NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

The Turn to Ethics and its Democratic Costs

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Political Science By Ella Myers EVANSTON, IL December 2006

UMI Number: 3230090

Copyright 2006 by Myers, Ella All rights reserved.

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3 ABSTRACT The Turn to Ethics and its Democratic Costs Ella Myers This dissertation critically examines the turn to ethics in recent democratic theory the renewed interest in elaborating an ethics that can constrain, ground or animate political activity and seeks to expose its unacknowledged costs. The project argues that a crucial conception of politics, centered on associative democratic activity in which a plurality of individuals combine together in an effort to alter shared conditions, is put at risk by dominant ethical approaches. In particular, the twin dangers of absolutism and individualism, which characterize prominent strands of the ethical turn, threaten to undermine the collaborative practice of democratic politics, in which collectivities endeavor to jointly shape the world that lies between them. The dissertation is both critical and constructive; it aims to expose the costs wrought by absolutism and individualism in the name of ethics, while also forwarding an alternative ethical sensibility that might serve to inspire associative democratic politics today. The project centers on close readings of the tense relationship between ethics and politics in the work of Isaiah Berlin, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt. My reading of Berlin and his interpreters reveals that the fascination with ethics is at times an attempt to imaginatively secure for politics an uncontestable or extrapolitical foundation. Such moral absolutism is problematic because it misrepresents certain principles or norms as given, thereby obscuring the extent to which they remain dependent on the articulation, allegiance, and enactment of democratic actors. Second, I show that Foucaults late work on the care of the self amounts to a form of ethical individualism that cannot effectively address the political problems of individualization and

4 massification that Foucault so deftly diagnoses. The depoliticizing effects of contemporary power require primarily not strategies of self-cultivation but new associational relations or what Foucault calls horizontal conjunctions. Finally, the project explores the possibilities of an ethical orientation, implicit Arendts writings and expressed in her invocation of amor mundi (love of the world). I show that an ethical sensibility focused on care for the world as a common object is a meaningful and distinctively democratic alternative to the absolutism and individualism whose dangers I track.

5 Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible were it not for the support of my teacher and advisor, Professor Linda Zerilli. She has been an invaluable critic and interlocutor, tirelessly reading and discussing the project at every stage. Her rigorous intellectual engagement with my work, coupled with her encouragement and advocacy, saw me through the dissertation and serve as an inspiring model of mentorship. I also benefited tremendously from writing my dissertation as a member of the growing Northwestern University political theory community. Professor Bonnie Honig, who first convinced me to come to Northwestern for my graduate study, is not only a brilliant thinker but also a wonderful teacher. The dissertation was enriched by her involvement in it. I am thankful for her original, incisive readings of texts and events, which always push me to consider things anew. Among the other Northwestern faculty whose conversations over the years have informed my thinking and writing are Professor Michael Hanchard and Professor Sara Monoson. Mike brought a welcome historical and comparative sensibility to the project and also provided some much needed coffee breaks. Saras scholarly enthusiasm has remained an inspiration to me ever since our Thucydides seminar in my first year. The graduate student cohort in political theory at Northwestern, which I have had the pleasure of watching take shape, is full of smart and interesting folks who do a lot to make graduate school more fun. In particular, I want to thank Crina Archer and Demetra Kasimis for their intellectual companionship as well as plain old friendship. Crina deserves special acknowledgement for reading the entire dissertation and providing incredibly thoughtful and meticulous feedback. Demes arrival at Northwestern at a

6 critical point in my graduate school journey was a genuine blessing. Beyond the political theory enclave, Paul North has been an excellent listener and constant friend. Although projects of this sort always entail a certain degree of isolation and fixation, I would never have been able to complete the dissertation were it not for those people who reminded me of life beyond it. Christine Pirrones friendship is by now a condition of my existence. Her warmth and insight make every day better. Friese Undine and Roshen Hendrickson threw the loveliest dinner parties and were the perfect people to call for a nightcap. David Singer and Eva Yusa supplied much needed distraction during the final and hardest phase of the project. My family has encouraged me at every turn and I wish to especially thank my mother, Robyn Wagner, who regularly declared that I was marvelous, with or without a PhD. Finally, my greatest debt is to Mark Schwarz for the curiosity, good humor, and patience he brings to our life together. His distinctive voice and vision make the world more intriguing and my place in it more sure.

7 Contents

Chapter 1 Tracing the Ethical Turn Chapter 2 Value Pluralism and the Return to Moral Absolutism: On the Uses and Abuses of Isaiah Berlin Chapter 3 Michel Foucault and the Limits of the Care of the Self Chapter 4 The Perils of Good Conscience: Hannah Arendts Worldly Ethics Chapter 5 Conclusion: Toward an Ethics of the Common Object

8 42

103 164 222

Bibliography

244

8 Chapter 1 Tracing the Ethical Turn Consulting recent writings in democratic theory, it is easy to get the impression that the solutions to any number of political problems are best sought in the domains of morality or ethics. Theorists working within a variety of traditions and driven by competing concerns display a surprising degree of unanimity when it comes to the indispensability of morality or ethics for contemporary political activity. As Chantal Mouffe has noted, ethics and morality have once again become fashionable.1 Notwithstanding their rivalrous visions of democracy and their equally diverse conceptions of what a proper morality or ethics entails, political theorists efforts to unite the political with the ethico-moral are prominent. Why is this move so common? How should we understand the so-called turn to ethics within contemporary political theory? And does the search for an ethics that can constrain, ground, or otherwise animate democratic politics entail unacknowledged costs? This dissertation answers that last question in the affirmative, claiming that many contemporary efforts to marry ethics and politics tend to deplete rather than enrich the theory and practice of associative democratic politics. Before developing that position, however, a sketch of the turn to ethics is in order. Among the most well-known contemporary arguments concerning the connections between politics, morality and ethics are those made by Rawls, Habermas, and their intellectual heirs. The starting point shared by both thinkers is what Rawls refers to as the

Chantal Mouffe, Which Ethics for Democracy, in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hansen, and Rebecca Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000), 85.

9 fact of pluralism.2 That is, both Rawls and Habermas begin with the recognition that human existence is characterized by many different conceptions of the good which cannot be reconciled with one another and they treat this insight as perhaps the challenge facing liberal democratic theory and practice today. What political arrangements are possible or desirable if it is acknowledged that modern individual and communal lives acquire significant meaning from multiple comprehensive views that we cannot definitely rank and which are frequently at odds with one another? As Rawls puts it, the question is, How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?3 Rawls well-known reply in Political Liberalism is an elaboration of a conception of justice that he claims is capable of securing general assent within the political realm, despite the existence of multiple and irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines. The notion of justice, although dubbed political by Rawls, functions in his theory as a minimal and universal morality that allows citizens to overcome the fact of pluralism in the public realm. It is the idea of justice that allows for an overlapping consensus among citizens whose particular comprehensive commitments may nonetheless vary greatly. Because the conception of justice is procedural rather than substantive, it can be the subject of broad agreement. Yet such agreement is limited in scope; pluralism continues to reign in the private realm, where individuals take their bearings from any number of comprehensive doctrines. In the public arena, however,

John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Not everyone has reconciled themselves to this fact, of course. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, laments the condition of moral disagreement as a catastrophic fall from an earlier state of unity. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1984). Rawls, Political Liberalism, xx.

10 deliberation should concern only those matters that can be addressed from within the overlapping consensus. Participants in political debate are expected to make their arguments in terms of reasons that opposing sides can be expected to endorse, rather than on the basis of contentious and particular value commitments. Thus, Rawls saves liberal democracy from the difficulties of pluralism by limiting contentious comprehensive doctrines to an area figured as private and installing a minimal and universal morality of justice at the center of politics. Habermas, like Rawls, contends that there is no single answer to the ethical question of the good life. Habermas acknowledges that our answers to that question are necessarily rooted in particular traditions and cultures that diverge and conflict without the promise of reconciliation. Yet he also argues pace Rawls that a certain kind of universal, rational morality is nonetheless discoverable. Questions of justice are subject to a universalization test and permit answers that are valid in general while questions concerning the good life are answerable only from within a concrete life-form or individual life project.4 Discourse ethics is the name Habermas gives to his proceduralist conception of justice, in which universal and necessary communicative presuppositions of argumentative speech guide processes of public deliberation.5 Discourse ethics is meant to provide a method according to which a correct, universally valid choice can be made between rival norms. It is through fidelity to the procedures
4

Habermas employs a very sharp form/content distinction to distinguish a universalistic concept of justice from particular conceptions of the good life, as Nikolas Kompridis points out (333). Kompridis argues that Axel Honneth draws a similarly sharp (and untenable) distinction in his recent work, separating out culturally and historically variable instances or interpretations of the good life from the formal conditions invariably necessary for its realization and contends that Honneth is unable to disarm the well-founded suspicion that his formal conditions already presuppose and are already shaped by a particular conception of the good Nikolas Kompridis, From Reason to Self-Realisation? Axel Honneth and the Ethical Turn in Critical Theory, in Contemporary Perspectives in Critical and Social Philosophy, ed. John Rundell et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
5

Jrgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 86.

11 of this special argumentation situation that the moral point of view can be discovered. The moral point of view is rational and universal, irreducible to our concrete forms of Sittlichkeit or ethical life. Despite differences between Rawls and Habermas theories of liberal democracy, which by their own accounts concern the letter and not the spirit of their arguments, their writings display a strikingly similar approach to questions of morality, ethics and politics.6 In both cases, a multiplicity of ethical values and corresponding ways of life are acknowledged as the lot of modernity. Yet this ethical plurality is subsequently qualified by a proceduralist morality that reintroduces a form of universal normativity into liberal democratic politics. In the work of Rawls and Habermas, the turn to ethics appears both as a nominal turn toward value pluralism but also as a partial turn away from ethical particularity and diversity and toward formal and universal morality. Liberal efforts to develop a universally-binding, procedural moral-rational foundation for political life have been subject to criticism by thinkers associated with communitarian political theory, who argue that the aspiration toward neutrality, embodied in dominant strands of liberal thought, is deeply flawed. Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, among others, have challenged the priority of the right over the good that underlies the theories of Rawls and Habermas.7 The communitarian critique involves, first, the assertion that the claim to procedural neutrality
6

As Habermas wrote concerning Rawls Political Liberalism in 1995: I admire this project, share its intentions, and regard its essential results as correct. For this reason, he characterizes his critique of Rawls as within the bounds of a familial dispute. Jrgen Habermas, Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls Political Liberalism, The Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (1995), 110.

See, for example, Michael Sandel, Liberalism and its Limits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Charles Taylor, Atomism, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Cross Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

12 embodied in the conception of justice is disingenuous. Such theories, they contend, inevitably privilege certain human capacities and activities above others, thereby smuggling in substantive conceptions of the good. In addition to this criticism of liberals self-understanding, communitarians question whether what Sandel calls no-value neutralism on the part of political institutions is in fact a desirable objective.8 Advocating a civic republican view of citizenship, Taylor and Sandel argue for a political ideal in which citizens identify with their political community, see their political institutions as an expression of themselves, and abide by laws and practices that embody a common good. By drawing on the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit to challenge the liberal romance with neutrality, communitarian-minded political theorists argue that politics entails the collective pursuit of substantive goods that constitute what is most valuable for a particular people. Although the liberal-communitarian divide involves a reworked Kantian Moralitt that opposes Hegelian Sittlichkeit, a profound similarity nonetheless links the two schools of thought: in each case, morality or ethics is regarded as a necessary foundation for political life. What Rawls and Habermas call moral Sandel and Taylor would not recognize as such, yet these thinkers nonetheless share a commitment to grounding democratic political institutions in moral norms. Renewed interest in the relationship between ethics and politics is not confined to the confrontation between liberals and communitarians, however. In fact, one of the most interesting features of the contemporary turn to ethics within political theory is its appearance among thinkers whose political projects are aimed at critiquing the foundationalism of both liberalism and communitarianism. In these cases, ethics is frequently figured as politics animating
8

Michael Sandel, Democracys Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998).

13 supplement, rather than its authorizing ground. And ethics as it is articulated by such postfoundationalist theorists tends to refer not to a general procedure to be followed or to a shared sense of the good but instead to the cultivation of a certain mode of relation to oneself or to the Other. In the work of Emmanuel Levinas, for example, ethics names a responsive encounter with the Other that allows alterity to appear without being re-absorbed into the Same. Michel Foucaults work on ethics centers on the selfs care for itself and the transformative possibilities of this reflexive relation. Several contemporary political theorists have argued for the political relevance of Levinasian and Foucauldian ethics, claiming them as significant resources not only for individual personal conduct but also for the complex dynamics of modern political life. Advocates of these dominant strands of postconventional ethics contend that the self/Other and self/self relation Levinas and Foucault respectively elaborate bear the potential to foster more just and democratic political practices. William Connolly, for example, draws heavily on Foucaults notion of the arts of the self as part of his argument for the indispensability of ethics for the pluralistic democratic culture he advocates.9 Connolly resists both the modern secularism of liberalism, which demands that we leave controversial religious and metaphysical judgments at home so as to hone a single

Among those theorists who explore the political import of Foucaults ethics of care of the self are Thomas Dumm and Jon Simons, whose work is referred to in Chapter 3. Major examples of theoretical projects that attempt to extend Levinasian ethics in the direction of democratic politics are those of Simon Critchley (discussed briefly in this chapter), Drucilla Cornell, and Iris Marion Young. Drucilla Cornell in The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992) argues that the unerasable moment of utopianism in Levinas understanding of the ethical relation is important for a conception of justice that promotes, not just allows, legal transformation (8). She contends, The aspiration to a just and egalitarian state proceeds from the irreducible responsibility of the subject to the Other (105). Iris Marion Young suggests that Levinas notion of the Saying the process of subject-to-subject recognition which is distinct from the expression of content between subjects is an important supplement to Habermas understanding of political communication. Levinas ethical theory, according to Young, highlights the importance of greeting or public acknowledgment as the precondition of deliberation. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 57-62.

14 public practice of reason or justice10 and the communitarian quest for a unifying notion of the good that is shared by all members of a polity, elaborating in their stead an ethos of engagement.11 This ethos, which is linked to an alternative ideal of public life in which a plurality of fundamental orientations are admitted to the political realm, is cultivated in part, Connolly argues, through practices of self-artistry such as those advocated by Foucault and Nietzsche. According to Connolly, the arts of the self as an ethical strategy enable individual subjects to work upon themselves in ways that prepare them for the challenges generated by the democratic politics of pluralization.12 Connolly is not alone in his efforts to re-conceive ethics in terms that might inspire or guide radical democratic politics.13 Simon Critchley has argued that Levinas ethics, defined as
10 11

William Connolly, Why I am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 36.

It is the ethos of engagement, Connolly claims in Why I Am Not a Secularist, that provides the best alternative to both a secularism in which partisans pretend to leave their most basic presumptions at home when they enter public life and a republican nation governed by a single conception of the common good (155). Connollys argument against modern secularism also concerns strategy. Connolly writes that a stance that aims to leave controversial metaphysical commitments out of public debate makes it difficult for its partisans to engage in a variety of issues of the day, such as the legitimate variety of sexual orientations, the organization of gender, the question of doctorassisted death, the practice of abortion, and the extent to which a uniform set of public virtues is needed. It is difficult because most participants in these discussions explicitly draw metaphysical and religious perspectives into them and because the claim to take a position on these issues without invoking controversial metaphysical ideas is soon seen to be a faade by others (37). According to Connolly the secularists remain at a tactical disadvantage in political debates so long as they pursue the eviction of fundamental commitments from political life. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, Ch. 7.

12 13

For another, more attenuated example of such an effort, see Chantal Mouffe, who, like Connolly, criticizes both the Aristotelian problematic governing communitarian thought, which assumes that politics should take its bearings from a holistic conception of the common good as well as liberalisms emphasis on impartiality and rational consensus which tends to formulate the ends of democratic politics in the vocabulary of Kantian moral reasoning. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, Verso, 2000), 134, 12. [For Mouffes critical engagement with communitarianism, see American Liberalism and its Communitarian Critics, in The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993)]. Yet Mouffe also suggests that the creation of a democratic ethos is significant for advancing the pluralist democracy she favors. Chantal Mouffe, Deconstruction, Pragmatism and Democracy, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1997), 5. Identification with democratic values and practices cannot be secured through appeals to rational universality, Mouffe contends, but requires that passions be mobilized toward democratic designs. Mouffe, Which Ethics for Democracy, 92. Yet Mouffe also argues that democracy should be inspired by an ethics of dis-harmony. Such a conception of

15 the infinite responsibility of the face-to-face relation, is politically significant because such an ethics interrupts and unsettles politics as usual: Ethics is ethics for the sake of politics. Better stated perhaps, ethics is the metapolitical disturbance of politics for the sake of a politics that does not close over itself, becoming what Levinas would call a totality, becoming a whole.14 On Critchleys reading, Levinasian ethics is valuable for democratic politics because it disrupts the archic tendencies of everyday, rationalized political life. Drawing on Jacques Rancieres analysis of the reduction of la politique to la police, Critchley contends that Levinasian ethics serves as an anarchic, metapolitical disturbance of the antipolitical order of the police.15 Critchley argues that the activity of government always risks pacification, order, the state or what Ranciere refers to as the idyll of consensus. In this context, democracy or politics itself two names for the same thing consists in the manifestation of dissensus, a dissensus that disturbs the order by which government wishes to depoliticize society.16 On Critchleys view, such dissensus is fostered and nourished by Levinasian ethics and its call to responsibility for the Other. Politics stands in need of ethics, then; politics has to be empowered by an anarchic ethical injunction and the experience of an infinite ethical demand if it is not to ossify into the

democracy, she writes, would be suspicious of any attempt to impose a univocal model of democratic discussion and would make room for the differend (94). This notion of an ethics of dis-harmony corresponds to Mouffes vision of politics as fundamentally antagonistic, born of the fact that reciprocity and hostility cannot be dissociated. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 131. While Connolly stresses the importance of a generous and forbearing sensibility for pluralist democracy, Mouffes emphasis is on a sensibility that while eschewing a strict antagonism that would position the other as an enemy rather than an adversary grasps the conflictual nature of human sociability. Ibid., 131, 130.
14

Simon Critchley, Five Problems in Levinass View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them, Political Theory 32, no. 2 (2004), 173, 182. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 183.

