, deprived of the confrontational
frankness of the Freudian Left, an insistence on
Hegelian subjectivity easily becomes transcendent and
unbelievable in short, religious. The advantage of
the psychoanalytic interpretation over the conventional
Marxist charge of idealism is that it is not driven by
repression or moralism. Even if it uses terms which
are anathema to Hegelians (and probably to many
post-Marx Marxists), the pro-sex faction can explain,
even celebrate, Hegels underlying impulse, rather than
invoke a taboo. When Wilhelm Reich called orgasm
cosmic plasmatic sensation he gave it an innitude
no materialist can argue with. By reminding us that
philosophical writing is a substitute for the ineluctable
needs of the human body, a sexual interpretation
restores the readers sense of human equality (this was
the thrust of Peter Sloterdijks revival of Diogenes in
Critique of Cynical Reason). A surrealist Hegel would
provide just the ally Dunayevskaya needs, and could
open out into a revolutionary interpretation of dreams,
fantasy and the unconscious and a critique of their
exploitation by religion and the culture industry.
However, as shown by her curt dismissal of Freud
in 1973 (Womens Liberation has declared him sexist,
so we can bin him, it is declared in Philosophy and
Revolution), Dunayevskaya would not be interested.
Her direct line between Hegelian philosophy and
contemporary political activism meant ignoring the
ensemble of revolutionary ideas suppressed by Hitler
and Stalin and World War II: the concrete manifestat-
ion of the spirit of freedom she talks about. How
was the family restored after the worldwide assault
on bourgeois respectability in the 1920s? The banning
of Freud went together with the attack on dialectical
philosophy, working-class organization and womens
rights. Although she corresponded with Marcuse and
Fromm, it was always about philosophy, never psycho-
analysis. (For all his failings over the characterization
of the new ruling class in Russia, Trotsky was far
more alert to the potential of psychoanalysis.) Dunay-
evskayas uncritical embrace of new social movements
always superior in her eyes to the post-Marx Marx-
ists, who are portrayed as a crew of unhip grumblers,
ever fazed by the new nally threatened to unravel
her Marxism completely.
This aw (in Trotskyist jargon, movementism or
tail-endism) became glaring in late Marxist human-
ism. It was pinpointed in 1984, when Dunayevskaya
said of participants in revolutions: Whether or not they
were conscious of actually being the history-makers,
they were exactly that. Everything Dunayevskaya had
said in Marxism and Freedom about Absolute Mind
and Freedom revolved around consciousness. Every
human being capitalist, housewife or cop makes
history simply by participating in society: the point of
Hegels what is rational is real, and Marxs uncover-
ing of surplus value, is that they introduce the measure
of truth and consciousness into politics and econom-
ics. By saying that the revolutionary masses can make
history unconsciously, Dunayevskaya reduces the pro-
letariat to the level of the bourgeoisie, participants
in history who blindly create new conditions. Her
enthusiasm for social movements nally betrays her
own philosophy: moralism replaces enlightenment.
All this means that for the anticapitalist searching
for revolutionary theory, The Power of Negativity is
not the place to start (unless one isolated Lecture in
Japan on Hegel, 1966; Presentation to the Black-Red
Conference, 1968; and Logic as Stages of Freedom,
Stages of Freedom as Logic, or the Needed Ameri-
can Revolution, 1969; and the correspondence with
C.L.R. James between 1949 to 1951, the high point
of both their thinking or had these pages excerpted
by a canny pamphleteer). The earlier Marxism and
Freedom is free of the repetition which makes The
Power of Negativitys references to Hegels Absolute
Idea sound like a mantra. It is a more powerful and
convincing exposition of Dunayevskayas ideas.
Nevertheless, for socialists, The Power of Negativity
will provoke soul-searching about party instrumental-
ism and freedom of thought. Dunayevskayas brusque,
unpretentious and exclamatory epistolary style is
exhilarating. She articulates tenets about freedom and
subjectivity that are well established in the cosmo-
politan working class, though they may not yet have
become ensconced in their vanguard organizations at
the level of theory. Unfortunately, radical philosophy
unsupported by political party, academia or celebrity
is a thin if occasionally head-spinning broth to
live by. If one baulks before the exaggerations and
fancies of Dunayevskayas later pronouncements, it is
because one wishes to make actual her promise that
we have entered a new era.
Ben Watson
Trust me, Im a philosopher
Onora ONeill, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 213 pp.,
40.00 hb., 14.95 pb., 0 521 81540 1 hb., 0 521 89453 0 pb.
Onora ONeill, A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2002. 100 pp., 25.00 hb., 9.95 pb., 0 521 82304 8 hb., 0 521 52996 4 pb.
Onora ONeills Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics
comes with impressive credentials. There is her own
formidable reputation in philosophy, in particular as
an interpreter of Kant, and there is the distinguished
history of the lecture series from which the book
emerges. The Gifford Lectures have given rise in the
past to such works of enduring interest as Whitehe-
ads Process and Reality and Rosss Foundations of
Ethics. A reader who approaches ONeills book with
expectations raised by this background will, however,
be disappointed. It is true that allowances may have
to be made for the fact that her subject is bioethics,
often thought of as a poor relation of philosophy,
even as an intellectual shanty town that has sprung up
alongside it in recent years. But this will hardly account
for everything. ONeill tells us that she has tried to
link some serious philosophy with some consideration
of institutions and practices and attempts at serious
philosophy deserve to be taken seriously. It is when
one does so, however, that the chief doubts about her
project arise.
The books central concern is to diagnose a sup-
posed crisis of public trust in the UK in matters of
science, medicine and biotechnology. The crisis is,
it appears, not adequately reected in contemporary
bioethics in either of its two main domains of medical
and environmental ethics. The reason, at least in part,
is the dominance of the subject, and particularly of
medical ethics, by a certain conception of autonomy,
understood essentially as independence from others.
This individual autonomy belongs, in ONeills view,
with rights and adversarial claims, while trust belongs
with relationships and mutual obligations. There is,
however, she believes, a more adequate conception
of autonomy, derived from Kant, which so far from
being in tension with relations of trust provides a basis
for them. Principled autonomy is the idea of acting
on principles that we can will as universal laws. It
provides a basis for trust in that it yields robust ethical
obligations, in particular the rejection of deception
and coercion, which set demanding standards for
public policy. The way in which policies informed
by these standards may serve to enhance trust, or at
any rate trustworthiness, is explored by ONeill in
relation to such topics as genetic technologies, the use
of human tissue and standards of bioethical debate in
the media.
The obvious point at which a claim of serious phil-
osophy might be made for the discussion is the account
of principled autonomy and the derivation from it of
various ethical requirements. Misgivings about this
may be focused by singling out the issue of deception,
not least in view of its internal links with the trust it
both presupposes and betrays. What should be noted
here is ONeills insistence that the requirement not
to deceive is not exceptionless, for some forms of
deception must be accepted. She offers no guidelines
for identifying the cases where deception is legiti-
mate, though some broad categories are mentioned:
habits of civility, toleration of white lies, silence
and discretion. It may perhaps be assumed from these
examples, and in any case would t many details of
the later discussion, that grounds for exception will be
consequentialist in character. In pursuing her project,
however, she deploys at some length a sophisticated
argument which amounts to an individual reading of
central themes in Kants ethical theory. It sets her, as
she makes clear, at odds with such commentators as
Allen Wood, and, more generally, she implies, with a
tendency of neglect in Kant scholarship of the truths
to which she draws attention.