15 16

16 routines of domination characteristic of the modern state.17 Crucially, ethics is framed by Critchley as metapolitical, supplying to politics what it cannot give itself. Although Critchley does not adequately explain how the dyadic, ethical relation of self/Other is to serve as an anarchic force that transforms a staid consensus into the democratic activity of dissensus, it is clear that Critchley positions Levinasian ethics as a much-needed supplement to modern political life. Ethics, as theorized by both Connolly and Critchley in their Foucauldian and Levinasian idioms, departs critically from traditional notions of morality that take the form of a set of principles or rules that lay claim to universality. While thinkers such as Rawls and Habermas retain the category of the moral in order to differentiate the universal status of justice from varied and particular forms of ethical life, the turn to ethics among postfoundationalist political theorists is an explicit turn away from morality as such. Ethics, as imagined by Connolly, Critchley, and others, concerns the cultivation of dispositions, modes of relation, or ways of being in the world that cannot be formulated in codified terms or assume the character of universal law. Yet such postconventional ethics are nonetheless figured as necessary for politics, even if they are no longer imagined as its ground.18

17 18

Ibid.

In the case of Simon Critchley, Levinasian ethics still appears to enjoy primacy over politics, even if not figured as a foundation, since ethics is described as bearing metapolitical force. This seems to suggest that politics is somehow secondary to or authorized by the higher domain of ethics a claim that bears surprising similarities to Seyla Benhabibs discussion of Habermasian communicative ethics as entailing metanorms that (should) govern political activity. See my discussion of Benhabibs deployment of the label meta later in this chapter.

17 If some version of a turn to ethics is ubiquitous in contemporary democratic theory, how should we understand this turn?19 What difficulties of democratic politics prompt this gesture? What problems are being solved by the recourse to ethics? As my introductory remarks suggest, it would be a mistake to collapse recent inquiries in the area of ethics and politics into a single type. On the one hand, Habermas, Rawls and their followers seem to be motivated by a set of worries ushered in by the recognition of pluralism. If it is admitted that there is a diversity of human values, instantiated in varied forms of life, that are not reconcilable with one another, can politics be anything other than a series of battles and temporary armistices between constituencies who remain profoundly divided by their fundamental orientations? Without some moral universals that transcend the terrain of political struggle, what endows our collective existence with a measure of stability? Dont our most fundamental rights require some protection from challenges made to them in the name of competing values? Rawls and Habermas both effect a separation of questions of the good life from questions of justice in response to these sorts of concerns. The procedural conception of justice each develops is meant to serve as a moral universal that founds our political institutions and sets the terms of public debate. In their
19

The turn to ethics has not been without its critics, to be sure. Judith Butler writes, I have worried that the return to ethics has constituted an escape from politics, and Ive also worried that its meant a certain heightening of moralism and this has made me cry out, as Nietzsche cried out about Hegel, Bad air! Bad air! Judith Butler, Ethical Ambivalence in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Garber, et al. Ernesto Laclau has also criticized what he dubs ethicization the tendency to revert, on ethical grounds, to a discourse of first philosophy (67). According to Laclau, the ethical injunction is an attempt to identify a universal principle that precedes and governs any decision, a move which attempts to evade the undecidability that properly characterizes the political (53). Ernesto Laclau, Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Mouffe. Laclau is responding in particular to Simon Critchleys suggestion in the same volume that a Levinasian awareness of the infinite responsibility before the singular otherpropels one forward into politics, that is to say, from undecididability to the decision. Simon Critchley, Derrida: Private Ironist or Public Liberal, 35. More often than not, skepticism toward the increasing dominance of a moral-ethical vocabulary in both political theory and practice has been directed at moralism. Although it is hard not to wonder whether this critique, by labeling its target moralism, does not participate in the same gesture it condemns, the scholarship that explores this problem is nonetheless important. See especially Wendy Brown, Moralism as Anti-Politics in Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Jane Bennett and Michael J. Shapiro, eds. The Politics of Moralizing (New York: Routledge, 2002).

18 work, justice as a moral and not merely ethical concept is what restores to the political realm the hope of consensus seemingly undone by pluralism. William Connollys post-foundationlist inquiry into ethics, on the other hand, would seem to be driven by quite different concerns and to move in a contrary direction. To begin with, Connolly is less compelled by the threats of political instability and disorder that seem to animate Rawls and Habermas work. His interest in ethics does not grow primarily out of a worry about the uncertain flux of political life conducted in the absence of any universal moral absolutes. Connolly tends to see pluralism as a condition that calls for greater generosity and receptiveness to difference, rather than as a problem for politics that requires intervention in the form of universal-rational procedures that reveal a moral point of view. The persistent violences and exclusions committed by liberal democratic societies that regard themselves as pluralist are the focus of Connollys recent work. His foray into ethics is largely an effort to imagine how existing configurations of identity/difference might be rendered more flexible. Current pluralist cultures are still too often closed off to what Connolly calls the politics of becoming, in which new identities, not yet ascended to the threshold of legibility, struggle to acquire a public existence.20 It is the task of pluralization beyond existing regimes of pluralism that concerns Connolly most, and his interest in ethics is driven by this commitment. Consequently, the ethics forwarded by Connolly is meant to serve as an vivifying supplement to liberal democratic politics, rather than as its moral foundation. On Connollys view, the desire to specify a universal procedure (figured as moral and rational) by which to manage pluralism is itself a symptom of a refusal to affirm and foster deep pluralism. While

20

See Connolly, Suffering, Justice, and the Politics of Becoming, in Why I am Not a Secularist.

19 dominant approaches like Rawls and Habermas endeavor to set the terms within which plurality can (or cannot) appear, Connolly argues for an ethos of engagement that helps to desanctify established patterns of recognition. Cultivated in part by reflexive arts of the self, such an ethos is meant to support greater generosity and receptivity to multiplicity and difference. If the turn to ethics in the thinking of Rawls and Habermas is an effort to secure a minimal foundation in the wake of the risks posed by pluralism, then the turn to ethics in Connollys theory is primarily an effort to respond to the dangers of foundationalism itself. Although the worries that motivate these various turns to ethics in democratic theory are understandable, my project traces the unacknowledged costs of such strategies. Surely Habermas and Rawls are grappling with genuine questions when they endeavor to specify how liberal democracies can respect a diversity of ethical traditions and commitments while also endeavoring to bestow political life with the stability that comes from treating certain rights and procedures as uncontestable. And Connolly is right to be concerned about the investments that drive us to consolidate existing hierarchies of identity and prevent us from deepening our engagement with plurality. Despite the validity of these concerns, however, my dissertation argues that the turn to ethics carries its own risks. This project asks, what are the consequences for democratic politics when responses to the above challenges are sought in the domain of the ethical? This project contends that an important conception of associative democratic politics, in which individuals engage in cooperative speech and action directed toward the transformation of shared conditions, is unintentionally sacrificed by many efforts to wed political and ethical theory. I argue that several dominant approaches to theorizing the connection between ethics and

20 politics, which I explore in relation to the work of Isaiah Berlin, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, result in a foreclosure of associative democratic politics. In using the term associative democratic politics, I am referring to a conception of politics that centers on collective action undertaken by groups of people who combine together in an effort to alter some dimension of shared existence. In part, this understanding of politics serves as a counter-point to what has been termed the democratic deficit in contemporary theory that is, the tendency within recent political thought to emphasize the liberal side of liberal democracy by focusing primarily on questions of individual rights and safeguards against the state at the expense of pursuing questions that concern the distribution of political power and the existence of meaningful opportunities for citizen participation in selfgovernment.21 Conceiving of politics in terms of associative democratic practices grants primacy to public and collaborative modes of engagement in which differentiated collectivities struggle to shape the conditions under which they live. Associative democratic politics refers to cooperative speech and action undertaken by a plurality of people who endeavor through their joint activities to challenge existing sociopolitical practices and policies. Although the existence of certain political institutions and spaces can serve as enabling conditions for the enactment of associative democratic politics, such
21

I borrow the term democratic deficit from Chantal Mouffe, who uses it to refer to the dominant tendency today according to which democracy is almost exclusively identified with the Rechtstaat and the defence of human rights, at the expense of a democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 3-4. The term, which Mouffe puts to her own radical democratic uses, has been in wide circulation during recent debates over the design of the European Union. For an overview of that debate, see Andrew Moravcsik, "In Defence of the Democratic Deficit: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union," Journal of Common Market Studies 40, no. 4 (2002) and Andreas Fllesdal and Simon Hix, Why There is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Majone and Moravcsik, Journal of Common Market Studies, forthcoming 2006.

21 politics is not confined to the official channels of government. As many of the most powerful examples of associative democratic politics in recent American history indicate, these projects frequently involve creative forms of advocacy that take place on the margins of, or in opposition to, the state apparatus. Direct collective action, whether in pursuit of African-American civil rights, environmental protections, or a humane AIDS policy, typically has involved the creation of new institutions and the reconfiguration of public space, not simply the occupation of preexisting political venues. In other words, we cannot fully anticipate where or how associative democratic politics will appear. Although the existence of certain legal protections such as the right to assemble can help to support the emergence of collective movements, examples of associative democratic politics among dissidents in the 1980s, most especially in the Polish Solidarity movement, suggest that it would be a mistake to rule out the appearance of associative action even in regimes with very limited rights protections. It would also be a mistake to interpret the existence of Constitutional rights to speech and assembly, for example, as proof that American political culture is particularly hospitable to the creation and preservation of associational relations. As Michael Rogin has powerfully demonstrated, aggressive governmental efforts throughout American history have effectively suppressed associative activities and collective forms of life thought to threaten state power. What Rogin calls the countersubversive tradition in the U.S. involves the states valorization of private freedom and a routine denial of public freedom, or the freedom of community members to speak and act together.22

22

Michael Rogin,Political Repression in the United States, in Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 65.

22 The idea of associative democratic politics affirms the significance of collective action that occurs not only inside but perhaps more importantly outside of official political channels. In this sense, the reference to association in the term can be understood to indicate political activity that occurs at the level of civil society, within so-called secondary associations such as churches, advocacy groups, schools, social service agencies, neighborhood associations and so on. Yet I also intend for associative to signal a non-holistic understanding of collective identity. Relations of association are ones in which distinct individuals coordinate their actions with others so as to produce effects not achievable by a single actor.23 Democratic politics thus understood does not depend on the existence of a unified demos or a single people. Rather, democratic action emerges out of a plurality of individuals, connected yet differentiated from one another. Action in concert is one of the ways Hannah Arendt describes participatory politics among citizens, and the phrase effectively conveys a form of action undertaken by a group whose members remain distinct individuals.24 Action thus understood is neither the effect of any single individual, nor is it performed by a meta-subject, such as a class or the demos. Instead, associative democratic politics involves cooperation among co-actors who constitute a collectivity that is not simply a mass.25 We can imagine forms of democratic association as
23

Alexis de Tocqueville famously credits associational activity with saving the independent and weak citizens of democracy from helplessness. The art of association in which men combine for great ends enables individual citizens to produce effects they could not otherwise. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), Part 2, Chapters 5-7.

24

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 162 and also 244, where action in concert is theorized in terms of power. Co-acting is referred to by Arendt in The Human Condition, 189, where she argues that action is never possible in isolation.

25

23 emerging out of an excluded middle space that is hemmed in on one side by images of the atomized liberal subject and on the other by those of an engulfing communitarian whole. The conception of democratic collectivity I have in mind is in one in which citizens are both brought together and separated from one another by a common object they share. In other words, democratic actors always associate around something. This something lies between individuals and serves to mediate relations between them. My understanding of association builds on Arendts theorization of politics as an activity in which we are concerned with something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Although Arendt identifies this mediating object as the world itself (an idea I explore in Chapter 4), it may be helpful to envision the great number of worldly objects that can inspire associational activity. Whenever a collection of people organizes itself in an effort to impact some aspect of shared existence by putting on a play, cleaning up a river, advocating or protesting a smoking ban, starting a charter school relations of association are shaped by the presence of a shared object of concern. This object (the play, the river, the potential law, the school) acts as a third term between the participants, relating and separating them. The conception of associative democratic politics that I defend and that serves as my critical vantage point on the turn to ethics is inspired by an Arendtian understanding of politics as speech and action undertaken by a plurality of individuals in public space. 26 The notion of

26

The Arendtian conception of associative democratic politics that guides this project is distinct from the vision of associative democracy put forth by Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, for example. What they call associative democracy is a state-centered and instrumental model of governance designed to match group characteristics with assigned functions, limiting groups factionalizing potential and maximizing their contributions to democratic order. The vision of associative democratic politics I affirm stresses cooperative action undertaken by a plurality of individuals action that frequently challenges, if not opposes, state conduct. Cohen and Rogers show little interest in the spontaneous action of citizens who join together, often in an episodic fashion, to address shared conditions. They tend instead to treat groups as discrete and stable entities that simply await state institutionalization. Such

24 action in concert is important for a vision of democratic politics in which collective projects are undertaken by multiple individuals who cooperate in an effort to address shared conditions, or what lies between them. Arendts emphasis on the mediating function performed by shared objects is also pivotal for the notion of association I place at the heart of democratic politics. The common object around which people associate is shared by the participants, thus binding them together, but it is shared in such a way that each individual also brings her own distinct perspective of that object to the collective endeavor.27 Democratic politics, on this

institutionalization, they urge, will, among other things, enhance economic performance and state efficiency. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance, in Associations and Democracy, ed. Cohen and Rogers (New York: Verso, 1995): 7-98. Although my conception of associative democratic politics draws heavily on key Arendtian concepts, I would also want to loosen some of the perceived strictures of Arendts political theory. For example, Arendt seems to demarcate the social and the political such that the range of topics or concerns admitted into public debate is problematically restricted in advance. In particular, her tendency to align material needs with the non-political social has led some readers to question Arendts commitment to democracy. Sheldon Wolin, for example, claims that she endorses a severely impoverished notion of the political that displays indifference to the culture of ordinary and poor citizens. Sheldon Wolin, Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political Salmagundi, no. 60, (1983), 14. Yet as some of Arendts readers have suggested, Arendts social/political distinction can be understood as a description of different mentalities, attitudes, or modes of thinking rather than as corresponding to distinct subject matters. See Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendts Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also Mark Reinhardt, Acting (Up) in Publics, in The Art of Being Free (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997) and Bonnie Honig, Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). Reinhardt endorses a view in which the political/social distinction is not taken to be ontological. The social, he suggests, names not domains or objects, but discourses and sensibilities. He argues, however, that such a view involves overriding some of [Arendts] most fundamental commitments (154). In addition to pursuing these interpretive possibilities, I would also want to question what is sometimes interpreted as Arendts ban on instrumental thinking and acting in politics. Although there is much to be learned from Arendts critique of means-end reasoning and her approach to politics as a performative activity, it is important not to overstate Arendts position on instrumentality and politics. In The Human Condition, for example, she acknowledges that political action and speech concern the specific, objective, worldly interests that arise out of the world of things in which men move. While speech and action inevitably disclose the acting and speaking agent and generate world-building effects, these political activities are also always about some worldly objective reality (182, my italics). This perspective allows for an understanding of associative democratic politics as emerging out of instrumental efforts to alter an existing practice or policy, yet regularly producing effects which exceed those immediate intentions. When we associate with others in order to achieve particular political goals, the new relations that are brought into being re-shape the web of relations, regardless of whether the strategic goal is accomplished. In other words, our collaborative political projects with others have world-building properties that persist apart from our instrumental goals. Nonetheless, Arendt does sometimes seem to oppose instrumentality and political action. For an interesting intervention on this front, see Mary Dietz, The Slow Boring of Hard Boards: Methodical Thinking and the Work of Politics, APSR 88, no. 4 (1994) in which she looks to Simone Weils thought
27

25 understanding, consists of triangulated relationships that are not simply intersubjective or dyadic. Political relationships always involve a third term that mediates between multiple individuals and serves as the object of their energy and advocacy. Associative democratic politics knows no single agent or site. It makes its appearance when and where individuals combine in order to cooperatively tend to some aspect of the world they share. It is this conception of democratic activity, I argue, that frequently goes missing in the course of efforts to link politics and ethics together. More specifically, democratic associative politics is occluded in two ways when ethics is sought as the ground or the supplement to political activity. In the first case, democratic associative politics is harmed when the turn to ethics results in the assertion of a moral absolute that is understood as beyond the play of politics. Although ethics is often meant to signal a postconventional approach to normativity, in which the dream of a universal morality is relinquished in favor of more contextualist and pluralist understandings of human values, I contend that in many cases, the category of ethics continues to perform the work once done by the category of morality. That is, the quest for ethics is often a quest for a moral absolute that can supply to political life a solid foundation, which is understood as uncontestable and therefore stabilizing. On this model, ethics is a way of contending with the difficulties brought on by the recognition of pluralism. The turn to ethics here is designed to establish a minimal morality, often in the form of a procedure, that can act as a grounding and constraining mechanism on politics.

for conceptions of liberatory instrumentality and purposeful performance that challenge Arendts efforts to distance political action from means-end rationality.

26 Ive already suggested that Habermas discourse ethics function in this way. Delineating a universal-rational procedure by which the moral point of view can be achieved, Habermasian ethics set the terms by which political debate should proceed. Figuring the procedures of discourse ethics as ethical is a way of casting them as non-political, both prior to and somehow above the practices of deliberation themselves. The special status of discourse ethics is evident in the description of discourse ethics as involving a metanorm, according to which just those norms are valid to which all those possibly affected could agree as participants in rational discourses.28 Additionally, this metanorm, as Seyla Benhabib explains, presupposes the principles of universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity.29 Benhabibs labeling meta reveals how discourse ethics is figured as standing in hierarchical relation to actual political practices in which we face conflicts between competing norms. The metanorm embodied in discourse ethics acts as the criterion according to which political institutions and activities are meant to take shape.30 My point here is not to contest the desirability of the content of the metanorm itself or the principles of respect and reciprocity that are somehow presupposed by it. Rather, I want to draw attention to the way in which discourse ethics operates so as to position certain value commitments as pre-political. As a result

28

Metanorm is Seyla Benhabibs description of what Habermas refers to as the principle of discourse. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 107. See also Jrgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 107. Benhabib departs somewhat from Habermas in acknowledging that universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity entail strong ethical assumptions, a point Habermas avoids by presenting these as simply the two conditions of an ideal speech situation. Seyla Benhabib, Communicative Ethics and Current Controversies in Practical Philosophy, in David Rasmussen and James Swindal, eds., Jrgen Habermas, vol. 3, Ethics (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 182.
30

29

Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 107.

27 of this casting, political life in its ideal form is the embodiment of a metanorm and principles that are themselves outside and beyond deliberative politics.31 When the turn to ethics masks a return to absolute morality, associative democratic politics suffers. Why? By treating certain principles or norms as given, theories such as Habermas have the unintended effect of diminishing human responsibility for articulating, defending and struggling for various principles. Depicting values such as respect and reciprocity as part of a framework that sets the terms of political activities in advance denies the extent to which such principles are themselves political, which is to say, humanly created, contested, and changeable. No matter how passionately we may be committed to the ideal of egalitarianism, for example, to cast that ideal as the ground of politics is to suggest that it is somehow beyond the realm of dispute or interpretation. Figuring certain metanorms or principles as the starting points of politics may offer a sense of security, by allowing us to imagine that a solid ground undergirds our political activities and arrangements. But is it perhaps a false sense of security, one that comes at considerable cost? For principles and norms no matter how meta we think them to be remain dependent on the articulation, allegiance, and enactment of human actors. When we envisage certain principles as pre-political, we lose the sense in which we are ourselves
31

It is not only Habermas and thinkers influenced by him who seek and find in ethics a version of absolute morality that is then called on to perform a grounding function for politics. In The Ethics of Dissensus, Ewa Ziarek draws on Foucauldian and Levinasian ethics in an effort to develop an ethics of dissensus suited for the practice of radical democracy, as theorized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Ziarek assumes from the start that ethics is the solution to an ill-specified but crucial lack in the practice and theory of radical democracy. She asserts that politics cannot be based only on hegemonic consolidation of dispersed struggles and therefore requires ethics as a framework. Yet although Ziarek declares that the ethics of dissensus should not be understood as a recovery of ethics as a new ground of politics, it often seems to be performing just that foundational role vis--vis politics. For example, Ziarek argues that the ethical idea of obligation bring[s] an element of the unconditional into the radical contingency of democratic politics. Although Ziarek continues to assert that the turn to the unconditional ought not to be understood as an attempt to recover a moral foundation, it is difficult to see how aligning ethics with the unconditional and insisting on its relevance for a politics marked radically contingent is not an effort to establish a ground for the agonistic contest Ziarek says she wants to affirm as the stuff of democratic politics. Ewa Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001), 5-6.

28 responsible for creating conditions that manifest the principles to which we are committed. This loss is particularly devastating for an understanding of associative democratic politics that affirms the human capacity to engage in cooperative world-building in the absence of metaphysical guarantees. A second problem with the turn to ethics follows from the dyadic relational structure that is the focus of many postconventional ethical theories. Whether centered on the self/Other or the self/self relationship, much ethical theory forwards a strictly dyadic model that tends to occlude the unique, triangulated structure of democratic politics, in which a plurality of subjects engage not simply with one another but also with the worldly objects that mediate their connectedness. Neither the face-to-face immediacy of the Levinasian encounter nor the reflexive intimacy of Foucauldian arts of the self leaves room for the crucial third term those worldly objects or conditions -- that inspire democratic projects and supply democratic collectivities with their distinctive character of relation and separation. Dyadic approaches that privilege the single individual as the primary subject and object of ethics are particularly troubling for associative democratic politics. Here the problem lies not with a concealed moral universalism, but with an ethical individualism that regards the self in relation to itself as the nexus of ethical life. Although thinkers like William Connolly insist that participation in ethical arts of the self can enhance democratic pluralist politics, my project exposes the limits of this approach. Connolly contends that to redefine relations to others a constituency must also modify the shape of its own identity and posits a chain of relations in which the care of the self is linked to what he calls micropolitics which is, in turn, linked to

29 macropolitics.32 On this view, an ethical sensibility cultivated through tactics applied by the self to itself is in some sense the condition of possibility for transforming our interpersonal, social and political relations with one another.33 My concern is that although Connolly wants to foster an ethos of engagement, which would seem to be supportive of associative democratic politics as I conceive it, treating the selfs relation to itself as the starting point of ethics does not assist in the creation of new associational relationships and may actually discourage them. As I will argue in Chapters 3 and 4, such associational relations depend on a re-orientation, away from oneself and toward an external object.34 Such re-orientation makes possible the elaboration of those triangulated, worldly relationships that define democratic politics. I argue that the twin problems of absolutism and individualism characterize much recent work on ethics and that these features of the contemporary turn to ethics harm our ability to theorize associative democratic politics. Although the ethical theories put forth by thinkers such as Habermas and Connolly would seem to have little in common, the absolutism and individualism that mark their respective approaches, actually converge in their effects on associative democratic politics. When absolute morality masquerades as an ethics, too much is thereby removed from the political domain. The importance of associative democratic politics is diminished when we imagine that certain principles or norms exist apart from or prior to the
32

William Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xvi. For a discussion of the relationship between micro and macro politics, see especially Connolly, An Ethos of Engagement in Why I Am Not a Secularist. William Connolly, Beyond Good and Evil, Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993), 379-80.

33 34

Too often democratic theorists interested in the arts of the self assume a direct link between activities of self care and care for collective conditions. Jane Bennett, for example, argues that Foucaults understanding of selfartistry can be used as part of a project to cultivate a care for the world yet does not explain how the crafting of a sensibility that is directed toward a shared world can emerge from ascetic practices that center on the self as subject and object of ethics. Bennett, How is it, Then, that We Still Remain Barbarians? Political Theory 34, no. 4 (1996).

30 efforts of human subjects who enunciate, defend and argue about them. Alternately, when the single individual and her self-relationship is taken as the focal point of ethics, the task of forging connections between individuals on behalf of a common cause is elided. I would argue, for example, that Connollys conception of an ethos of engagement, which initially would seem to hold considerable promise for democratic politics, is significantly undermined by his persistent characterization of that ethos as something that is generated out of the tactical work performed by individual selves upon themselves.35 Although Connolly contends that the arts of selfcultivation can help alter individuals entrenched modes of thought and action and therefore potentially contribute to the transformation of intersubjective relations, I worry that privileging the selfs relation to itself nonetheless threatens to pull individuals further away from the world which relates and separates them and serves as the potential site of democratic activity.36 This dissertation tracks the ways in which various efforts to wed ethics to politics bear traces of the absolutism and individualism just discussed. By bringing these dimensions of the turn to ethics to the fore, my aim is not to divorce the categories of ethics and politics from one
35

In Neuropolitics, the selfs relation with itself, though purportedly still linked to the project of advancing political pluralism seems to involve a quite literal turn inward (2). Connolly is here explicitly interested in the body/brain processes that shape the activity of thinking, and, in turn, affect cultural life (7). Among the techniques of thought that Connolly suggests might influence dispositions installed below consciousness and therefore be significant for micro- and macro- politics, is, for example, an electrical probeapplied purposively to a patch of the brain (88). Tactical work on the texture of ones own thought is now no longer a metaphorical description but a neuroscientific possibility (88). Although I am sympathetic to Connollys interest in complicating intellectualist models of thought and investigating the interplay of thought and culture, I believe that his celebration of running experiments on ourselves runs risks he does not acknowledge namely, the reinforcement of solipsistic modes of being and the simultaneous devaluing and discouraging of collaborative world-making projects (77). William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

36

Although I do not wish to reinforce a crass division between self and world, which posits either as a discrete entity, I do believe that there is a meaningful difference between ethical approaches that treat the relationship of a self to itself as primary and those that proceed from the fact of intersubjectivity and focus on the cultivation of shared dispositions and practices that might enable the transformation of collective conditions. On the basis of this distinction, I also attempt in this dissertation to challenge a commonly held belief that working on oneself is the first step in effecting political change, an assumption that I believe finds sophisticated expression in Connollys work.

31 another or insist on their strict autonomy. Instead, I want to caution against certain styles of ethics that discourage associative democratic politics. On the one hand, ethical approaches that posit certain principles or norms as absolute cast the very terrain of political struggle as a domain of moral certitude. As a result, human agents are seen as inhabiting a pre-existing moral structure, rather than understood as creative agents responsible for articulating and identifying with values and enacting practices we believe embody them. On the other, treating the individual as the central ethical actor and techniques of the self as the privileged ethical activity furthers a peculiar solipsism that comes at the expense of modes of relation that enable collective action directed at common conditions what inter esse.. The distinctive triangulated relations between multiple individuals and worldly objects that characterize associative democratic politics are unlikely to be enriched by ethical orientations that assume strictly dyadic relations and thereby eclipse the worldliness of political life. My examination of how ethics and politics have been thought in relation to one another involves close readings of Isaiah Berlin, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt. These thinkers, with the exception of Foucault, are not themselves identified with the recent turn to ethics in political theory. Yet their work offers rich sites for exploring the ethics-politics nexus. Although each theorist marshals the categories of ethics and politics in the service of quite different ends, one can recognize a strong identification of ethics with politics in Foucaults thought, a persistent ambiguity concerning the link between ethics and politics in Berlins and a well-known attempt to demarcate the moral (if not, perhaps, the ethical) and the political on the part of Arendt.

32 Berlins work and its reception, with which I begin, serve as important terrain through which to explore the problem of moral absolutism and politics. Although Berlin was an articulate defender of the ethical doctrine of value pluralism, largely meant as a challenge to earlier, more determinate notions of morality, his work is also marked by a strong commitment to liberalism. As many readers have pointed out, these two commitments not only in Berlins work but in liberal political thought more generally are not easily reconciled. Is ethical pluralism, which affirms the multiplicity of values and denies any definitive ranking among them, actually at odds with liberalism, which tends to claim universal legitimacy while clearly privileging certain among the plurality of values? Since Berlin, liberal political theory claims for the most part to have relinquished the notion of moral absolutes that would validate liberalism, in favor of value pluralism, but it is not entirely evident that this position is tenable. Can liberalism really do without a moral foundation? Many of Berlins interpreters, as I show, answer this question with a resounding no. Even as they retain the language of value pluralism, they nonetheless work to turn value pluralism into the sort of moral foundation that can ground liberal political orders. This very popular reconstruction of Berlins thought illustrates the ways in which the turn to ethics can assume the character of a return to morality. While Berlins work, I argue, displays a genuine tension between value pluralism and liberalism, his interpreters have preferred to resolve this tension in a particular way by reconfiguring value pluralism in such a way that it can serve as a moral absolute that uniquely sanctions liberalism. Tracing the return to morality that has been undertaken in the name of value pluralism, I demonstrate its unfortunate consequences for associative democratic politics. At the same time, I recover elements of Berlins scholarship,

33 suppressed by dominant readings, which can serve as important resources for theorizing specifically democratic figurations of pluralism. With the democratic dangers of moral absolutism in mind, I turn next to Michel Foucault, whose work has been seen by many readers to be marred by an opposite problem a failure to posit any strong normative directives. While it is true that Foucault remains skeptical of rulegoverned forms of morality and tends not to announce his own normative commitments, his late work is an object of fascination in part because of its engagement with the category of ethics. Indeed, the arc of Foucaults scholarship evinces its own ethical turn. In the late work that has captivated many of his readers, Foucault explores Greco-Roman asceticism in terms of the care of the self as a practice of freedom and seems to suggest that a reworked version of the care of the self might contribute to an ethics for the present. Coupled with his professed interest in politics as an ethics, Foucaults foray into ethical techniques of self-artistry, identified specifically as practices of freedom have piqued considerable interest. Can arts of the self serve as a means of immanent resistance within regimes characterized by disciplinary and bio power? If certain styles of subjectivity, which we might want to refuse or rework, are encouraged by these forms of power, can participation in an aesthetics of existence help to generate alternative styles of subjectivity? And if so, does the very division between ethics and politics lose salience? In Chapter 3 I examine these questions posed by Foucaults late work. In the course of doing so, I draw out important dimensions of Foucaults work on power that have been overlooked. These neglected features of Foucaults theory emphasize the ways in which disciplinary and bio-power exert effects on collectivities, preventing or disabling the creation of associational relationships, or what Foucault calls

34 horizontal conjunctions. These important strands of Foucaults thought, as I show, suggest that the ethics of self-care is a limited resource for resisting contemporary configurations of power. A more promising mode of resistance, hinted at though not fully developed by Foucault, would entail efforts to establish associational relations between subjects whose collective counterpower challenges the simultaneous individualizing and massifying effects of discipline and biopolitics. Having examined the twin dangers of absolutism and individualism, I turn next to Hannah Arendts work because, as I indicated earlier, it offers a compelling account of associative democratic politics, one that is mostly missing from the writings of Berlin and Foucault. Arendts notion of action in concert suggests a differentiated understanding of political collectivities that might better respond to the problems Foucault traces in his analysis of power yet fails to respond to in his ethics of self-care. And her conceptualization of plurality although not identical with value pluralism as the condition of politics would seem to resist Berlins characteristic liberal move through which pluralism is rendered a feature of private, but not public, life. These elements of Arendts thought potentially challenge the differing forms of ethical individualism that characterize Berlins and Foucaults thinking. In addition, Arendts political theory as a whole stresses the groundlessness of political life, the abyss of freedom upon which our political arrangements rest. This non-foundationalist understanding of politics counters the assumptions of Berlins interpreters, which imagine a moral absolute, rather than undetermined human action, as the source of political designs. Yet Arendt also seems to sever morality and ethics from each other, on the one hand, and from politics, on the other. If Berlin is tempted toward moral absolutism in ways that threaten to

35 minimize collective responsibility for the negotiation of plural values, ought we to insist on the strict autonomy of the political? If Foucault forwards a conception of ethics that sanctifies individual habits of self-creation at the expense of collaborative political engagement, does this mean that associative democratic politics should somehow do without any notion of ethics whatsoever? Is the strict demarcation of the ethical/moral from the political a necessary strategy for keeping alive the possibilities of associative democratic politics threatened by the turn to ethics? My reading of Arendt argues otherwise, by constructing out of her work an alternative notion of ethics that centers on care for shared conditions rather than individual selves. I argue that this worldly ethics is a rich resource for cooperative democratic undertakings. Disputing the charges of amoralism that have been leveled at Arendts work for its lack of normative foundations,37 I first draw out of Arendts thought a deep appreciation for a style of ethics that, like Foucaults, centers on a reflexive relationship of the self with itself. Arendt positions the ethics of conscience as a significant alternative to command morality, which she contends is dangerous because it inclines individuals toward unthinking obedience. Yet Arendt also insists that the care of the self or concern for personal integrity, which inspires conscience, is not the same as, and should not be confused with, care of the world. This latter mode of concern is indispensable to associative democratic politics. While complicating somewhat Arendts separation of these two kinds of care, I affirm the core distinction she works to illuminate, arguing that even the most highly developed practices of self-care cannot substitute for collective efforts to tend to shared conditions. I claim that the idea of amor mundi, or love of

37

See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996) and George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983).