All this indeed amounts to serious philosophy but,
unfortunately, only in the sense in which philosophys
way of being serious so often strikes non-philosophers
as ridiculous. For a mountain of intellectual effort has
given birth here to the tiniest mouse: the conclusion
that we should generally, but not always, avoid deceiv-
ing others. The sense of incongruity arises in large part
from the fact that we are likely to have signicantly
greater condence in the conclusion taken by itself
than in the complex and contentious philosophical
arguments that profess to establish it. To avoid embar-
rassments of this kind, philosophers may need a sense
of proportion and of their relationship to an audience,
even perhaps a sense of humour such as Brecht claimed
to nd in Hegel and is surely no less present in some
other great practitioners of the subject.
Whatever problems Kants dealings with the issue
of deception may give rise to, the insipidity of his
conclusions is not among them. For, notoriously, he
regards the requirement not to deceive others as a
matter of strict duty that does not permit of exceptions,
even to save a life. This ensures the interest and point
of his philosophical efforts, whether they are ultimately
successful or not. Stated generally, and in the terms
used by ONeill, their basic thesis is that the principle
of an act of deception cannot be willed as universal
law. She lls out this thesis in an illuminating way.
As if in reaction to familiar charges against Kant of
excessive individualism, she stresses what might be
termed his intersubjective aspect. His fundamental
thought on this reading is that reasons are the sorts of
things that we give and receive, exchange and refuse.
Hence it is that If anything is to count as reasoned
it must be accessible to others who are to be the
audience for that reasoning. It seems all too obvious,
however, that for deception to occur the reasoning
of the deceiver cannot possibly be accessible to the
victim. If it were to be suggested by way of response
that the victim should be excluded from the audi-
ence, this would surely be a transparently arbitrary
and question-begging ploy. ONeills reading sheds
particular light on the peculiar vehemence of Kants
denunciations of deception as an offence against the
dignity of man as a rational being. What it specically
offends against, it now appears, is the dignity that
belongs to the proper exercise of reason in its central
task of communicating with others. It seems hard to
see how one may coherently combine acceptance of
this insight with allowing an indenitely large number
of exceptions to the ethical requirement it grounds.
It is perhaps not surprising that, with the philo-
sophical bets hedged, the consideration of practices
and institutions should tend towards blandness. The
tendency is carried still further in ONeills Reith
Lectures, on broadly the same issues, though this
is, of course, a series from which much less is to be
expected. In her contribution, at any rate, the intel-
lectual pressure seems deliberately set low, as if to
illustrate a peculiarly British Faustian pact by which
serious thinkers are assumed into the great and the
good on condition that they give up thinking. Even in
the Gifford Lectures the treatment of particular topics
arrives again and again at verdicts such as the follow-
ing: In short, we have strong reasons for claiming that
carefully regulated practices for removing, storing and
using human tissues are part of the ethically accept-
able practice of medicine. This suggestion of large
intellectual resources needing to be at hand to ground
a platitude is depressingly typical.
It is true that the discussion does decisively escape
blandness at one stage, in the oddly authoritarian
proposals for regulating the media. Here, however,
it has become almost entirely disengaged from theor-
etical considerations, being content for the most part
to moralize and indulge a high-minded distaste for
low culture. This makes for a persistent uneasiness
of tone, as when newspapers are said to need strong
conventions such as setting out the evidence, indicat-
ing its sources, and explaining its limitations. What
is required, it seems, is for your soaraway Sun to be
equipped with footnotes to keep it tethered. There
is also a point at which a hint of a deeper social
analysis briey emerges. This is in the suggestion
that the problem of trust may reect the everyday
life of consumer society and consumerist ideologies
which propose a breathtaking simplication of ethical
justication. It is surely possible to detect the spectral
presence here of Marx, still the primary source of
insight into the way the market systematically under-
mines traditional relationships. It vanishes, however,
as suddenly as it appears, never to trouble the even
surface of the discussion again.
ONeills book has to be seen as a missed oppor-
tunity, the opportunity for a signicant contribution
from philosophy to the public culture in an area of
great current interest. It would be wrong, however,
to leave the impression that there are no compen-
sations. Most all there are her acute comments on
the malaise of contemporary medical ethics. Their
highlight is the demonstration that the cash value, so
to speak, of the central notion of individual autonomy
is informed consent and the cash value of informed
consent is the right to refuse treatment. Moreover, in
view of what was said earlier about the connection
between philosophy and a sense of humour, it should
be noted that there is a good, pre-emptive joke. Some
examples are given of material in newspapers that will
not need regulation because it makes no claim to
truth, and into this routine listing of bridge problems,
competitions and short stories there is unemphatically
inserted book reviews.
Joseph McCarney
Therefore religion?
Phillip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety, Routledge, London and New York, 2002. 260
+ xvi pp., 16.99 pb, 0 415 28224 1.
Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, Baltimore, 2002. 443 + xix pp., 38.00 hb., 17.00 pb., 0 8018 6767 3 hb., 0 8018 6768 1 pb.
What would mark a return to religion in philosophy?
The two books reviewed here offer two distinct Chris-
tian models. Both conceive of the turn to religion
as prompted by practical reason rather than theo-
logy; both are post-secular in that no mention is
made of an afterlife or any metaphysical doctrine.
Instead, de Vriess Religion and Violence examines
ecclesiastical religion as the paradigm for modern
institutional politics in the changing public sphere
created by immigration and new media technologies.
In Capitalism and Religion, Goodchild transforms
Nietzsches slogan into the Murder of God, performed
by nance capital, which becomes the precondition for
reconceiving religious experience free from dogmatics.
This, in turn, is presented as the condition for a new
ethics of thinking.
De Vries extends the analysis of his earlier book,
Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (1999), into
the political domain. This turn, associated with the
work of Levinas and Derrida, represents a twist in
the dialectic of enlightenment so that religion now
has the upper hand. Religion and Violence presents
a scholarly reading of Kants essays The Conict of
Faculties and Religion with the Boundaries of Mere
Reason in the context of Derridas work on iterability,
hospitality and responsibility. The fundamental claim
of the book is that Kants two essays should be read
as a Fourth Critique, which present a theory of the
institution under modern political conditions. De Vries
argues that the complexity and current applicability of
Kants project are misunderstood without an appreci-
ation of the importance of these essays.
Kants essays develop themes from What is
Enlightenment? and sketch a critical relationship
between sovereign government, the university and the
latters higher and lower faculties as they dene the
space of public debate. Briey, the higher faculties
of the university law, medicine and theology are
responsible for aiding the state in its maintenance of
political order. Kant focuses on the role of philosophy
as the lower faculty charged with criticizing the higher
faculties. This criticism is only to manifest itself as
argument within the connes of the university system
it is not to appear before the public, whose willing-
ness to obey will be affected. The essays deal with
the issue of censorship and the appropriate arena for
debate on issues relating to the public good. De Vries
unravels the niceties of Kants model in conjunction
with his conception of historical progress and indi-
vidual maturation. The establishment of a minimal
state-sanctioned space for dissent will preserve the
possibility of the gradual retreat of state power. De
Vries has this as an aporetic modern theory in so
far as it represents an enlightened rejection of the
authority of revealed theology or unreecting faith,
while casting political space as negotiations of strife
between competing interests. This critique of impure
reason is used to refute Kantian political theorists
who promote an abstract universalism; de Vries also
rejects Nussbaums stoical interpretation of expand-
ing inclusivity.
Difculties arise as de Vries attempts to move
beyond the space of Kantian scholarship. The latter
half of the book develops his anti-Habermasian con-
ception by conjoining it with Derridas and Levinass
work on ethics and the Other to produce a decon-
structed conception of political authority and order
which exceeds the ideal of innite approximation to
justice in favour of a more demanding tarrying with
the worst on behalf of the best. There can be no non-
violent and non-arbitrary intersubjectivity. There is
always a necessary censorship. De Vries concludes:
As Kant already knew, respect for the best has no
existence outside or independent of the many
multifaceted institutional forms that punctuate
the path of humankind on its postulated progression
toward the better and the best. Of this, I have sug-
gested, the history of religion forms the most salient
example. In this history, in order to mitigate the
propensity toward radical evil one must run the
risk of indispensable yet disposable errors.