36 the world, amounts to a distinctive Arendtian ethical orientation. This ethical sensibility is focused on care for the world, as a common object that lies between people, rather than on care for individual or even collective selves. Such an ethics is manifest in actions such as the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s in which citizens took sides for the worlds sake. Associative politics, I argue, is not without ethical support; it involves a distinctive sort of ethics, oriented toward the world that relates and separates us. By examining Berlin, Foucault and Arendt together, fruitful connections, tensions and questions appear that might not otherwise. Concerning the category of ethics, for example, Foucaults central distinction in his late work between morality and ethics makes present the possibility of ethical projects that do not aspire toward the formulation of universal codes. Might we be able to read Berlins writings on value pluralism in this light as entailing a critique of traditional rule-governed morality (because of the tendency of such approaches to treat one particular ranking of values as definitive or metaphysically endorsed) while leaving open the question of an ethical response to the fact of pluralism? And could Arendts exploration of individual conscience as well as her idea of care of the world be seen as competing ethical orientations that themselves act as alternatives to the command morality she rejects? Does Foucaults exploration of an ethics of purposeful self-creation suggest that the individual choicemaking at the heart of Berlins liberalism be viewed as part of a process of self-elaboration rather than as the expressions of an already-constituted self? Does Arendts inquiry into the thinking process of the two-in-one and the development of conscience look different if read in connection with Foucaults work on the care of the self?

37 The pluralistic dimension of all three thinkers work also comes to the fore when they are read together. Berlins varied and tragic universe is echoed, with a difference, by Arendts insistence on plurality as the law of the earth and her efforts to engage with multiplicity, both within and without the self.38 Berlins framing of pluralism as specifically a matter of values allows us to ask what this sort of plurality shares with the Arendtian sort, where emphasis falls on the men, not Man that inhabit the earth. What do these Arendtian and Berlinian conceptions of plurality share with Foucaults invocation of multiplicity as the material upon which modern power works? Is the pluralizing project of multiplying extant forms of subjectivity, voiced by Foucault, one that Berlin and Arendt might also affirm? Does imagining, with Berlin, a world characterized by plural values enrich our sense of the inbetween that Arendt takes to be the focal point of political activity? Or does thinking of plurality as essentially a matter of values push Berlin away from considering pluralism as a public phenomenon and toward a privatized understanding of choice-making? Our understanding of associative democratic politics is also enhanced by reading Berlin, Foucault, and Arendt with and against one another. Might Berlins belief in the indeterminacy of
38

Berlin, Foucault and Arendt are all committed to a pluralistic vision of human existence, despite important differences in how they imagine such plurality. For Berlin, plurality is presented as a characteristic first and foremost of values while Foucauldian multiplicity and Arendtian plurality seem to signify, at bottom, that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all three thinkers affirm plurality of one kind or another as a fact, they also warn of its potential diminishment by rationalizing and unitarian forces. It appears as a strangely fragile fact, in other words. All three also treat plurality not only as a fact to be recognized, but as an ideal something to be protected and also enhanced. In Berlins work his insistence on the fact of the value pluralism is coupled with a sharp critique of the monistic states efforts to impose a single way of life on its citizens and the suggestion that the pluralism of values will survive and flourish best under conditions of minimal government. Foucault and Arendt both pair their recognition of basic, existential plurality with an appreciation of how such plurality might or might not assume further political significance. The distinction between existential and political plurality is more pronounced in Arendts work, particularly in her efforts to think critically about the types of institutional arrangements that can support associational relations among citizens by mediating between them. But as I show in Chapter 3, Foucault implicitly recognizes that fundamental multiplicity routinely de-politicized by processes of individualization and massification also has the potential to acquire counter-power if that sheer, given multiplicity is transformed into relations of association.

38 human existence serve, unexpectedly, as a prod to democratic responsibility? Could Foucaults recognition of the counter-power born of collective action find unexpected affinities with Arendtian politics? And does Arendts account of cooperative action centered on that which inter-est or lies between individuals, respond productively to the problems revealed by Foucaults analysis of individualizing and massifying power? Simultaneously, doesnt Foucaults account of disciplinary and bio power deepen our sense of the profoundly challenging conditions under which contemporary subjects must struggle to act in concert? If Foucaults theory calls into question the Berlinian dream of a zone untouched by power, might the Foucauldian project of minimizing domination (without ever escaping power relations altogether) nonetheless echo Berlins own commitments? How does Arendts understanding of amor mundi, paired with her worries about world alienation and heightened subjectivism, reframe Foucaults celebration of care of the self and Berlins valorization of negative liberty as privacy? Although this project cannot claim to explore all of these questions with equal depth, it nonetheless stages a generative encounter between Berlin, Foucault, and Arendt that opens up possibilities for future research. This dissertation is dedicated to tracing the ways in which an associative democratic conception of politics is threatened by certain strains of ethical thought. The project, however, is both critical and constructive. On the one hand, it aims to reveal unacknowledged costs of the turn to ethics by demonstrating how associative democratic politics is undermined by the twin dangers of absolutism and individualism. On the other hand, that argument does not conclude with a refusal of ethics per se as damaging to associative democratic politics. Rather than advocate a separation of the ethical and the political, I attempt to construct an ethical orientation

39 focused on the world as a common object of care. Such an ethics, I suggest, has the potential to animate cooperative endeavors that tend to shared conditions. By directing attention toward an object that lies between us, worldly ethics can help create those relations of connection and distinction that serve as the basis of associational democratic politics. In place of the moral absolutism and ethical individualism that often taint the turn to ethics and disable associative democratic politics, an ethical orientation directed at collective care for shared conditions holds considerable promise. Accepting the insight shared by many contemporary political thinkers -- that ethical sensibilities or dispositions are significant for democratic practice -- I nonetheless challenge the usual forms taken by the turn to ethics. I insist that an ethical orientation which re-directs individuals away from themselves and their personal interests and toward a shared object is critical if the turn to ethics is to inspire rather than discourage collaborative projects among citizen-actors. One particular image, from the margins of Arendts work, can help bring into view the perspective that I argue is missing from recent efforts to wed ethics and democratic politics. In the summer of 1963, Gershom Scholem, the renowned Jewish scholar, wrote a letter to Hannah Arendt concerning her recently published book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which reported on the trial of former SS officer Adolph Eichmann.39 At the time of its appearance, Eichmann was the subject of an intense dispute that continues to shape its reception today. One of the most controversial points in the book was Arendts claim that the Judenrte local Jewish governing structures had, in their maintenance of Jewish public order in the ghettoes, enabled the Nazis to

39

Arendts and Scholems letters were published in English translation as Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters Between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt, Encounter 22 (January 1964).

40 slaughter greater numbers of Jews with greater efficiency than they might otherwise have done. Many Jews and non Jews were shocked by this claim, seemingly heartless and unempathic. In Scholems letter to Arendt, he accuses her precisely of adopting a heartless tone in her discussions of Jews and their bearing in the days of catastrophe. By way of elaboration, Scholem explains to Arendt, In the Jewish tradition, there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough, which we know as Ahabath Israel: Love of the Jewish people. And he declares that he finds little trace of this in her book.40 In her response to Scholem, Arendt responds directly to this charge. She writes of the love of the Jewish people: You are quite right I am not moved by any love of this sort. She states, This love of the Jews would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. And she writes, as a point of contrast, that the greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come of that? Well, in this sense I do not love the Jews, nor do I believe in them.41 Arendts response to Scholem calls into question the self-oriented nature of Ahabath Israel love of the Jewish people by the Jewish people. She reminds him of the real greatness of the Jews, which concerned their trust and love for an entity outside themselves in relation to which they came to be God, who acted as a common object of devotion and thus constituted a shared world for them, an in-between. It is not the Jews love for themselves or even for one another that

40 41

Ibid., 51. Ibid., 54.

41 Arendt wants to recall and honor, but their regard for a third term, their God, around which they constituted a community. This dissertation invites us to see in Arendts exchange with Scholem a nascent political analogy. Scholems invocation of a self-oriented relation of love and faith (of Jews to themselves) suggests a dyadic ethical relation of the sort I discussed above. Arendts radical shift in perspective, which brings into view a relation involving multiple individuals and a shared object of love and faith, offers a religious analog to the triadic political relation. The third term evoked here God is akin to those secular, worldly objects that inspire the labors of democratic actors and mediate relations among them. My dissertation tracks how these political modes of relation in which individuals are connected to and separated from one another by a common object which they attempt to preserve, alter or otherwise tend to in the absence of moral guarantees are occluded by popular ethical approaches. As an alternative to the problems of moral absolutism and ethical individualism I trace in the following chapters, I suggest that an ethical sensibility focused on the world as a common object of care is supportive of the conception of associative democratic politics foreclosed by dominant strands of ethical theory.

42 Chapter 2 Value Pluralism and the Return to Moral Absolutism: On the Uses and Abuses of Isaiah Berlin Writing of the unqualified relativism that had come to infect not just German philosophy, but Western thought in general, Leo Strauss declared in 1953 that the rejection of natural right is bound to lead to disastrous consequences.42 Without a standard of right and wrong independent of positive right, Strauss argued, we are left with nothing but the particular (and conflicting) ideals of various human societies. Such ideals are multiple, malleable and inconstant; nothing, Strauss warns, protects against placidly accepting a change in the direction of cannibalism. If we abandon the quest for natural right, we deprive ourselves of a standard with reference to which we can judge the ideals of our own as well as any other society.43 Although Strauss himself identifies the rejection of natural right with nihilism, he argues that generous liberals tend to welcome the abandonment of natural right, because they believe that recognizing the impossibility of any knowledge regarding what is intrinsically right or good compels us to be tolerant and respectful of multiple and even incompatible understandings of the good. That is, liberals assume that relinquishing the notion of a transcendent moral absolute supports liberal respect for diversity. Yet Strauss argues, liberalism falters on its claim to forgo absolutes: At the bottom of the passionate rejection of all absolutes, we discern the recognition of a natural right, or more precisely, of that particular interpretation of natural right according to which the one thing needful is respect for diversity or individuality.44 In other
42 43 44

Leo Strauss, Introduction, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 2, 3. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 5.

43 words, although liberals tend to celebrate the purported demise of absolutism, their political philosophy cannot do without some such absolute (even if only the absolute of tolerance), and as a result a version of natural right is smuggled into liberalism. Yet even this maneuver cannot succeed, Strauss argues, because even the most liberal version of natural right requires absolute limits to diversity or individuality, forcing a choice between natural right and the uninhibited cultivation of individuality. Liberals, on Strauss telling, opt for the latter, and as a result, tolerance becomes simply one value or ideal among many, and not intrinsically superior to its opposite.45 Such an impasse results from the quest for an impossible middle ground between relativism and absolutism.46 For Strauss, the contradiction afflicting liberalism is a direct consequence of the fact that liberalism has abandoned its absolutist basis and is trying to become entirely relativistic.47 That is, liberalism is in trouble because it claims to have given up the project of grounding itself in a moral absolute and this position is untenable. Nowhere is this crisis of liberalism on clearer display, says Strauss, than in the thought of Isaiah Berlin. Reading Berlins essay The Two Concepts of Liberty as symptomatic of this broader crisis, Strauss argues that although Berlin defends the plurality of values over and against the notion of any moral meta-standards, he also flirts with absolutism. Berlin, for example, insists that there must be some frontiers which nobody should ever be permitted to cross and refers to these frontiers as sacred. The world of plural values seen from a liberal perspective, Strauss ventures, seems to require some kind of
45 46

Ibid.

Leo Strauss, Relativism in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 17.
47

Ibid.

44 absolutism.48 Yet, as Strauss also shows, Berlin hesitates to supply to liberalism any absolute foundation. Although Berlin wants to claim that the private sphere is sacred, this declaration has no basis, in the end, since Berlin says the claim might be defended with reference to God, Natural Law, the demands of utility, or even my own subjective ends, or the ends of my society or culture.49 As Strauss quips, any old basis will do.50 And indeed, Berlin is reluctant to posit an absolute basis for liberalism, indicating repeatedly that liberal commitments are not transhistorical truths but emerge from historically specific and contingent beliefs. It is Berlins oscillation between what Strauss calls relativism and absolutism that makes his essay a characteristic document of the crisis in liberalism.51 The crisis Strauss names, which centers on the feasibility of liberalism absent a moral absolute, is one which continues to haunt liberalism today. It also dominates the vast secondary literature on Isaiah Berlins thought, a fact that would seem to affirm Strauss sense that Berlins work constitutes a rich site through which to explore this crisis. Scholarship on Berlin is indeed obsessed with the question of the relationship between value pluralism and liberalism. In particular, many of Berlins interpreters worry that his commitment to value pluralism may actually undermine his other commitment, to the theory and practice of liberalism, since the latter, like any political philosophy or system, inevitably privileges certain values above others. What could warrant liberalisms claims to universality if value pluralism denies any special status to the constellation of values that liberalism celebrates? If liberals wish to embrace the
48 49 50 51

Ibid., 15. Quoted by Strauss, Relativism, 15. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 17.

45 ethical doctrine of value pluralism, must they recognize liberal political orders as simply one possibility among many? As I show in this chapter, the dominant approach to Berlins thought attempts to address the vexed relationship between pluralism and liberalism by reformulating value pluralism so that it functions as an absolute (albeit minimal) morality mandating liberal political arrangements. In other words, Berlins readers tend to resolve the crisis Strauss identified by returning to the absolutism that value pluralism was thought to have undermined. Such a resolution would likely please Strauss himself, for although few of Berlins interpreters employ the language of natural right, they do seem to agree with Strauss that liberalism or any other political order requires grounding in some moral absolute. Nonetheless, this popular liberal revision of value pluralism is still open to Strauss charge of being disingenuous, since the return to moral absolutism is rarely announced as such. Indeed, the language of pluralism is typically retained. In this chapter I examine the return to moral absolutism that has been undertaken in Berlins name. Although Strauss is correct in claiming that Berlins work evinces a tension between pluralism, on the one hand, and some notion of moral absolutism, on the other, the preferred solution offered by Berlins readers an embrace of moral absolutes erases this tension in favor of a moral-foundational portrait of liberalism. This solution in which value pluralism is made to operate as a moral ground not only does violence to Berlins work but also, I argue, exacts serious costs for associative democratic theory and practice. The return to morality is problematic because it involves a disavowal of democratic agency and a displacement of properly political questions onto the purportedly uncontestable domain of morality.

46 I. Berlins Puzzle Berlins eclectic body of work evinces a singular preoccupation, by now well known debunking monism and arguing for the truth of pluralism. By monism Berlin means first and foremost the assumption that all questions are questions of fact, admitting of one correct answer, including moral and political questions.52 It is belief in an ultimate ordering of values which would resolve all apparent conflicts that Berlin rails against throughout his work by arguing that some values may conflict intrinsically. The universe human beings inhabit, Berlin argues, is one in which values can and do clash, giving the lie to the monistic view: These collisions of values are the essence of what they are and what we are.53 Value pluralism attempts to describe the human predicament in which conflicts between values cannot be resolved through recourse to a moral yardstick that would translate them into more or less of a single good.54 Our moral experience, for Berlin, is marked by sacrifice and loss. We cannot have everything and whatever we do have may be incomparable to what we forgo, such that we cannot always be assured of having gained more than we have lost. As Berlin explains it, we
52

Isaiah Berlin, The Romantic Revolution, in The Sense of Reality, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 170. Although Berlin sometimes rashly attributes monism to the whole of Western thought, he does acknowledge that there have been thinkers scattered throughout history who have doubted the validity of this view, such as Sophocles, Euripedes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Leibniz, and Rousseau. Nevertheless, he argues, the central stream of the Western tradition was little affected by this fundamental doubt. Isaiah Berlin, Herder and the Enlightenment, in Three Critics of the Enlightenment, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 233. Isaiah Berlin, The Pursuit of the Ideal in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 13. As Berlin puts it at his most imperative: And if we understand how conflicts between ends equally ultimate and sacred, but irreconcilable within the breast of even a single human being, or between different men or groups, can lead to tragic and unavoidable collisions, we shall not distort the moral facts by artificially ordering them in terms of some one absolute criterion. Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 102.

53

54

47 face situations in which the choice is not always between superior and inferior values.55 Significantly, Berlin illustrates this claim using the example of freedom, arguing that we should not misconstrue freedom as the highest of all the plural values. If that were so, in cases of conflicts between, say, the principle of freedom and the principle of equality, freedom should always win out. Instead, the situation is much more complex and more painful, since freedom may clash with other no less ultimate values.56 Liberty is not the only value and may need to be sacrificed to others.57 But the sacrifice is real: We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.58 It is to this loss that Bernard Williams refers, using a different vocabulary, when he declares, Moral conflicts are neither systematically avoidable, nor all soluble without remainder.59 But what is the connection between Berlins evocation of a bountiful, varied, and sometimes tragic ethical universe and his liberal political outlook? If the value pluralist position affirms the existence of multiple and competing ultimate values, what warrants the liberal
55 56

Berlin, Introduction, in Four Essays on Liberty, lvi.