Religion and Violence is characterized by an exposi-
tory style that leaves one in doubt as to the relation
between the separate chapters. How far does de Vries
describe Kants Fourth Critique and how far does he
advocate it? It is not clear whether the later chapters
correct or develop the rst chapter, particularly in
relation to Kants conception of radical evil and the
fallibility of the public. It is the exemplarity of the
history of religion that is at issue. There seem to
be four possible interpretations of this exemplariness
present within the text.
1. The historical dialectic of revealed and rational
religion in Protestantism provides a model for the
management, or administration, of the cultural
sphere transformed by multiculturalism and tele-
communications. Certain spaces or niches would
be censored differently from the university, and
potentially from the philosophy faculty.
2. Alternatively, by nessing the rst model, the
history of religion is a shortcut to full, formal and
concrete explication of ethical and political thought
as it progresses over time. That is, the history of
religion is also the history of progress in ethical
and political thought.
3. Intensifying the second model: democracy cannot
survive without letting itself be inspired and called
forth by tradition that precedes it. [E]ven where
the religious can no longer be identied as an
integral and compelling system of belief it
provides us with the critical terms, argumentative
resources, and bold imaginary that is necessary for
a successful analysis of contemporary culture.
4. Finally, religion is the only realm that allows one
to address and remedy radical evil. It is only reli-
gion that can animate a true desire for justice and
hospitality. Or, there must be some ecclesiastical
form of faith if the state is to have purchase on
the aspirations of its people. (For de Vries there
appears to be no tension in this formulation.)
This ambiguity is more than likely deliberate. But the
stronger the claim that is made on behalf of religion,
the more difculties appear. The major difculties
revolve not only around this ambiguity but also around
the valorization of the history of ecclesiastical reli-
gion.
Kierkegaards, Fear and Trembling is a sustained
attack on this conception of ecclesiastical religion
as determined by a progressive rationalization. The
presentation of Abraham marks a polemic against
Conict of the Faculties, where Kant argues that
Abraham must have been deceived for no good
God would demand that sacrice. Kant is a shrewd
pate who mollies the horror religiosus that de Vries
cites as an epigraph. For Kierkegaard, Kant is a good
Humean so far as revelation is reduced to miracles,
which serve to encourager les autres. An ecclesiastical
focus must excise the prophetic, mystical and messi-
anic traditions. Though de Vries continually attacks
the notion of good conscience, this would appear
to be the fate of a religion which effaces its anti-
institutional tradition in deference to positivism. The
tradition of radical Protestant communities, often sup-
pressed by the Church, is evaded at several junctures.
It requires a strange historical amnesia to take Kants
optimism about ecclesiastical history and progress at
face value.
Second, it is not at all clear that what motivates
any turn to religion in Derrida is an enthusiasm for
this model. The question that de Vries is unable to
address given his at, guileless readings of Derrida
is the following: does Derrida build on Levinass
work concerning the Other or does Derrida salvage a
revolutionary use value from the vogue for Autrui by
transforming concern for the latter into concern for
les sans-papiers? Or, more generally, does Derrida
espouse a turn to religion or does he rescue from the
realized unreason of sedimented religion an opposition
to instrumentalist conceptions of politics (Habermas,
MacIntyre, Giddens, Blair etc.)? The texts central to
de Vriess reading contain subtleties which undermine
his project.
The methodology of de Vries is a blessing com-
pared to the hasty readings found in Religion and
Capitalism. Goodchild has no care for the sobriety that
Derrida, quoted by de Vries, identies as the character
of philosophical works. In the preface, Goodchild asks
that readers not be too quick to refute his presenta-
tion, so as to be stimulated to listen to the force of
what is most worth thinking about. But in that case,
why choose to conduct this cry against economic
reductionism through the history of philosophy?
Although the materials arranged by Goodchild are
names from the canon of philosophy, they are paraded
and dismissed one by one in uncharitable circum-
stances. Only Bergson, Deleuze and Spinoza appear to
escape the totalizing critique that all thinking to date
has misdirected its attention away from what matters
most: the suffering of the world that increases under
the reign of nance capital. As a corrective to de
Vriess optimism, Goodchilds excoriation of modern
historical developments is welcome. However, the lack
of argument in Religion and Capitalism leaves its
formal status in doubt. The question must be asked:
is this philosophy?
The thesis is as follows. Thinking is currently
bound up in the world of capital. A new ethics of
thinking (a critical piety) is required which must
mine the immanent potential of thought to create
a force equal to opposing the ideology of nance
capital. This thinking directs attention to what is most
important: the suffering of others and the limits of
global capitalism. To survive the impending ecological
threat, we need a new asceticism based on fear, care
and generosity. The latter is tagged a revaluation of
values, but it is hard to see anything novel in this
formulation, or in the idea that the mutual suspicion
of modern relations needs to be replaced by local
community relations based on honour and trust. It
rings in harmony with the theorists of compassionate
conservatism and communitarianism.
A rewriting of Marxist political economics
reintroduces some distance: the relationship between
capital and labour is replaced with the more funda-
mental distinction between the householder, who
aims to meet subsistence needs; and the nancial
speculator, whose capital and situation are more
mobile. Surplus value is extracted through differ-
ent experiences of time: the householder attends to the
present of immediate need, the speculator to future
returns on investment. Goodchilds solution does not
lack boldness in the face of positivism: those who
struggle for subsistence seem pious before death.
Hence, capitalism, as consensual religion, appears
to thrive on the materialism of the global populace.
Once the thought of death appears as a simulation,
then an immanent ethics of thought can be constructed
which no longer treats death as the absolute source
of meaning and value in ethics. If this is developed
from an aberrant reading of Heidegger, it is not clear
from the text. It is only this shock which perhaps
differentiates Goodchild from Bryan Appleyard or
Thought for the Day.
Critical piety operates as a post-secular religious
experience, attending to signs left by higher potencies
of awareness: it is critical in that it does not collapse
into dogmatic theology. That said, the ability of this
attention to relieve suffering apparently points to a
justication of it as a religious category. Attention
may be adopted from Bergson, but its workings are
not analysed or explained and in effect it operates
as a part of a broader folk psychology. Paraphrasing
Lichtenberg, one might say that it is not what one
attends to that matters, but what that attention pro-
duces. The apocalyptic tone is continually undermined
by a residual liberalism. So the capitalist religion will
be shattered by appreciation of the magnitude of the
[ecological] crisis which affects us all. Death itself will
murder the god of capital, who will die of lack of hope
the sooner the better, if a remnant is to be saved.
But if this grand soir is to be averted (or redeemed?)
by critical piety rooted in local self-organizing com-
munities, it must be protected. It is necessary to
have an independent global religion, charged with
directing attention, and redistributing civil honour in
its alienated form as wealth. This institution must be
self-regulating and not accountable to any external
powers; its hierophants a strange combination of spir-
itual leaders, ascetics, intelligentsia and investigative
journalists. An amalgam of the UN and the Catholic
Church? Or maybe the team at the Today programme
would sufce?
Thus, the prophetic stance of outrage yields to the
liberal paternalism of de Vries; the overt agonies of
Goodchild meld with the deconstructionist ban on
good conscience. Both believe that progressive politi-
cal change only comes from the top down. Both seek a
theologically aware politics that would avoid liberation
theology. Institutions are assumed to dene spaces of
control, directing the aspirations of a passive populace,
since, concerned only with present needs, they, the
public, adhere to the doctrines that demand the least
self-exertion. Radical evil becomes the refusal of
discourse within this hegemonic space, and critical
piety is obliged to separate religion from the violence
of religious terrorism. We are still here within the
Kantian political tradition: disagreement is possible so
long as one obeys. That the public might organize
their own institutions of resistance, rather than waiting
for the catastrophe or the ruling classs bestowal of
maturity, escapes both authors.
Andrew McGettigan
Worse than
Beethoven
Dave Beech and John Roberts, eds, The Philistine
Controversy, Verso, London and New York, 2002.
314 pp., 40.00 hb., 16.00 pb., 1 85984 842 7 hb., 1
85984 374 3 pb.
That there is something suspicious about nding the
word philistine in a philosophers mouth is more than
mere idiosyncrasy. Nor is such suspicion reserved only
for those mouths in which the term is a corpse, full of
contempt for those who have never heard Bruckners
Ninth or Mahlers Eighth played properly (Andrew
Bowie). The fact that, in their third and nal essay
in this volume, Dave Beech and John Roberts have
resorted to the term the counter-intuitive philistine
indicates perhaps not only the terms irremediable
stigma, but also that a (philistine) intuition precedes
and resists their attempt to redeem it.
Played out mostly in the pages of New Left Review,
this controversy originated with an essay by Beech
and Roberts, Spectres of the Aesthetic, and responses
to it, which make up the rst part of the book; in the
second part, other writers take the provocations as
a point of departure. Beech and Roberts thesis pro-
voked what is more properly polemic than controversy
because it was, in part at least, specically targeted
against what they labelled the new aestheticism: a
perceived new consensus in the British philosophical
Left since around 1990, centred on a return to aesthet-
ics, with Adornos newly translated Aesthetic Theory
as its shibboleth.
While sympathetic to many aspects of new aestheti-
cism, Beech and Roberts attack what they see as its
jettisoning of the political achievements of the two
decades previous to it (such as the new emphasis on
gender, race and class brought by Cultural Studies), its
hypostatization of aesthetic autonomy and disinterested
contemplation, its concomitant disdain for partisan
practices, and its idealistic and ideological overinvest-
ment in the aesthetic realm in general as the arena
of ethical and social critique. Against these develop-
ments, they deploy the gure of the philistine, plucked
from the margins of Adornos text, as the necessary
but neglected point of coincidence for everything
excluded or repressed by arts civil subjectivities and
their institutions in other words, the embodiment
of all extra-aesthetic comportment.
Over the course of two further essays, Beech
and Roberts position is developed and complicated
in response to, amongst others, the new aesthetes
Andrew Bowie and Jay Bernstein. As Stewart Martin
observes in his introduction, their dialogue is often
dened by clashes in register (particularly between
art criticism and philosophical aesthetics) and various
selective deafnesses. Beech and Roberts seem to do
more of the listening: they ditch their initial emphasis
on the evacuation of the body from the new aestheti-
cism in the face of some withering attacks, rethink
the philistine and cultural division as
such through the early Marxs notion of
alienation, and complicate the philistines
relation to the popular. Above all, they
wish to go beyond the impasse reached
by Cultural Studies on the one hand
(xated on non-judgemental difference
and an uncritical celebration of popular
cultures) and critical theory on the other,
which risks piety and elitism.
Adorno, whom they do not exempt
from the latter, had already conceived of
the philistine as the counter-concept to
aesthetic comportment and, refusing to
dismiss it, urged that something in art
calls for this response. But, as Beech
and Roberts are correct to note, Adorno
assimilates the moment of philistinism to
art; he does not assimilate the moment of
art to philistinism. Quite where that path
not taken might lead, however, remains
unclear. At the end of their second essay
Tolerating Impurities, Beech and Roberts
propose a genealogy of philistine modes
of attention, not as the traits of actually
existing art-haters but as a genealogy of
exclusions, of cultural derogations. This
is important, because they do not wish,
la Bourdieu, merely to esh out forms
of (popular) taste which have historically
been excluded: rather, the philistine is
to be a real determinate absence in
aesthetic ideology, a form of attention proscribed by
ofcial taste rather than an overlooked alternative.
As an example, Beech and Roberts gesture towards
changing attitudes to pornography since the advent
of feminism as complicating the cultural status of
images of the objectication of women. If this was
simply about the changing status of desire and dis-
interestedness in art, we would still be in the purview
of Aesthetic Theory; but Beech and Roberts wish to
claim that the question of pleasure in general has
undergone a radical revaluation, that it is no longer
regarded as bad faith to pursue pleasures not in your
best interest, and that therefore philistine modes like
the love of distraction, dissipation, relaxation and idle
thrills, now subject to choice, modication, customi-
sation just as much as ironization [sic], can no longer
be dismissed as politically worthless. This effects
a radical shift: the inalert and leisurely forms of
attention associated with TV viewing, radio listening,
movie-going, watching football and sex-shop browsing,
are freed from their received subordination to the
authority of great art and the cognitive discipline of
cultural critique.
Delivered briskly, after pages of densely argued and
allusive genealogy, this conclusion seems a shocking
non sequitur. Above all it seems opaque that, having
insisted that the philistine be a relational concept, the
speculative suspension of the derogatory connotations
of the concept should so easily allow the freeing of
philistine modes of attention from subordination to
autonomous art and its attendant modes. The important
omission, only really addressed in a footnote in the
nal essay, is that some form of irony or reexivity
is required to distinguish counter-intuitive philistin-
ism from its conventional counterpart. Only this can
turn the injunction to love your alienation like the
philistine into more than merely carry on consuming.
But how much more? According to this last essay,
reexivity opens philistinism to the risk of being the
target of disgusted authority, in an effort to register
dissent at the false universals of high culture. It is
easier, however, to see this at work in art practice in
the historical examples they give (Dada, conceptual
art) than in radicalized radio listening.
If Beech and Roberts programmatic ambitions
prove fragile, their critique of new aestheticism
proves more fruitful, if only in the bluntness of res-
ponse it generates. Andrew Bowies two essays are a
reminder that Adorno posited the philistine against
those navely at home in art. Bristling at the treatment
of his work on subjectivity in Beech and Roberts
account, Bowie mounts an all-out defence of great
art in an A.C. Grayling vein. Exhorting us to try to
imagine what our culture would be like without its
major works of art, he deals brusquely with Beech and
Roberts thesis, trashing post-structuralist accounts of
subjectivity along the way. As Gail Day points out in
her essay, however, breezy apodictic claims such
as that Rachel Whitereads House is self-evidently a
masterpiece are self-defeating. In Bowie, the threat
to arts existence migrates entirely to the outside, it
seems, in the form of the forces of dumbing-down
he regards Beech and Roberts as championing, while
art seems to lose its aporetic character and to turn
into a trophy cabinet. While his account of autonomy
pays lip service to Adorno, he sounds closest to the
latter at his worst when advocating education into
the classics some of the ridiculousness of Adornos
assertion that he could imagine a music teacher who
does not happen to come from the youth music scene
analysing hit songs and showing why these hits are
incomparably worse than a movement of a Mozart
or a Beethoven quartet, or a really genuine piece of
modern music resonates in Bowies desire to persuade
students who reject it or ignore it of the value of great
music or other art.
Bowies inability or unwillingness to engage
fully with Beech and Roberts notion of the philis-
tine, however, does testify to an intuition which is
ineliminable: that philistine is a name for a counter-
concept of philosophy as much as art. In Adorno, the
use of the term philistine is at least mitigated by
constellatory form (which amounts to more than a
relational framework) and a tacit acceptance of the
concepts tainted history. Beech and Roberts thesis by
contrast looks too tactical and too selective. Program-
matic philistinism perhaps calls for a performativity,
a more dissipated and ironic register than these, after
all, relatively polite scholars are prepared to risk.