Ibid. Moreover, any single value is subject to multiple and conflicting interpretations: The notions of, say, rights or justice or liberty will be radically dissimilar for theists and atheists, mechanistic determinists and Christians, Hegelians and empiricists, romantic irrationalists and Marxists, and so forth. Isaiah Berlin, Does Political Theory Still Exist? in Concepts and Categories (New York: Penguin Books, 1950), 149.

57

Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, in Four Essays on Liberty, 125. Liberty is also not a unitary value, as Berlin presents it, and different kinds of liberty may be incompatible with one another.

Isaiah Berlin, The Pursuit of the Ideal, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990), 13. Along the same lines: We must choose, and in choosing one thing lose another, irretrievably perhaps. Berlin, European Unity and its Vicissitudes, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 201. In another essay, Berlin summarizes the lesson he received from Machiavelli: One is obliged to choose: and in choosing one form of life, give up the other. That is the central point. Berlin, The Originality of Machiavelli, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 63. Bernard Williams, Ethical Consistency, in Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956-1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 179. A moral conflict, according to Williams, has as one of its distinctive features that to end it in decision is not necessarily to eliminate one of the conflicting items: the item that was not acted upon may, for instance, persist as regret (179).
59

58

48 privileging of certain among these?60 Does a defense of liberalism somehow follow from his value pluralism or is pluralism indeterminate such that a commitment to liberalism must be understood as something other than its necessary conclusion? These questions have occupied Berlins readers in part because he does little to answer them. He never theorizes the relationship between value pluralism and liberalism, offering only minimal and inconsistent remarks on the subject. In the Two Concepts essay, for example, he refers to pluralism, with the measure of negative freedom that it entails, suggesting that the liberal privileging of negative liberty is somehow implicit in the value pluralist thesis.61 But in a later interview, Berlin offers, Pluralism and liberalism are not the same or even overlapping conceptsI believe in both liberalism and pluralism, but they are not logically connected.62 Not only is Berlin relatively silent on the specific subject of pluralisms relationship to liberalism, but his thought as a whole seems to deepen rather than resolve the question. As Strauss observed, Berlins work contains contrary strains of argument. On the one hand, pluralism seems to be thorough-going and subversive of any claim to an authoritative ranking of values, but, on the other, Berlin sometimes seems to grant special weight to negative liberty. While radical pluralism would seem to challenge liberalisms claims to universality, the suggestion that there are absolute frontiers protecting individual privacy would seem to support
This question is posed most forcefully by John Gray in Berlin (New York: Harper Schmidt, 1995). Gray defines Berlins thought as a form of agonistic liberalism in which the relation we have to liberal practices is in the nature of a groundless commitment (165). On Grays reading of Berlin, there can be, and need be no universal justification of liberalism (161). Although I agree with this last statement and with Grays overall effort to separate out the idea of pluralism from that of liberalism, Gray seems overlook the weight Berlin gives to humans capacities for action, choice-making and creativity when he suggests that the world will be richer in value if it contains illiberal as well as liberal societies, even if the former cannot withstand the force of the exercise of free choice by its members (152). This last assertion seems to me to be unsupported by Berlins writings.
61 62 60

Berlin, Two Concepts, 171. Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (New York: Scribners, 1992), 44.

49 liberalism and simultaneously undermine the value pluralist thesis. Without signing onto Strauss evaluation of this tension, which puts it in the service of his own defense of natural right, it is important to recognize the countervailing lines of thought he correctly identifies. An awareness of the oscillation that marks Berlins thinking is necessary in order to grasp the implications of various efforts at reconciliation. Value pluralism in the context of Berlins work often describes a condition of profound open-endedness, in which multiple values co-exist (and conflict) in the absence of any authoritative guide that could instruct us as to how to live amidst such plurality. The values that characterize human existence, past and present, may be ultimate, they may be ends in themselves, and nonetheless incompatible and incomparable to one another. Berlin declares: I should like to say once again to my critics that the issue is not one between negative freedom as an absolute value and other, inferior values. It is more complex and more painful. One freedom may abort another; one freedom may obstruct or fail to create conditions which make other freedoms, or a larger degree of freedom, or freedom for other persons, possible; positive and negative freedom may collide; the freedom of the individual or the group may not be fully compatible with a full degree of participation in a common life, with its demands for co-operation, solidarity, fraternity. But beyond all these there is an acuter issue: the paramount need to satisfy the claims of other, no less ultimate values: justice, happiness, love, the realization of capacities to create new things and experiences and ideas, the discovery of truth.63 Here Berlin refuses to position negative liberty as a meta-value, whether in relation to other conceptions of liberty or to other ultimate values such as justice or love. The pluralism of values appears to be thorough-going; even liberalisms cherished notion of negative liberty is left to vie with other, no less significant values. Berlins repeated insistence on the multiplicity and

63

Berlin, Introduction, lvi.

50 even incommensurability of values would seem to rob liberalism of any basis on which to assert its preferred set of values as uniquely authoritative. Yet at other points in his writing, as Strauss notes, Berlin invokes negative liberty as something of an absolute, seemingly tempering the radical pluralism described above. In the Two Concepts essay, for example, Berlin asserts, there must be some frontiers of freedom which nobody should ever be permitted to cross.64 This sort of statement suggests that negative liberty is a non-negotiable requirement for any human society. Does this mean that negative liberty enjoys a special standing relative to other values? When Berlin remarks, there are frontiers, not artificially drawn, within which men should be inviolable, the protection of negative liberty by positive law appears as the reflection of frontiers that exist independently of it.65 And Berlin writes of the moral validity irrespective of the laws of some absolute barriers to the imposition of ones man will on another.66 Does belief in the moral validity of negative liberty offer liberalism the absolute basis it is said to require? If so, what becomes of value pluralism? Berlin continues to flirt with absolutism by linking negative liberty to the category of the human. Although he generally disputes the idea of a fixed or unaltering human nature,67 he also seems to suggest that negative liberty is somehow intrinsic to or definitive of human being. The frontiers of individual liberty, he explains, are sacred, that is to say, that to overstep them
64 65 66 67

Berlin, Two Concepts, 164. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 166.

Berlin makes many critical remarks concerning the assumption that men have a certain fixed, unfaltering nature, certain universal, common immutable goals. Isaiah Berlin, The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 20.

51 leads to inhumanity. A minimum area of privacy is required if dehumanization is to be averted.68 If negative liberty is a property of humanity as such, it would seem to enjoy a special status. Writing appreciatively of earlier liberal thinkers such as Paine and Mill, Berlin notes that the argument for keeping authority at bay rested on the belief that we must preserve a minimum area of personal freedom if we are not to degrade or deny our nature.69 Is our nature such that negative liberty is, after all, uniquely privileged among the plurality of values? Still, the tension in Berlins thought runs deep. Even when he speaks of certain frontiers as sacred, for example, he specifies that for the great majority of men, at most times, in most places, these frontiers are sacred.70 This description, though surely contestable, is notable for its quasi-empirical character. Berlin does not seem to be positing negative liberty as a transhistorical or ordained value, but as one that, in practice, has been recognized by many cultures and societies.71 Additionally, Berlin repeatedly claims that negative liberty is a distinctively modern ideal, scarcely older than the Renaissance or the Reformation.72 It may be only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilization.73 The historical character of Berlins account is predictably attacked by Strauss, for example, who questions whether there can be

68 69 70 71

Berlin, Introduction, lxi. Berlin, Two Concepts, 126. Berlin, Introduction, lxi.

Yet Berlin also argues that the domination of this ideal has been the exception, rather than the rule, even in the recent history of the West. Berlin, Two Concepts, 129. Berlin, Two Concepts, 129. Ibid., 172.

72 73

52 eternal principles on the basis of empiricism, of the experience of men up to now.74 Contra Strauss, however, Berlin is genuinely reluctant to posit any value, including negative liberty, as an eternal principle. He harshly questions the very aspiration: Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.75 Even Berlins references to negative liberty as an element of human nature are hardly unambiguous. In the passage cited earlier, in which Berlin commends the tradition of liberal political thought that recognized we must preserve a minimum area of personal freedom if we are not to degrade or deny our nature, that nature is revealed to be less a foundation than a question. Berlin continues: What then must the minimum be? That which a man cannot give up without offending against the essence of his human nature. What is the essence? What are the standards which it entails? This has been and perhaps always will be, a matter of infinite debate.76 Berlins invocation of human nature does not seem to settle the question of the status of negative liberty, then, but instead draws attention to the disagreement that attends any effort to define a human essence or delineate standards in relation to it. Moreover, Berlins most absolutist claims such as his reference to frontiers of negative liberty as not artificially drawn strain against other elements of his thinking. While the
74 75

Strauss, Relativism, 16.

Ibid. And in an interview, Berlin speaks pointedly of Strauss: He did try to convert me in many conversations when I was a visitor in Chicago, but he could not get me to believe in eternal, immutable, absolute values, true for all men everywhere at all times, God-given Natural Law and the like. Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, 32. Berlin, Two Concepts, 126.

76

53 naturalized portrayal of negative liberty protections seems to deny that they are contingent or constructed, Berlin also refers to these frontiers as something that must be drawn, phrasing that emphasizes the creative role of human agents.77 In contrast to the absolutist understanding of negative liberty, which suggests that frontiers are discovered rather than made, Berlin declares, Genuine belief in the inviolability of a minimum extent of individual liberty entails [an] absolute stand.78 Here, what is absolute is not a Straussian eternal principle to be discovered but rather a stand that is taken. Berlins work, then, is as perplexing as it is engaging. While his depiction of a varied and conflictual value pluralist universe would seem to deny liberalism any ultimate moral foundation, he also comes close to positing negative liberty as a universal good, a feature of the human as such. How are we to make sense of these contrary lines of thought? One particularly popular way of making sense of this puzzle in Berlins work involves developing what Berlin did not an argument for the compatibility, even unity, of pluralism and liberalism. As we will see, this conciliatory approach follows a certain form, one which is deeply problematic for associative democratic politics.

II. The Return to Morality The signature of those readings that seek to reconcile Berlins pluralism and liberalism is an attempt to identify limits on pluralism, so that it is understood as constrained, moderate

77 78

Ibid., 124. Ibid., 165.

54 or informed rather than radical pluralism.79 The point of this move is that it introduces liberal commitments into pluralism, thereby allowing for pluralism to serve as a foundation which justifies liberalism, rather than as a potential challenge to its supremacy.80 In the process, the doctrine of value pluralism is re-made into a more comfortable and familiar form of absolute morality. In an article on Berlin titled Liberty and Pluralism in Pursuit of the Non-Ideal Amy Gutmann focuses on identifying a moral minimum implicit in Berlins work that makes his conception of pluralism unlike many others at least minimally liberal.81 Gutmanns strategy, not uncommon in theorizing pluralism and liberalism in relation to Berlins thought, is to assert that by adding or incorporating substantive moral judgments into pluralism, as Berlin did a specifically liberal pluralism is established.82 Although Gutmann acknowledges that

79

I include in this grouping William Galston, Amy Gutmann, Stephen Lukes, Jonathan Riley, and Daniel Weinstock. See William Galston, Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory, American Political Science Review 93, no. 4 (1999); Amy Gutmann, Liberty and Pluralism in Pursuit of the Non-Ideal, Social Research 66, no. 4 (1999); Stephen Lukes, The Singular and the Plural: On the Distinctive Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin, Social Research 61, no. 3 (1994); Jonathan Riley, Interpreting Isaiah Berlins Pluralism, American Political Science Review 95, no. 2 (2001) and Cultural Pluralism within Liberal Limits, Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002); Daniel Weinstock, The Graying of Berlin, Critical Review 11, no. 4 (1997). In a discussion of pluralism in the thought of Weber, Berlin, and Rawls which highlights the differences between existential and moderate pluralism, Peter Lassman argues that recent political thought has moved uneasily between the kind of existentialist view put forward by Weber and the attempt to contain it. The interpretations of Berlin that I attempt to complicate here are devoted to the task of containing pluralism. As Lassman points out, Most contemporary political thinkers, and especially those generally thought of as being in the Liberal camp, have spent much of their energy in trying to argue for some grounding for general principles as a counterweight to the demands of pluralism. Peter Lassman, Political Theory in an Age of Disenchantment: The Problem of Value Pluralism: Weber, Berlin, Rawls, Max Weber Studies 4, no. 2 (2004). Glen Newey concludes an essay on value pluralism and liberalism with the speculation that Liberals could, of course, narrow pluralism to refer only to values, or associated conceptions of the political, which they endorse. It is my contention that this sort of narrowing is a widespread interpretive strategy in the secondary literature on Berlin. See Newey, Value Pluralism in Contemporary Liberalism, Dialogue 37 (1998). Gutmann, Liberty and Pluralism in Pursuit of the Ideal, 1042. Ibid., 1047.

80

81 82

55 Berlin does not explicitly delineate such a position, Berlins understanding of pluralism, at its best, is morally informed and constrained by the values of individual liberty and the avoidance of human suffering83 The critical move here is Gutmanns effort to imagine Berlins pluralism as morally informed and constrained such that pluralism is always-already liberal, and therefore capable of serving as an authoritative foundation justifying the superiority of liberal political orders over all others. Gutmann distinguishes pluralism per se from the morally defensible conception of value pluralism she forwards.84 That is, she acknowledges that pluralism by definition does not entail the moral imperatives on behalf of individual liberty and the avoidance of suffering that she includes in the morally discriminate pluralism she wants to derive from Berlins work.85 But Gutmann defends her constrained pluralism by depicting pluralism per se and pluralism by definition as so dangerous that they cannot be accepted on their own terms. After declaring, No defense of value pluralism can do without (at least) a moral minimum, she offers the following warning: Without a moral minimum, value pluralism would lead to such absurdity as considering Serbia and Sweden as incommensurably decent societies.86 According to Gutmann, then, value pluralism per se leaves us incapable of rendering judgments or making ethico-political distinctions. If we wish to engage in these activities, according to Gutmann, we must re-formulate value pluralism so that it privileges certain values as absolute. This allows us
83

Ibid., 1049. Gutmann includes the latter on the basis of Berlins statement in The Pursuit of the Ideal that the first public obligation is to avoid extremes of suffering (17). Gutmann, 1048, 1050. Ibid., 1048, 1051. Ibid., 1057.

84 85 86

56 to look to value pluralism for unwavering criteria to be used in making critical evaluations. These criteria, in turn, will validate liberalism as a universal political form. Jonathan Rileys re-constructive reading of Berlin also centers on developing a version of value pluralism that is, in his words, limited rather than radical.87 There are, according to Riley, moral values that are at least minimally liberal insofar as they prescribe the protection of some set of basic human rights and such values place rigid constraints on how much pluralism is permissible.88 In other words, Riley, like Gutmann, envisions the plurality of values that Berlin insists upon as circumscribed within certain liberal limits.89 Drawing on statements made by Berlin in which he claims that the protection of some negative liberty is inseparable from what we mean by a normal human being, Riley argues that Berlin insists on minimal liberalism as a binding constraint on the legitimate scope of pluralism.90 The significance of this reading of Berlin is evident in Rileys declaration, All decent cultures or ways of life share these minimally liberal values. Any culture that does not exhibit them is vetoed as indecent. It does not count as a way of life that is compatible with our common humanity.91 Depicting Berlinian pluralism as a source of unwavering moral standards allows Riley to call upon

87 88 89 90 91

Riley, Cultural Pluralism within Liberal Limits, 69-71, 78. Ibid., 78. Riley, Interpreting Berlins Liberalism, 292. Riley, Cultural Pluralism within Liberal Limits, 89. Ibid., 78.

57 pluralism itself as a tool for sharply distinguishing cultures which are compatible with our common humanity from those that are not.92 The arguments made by Gutmann and Riley are echoed in several other interpretations of Berlin. Stephen Lukes insists that Berlins pluralism should be understood as qualified and limited because Berlin posits the priority of liberty as an absolute and universal precondition for valuable lives being valuable.93 Once again, pluralism is made into liberal pluralism; no argument need be made from the plurality of values to liberalism, since pluralism is rendered definitionally liberal. Similarly, William Galston contends that Berlin refuses to radicalize value pluralism so as to put negative liberty on all fours with other goods.94 Thus, Berlin maintains a moral threshold below which no form of life can be considered minimally human, decent, and morally acceptable.95 Daniel Weinstock likewise endorses what he calls Berlins restricted pluralism which recognizes that value pluralism must be constrained by concepts that bound and define the recognizably human.96

92

The extent to which Riley seeks to establish a liberal pluralism that provides us with sorting criteria is evident in his argument that his reconstructive reading of Berlin allows us to isolate a top set of advanced liberal cultures as superior to all other cultural forms (yet incommensurable in relation to one another). Rileys attempt to rank cultures is aided by his questionable interpretation of Berlins idea of the human horizon. Riley prefers, tellingly, the term common moral horizon, which is not Berlins own. Riley treats this horizon as a site of universal moral values that can be used as criteria in our judgments and does not address Berlins inclusion of the Nazis within the human horizon. The latter is important, as I argue later in this chapter, because it indicates that Berlin understands critical judgment to be a non-algorithmic activity undertaken within the human horizon. Lukes, The Singular and the Plural: On the Distinctive Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin.

93 94

Galston, Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory, 773. Negative liberty enjoys a special status in Berlins thought, according to Galston, because he incorporates the value of negative freedom into his understanding of human nature. Ibid., 772. Weinstock, The Graying of Isaiah Berlin, 489. Weinstock counts choice and freedom among these concepts.

95 96

58 Such re-constructions, indicative of the dominant interpretation of Berlins work, strive to eliminate the tension between pluralism and absolutism in Berlins writings by re-imagining value pluralism in absolutist terms.97 This strategy, as I will argue, is detrimental to our understanding of democratic political activity because it tends to misrepresent political commitments as moral truths and to discourage future movements of pluralization. Two features of the interpretive strategy outlined above, which I explore in more depth in Sections 3 and 4 of this chapter, are particularly problematic. First, substantive moral commitments are incorporated into Berlins value pluralism. To understand the significance of this move, it is important to recall the status of value pluralism within Berlins thought. As he presents it, value pluralism is a true description of the moral universe, independent of our understanding of it. (Some of us remain monists, after all.) The multiplicity of values and the conflicts between them are, for Berlin, facts about the world.98 If liberal goods or a moral minimum are introduced into the meaning of value pluralism, as they are by these interpreters, such values come to enjoy a special status as self-evident truths. They are not merely commitments we hold or principles we invoke in our appeals to one another, but instead given, part of the natural order of things. When pluralism is presented by Berlins
In contrast to these readings, which seek to marry pluralism and liberalism, John Gray and George Kateb work to effect a divorce between the two, although from very different positions (Gray wants to challenge the hegemonic position of liberalism from the perspective of pluralism, while Kateb seeks to save liberalism from the ethical uncertainty of pluralism). See Gray, Berlin; George Kateb, Can Cultures Be Judged? Two Defenses of Cultural Pluralism in Isaiah Berlins Work, Social Research 66, no. 4 (1999). Two notable exceptions these efforts to unite or sever pluralism and liberalism are Ira Katznelson and Michael Walzer, whose interpretations of Berlin emphasize and celebrate the irresolvable tension between the pluralist and liberal lines in his thought. Ira Katznelson, Isaiah Berlins Modernity, Social Research 66, no. 4 (1999); Michael Walzer, Are there Limits to Liberalism? The New York Review of Books, October 19, 1995.
98 97

This aspect of Berlins work is susceptible to the criticism Strauss makes that Berlin makes an unjustified leap from the is to the ought of value pluralism. Berlin presents value pluralism as both an empirical fact and as something worth recognizing and even cultivating. See Strauss, Relativism, where he declares, knowledge of the observable Is seems to lead in a perfectly unobjectionable manner to knowledge of the Ought (14).

59 readers as limited, constrained, informed, or restricted by the overriding value of negative liberty or a certain core of human rights, it is reconfigured as an uncontestable moral ground. Implicit in this move is the conviction that liberalism, to be validated, must have recourse to a moral foundation of some kind. The return to morality affected in the name of value pluralism is fostered by the belief that political arrangements cannot be self-grounding, but must be authorized by something beyond the domain of politics, namely morality. Second, the return to morality undertaken in the guise of value pluralism is expressed in and through a particular deployment of the category of the human. Liberal readers of Berlin who aim to constitute value pluralism as a moral ground regularly invoke a universalistic conception of the human to support their claims. In doing so, they rely heavily on scattered remarks by Berlin which suggest that despite the fundamental multiplicity of values, certain among them may be definitive of humanity as such. Particular emphasis is given to those places where Berlin seems to forward an understanding of humanity which incorporates into it a set of universal or shared values, including a specifically liberal form of freedom. This definition of the human is drawn on by interpreters in order to re-make pluralism as a form of minimal morality that can serve as a foundation for liberal political arrangements. Liberalism is thereby naturalized, appearing as an unmediated reflection of the human as such. Before signing on to an understanding of Berlinian value pluralism in which a moral minimum, linked to a determinate definition of the human, works to secure the legitimacy of liberalism, it is important to examine the implications of this approach. Does the attempt to reconstitute value pluralism as a moral foundation for politics run the risk of casting the contingent and contestable products of political struggle the limits placed on pluralism as

60 given or necessary truths? Might this representation devalue the importance of democratic activities through which constituencies advocate, resist and argue over particular ways of organizing collective existence in the absence of extrapolitical guarantees? And does reliance on a liberalism-authorizing definition of the human pose troubling obstacles to potential pluralization? Examining these questions will also allow us to consider counter-tendencies in Berlins work that complicate this wide-spread approach to resolving tensions in his thought. Are there features of Berlins approach to value pluralism and liberalism that might help us to resist the return to morality achieved by his readers? And might Berlins fascination with the liminal qualities of the human push in the direction not of moral absolutism but instead greater pluralization?

III. Imagining Pluralisms Limits At the heart of the reading of Berlin that I want to contest lies the assumption that politics cannot do without a moral foundation. It is on the basis of this assumption that Berlins value pluralism is perceived of as a threat to his liberalism, such that the former must be made more moderate. This moderation, I argue, is achieved at the expense of democratic politics, because the return to morality imagines certain limits on pluralism to exist in advance of their political construction. By depicting the products of political struggle as settled moral truths, prevalent approaches to Berlins thought tend to devalue the democratic activities through which citizens negotiate the plurality of values and struggle over the limits that ought to govern collective existence. Before developing this line of argument, which concerns at bottom the question of

61 non-foundationalist politics, I want to briefly consider a related subject that has also captured the attention of Berlins audience. Many of Berlins readers argue that value pluralism not only deprives liberalism of a much-needed moral ground, but also, more generally, leaves us adrift in relativism. As we saw earlier, Strauss contends that without a standard of right and wrong independent of positive right and higher than positive right, judgment cannot proceed.99 Amy Gutmann likewise worries that pluralism may be nothing other than relativism, which robs us of tools necessary for making principled judgments. She warns, as I noted earlier, that pluralism without a moral minimum will leave us unable to distinguish between the governments of Sweden and Serbia. Many of the efforts to reformulate Berlinian value pluralism appear to be inspired by the conviction that our capacity to meaningfully make political judgments hangs in the balance. The degree to which the secondary literature on Berlin remains fixated on the problem of relativism would seem to affirm John Gunnells argument that the problem of relativism and the search for a solution so structures contemporary political theory as to act as its language, comprising a grammar that is common to many otherwise quite divergent conversations within the field.100 Gunnell also convincingly argues that political theorists ought to refuse relativism as a pseudo-problem that is sustained by the aspirations of rationalism and foundationalism.101 Relativism, he contends, appears as a gripping problem only from within the confines of a

99

Strauss, Introduction, 2.

100

John Gunnell, Relativism: The Return of the Repressed, Political Theory 21, no. 4 (1993), 564. The central argument of this essay is that the pervasive concern with relativism in academic political theory is a repressed expression, or displacement, of the problem of theory and practice, or more specifically, the problem of the relationship between academic and public discourse (563). Ibid., 563.

101

62 traditional epistemological search for transcontextual certainty and political theorys obsession with it testifies to its being held hostage by philosophy.102 I would suggest that Berlin himself sees relativism as something of a pseudo-problem. Readers who worry that Berlins value pluralism delivers us to relativism and deprives us of our ability to judge rely on a conception of the practice of judgment that Berlin does not share. Warnings like Gutmanns, which claim that the acceptance of value pluralism will leave us unable to meaningfully discriminate between political regimes, implicitly assume that judgment requires what Gunnell calls transcontextual grounds.103 This assumption is at odds with Berlins own understanding of how we make judgments. He rightfully understands judgment to be a concrete practice that involves meaningful reason-giving in the absence of any wholly independent or transcendent standards such as those called for by Strauss. Although some have faulted Berlin for not rigorously differentiating pluralism from relativism, it may be that Berlin is not as exercised by the problem of relativism as many of his readers precisely because he believes it to be a pseudo problem that rests, finally, on an inaccurate understanding of what we do when we judge. Throughout his work, Berlin maintains that judgment under conditions of value pluralism is both possible and necessary. Although he does not offer a well-developed theory of judgment, he consistently depicts judgment as a situated and particularistic practice in which we draw on a repertoire of tools immanent to our form of life (themselves pluralistic and possibly at odds with one another) while also, at our best, endeavoring to stretch beyond our own culturally specific

102 103

Ibid., 563, 567. Ibid., 563.

63 norms to imagine the meaning of various practices and beliefs for people different from ourselves: Or, if we do condemn societies or individuals, do so only after taking into account the social and material conditions, the aspirations, codes of value, degree of progress and reaction, measured in terms of their own situation and outlook; and judge them when we do (and why in the world should we not?), as we judge anyone or anything else: in terms partly of what we like, approve, believe in, and think right ourselves, partly of the views of the societies and individuals in question, and of what we think about such views, and of how far we, being what we are, think it natural or desirable to have a wide variety of viewsWe judge as we judge, we take the risks which this entails104 This statement highlights Berlins non-procedural approach to the question of judgment. There is no attempt to delineate a set of fixed principles or to specify a method by which to evaluate an action or policy. Our judgments, when well-considered, are the result of a complex assessment informed not only by our own preferences, beliefs and commitments (which may themselves conflict), but also by some sense of the views held by those involved, which may be quite contrary to our own.105 Berlin stresses the multiple factors that enter into our existing practices of judgment and affirms their messy and unscientific character. This rather pragmatic account of the judgment-making we already engage in stresses that we are capable of judgment even in the absence of a formula or super-standard that tells us how to proceed.106

104 105

Berlin, Historical Inevitability, 103.

With regard to this aspect of judging, Berlin describes a process by which we make out the best, most plausible cases for persons and ages remote or unsympathetic to us or for some reason inaccessible to us. Berlin, Historical Inevitability, 103. Berlin, Historical Inevitability, 86. Here Berlin asserts, It is plain that there can exist no super-standard for the comparison of entire systems of value, which itself derives from no specific set of beliefs, no one specific culture. Berlin also argues that in cases of conflicts among ultimate ends which require the sacrifice of one end to another, there is no rule according to which this can be done one must just decide in Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes, Salmagundi, no. 120 (1998), 108. And in the same interview when asked How do you decide what the bases for human rights are? Berlin replies simply, How do you decide anything? (111). In these places and elsewhere Berlin declines to provide the sorts of determinate rules his readers assume to be indispensable for judgment.

106

64 In a short essay co-authored with Bernard Williams, Berlin suggests that we ought not to attribute rationality or reasonableness only to judgments made in accordance with a preestablished, general criterion. Responding to an article by George Crowder is which he argues in Berlins and Williams gloss that pluralism is anti-rational and in effect skeptical they affirm Crowders claim that the pluralist perspective they share contends that there is no common currency of comparison, such as that promoted by Utilitarianism. And, it also means something wider, in that there is no other determinate and general procedure for solving conflicts, such as a lexical priority rule. But they question Crowders assumption that these tenets result in a particularly anti-rational understanding of judgment. They argue that Crowders idea seems to be that a judgment to the effect that in a particular context a certain consideration is more important or significant than another is specially non-rational or subjective or a matter of taste. They query, Why should we believe this? In particular, why should we believe that such judgments are intrinsically less rational or reasonable than a claim to the effect that some simple priority rule should be accepted (e.g. that justice always trumps loyalty.) They argue that their refusal of an algorithmic model for practical decisions does not mean there is nothing reasonable to be said in specific situations of conflict.107 Against those who assume that without a settled ordering of values or at least some moral minimum, we will somehow be at a loss when it comes to critical evaluation, Berlin insists that this is not the case. We can and do make meaningful judgments in the absence of transcontextual standards and settled procedures. When theorists such as Gutmann and Riley

107

Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply, Political Studies 42 (1994), 306-9. This essay is a response to George Crowder, Pluralism and Liberalism, Political Studies 42 (1994).

65 import to Berlins work fixed criteria that Berlin himself was at pains to refute,108 they rely on a particular and contestable understanding of judgment. As William Galston has argued, the belief that value pluralism makes rational judgment impossible is the product of top-down philosophical assumptions about how the process of judgment must work.109 Those assumptions are not Berlins own. His depictions of judgment as non-algorithmic, qualitative, and particularistic might even urge us to refuse the problem of relativism altogether. The concern over relativism, voiced by many of Berlins readers, is driven by the same sort of ambition that guides the quest for a morally grounded politics. A common aspiration to identify standards understood as external to and authoritative of our practices guides both worries over relativism and worries over the loss of a moral foundation that would sanction liberalism. While I would describe both worries as misguided insofar as they hinge on a belief in transcontextual first principles, it is the picture of politics in particular as requiring an alwaysalready there moral ground that I will argue exacts unacknowledged costs for associative democratic politics. First, the most common solution to the tension between pluralism and liberalism, as I argued earlier, portrays limits on value pluralism as natural and moral, rather than political. That is, the positions articulated by Gutmann, Riley, and others envision a plurality of values that is restricted in advance by certain moral standards. This version of pluralism, which I claim is at

108

Gutmann, for example, insists that we must draw out of Berlin a fixed moral minimum if we wish to be able to assess the decency of any political order. Her assumption is that without an authoritative ordering of values that can serve as criteria, we will somehow be paralyzed when it comes to evaluating competing regimes. And Riley posits a universal standard according to which we can sort the worlds cultures into a top set and bottom set, the latter falling under the threshold of moral acceptability. See Gutmann, Liberalism and Pluralism and Riley, Interpreting Isaiah Berlins Pluralism. Galston, Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory, 771-2.

109

66 odds with Berlins understanding of human existence as essentially indeterminate, figures liberal constraints on value pluralism as moral facts rather than as the product of our attachment to, and struggle over, certain values. The trouble with this construction is that it displaces properly political questions concerning how to live under conditions of value pluralism onto the domain of morality, where they re-appear as settled truths.110 That is, by imagining prepolitical limits on value pluralism, these readings position certain value commitments as beyond the play of politics altogether. Evading the politicizing potential of the value pluralist insight which, on one reading, could be understood to deprive politics of a moral foundation in order to implicitly affirm human action as the source of both individual and collective forms of existence the reworked value pluralism proffered by many of Berlins readers reassures with the promise that value pluralism on its own supplies us with a guide for political life. Yet this reassurance rings rather hollow. A moral minimum has no meaning apart from the actions of political actors who articulate it, seek the agreement of others, and work to see that minimum enacted in practices. Imagining limits on pluralism as pre-political may offer a sense of security, but it is surely a false sense, since any strategy for limiting pluralism remains utterly dependent on the commitment and action (or inaction) of citizens. The return to morality rests on the mistaken conviction that certain practical outcomes can be guaranteed by labeling particular standards or values as moral. Yet those outcomes remain contingent on the assent and
110

For a powerful critique of the preference for moral reasoning over political contest in the context of contemporary feminism, see Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Brown argues that feminist anxieties concerning the postmodern disruption and deauthorization of our moral ground express a modernist attachment to Truth as the bearer of morality and wholly opposed to power (47). Browns suggestion that postmodernity poses the opportunity to radically sever the problem of the good from the problem of the true, to decide what we want rather than derive it from assumptions or arguments about who we are (49) resonates with the argument I make here.

67 undetermined activities of citizens, within the immanent field of politics. Discursive recourse to morality attempts to bypass the difficulties of non-foundational politics, but this shortcut cannot succeed, because a moral minimum can never be guaranteed by anything other than ongoing human action. This brings us to the second problem that afflicts absolutist interpretations of Berlins value pluralism. By imagining limits on pluralism as morally given, these interpretations obscure the responsibility and authority that properly belong to democratic actors to collectively determine how to negotiate the plurality of values. In the process of establishing a moral minimum envisioned as beyond the play of politics, such approaches inadvertently render democratic collectivities superfluous. With certain limits on political activity figured as prepolitical, democratic actors appear rather late on the scene, if at all.111 Moral absolutism mischaracterizes political decisions as moral imperatives, thereby replacing political struggle over the constitution of public life with the illusion of moral certainty. Finally, transforming Berlins value pluralism into a moral ground that justifies liberal political orders is troubling for associative democratic politics because it tends to foreclose the question of democratic and not simply liberal responses to pluralism. When liberal commitments are built into the definition of value pluralism, liberal political arrangements appear as a foregone conclusion. The adequacy or superiority of liberal strategies, which tend to confine pluralism to the domain of private life, is assumed and the possibility of pluralistic

It is easy to imagine a Rawlsian or Habermasian response to this criticism which would insist that there are still plenty of struggles to be had within the moral limits that determine the scope of politics. In other words, democratic collectivities have plenty of work to do and only some forms of political activity are off the table those that conflict with the minimal demand for reasonableness, for example, in the case of Rawls. I would argue, however, that the very figuration of politics as bound by moral limits produces a false sense of security that risks fostering depoliticized publics.