Michael Sperlinger
Virtually Deleuze
Henri Bergson: Key Writings, edited and introduced by
Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, Continuum
Press, London, 2002. xi + 402 pp., 60.00 hb., 19.99
pb., 0 8264 5728 2 hb., 0 8264 5729 0 pb.
Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of
the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life, Routledge,
London and New York, 2001. 246 pp., 50.00 hb.,
15.99 pb., 0 415 23727 0 hb., 0 415 23728 9 pb.
These two books make an important contribution to
the development of contemporary Bergsonism. Perhaps
because of his previous popularity, Bergsons reputation
suffered an eclipse during the 1930s, a neglect that
Levinas described in terms of a scandalous sojourn in
purgatory. Each book contributes to the posthumous
rebirth of Bergson as well as aiding an appreciation
of certain of the more radical and innovative facets of
his thought which deserve to be placed at the heart of
contemporary debates.
Henri Bergson: Key Writings is a collection of
material presenting the evolution of Bergsons thought
from his rst work (Time and Free Will, 1889) to his
last (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1932),
along with selections from his essays and two letters
addressed to Hoffding and Dellatre, which appear for
the rst time in English. The thematic and chrono-
logical selection of material allows the editors to
display both the central aspects of Bergsons philosophy
and those dimensions of his thought that continue to
live today in the form of fertile problems. The latter
include thinking an irreversible and non-spatialized
time (duration), the relationship between perception,
memory and representation, thinking the relationship
between the psychic and the physical realms beyond
the parallogisms of both idealism and realism, the
immanence of the theory of knowledge in the phil-
osophy of life, the relationship between metaphysics
and science, the renovation of the idea of intuition and
its use as a method for the philosophy of life.
The introduction to the Key Writings makes a per-
suasive case for Bergsons reputation as a rigorous
thinker, rescuing him from accusations of intellec-
tual dilettantism and incoherence. The editors place
Bergson in the post-Kantian tradition by showing how
he pursues a route intimated but blocked off by Kant

through a transformation of the latters idea of intui-
tion. They show the ways in which Bergsons idea of
time and continuity engages with both physics and
epistemology and emphasize Bergsons challenge to
classic ontology through his radical thinking of dura-
tion as a non-numerical and virtual multiplicity. It is
such concerns that make Bergson our contemporary
and distance him from the hasty simplications and
easy victories of a popular Bergsonism.
Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual takes
as its task to contribute to the correction of Bergsons
erasure from our image of post-Kantian philosophy
and to contribute to our comprehension of Deleuzes
unique conception and vision of philosophy. However,
beyond this seemingly modest task, there is a serious
and dense study of the major works of Bergson and of
the relationship between Bergson and Deleuze. Ansell
Pearson does not adopt Deleuzes Bergsonism uncriti-
cally, but rather immerses himself in thinking the
questions of time and life through the elaboration of
the notion of the virtual; a virtual that is never given,
but always open and undened. From the outset, Ansell
Pearson insists that it is necessary to create a concept
of the virtual that is exible and harbours difference
at its core. For this reason, he refrains from giving
a determination or a clear denition of the virtual
until the end of the book. Ansell Pearson shows that
a clear-cut denition would contradict Bergsons own
thought of the virtual and its creative appropriation by
Deleuze. For a exible concept in Bergsons terms
is a concept that does not subsume the particular but
expresses it; it is a concept which is carved according
to the natural articulations of the real.
The book comprises a collection of essays that
deliberately refrains from a chronological approach
to the works of Bergson. The author develops in
each chapter certain aspects of his ideas of time, life
and the virtual and their encounters with Bergsons
predecessors, his contemporaries and future think-
ers either inspired by Bergson or adopting a critical
attitude towards him, like Popper and Russell. An
example of this approach is Bergsons and Deleuzes
diferentiation of the notion of one, simple and imma-
nent virtual being from the Parmenidean ontology of
the One and Plotinus negative thinking of the virtual
(which issues in a negative theology of eminence and
emanation) as well as from Badious version of the
Deleuzean virtual as an actual unity that precludes
any potential for multiplicity.
Another theme that recurs throughout the book
is that of the relationship between science and meta-
physics. Ansell Pearson does not offer any facile
solutions to this problem, but rather exposes different
formulations of it through Bergsons encounter with
Einstein in Duration and Simultaneity (1922), the
double critique of mechanism and nalism in Crea-
tive Evolution (1907) and the creation of a theory of
perception which claims to be beyond idealism and
realism (empiricism) in Matter and Memory (1896).
Implied in this elaborate treatment of the relation-
ship between science and metaphysics is the claim that
it can only be elucidated through the idea of superior
empiricism or transcendental empiricism: an idea
which, for Ansell Pearson (following Deleuze), best
captures the character of Bergsons philosophy. The
task of establishing philosophy as virtual ontology is
inseparable from this idea of transcendental empiri-
cism. This becomes clear through repeated reection
upon the relationship between Bergson and Kant.
Ansell Pearson frames an innovative encounter
between Bergsons and Kants ideas of time. For Ansell
Pearson, the move from what he reads as a psycho-
logical account of duration (virtual multiplicity) as it
appears in Time and Free Will, towards an ontology
of the virtual which can be found in Bergsons study
of pure memory in Matter and Memory and in his
conception of life as a simple but virtually multiple
vital impetus in Creative Evolution requires the
prior critique of classic ontology and an elaboration of
Bergsons idea of intuition as the appropriate method
for philosophy. The breach between Bergsons initial
conception of duration and Kants homogeneous time
seems to be bridged gradually through the transforma-
tion of Bergsons duration from a psychological reality
to a new ontology.
Ansell Pearson discovers a number of unsus-
pected bridges between the philosophies of Kant
and Bergson, while at the same time maintaining
their differences. We could say that the author uses
the Bergsonian idea of divergent but complementary
tendencies in order to elucidate Bergsons relation
to the Kantian heritage. The rst and perhaps most
signicant of these links is the idea of intuition. Unlike
Kant, Bergson does not believe that as human beings
we are restricted to sensuous intuition, but that we
can indeed, this is the essential task of philosophy
think beyond the human condition. This means we
can think beyond the inveterate habits of our intellect
and therefore beyond the subjective conditions which
conne our knowledge to the conditions of all possible
experience. Through Bergsons idea of intuition, Kants
concept of experience is enlarged and transcended,
while at the same time our knowledge discovers the
conditions of actual experience.
This enlargement of experience is interpreted by
Ansell Pearson as an exit from the psychology of
subjective duration (a duration which only resides in
human consciousness) towards a duration which is
immanent in the universe and which, in Deleuzes
work, will become a complete theory of virtual ontol-
ogy.
The second major encounter between Kant and
Bergson involves the question of nality and the role of
teleology in the study of nature. Ansell Pearson distin-
guishes between the internal nality of Kants notion of
the organism, a self-propagating but closed system, and
Bergsons external nalism of the undivided impetus,
which results in quasi-open organisms, something like
provisional breaks in the continuous stream of life.