111

68 democracy, in which pluralism also finds expression in public sites of contestation and decisionmaking, goes un-pursued. On all three of these fronts, then, the return to morality, undertaken in the name of value pluralism, poses real problems for the theory and practice of associative democratic politics. The difficulty lies not with the affirmation of certain values as more significant than others or even with the argument that pluralism stands in need of certain limits. Such distinctions are unavoidable and necessary. What is problematic about arguments that build particular values or limits into the definition of value pluralism is that they portray limits on value pluralism as morally given, rather than politically constructed. The positions articulated by Gutmann, Riley, et al. envision a plurality of values that is restricted from the beginning by certain self-evident moral standards. The recurring version of pluralism that I am concerned with is one that figures liberal constraints on value pluralism as moral facts rather than as contingent political productions that result from our choices and actions. In order to clarify the point I am making, it is helpful to consider an argument made by Chantal Mouffe in regards to pluralism, though not in reference to Berlin. In the book The Democratic Paradox, as well as in an article on Rawls political theory, Mouffe offers an alternative approach to value pluralism and its limits that differs from the moral foundationalism of the arguments I tracked above. In Democracy and Pluralism: A Critique of the Rationalist Approach, Mouffe begins by positing pluralism as the definitive feature of modern liberal democracy. Her orientation toward such pluralism is unequivocal; while main forms of liberal pluralism tend to treat pluralism as something we must bear grudgingly or try to reduce, Mouffe says we should celebrate and enhance pluralism. Yet she makes clear from

69 the start that such a view does not allow a total pluralism. She continues, It is important to recognize the limits to pluralism which are required by a democratic politic that aims at challenging a wide range of relations of subordination. Although Mouffe here introduces a commitment to non-subordination that is distinctive to her radical democratic vision, it is the notion of limits to pluralism that is most significant for the argument I am making. Mouffe contrasts her position which entails such limits from one of extreme pluralism or the valorization of all differences.112 But what is the nature of these limits? Isnt Mouffes move here similar to the return to moral absolutism I critiqued above? Mouffes distinctive approach emerges out of her reading of Rawls. Concerning Rawls attempt to specify a reasonable pluralism, Mouffe contends that Rawls uses the reasonable/unreasonable distinction to draw a frontier between the doctrines that accept the liberal principles and those that oppose them. What Rawls is attempting to do with the idea of reasonable pluralism, Mouffe argues, is discriminate between a permissible pluralism comprised of religious, moral or philosophical conceptions as long as those views can be relegated to the sphere of the private and satisfy the liberal principles and an unacceptable pluralism that would jeopardize the dominance of liberal principles in the public sphere. The significance of Mouffes subsequent critique transcends the details of Rawls political theory. Mouffe argues that Rawls distinction between reasonable and unacceptable pluralism is an effort to express that there cannot be pluralism where the principles of political association are concerned; conceptions that refuse the principles of liberalism are to be excluded.113
112

Mouffe, Democracy and Pluralism: A Critique of the Rationalist Approach, Cardozo Law Review 16 (1995), 1534-5. Ibid., 1539.

113

70 Importantly, Mouffe declares, I have no quarrel with him on this point.114 In other words, Mouffe agrees with Rawls that political life requires the drawing of boundaries; a liberaldemocratic framework necessarily involves the establishment of certain procedures and rights as authoritative and relatively immune to the challenges that might be made in the name of conflicting values. There must be some agreement on the principles of political association that protects them from the force of total pluralism. As Mouffe explains it, Calling the antiliberals unreasonable is a way of stating that their views cannot be admitted as legitimate within the framework of a liberal democratic regime. But the non-admittance of illiberal views must be understood, Mouffe argues, as the expression of an eminently political decision, not of a moral requirement.115 The problem with Rawls approach is that he depicts liberal commitments, which involve placing restrictions on an unmitigated pluralism of values, as moral facts that follow from what is reasonable. As Mouffe puts it, Rawls presents as a moral exigency what is really a political decision.116 A very similar problem appears in those places in Berlins work in which he portrays liberal frontiers as not artificially drawn and seems to connect them with the figure of a normal human being. While I will argue in the next section that countervailing strands of Berlins thought complicate this reading, focus on these passages would seem to suggest that he identifies the protection of negative liberty with the normal human being, allowing liberalism to appear as a moral necessity that issues from the identity of man. The projects of re-

114 115 116

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 1538.

71 construction undertaken by Berlins readers who emphasize these aspects of his thinking in order to construct a pluralism that can underwrite liberalism affect a similar move: the limits, constraints, and restrictions they envision what keeps pluralism from being radical are not recognized as political in character, but are presented as pre-existing moral truths. As Mouffe argues, the point is not to accept a total pluralism as if such nondiscrimination or full inclusion were possible: Some limits need to be put to the kind of confrontation which is going to be seen as legitimate in the public sphere. Yet as Mouffe insists, The political nature of the limits should be acknowledged instead of being presented as requirements of morality or rationality.117 I want to affirm an understanding of liberal limits as political in origin that is, as contestable and contingent productions. Berlin does speak of liberal rights protections in such political terms when he refers to the frontiers that must be drawn between state authority and individual liberty in the same essay in which he speaks of these frontiers as not artificially drawn.118 The former description, which allows for the recognition of such frontiers as constructed, comes closer to what I am arguing for an acknowledgement of what Mouffe calls the real nature of frontiers, and a disavowal of efforts to disguise them under the veil of rationality or morality.119 A de-naturalized view of liberal limits is important because seeing liberal commitments as political decisions rather than as moral necessities encourages recognition of the human agency behind even those rights and procedures we take to be so authoritative as to be beyond question. In place of a view that would have us believe that liberal regimes are simply
117 118 119

Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000), 93. Berlin, Two Concepts, 124. Cf. 165. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 105.

72 unmediated reflections of a moral minimum, we ought to recognize the variety of practices and policies that characterize liberal polities as inventions for which we remain responsible. Resisting a morally absolutist conception of liberal limits means acknowledging not only the terrestrial origins of such limits, but also their relative non-fixity. In place of a view of political arrangements as morally guaranteed, we might think of existing liberal rights, for example, as fragile creations in need of ongoing enactment and even re-invention. This dual emphasis on responsibility and non-fixity highlights the essential contestability of the political limits liberal or otherwise that we draw.120 This approach, which conceives of the limits placed on pluralism as contingent political creations, can find support in Berlins appreciative recognition of indeterminacy as the condition of human experience. Such indeterminacy, linked to our capacities for creativity, invention, and action, is highlighted and affirmed by Berlin throughout his corpus.121 The diversity of individual and collective forms of life that have marked human history is regarded by Berlin as evidence of the open-ended nature of existence and of our character as creative and

Appreciating the fundamentally political character of the frontiers and limits involves understanding those limits as provisional and open to reformulation. As William Connolly argues, Pluralists set limits to tolerance to insure that an exclusionary, unitarian movement does not take over an entire regime yet we are cautious in setting final limits in advance to the scope of diversity. For we are attuned to the dicey history of how absolute limits posed at one time in Europe or America were revealed later to have fostered grave suffering and to have been unnecessary to effective governance. William Connolly, Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 42. Elsewhere Connolly describes the limits to pluralization as including general civilizational values, including the protection of life, respect for privacy, the appreciation of diversity, and the protection from undeserved suffering. Yet the need for such limits must be coupled with an awareness of the persistent possibility that established lines of demarcation inflict unnecessary injuries and closures. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 194-5.
121

120

John Gray identifies a conception of basic freedom in Berlins work that is close to what I am referring to here. He argues that basic freedom is not synonymous with either the negative or positive liberty that he famously parses. Gray defines this basic freedom in terms of capacity for choice among alternatives, but his description of such choice as originative and creative emphasizes the capacity for innovation (and not simply the selection among given options) that Berlin attributes to human actors. See Gray, Berlin, 15-6.

73 self-directing beings.122 Berlins recognition of indeterminacy as the basis of our existence and his corresponding respect for the creative power of human action guards against the interpretive tendency to represent liberal political designs as the direct consequence of moral truth. It invites us to appreciate the constructed and non-necessary character of our political arrangements. Although the activity of choice occupies a central place in Berlins writings, the affirmation of indeterminacy that informs his thought places greater emphasis on our capacities for innovation and undetermined action than the notion of choice might suggest. George Kateb has helpfully pointed out that the term choice is a bit anemic when it comes to conveying what Berlin is emphatically interested in the rich creative capacities of men and women, reflected in the vast array of personal and collective forms of existence, not all of them liberal, that have marked human history. As Kateb explains, Berlin is fascinated by those mysterious contingencies that go into the creative formation and continuous elaboration of a culture or whole way of life.123 And despite Katebs claims to the contrary, Berlin is also interested in the creative production of individual ways of life, as evidenced in his appreciative reading of J.S. Mill, where he emphasizes not only Mills belief in the freedom to choose but also in the freedom to experiment, to craft a mode of existence that is uniquely ones own.124 Because the category of choice can seem to refer to the selection of options among possibilities that are simply given, creativity better represents Berlins depiction of humans as self-transforming
122 123

Berlin, Political Ideas in Twentieth Century, in Four Essays on Liberty, 35.

Kateb, Can Cultures be Judged? 1014. Kateb uses Berlins interest in creativity against him, arguing that Berlins work amounts to an immoral aestheticism. Reading Berlin as a relativist, Kateb charges him with failing to offer determinate moral standards that would reveal the universal priority of liberalism. For an interesting counter to Kateb, see Jonathan Riley, Defending Cultural Pluralism, which aims to complicate the clear division between aesthetics and morality that Kateb assumes. Berlin, John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life, in Four Essays on Liberty, 206.

124

74 and unpredictable beings who do not simply confront options but actively participate in the invention and development of ways of life and the choices embedded in them. Indeterminacy is a characteristic of the pluralist universe. If there is no determinate ordering of values to be discovered through the careful use of reason, we are to put it bluntly left to our own devices. With no single best way of life or corresponding hierarchy of values for us to discern, we are resigned to living out the burden of freedom.125 As Alex Zakaras has argued concerning Berlin, Once we know that there are multiple conflicting and incommensurable values, once we know that reason is powerless to order them, we are freed to live by our own lights.126 For Berlin, the multiplicity of incomparable values is not cause for regret, lest we also wish to lament our freedom. Berlins portrait of existential indeterminacy supports an understanding of liberal political arrangements as non-necessary productions for which we are responsible. Rather than imagining value pluralism as a morally prescriptive doctrine that offers extrapolitical grounding for the establishment of liberal orders, we might affirm the human creativity Berlin so articulately defended by acknowledging that our political arrangements originate in our own undetermined actions and choices. The naturalized liberalism defended by many of Berlins interpreters paradoxically denies creativity and choice by presenting liberal arrangements as following directly from a pre-existing moral minimum. Such a view, I argue, does violence to what Berlin affirms as the basic indeterminacy of human experience. Fidelity to this sense of indeterminacy should encourage us to recognize the choice-making and free action that

125 126

Berlin, Two Concepts, 159. Alex Zakaras, Isaiah Berlins Cosmopolitan Ethics, Political Theory 32, no. 4 (2003), 510.

75 inaugurates and sustains liberal orders, rather than imagining such freedom as something that resides only within such orders. The approach to Berlins thought that I develop here accepts value pluralism in its radical form as the very condition of contemporary liberal-democratic politics. But it also does not disavow the absolutist moments in Berlins work, even as it attempts to re-cast them as political commitments rather than moral truths. In place of dominant readings which resolve the tension in Berlins writings between pluralism and absolutism in favor of the latter, we might instead accept and affirm this tension as the very structure of free political life. If the project of democratic politics is characterized, as Alan Keenan has effectively argued, by both openness and closure, then perhaps the poles of pluralism and absolutism within which Berlin oscillates are not so much a contradiction to be solved as a representation of a tension that frames democratic existence.127 On the one hand, Berlins value pluralism corresponds to what Claude Lefort refers to in his characterization of democracy as the dissolution of the markers of certainty.128 The fundamental indeterminacy that accompanies the loss of metaphysical foundations means that politics is deprived of any external authorization; politics in a pluralist age is necessarily self-grounding.129 On the other hand, as Keenan shows, democratic politics can never be wholly open, because it inevitably involves specific practices, procedures, and institutions degrees or kinds of closure that prevent any democratic polity from being fully

127

Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Claude Lefort, The Question of Democracy in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 19.
129

128

Ibid.

76 inclusive or fully open to question.130 The strains of absolutism in Berlins work can be productively understood to express the need for closure, a counterpoint to the fundamental openness signified by pluralism. Yet while Berlins readers are eager to imagine those limits on pluralism as moral and therefore pre-political, the view advocated here reminds us that such absolutes are themselves created, resisted and re-worked within the domain of politics, itself uninsured by any external authority. The absolutes Strauss hunts for and the limits that Berlins readers erect are, finally, stands taken within the immanent field of politics. To embrace the tension between pluralism and absolutism in Berlins work as the very framework of democratic politics means refusing the most common readings of this conundrum. While some interpreters, like Strauss, charge Berlin with a fatal incoherence or confusion,131 most treat the gap between value pluralism and the defense of certain liberal absolutes in Berlin as a contradiction that is best eliminated through a re-definition of value pluralism that erases its antagonism toward absolutism. The alternative I am proposing differs from both of these tactics because it does not interpret this gap as a logical contradiction but instead as the conceptual space of democratic politics. Section 5 of this chapter develops this interpretive possibility further, by exploring how Berlins thought might animate a vision of pluralistic democracy. But before turning to that question, it is important to consider another productive ambiguity in Berlins writings, covered
Keenan argues that democratic politics is animated by the ideal of openness. Such openness is twofold, involving both the openness of inclusion and the openness to question. But, as Keenan writes, it turns out that the people cannot be fully open, either in the sense of fully inclusive and general, or in the sense of fully open to question..in order to be the kind of entity able to have and to regulate its own collective life, the people must take on an identity whose relative clarity and stability depend on particular foundations, traditions, and institutional forms that cannot be fully general or open to question. Ibid.,10-11.
131 130

See, for example, Perry Anderson, The Pluralism of Isaiah Berlin, in A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992) and George Crowder, Pluralism and Liberalism.

77 over by dominant interpretations. The human is frequently invoked by Berlins readers as part of the effort to tame pluralism, yet the category is not easily pinned down in Berlins writings. Its complexity is worth pursuing. If the human describes a horizon and not simply an identity, what might this mean for politics?

IV. The Human Horizon Although Berlin is skeptical of claims that there exists a common human nature persisting across time and space, aligning such beliefs with monism, he does not abandon the vocabulary of common humanity altogether. At times he suggests that human beings share certain values which can be regarded as universal or almost universal.132 The moments in which Berlin refers to the existence of common values that are definitive of what it is to be human are granted considerable weight in many of the readings that seek to unify Berlins pluralism and liberalism. This is the case despite the fact that Berlins account of universal human values remains notably thin.133 Although he suggests that there might be some generic human character,134 this suggestion is complicated by his appreciative readings of thinkers like Vico and Herder who eschew the notion of a common human nature in favor of a

132

Berlin, Does Political Theory Still Exist? 166. For example, at one point he posits, there are certain universal values, though he does not state what they are or explain the significance of this assertion vis--vis the doctrine of value pluralism. Berlin, European Unity and its Vicissitudes, 202. Berlin claims in this essay that there has been a new recognition of universal values in the west, following recent holocausts. But Berlin specifies that he does not mean that our laws and principles are based on theological or metaphysical foundations. Rather we regard them as incapable of being abrogated and we treat them not as something that we, or our forefathers chose to adopt, but rather as presuppositions of being human at all (204, my italics). Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 134. Berlin, Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought, 80.

133 134

78 vision of human nature as varied and self-transforming.135 This leaves open the possibility of a paradoxical understanding of human nature in which the constant ascribed to human nature is at bottom, an inconstancy, the utter unpredictability of human activity, as Berlin puts it.136 Despite the question-begging character of Berlins comments concerning human nature and universal human values, many responses to Berlin that seek to reconcile pluralism and liberalism attempt to specify a determinate definition of the human that serves to de-radicalize pluralism. If a substantive conception of the human can be derived from Berlins writings, this would seem to go a long way in supporting the larger project of transforming value pluralism into a moral foundation supportive of liberalism. Daniel Weinstocks approach to the category of the human is representative of a common approach.137 He argues that the restricted pluralism he finds in Berlin is constrained by the concepts that bound and define the recognizably human.138 Yet while Weinstock intends for freedom as choice to define the recognizably human and in turn restrict pluralism, the human for Berlin is a much more capacious and less determinate category than this deployment would suggest.

135 136 137

See especially Berlins discussions of Vico and Herder in Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Isaiah Berlin, TheRoots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 147.