Beyond the critical confrontation between Bergson
and Kant, the author concludes with the possibility
of an alliance between the two philosophers, on the
basis of Deleuzes work. Ansell Pearson establishes
this alliance through his interpretation of Deleuzes
three syntheses of time as they appear in Differ-
ence and Repetition and in the thinking of time as a
crystal-image which is developed in Deleuzes texts
on cinema. According to Ansell Pearson, Deleuzes
virtual ontology and the primacy of the virtual as pure
past is an effort of saving or redeeming time, through
a combined reading of Bergson, Kant, Nietzsche and
Proust. It is a novel time of depths that escapes the
opposition between interiority and exteriority, the
problem of one or many durations and the norma-
tive psychology of the self. Ansell Pearson shows
how already in Matter and Memory the pure past is
dissociated from consciousness and how Bergsons
analysis opens up the way for a study of a pathologi-
cal duration in dreams and delirium. Time regained
or redeemed is exactly the being of time: the core of
the virtual ontology. Ansell Pearson shows that this
involves a return to Kants form of time, or time as a
straight line a time dissociated and not subordinated
to movement; a time which is not any more opposed
to the exteriority of space but has become itself an
interiority that encompasses us. This develops into a
thought of a being of time as the being of the pure past
which coexists and grounds the present. However, this
return to Kant becomes incomprehensible, for Ansell
Pearson, if it is not related to Nietzsches idea of
eternal recurrence via Deleuzes reading of Nietzsche.
According to this reading, the greatest weight of
Nietzsches theory of eternal recurrence is exactly the
image of time as the great devourer towards which
the will turns its revenge. It is only by establishing
a virtual ontology of time, in which the peaks of
de-actualized present coexist with the virtual being
of the past, that this can be avoided.
However, Philosophy and the Adventure of the
Virtual is not content to repeat Deleuzes conclusions.
Rather, it tries also to show that there is a Bergson
beyond Deleuze. The question is, then, whether this
Bergson would be happy with the marriage to Kants
form of time. Perhaps Bergson was not that inter-
ested in saving, regaining or redeeming time: not
because he was a philosopher and not an artist, but
because for him time, with its devouring qualities, is
a creative time, creating through its incessant ow.
Maybe Bergsons great critique of classic ontology
also entails the idea that time as duration is no longer
a haemorrhage of being but a joyful afrmation of
becoming that needs neither redemption nor saving.
Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual is
a vital step towards discovering the Bergson of the
future. It is a rigorous work that reintroduces Bergson
to the centre of contemporary thought and prepares
the ground for discussion of the relationship between
philosophy, art and science.
Margarita Karkayanni
Creative evolution
Gilles Deleuze, Lle dserte et autres textes, edited by David Lapoujade, Minuit, Paris, 2002. 416 pp., 21.50
pb., 2 707 31761 6.
of the process of rationalization, at times a zealot of
the Hegelian erudition of Hyppolite (Jean Hyppolite,
logique et existence, 1954); on occasion a professor of
the Sorbonne (Jean-Jacques Rousseau prcurseur de
Kafka, de Cline et de Ponge, 1962); a professor at
the college of Orlans (Instincts et institutions, 1955);
a reader and brief acquaintance of Kostas Axelos
(Faille et feux locaux, 1970), and a follower of Gilbert
Simondons inquiry into disparate schemes of individu-
ation and heterogeneity (Gilbert Simondon, Lindividu
et sa gense physico-biologique, 1966). These are
all important historical and conceptual pointers for
situating Deleuze.
The texts spanning 1950 to 1970 show Deleuze
surveying the ground upon which he would erect his
armature of thoughts variegations beyond reason, his
way of measuring the catastrophic seizures within a
world articulated by a double movement, and always by
a double movement. The candid and exotic Causes et
raisons des les dsertes (circa 1950) is the edgling
expression of such a scheme in unearthing the afli-
ations between geography and the precariousness
of existence consequent upon thoughts movement
to both separate and recreate the movement that
brings man to the island. The pleasure of the text
is in its vivacious tone, decorating an inquiry into
geneses and recreation in which we nd many of
the themes of Deleuzes later projects.
All this supposes that the formation of the world is
of two times, of two levels, birth and rebirth, that
the second be just as necessary and essential as the
rst is necessarily compromised, born for a reprise
and already reborn within a catastrophe.
The unearthing of the apocalyptic need through
a double movement gives us a Deleuze who
would eventually write of thoughts cataclys-
mic yet rening consequences within the grand
scheme of Difference and Repetition, a scheme of
thoughts aesthetic misadventures, aptly outlined
in the interview Sur Nietzsche et limage de la
pense (1968). There, the enterprise of the image
of thought, a new image of the act of thinking (a
central theme to Difference and Repetition), with
its empirical creation of concepts, is announced
through a retrospective glance at Deleuzes work
on Nietzsche, before the conclusive announcement
The novelty of published letters and correspondence
is that there is a youthful, unbound, non-negotiable
nature to expression. With Deleuze, we have no
correspondence, but the present collection of articles,
reviews and seminars from 1950 to 1974 is not without
its incandescent moments, its impassioned spells and
apprehensive instances in grappling with the mechan-
ics of an ontology of pure difference, an ethic in its
nascent state spanning the intermittent eruptions of a
developing project marked by anatomizing studies of
Hume (1953), Nietzsche (1962), Kant (1963), Bergson
(1966), and Spinoza (1968). Such anthologies can func-
tion as a denouement to entanglements left in the wake
of weightier works, not so much in what they say, but
by virtue of to whom and what they refer.
With such an anthology Deleuze studies is given a
site-map of his engagement with the gures fashioning
his philosophical environment. The best parts of the
text bear on Difference and Repetition (1968). We
are witness to a Deleuze caught within the allure
of the double value of a new thinking called for by a
double world of deviation and dissimilarity:
Repetition is difference, its the same thing, the
actual categories of our thought. Its a problem of
repetitions and invariants, but also masks, disguises,
displacements, variants within repetition.
La mthode de dramatisation (1967) is a seminar
at which Deleuze communicated the central themes
of Difference and Repetition to the Socit Franaise
de Philosophie (Alqui, Beaufret, Bouligand, Breton,
de Gandillac, Merleau-Ponty, Mouloud, Philonenko,
Prenant, Schuhl, Souriau, Ullmo, Wahl), whose
inspired questioning picks at the cortege of Deleuzes
reasoning. The structuralist Mouloud highlights the
amalgamation of mathematical and biological func-
tions of difference within Deleuzes project as the
workings of rationalization rather than the imagination.
Merleau-Ponty urges Deleuze to explicate the working
relationship between dynamisms, space and time a
relationship that the cosmological scholar doesnt see
as being truly Bergsonian; while the priest and theo-
logian Breton (whose interjection is a Hegelian exposi-
tion in itself) enquires as to what exactly, in light of the
temporal operations of Deleuzes mode of questioning,
the method of dramatization applies to. To the world of
man? Or to the world of common scientic experience?
What exactly, in terms of traditional ontology, does it
serve as an approximation of?
Of equal weight and value is the review of Jean
Hyppolites Logique et existence (1954) where Deleuze
writes of an ontology of sense qualifying the very logic
of existence to be found within an ontology of pure
difference, an ontology which, according to Deleuze,
Hyppolites study heralds. He asks, can we not con-
struct an ontology of difference that would not have
to go as far as contradiction, because contradiction
would be less than difference and nothing more?
This is a question that positions Hegel as an admired
protagonist within Deleuzes theatre of philosophy, a
theatre constructed under the direction of Hyppolite
and Canguilhem with the problem of immanence as
its recurring theme.
The year 1970 sees Deleuze review Kostas Axeloss
cosmo-anthropological project in Faille et feux locaux.
Deleuze enthusiastically recognizes within Axelos the
estranging qualities of a planetary thought, a pathos
very much echoing the younger Deleuze of Causes
et raisons des les dsertes. What he perceives within
Axelos is a project that goes beyond metaphysics into
a pataphysical realm of a OneAll (LunTout), a frag-
mentary totality, a game of difference and repetition,
an afrmation of difference and the absence of origin,
a celebratory pathos, the pathos of this thought, bitter
thought, but joyous with its estranging force. Deleuze
had spotted the pataphysical markings of Axelos six
years earlier in a review entitled En crant la pata-
physique Jarry a ouvert la voie la phnomnologie
(1964). That review explicates a pluralistic rationalism,
a totality of a dismembered Dionysus through a game
of perpetual afrmation, a game that Deleuze sees
Axelos approximate with a new ontology, a planetary
act of thinking, enumerating a thinking the difference
fuelling a journey into the surfaces and depths of an
erratic and variable world. Deleuzes enthusiasm for
Axeloss project of a planetary mode of thinking, a
pataphysical undertaking, is carried through to his
short homage to Sartre Il a t mon matre, 1964).
There, writing with remorseful tone of a scattered
modern people navigating the conditions of Sartrean
totalization, Today we live as scattered members. It
is a salutary gesture to a philosophical and political
luminary, but all too brief in its mentioning of Teilhard
de Chardin, whose cosmological project no doubt
helped shape, along with Axelos, the bolder moments
of Difference and Repetition and the foundations for
Logic of Sense.
The texts of 1972 lack the seminal excitement of the
formative years. They deliver a Deleuze with whom
we are very much familiar, giving an unwelcome
tedium to the anthology, for these texts have neither
the novelty nor the raw, inspired energy of those of
195070. The politically inspired Trois problmes de
groupe of 1972 is the preface to Guattaris Psychana-
lyse et transversalit. It shows us a Deleuze stepping
out of his circle to address psychoanalytic concerns
of group dynamics in much the same vain as Anti-
Oedipus (also 1972). Its a vein we know all too well.
Deleuze et Guattari sexpliquent (1972), Capitalisme
et schizophrnie (1972), Sur le capitalisme et le dsir
(1973) are complementary interviews which deliver the
expected rhetoric.
The momentary tedium of the collaborative burst
of 1972 is cut short by Hume (1972), which serves
very much as an extended parallel to Instincts et
institutions (1955): the latter a short, sharp four-page
initiation into Humes world of habit, intuition and
institutionalism moulded by the Deleuze of Orlans;
the former a biographical note on superior empiricism,
which is clearer, condent and more nely struck than
the rst. Here, with Hume, we are introduced to his
strange world, an irreversible world of relations, a
superior empiricism of extra-relations, preguring a
thought of the future. The twelve-page homage to Hume
is an inquiry bearing all of Deleuzes hallmarks.
On the one hand, we have Deleuze as the corrosive
sublimate of the French circle, reinstating thoughts
duties through an ontology of pure difference (1950
70); on the other, we have Deleuze as adept, having
found his voice and gained his sureties within a new
planetary scheme of thought (197274). It is a beauti-
ful evolution, whose shaping stages prove the most
arresting.
The biographical footnotes by David Lapoujade
attend to both the historical and the conceptual develop-
ment of Deleuzes project. A second volume is in
preparation covering the years 197595, entitled Deux
rgimes de fous et autres textes.
David Reggio
Hot and cold
Carl Cohen and Tom Regan, The Animal Rights
Debate, Rowman & Littleeld, Oxford and New York,
2001. xiii + 323 pp., 50.00 hb., 14.95 pb., 0 8476
9662 6 hb., 0 8476 9663 4 pb.
I once witnessed a philosophical exchange between
Roger Scruton and Steven Rose at a conference on
human nature. I was both enthralled and appalled at
its brutality I hadnt realized that philosophy could
be that entertaining, but then I wasnt sure that what
Id seen was philosophy at all. (Scruton seemed con-
vinced he had delivered a decisive blow in the debate
when he pointed out that Rose didnt seem to know
the plural of exegete.)
I get the same feeling of unease when reading this
book, a debate on animal rights between Tom Regan
(for) and Carl Cohen (against). In their joint preface
they declare their intent of creating an environment of
mutual respect in which the arguments are pursued in
good spirit. What we get is an ill-tempered exchange
in which both writers make it clear that, however
much they insist that they respect each other, they
havent an ounce of respect for each others arguments
everything is disputed, right down to basic facts
and gures.
The book begins with Cohens case against animal
rights, followed by Regans case for them. The second
half is taken up with their replies to those cases,
and this is when the debate takes a turn towards the
dark side. Regans irritation is understandable, because
Cohen focuses exclusively on medical experimentation,
with no discussion at all of the many other practices
in which the moral standing of non-human animals
is questioned. Regan makes it clear that he is bafed
and disappointed by this, since the book was intended
to be about animal rights in general. The reader may
well share this frustration (as may the publishers), but
Cohen insists that It is the use of animals in medical
research, above all other uses, that compels us to
think carefully about the moral status of animals. He
does not tell us why this should be so, and he does
not tell us how we could apply the lessons he draws
from the discussion of medical experimentation to
other practices.
Cohens central claim is that animals do not have
rights, and it may be argued that this does have
implications for food production, and so on, in that
if something has no rights we can do what we like to
it. But that is not Cohens position. He believes that
we have moral obligations towards animals we owe
them the obligation to act humanely towards them. Far
from justifying the current practices to which animals
are subjected, Cohens case has sweeping implications
for their reform, if not the outright abolition of those
which can never be humane. He, however, does not
consider any of these implications. He is concerned
with medical experimentation, and he writes in a
universe in which that practice is already morally
clean.
An added frustration with Cohens contribution is
that the vast majority of it is spent listing the benets
of animal experimentation. His case that animals do
not have rights is brief: they are not moral agents
and so do not belong to the moral community and
therefore cannot be the bearers of moral rights an
argument based on a Kantian conception of persons
as moral ends in themselves. A major part of his case
rests on pointing out what we have to give up if we
respect animal rights a utilitarian argument which
seems beside the point. Acting morally towards others
normally involves some kind of sacrice on our part,
and although Cohen is at pains to point out that we do
have moral duties towards animals again based on
utilitarian grounds the only thing we seem to have
to give up is being sadistic towards them; we can do
whatever we want to them as long they do not suffer
any needless distress. (Interestingly, Cohen exempts
his dog from this basic moral condition, because, he
claims, he has voluntarily accepted the obligation to
care for and be kind to his dog, and therefore has to
recognize that there are moral principles that govern
his conduct here.)
While there is not enough philosophical discussion
in Cohens contribution, one might feel there is too
much in Regans. He stresses that his argument for
animal rights is cumulative. He rst works through a
series of alternative moral positions and shows how
they cannot give us the basis for the moral status
of human beings. Only once he has done this does
he develop his own moral position, which he claims
can act as that basis. He then asserts that there is no
good reason to exclude non-human animals from this
status as they share an essential moral property with
humans. Animals only enter the argument, therefore,
at its conclusion.
For Regan, that essential property is being the
subject-of-a-life, which is to have an experiential
welfare. Humans and other animals share both a
family of mental capacities and a common status as
beings who have an experiential welfare. Subjects-of-
a-life have the right to continue to have the experiences
that constitute their welfare. They at least have the
negative right of non-interference with that experience,
and may have a positive right to support to enable them
to achieve it (many of us certainly believe that humans
have such a positive right to welfare).
My concern with Regans account is with its search
for the essential property that carries moral signi-
cance. It may be that the property we arrive at the
having of experiences that constitute welfare is not
what we thought we were looking for. Regans point
is that we morally value other humans because of
this property, and therefore we must be consistent
and offer the same respect to other animals who
share it. But we can always ask, is this really why we
morally value other humans? If we are searching for
the essential core of our moral concern for others, this
seems disappointingly thin. On the other hand, the idea
of welfare is going to have to be lled out in some
detail, with the recognition that welfare is going to be
signicantly different across different types of being.
And so while Regans approach has as its centre the
search for a common essential property, it also opens
up space for a pluralist approach to how that property
is achieved in different cases.
For me Regans most signicant contribution, which
is very underplayed in this discussion, is the distinction
between moral agents and moral patients, where the
latter are beings which lack the capacity for moral
agency but have a welfare that can be supported or
damaged. His point is that there are good reasons
to suppose that we do have moral duties towards
moral patients with regard to their welfare (again, we
certainly believe that to be the case for those human
beings who are moral patients), and therefore there are
good reasons to suppose that they have membership
of the moral community and can be bearers of moral
rights.
Once we allow this, then we realize that a moral
theory that holds only between moral agents will not
do we also need to work out our relationship to moral
patients. This Cohen recognizes with his two-theory
position, but his assertion that Kantian theory applies
to all humans while utilitarianism will do for all
non-human animals (except his dog) is just too quick
and easy, as Regan points out. It simply sets aside too
many awkward differences between humans and too
many awkward similarities between humans and other
animals, whether they be chimpanzees or Cohens
favourite example plague-bearing rats.
The book is two things: an introduction to the
problem of the moral treatment of non-human animals,
and an example of philosophical debate. On the rst
count it is too narrow. From Cohen, we get only one
issue within the debate about animal rights, and in
Regan we have just one possible approach to the moral
status of animals. On the second count, it depends how
you like your philosophical debate. Aimed at a general
readership, the book is enormously entertaining, and
both writers succeed in making it clear and simple.
But I cant help feeling that much of the entertainment
comes from seeing just how rude two philosophers can
be about each others arguments. In their joint preface,
they observe that much of the debate over the moral
status of animals is characterized by more heat than
light. In the end, this book is on the hot side. Perhaps
we just have to accept that, given the importance of
what is at stake in this particular debate, philosophical
cool is not an option.
Phillip Cole
CONFERENCE REPORT
Letdown
Siegfried Kracauer, University of Birmingham
1314 September 2002
O
nly the superstitious would argue that the omens should have been heeded.
Was it really the power of Friday the 13th that jinxed the event, such that all
four big name international speakers failed to show at this two-day confer-
ence devoted to the work of Siegfried Kracauer? Miriam Hansen and Tom Gunning
made their apologies in more or less good time, but Tom Levin and Gertrud Koch
simply failed to appear. Bad luck is a becoming a regular guest in Birmingham lately.
The conference was to be hosted by the legendary Cultural Studies department, had it
not been closed down, virtually overnight, and its staff sacked. Conference organization
moved over to the English Department, but http404s made progress difcult (http404
is what comes up on your computer when you visit an inactive URL or website). So
the conference was small, just thirty-odd of us, but all nicely
bonded in a sense of camaraderie against the disappointment
of the no-shows and the malign forces of the university
management.
The question of who is Siegfried Kracauer taxed confer-
ence participants more than is usually the case, struck as
many of them had been by the virtual anonymity that he
possesses even in some Cultural Studies circles, particularly
in comparison with his acquaintances Benjamin and Adorno.
It was mooted on several occasions that these friends of
Kracauer were part of the problem. Their bitchy comments
on Kracauers writings, such as his social biography of the
Paris of Offenbach, expressed in letters to each other, or
their subtly critical reviews of his work sullied his writings
reputation, prejudiced readers and put others off. And the news
from Germany brought by Graeme Gilloch, who has been
combing the archives for a forthcoming intellectual bibliog-
raphy is not good. Kracauers work is mainly out of print,
the future of the selected works uncertain (the volumes that
have already been published are remaindered), and the many unpublished manuscripts
in the archive an extended study of Simmel, diverse plans, manuscripts and letters
are likely to remain there and there alone. But here in Birmingham were a handful of
scholars happy to spend two days in the Frankfurters company.
Erica Carter discussed Kracauers lm criticism in relation to mainstream Weimar
and Nazi lm criticism, and used close-ups of Marlene Dietrich to touch on idealist
Kantian aesthetics as they emerge in 1930s lm analysis with its emphasis on inte-
gration and the Beautiful. Through a Kracaueresque phenomenology, John Allen
investigated the new Potsdamerplatz with its spaces of unpressurized but seductive
high-tech consumption at Sony Plaza. Eric Jarosinski glided through a history of
glass architecture and its attendant ideologies (the transparent imperative in Greater
Germanys new spaces of democracy) before invoking Kracauers critique of modernist
white cube architecture, a harbour for concealed ghosts and (suitably enough) remain-
ders. This chimed with my paper on Kracauers melancholic presentation of the hollow
space of 1920s Berlin, populated by ghosts made invisible by neon and uorescent
lighting in a culture of distraction.
Steve Giles also spoke of visibility and invisibility, the hidden and the manifest as
represented in debates on photography and realism in the 1920s, examining Kracauers
attractions to both formalism and Brechtian aesthetics. Barry Langford constructed a
passage from Ruttmanns 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a City, with its opening shots of
a train whizzing towards a Berlin main station, to Lanzmanns train to Treblinka in
Shoah, via Kracauers troubled poetics of the real, as presented in Theory of Film from
the 1960s. Frances Guerin analysed that poetics of the real in the context of lm, a
medium that both records (realistically) and reveals (via construction, and non-realist
lmic devices). This dual aesthetic documentary and revelation, realist and formative
was then explored in connection with Errol Morriss documentary practice in The
Thin Blue Line. James Donald introduced the most distancing note into the proceed-
ings. Railing against Kracauers structural homology of dance forms (the Tiller Girls
revue shows) and capitalist rationalization, he pointed to the existence of other dance
styles, in particular those of Josephine Baker. Here was a gure who, as an American,
signied modernity, and was involved with the modernist avant-garde (Le Corbusier
was a lover and Adolf Loos designed a house for her), but who as a black woman was
identied as primitive. For Donald this complicates Kracauers analysis of the homog-
enization of modernity and the singular logic of capitalism. However, it could be argued
that for all the theorists involved with the Frankfurt School the dialectical entwinements
of modernity and primitivism in capitalism are acknowledged, rather like the analysis
of still existing ghosts in the self-advertised new objective space.
Jan Campbell, one of the organizers of the conference, delivered reections on
Kracauer in the context of a phenomenological reading of mimesis and hysteria and a
notion of experience in which the borders between the conscious and unconscious are
dissolved. The paper attempted to bring Kracauer into the orbit of Marxian psycho-
analysis (and also Jungian notions of the dream picture) and draw him away from
Freud, Lacan and the Oedipus complex, where lm theorists still tend to operate. The
import of Kracauer, it was suggested, is that he does not divide the private and social
imaginaries. Campbells defence of this position goes against much contemporary
embarrassment about such a proposition as it appears in Kracauers most famous book.
Defenders of From Caligari to Hitler (1947) have been scared off by its unfashionable
thesis of a social unconscious manifested in lms, through which the push towards
Hitlers rise to power appears in the movies of the 1920s. The nal paper was by
Graeme Gilloch, and it was a lively reading of a lm script by Kracauer, who hoped to
turn his book Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time (1937) into a Hollywood
movie. The idea had been forcefully criticized by Adorno, who imagined a gruesome
biopic that would contradict all of Kracauers modernist and critical ideas on lm.
Through a close reading of the script, its scenes, its lmic techniques, Gilloch showed
how Kracauers critical theory of society was embedded in the innovative script both in
terms of subject (e.g. the importance of milieu and the critique of the personality) and
in terms of form the use of cinematic devices, montaging of scenes, mise-en-scne.
The lm was never made a recent composer biopic had not done well at the box
ofce and so there was no chance of a studio backing another one. Between his friends
and the commercial system, Kracauer seems to have been (and still to be) constantly let
down.
Esther Leslie

Radical Philosophy 116, 2002

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CONTENTS

iek and Jameson, discussion of Lenin and

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