Weinstock, The Graying of Berlin.489. Jonathan Riley quotes from the same passage as Weinstock, in which Berlin identifies the protection of negative liberty with our conception of a normal human being, and argues that this establishes the priority of liberty and keeps tragic pluralism within liberal limits. Riley, Interpreting Berlins Liberalism, 291-2. Lukes attempts to recover a conception of human nature from Berlin, despite Berlins pervasive skepticism toward the notion, even going so far as to argue that the point of Berlins comment regarding the essence of human nature What is this essence? What are the standards that it entails? This has been and perhaps always will be, a matter of infinite debate is that Berlin does not reject the question as absurd. Lukes, The Singular and the Plural, 711-2. Weinstock, The Graying of Berlin, 489. But as I discuss below the recognizably human does not, for Berlin, include only honorific practices or beliefs. Weinstock never addresses Berlins insistence that Nazi values, though worthy of condemnation, are nonetheless fully human

138

79 Although the temptation to equate a liberal subject with the human being per se is fueled by some of Berlins remarks,139 his most consistent approach to question of the human resists such an equation. Rather than posit a fixed definition of the human, Berlins writings most often stress the notion of a pluralistic human horizon. I want to suggest that the imaginary of the human horizon, as developed by Berlin precisely because it does not forward a hard and fast definition of the human bears significant potential for a democratic politics of pluralization. This potential follows from Berlins insistence on the diversity that characterizes that horizon as well as on our capacities for imaginative sympathy across difference. Berlins references to the human horizon affirm the multiple and conflictual values that shape human existence while also arguing for the possibility of mutual understanding: I am not blind to what the Greeks valued their values may not be mine, but I can grasp what it would be like to live by their light, I can admire and respect them, and even imagine myself as pursuing them, although I do not and do not wish to, and perhaps could not if I wished. Forms of life differ. Ends, moral principles, are many. But not infinitely many: they must be within the human horizon.140 The human horizon is a device Berlin uses to remind us of the plurality of ends and moral principles that characterize existence, past and present, but also to specify that they are comprehensible even across great distances of time and space. Although the horizon re-iterates Berlins pluralism, it also serves to challenge the notion that some ways of life are so completely foreign to us, or vice versa, that understanding or judging is an impossibility. Berlin describes the human horizon in terms of a finitude of plural values:

139

Most notably Berlins reference to frontiers being defined in terms of rules so long and widely accepted that their observance has entered into the very conception of what it is to be a normal human being. Berlin, Two Concepts, 165. Berlin, The Pursuit of the Ideal, 11.

140

80 There is not an infinity of them: the number of human values, of values which I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference this makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.141 The specification that human values are finite which is notably absent any effort to list or count the values within the horizon is critical because it implies that differences concerning the kinds of lives we pursue are not absolute barriers to mutual understanding. The human horizon is itself diverse: it contains many ends, some incompatible and even incomparable, but this multiplicity is not an excuse for provincialism. Berlin maintains that our own ways of life, individual or collective, are not impenetrable bubbles or windowless boxes that restrict our understanding to what is familiar and close.142 Still, the comprehension and even appreciation that Berlin argues is possible across great differences is only a possibility, one requiring great openness and effort. Imagination and sympathy enable understanding between human beings whose lives reflect competing and irreconcilable values. Drawing heavily on Vicos and Herders work, Berlin argues that members of one culture, can by the force of imaginative insight, understand (what Vico called entrare) the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space.143 The understanding of difference, which imagination makes possible, is related for Berlin to the human horizon, including as it does an array of values

141 142

Berlin, My Intellectual Path, in The First and the Last (London: Granta, 1999), 50-1.

Berlin, Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth Century European Thought, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 85; The Pursuit of the Ideal, 11. Berlin, The Pursuit of the Ideal, 10.

143

81 which may conflict and cannot all co-exist within any individuals or groups life, but which are nonetheless intelligible. The conceptual apparatus of the human horizon allows Berlin to distinguish his value pluralist stance from one which would interpret the multiplicity of values as an obstacle to any cross-cultural, cross-generational, or even inter-personal understanding. To be sure, Berlin places a tremendous weight on our willingness or desire to understand the unfamiliar and to see widely divergent lives as fully human. Although he recognizes how agonizing the quest for imaginative insight can be,144 Berlin seems to overlook the haste with which we can and do dismiss unfamiliar practices and forms of life as inhuman. Nonetheless, Berlins insistence on our ability to understand what is remote to us can be read as an incitement to sympathy. His notion of a human horizon invites us to make a presumption in favor of humanity when confronted with the foreign or the strange, yet it also counsels against attributing a single meaning or content to the human in recognition of the fact of plurality. Berlins emphasis on imagination and understanding urges us to encounter difference not as radical or unknowable (which can prompt dismissal) but as a challenge to our own entrenched habits and convictions that calls on our creativity and generosity. Berlins treatment of the human horizon also troubles any ready identification of the human with the moral. While Berlins readers tend to assume that a conception of the human culled from Berlins work can function as a tool on behalf of moral absolutism, Berlins human horizon is more capacious than this appropriation recognizes. Several interpreters re-name what Berlin calls the human horizon a common moral horizon and depict it in terms of a boundary
144

Berlin, Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment, in Against the Current, 123.

82 that marks off what is moral from what is not.145 But the horizon cannot fulfill this function, on Berlins telling. While the human horizon appears at first to be simply a device of demarcation, indicating what is within, and therefore intelligible despite differences of personality, history, and culture, from what is somehow outside humanity altogether, the imagery of the horizon itself suggests that the boundary between these two, the human and the non-human, is less stark than we might suppose. A horizon in the natural world, after all, does not mark an absolute division, but a fluctuating boundary that varies according to ones perspective. The desire to establish a definition of the human which is synonymous with and constitutive of the moral runs into trouble if we recognize with Berlin that the horizon includes a vast range of practices and beliefs, not all of which we would wish to commend. That the human as Berlin conceives of it cannot easily serve as a shortcut to moral universalism is most evident in the following passage: If I pursue one set of values I may detest another, and may think it damaging to the only form of life that I am able to live or tolerate, for myself or others, in which case I may attack it, I may evenin extreme caseshave to go to war against it. But I still recognize it as a human pursuit. I find Nazi values detestable, but I can understand how, given enough misinformation, enough false belief about reality, one could come to believe they are the only salvation I see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.146

145

Riley writes of a common moral horizon that is minimally liberal in content and Galston refers to the common moral horizon of the species. See Riley, Interpreting Isaiah Berlins Pluralism and Galston, Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory. Neither acknowledges that these terms are not Berlins own or that his notion of the human horizon appears to include values and practices (such as those of the Nazis) that we would judge to be immoral. Berlin, My Intellectual Path, 53.

146

83 In previously quoted passages, Berlin explored the idea of the human horizon in terms of a finite number of human values which are mutually intelligible through great effort. The emphasis was on grasping how one might be a full human beingand at the same time live in the light of values widely different from ones own, but which nevertheless one can see to be values, ends of life, by the realisation of which men could be fulfilled.147 Yet with regard to the Nazis, Berlin seems to include even their values within the human horizon insofar as he wants to argue that Nazis were still men and that it is possible to see how men could be led to behave so gruesomely. Berlins reason for wanting to include even the Nazis and their values within the human horizon stems from the belief that our critical assessment of any behavior or belief is predicated on a recognition of it as human in some sense. In other words, the horizon separates that which we can perceive and recognize as human beliefs and activities (even if informed by widespread illusion or false education) which are therefore available for our understanding and judgment and what is literally non-sensical or incomprehensible to us and therefore immune from judgment. Indeed, critical judgment is exercised within the human horizon. As we saw before, Berlin stresses the importance of imaginative sympathy in regard to ways of life different from our own. Yet he does not suppose such hard-earned understanding to be a replacement for, or an abdication of, judgment. Rather, Berlin tends to present such understanding as a prerequisite for judgment; some imaginative sympathy is required if we wish to judge at all. We are free to reject a particular custom, policy or belief, but only if weve struggled to apprehend it as a human practice. The human horizon, then, does not cleanly mark

147

Berlin, The Pursuit of the Ideal, 10.

84 off what is moral from what is not. Instead, the horizon refers to the immanent and pluralistic field of human experience, within which we attempt to understand and judge in the absence of moral certitudes. Finally, the ambiguity of the human reappears in the hypothetical cases Berlin uses to discuss what is beyond the human horizon, in the sense of being unintelligible: If I say of someone that he is kind or cruel, loves truth or is indifferent to it, he remains human in any either case. But if I find a man to whom it literally makes no difference whether he kicks a pebble or kills his family, since either would be an antidote to ennui or inactivity, I shall not be disposed like consistent relativists, to ascribe to him merely a different code of morality from my own or that of most men, or declare that we disagree on essentials, but shall begin to speak of insanity and inhumanity.148 Here the boundary between the human and the non-human, typically taken for granted, is thrown into question as the result of encountering someone whose behavior seems to violate basic presumptions about how humans think and act, even when those presumptions entail a pluralistic rather than unitary notion of the ends that can or should be pursued. Another example from Berlins writings attempts to draw the boundary of the human in relation to a different hypothetical. Berlin writes: Forms of life differ. Ends, moral principles, are many. But not infinitely many: they must be within the human horizon. If they are not, then they are outside the human sphere. If I find men who worship trees, not because they are symbols of fertility or because they are divine, with a mysterious life and powers of their own, or because this grove is sacred to Athena but only because they are made of wood; and if when I ask them why they worship wood they say Because it is wood and give no other answer; then I do not know what they mean. If they are human, they are not beings with whom I can communicate there is a real barrier. They are not human for me.149

148 149

Berlin, Does Political Theory Still Exist? in Concepts and Categories (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 166. Berlin, The Pursuit of the Ideal, 11-12.

85 Although Berlin is somewhat more ambivalent here than he was in the previous citation as to whether these wood-worshippers should be considered human if they are human, they arent beings with whom Berlin can communicate, and hence they are not human for him the passage reflects a similar structure to the first. In both examples Berlin offers a hypothetical figure that seems to trouble our everyday, common sense understandings of the human. These places in Berlins work highlight the problem of boundary-drawing itself. Rather than positing a sharp division that can be relied upon for organizing our experience, Berlins figures of the inhuman draw attention to the difficulty if not impossibility of establishing a fixed boundary that divides the human from what it is not. Although Berlin holds that there is a limit beyond which we can no longer understand what a given creature is at such that in certain situations we may speak of complete inhumanity, his attempts to specify that limit do more to emphasize its imaginative and unsettled character than to establish it with any certainty.150 Berlins treatment of the human horizon does not supply a fixed definition of the human and instead suggests that the category remains somewhat unsettled, despite our frequent reliance on it.151 (Humans are those who do not murder their family out of boredom and those who do not worship trees, or at least do not worship trees for no good reason?)

150 151

Berlin, Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth Century European Thought, 80.

For example, Berlins inclusion of Nazi values in the human horizon suggests that the horizon is in flux in relation to worldly events. Might the Holocaust so challenge previous understandings of what it means to be human as to alter our conception of the category altogether? One response would involve labeling Nazis as monstrous or inhuman, however, if we follows Berlins lead, it may instead push us toward questioning and re-configuring our very understanding of the human.

86 Berlins approach to the human is important because it can aid in the political project that William Connolly calls pluralization. While conventional pluralism tends to focus its affirmation on established diversity and even then, tends to bound diversity by the territorial state, the normal individual, and monotheistic or monosecular conceptions of morality, pluralization, in contrast, refers to movements and drives in which new entities lay claim to positive identity, thereby challenging the self confidence and congealed judgments of dominant constituencies.152 Connolly convincingly argues that pluralism, as a doctrine of diversity and tolerance, tends to affirm signs of diversity within the status quo, while remaining stingy, cramped and defensive when it comes to new movements of pluralization.153 The features of the Berlinian human horizon considered here are potentially supportive of pluralization, and in two ways. First, the imaginative sympathy that Berlin counsels as a strategy for engaging with unfamiliar identities and cultures might foster greater receptivity toward the politics of becoming in which identities not previously acknowledged as part of the cultural landscape come to acquire positive standing.154 Berlins insistence on our capacity to understand varied and conflicting activities and faiths as fully human might inspire more generous and less hostile styles of response to ways of life instinctively regarded as foreign, strange or even inhuman. Secondly, the ambiguity that marks Berlins engagement with the human is valuable because it can foster a healthy skepticism toward supposedly fixed definitions of the human. Such skepticism is significant for political projects that endeavor not only to protect existing

152 153 154

Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xv, xiii, xv. Ibid., xii.

Politics of becoming is Connollys term of art, appearing in several recent works. In Pluralism, he defines it as a politics by which new constituencies struggle to modify the register of legitimate diversity (68).

87 signifiers of plurality (multiple identities, habits, beliefs) but also to deepen that plurality.155 If Berlins engagement with the human keeps the category alive as a question, it can perhaps be used to push his picture of ethical pluralism a bit closer to the project of democratic pluralization.

V. Toward Pluralistic Democracy As I have argued, transforming Berlins value pluralism into a version of moral absolutism is troubling for democratic politics, because the return to morality misrepresents nonnecessary political constructions as moral imperatives and in turn, devalues the labors of democratic actors who collectively struggle to shape shared conditions in the absence of moral guarantees. The diminishment of associative democratic activity is perhaps unsurprising, since many approaches to value pluralism are so explicitly concerned with reconciling pluralism and liberalism and particularly with proving that the latter follows from the former that the question of democratic politics frequently does not appear at all. The alternative approach I have been developing here, however, not only challenges the return to morality undertaken in Berlins name, but also finds in his writing unexpected democratic potential. Berlins affirmation of indeterminacy, which emphasizes human action and inventiveness, enables a re-interpretation of pluralisms limits as contingent political creations rather than extrapolitical absolutes, thereby de-naturalizing current configurations and perhaps deepening our sense of democratic responsibility. As I also suggested, the tension in Berlins

155

Connolly argues that we may remain closed off to the politics of becoming if we cling too closely to certain universals. The human, I would suggest, is among those necessary-yet-dangerous universals that can stand in the way of political claims that involve new and unexpected articulations of the human or dispute the hegemonic status of that category for questions of ethics and morality. Because there is a powerful historical tendency toward closure in the structure of universals, remaining receptive to pluralizing drives involves a certain wariness toward universals such as the human. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, 185.

88 writings, between value pluralism, on the one hand, and the positing of absolutes, on the other, is not necessarily a contradiction to be overcome. If we recognize those absolutes as commitments made within the political realm rather than moral givens imported to it from without, then the tension between pluralism and absolutism can perhaps be understood as the very structure of democratic political life. Finally, the pluralizing sensibility that I drew out of Berlins engagement with the category of the human can help guard against the reification of the absolutes or limits we do establish, fostering receptivity to movements that challenge current boundaries. Objections can certainly be raised to this creative deployment of Berlins work. Even if Berlin does not ground liberalism in a moral foundation, he is certainly passionately committed to liberalism. The importance of collective democratic participation remains relatively muted in Berlins writings, a minor theme in relation to both pluralism and liberalism. Despite the fact that so much of Berlins thought seems to valorize individual and private modes of existence, I want to argue, by way of conclusion, that Berlins thinking is nonetheless alive to the possibility of pluralistic democracy. Such a conception, in which plurality not only of values, but also of identities, practices, and faiths finds public expression in the associative activities of democratic constituencies, is not openly advocated by Berlin. Nevertheless, his writings, as I show below, pose the problem of pluralistic politics. And if we read both with and against Berlin, certain of his commitments in addition to those mentioned above namely, his antipaternalist stance and his insistence that conflict over ends is endemic to the political can be put in the service of a conception of pluralistic democracy. In order to pursue this possibility, however, it is necessary to first examine Berlins frequently critical relationship to democracy.

89 Although Berlin declares democratic self-government to be a fundamental human need, something valuable in itself156 and sometimes suggests that democratic citizenship shares with his beloved concept of negative liberty a commitment to the exercise of choice,157 his valorization of a specifically negative form of liberty seems to come at the expense of more collective and participatory conceptions, especially because Berlin maintains that the negative liberty he passionately defends is wholly independent of democratic political arrangements. The negative liberty of non-interference that he celebrates is, he argues, not incompatible with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate the absence of self-government.158 Even more significantly, as I show below, Berlin repeatedly conflates democratic self-government with the authoritarian monism he attacks under the heading of positive liberty, such that his harsh dismissals of positive liberty also seem to serve as rejections of collective self-government. Berlin famously argues in the Two Concepts of Liberty that the idea of positive liberty, originally identified with the ideal of individual self-mastery, has historically developed in such a way as to be perverted into its opposite, the apotheosis of authority. The conception of freedom as self-mastery, Berlin posits, became dangerous when applied not merely to a mans
156 157

Berlin, Introduction, xlvii.

Berlin claims that the freedom to choose underlies both the demand to have a voice in the laws and the practices of the society in which one lives, and to be accorded an areain which a man is not obliged to account for his activities to any man, so far as it is compatible with the existence of organized society. Berlin, Introduction, lx. Berlin, Two Concepts, 57. Like recent theorists who emphasize the paradox or tension that exists between liberal rights and popular sovereignty, Berlin argues that non-interference and democratic self-government are distinct and separate pursuits that do not entail one another. He claims, against the later co-originality arguments of Rawls and Habermas, that the modern conception of freedom as the protection of a zone of non-interference is not, at any rate logically, connected with democracy or self-government. There is, according to Berlin, no necessary connexion between individual liberty and democratic rule (129-30). Yet Berlin goes beyond pointing out the non-identity of these two kinds of liberty to privileging the negative liberty of non-interference. He paints the vices of democratic organization, such as the tyranny of the majority, in full color without ever subjecting negative liberty to such a critique.

158

90 inner life, but to his relationships with other members of his society.159 While the metaphor of higher and lower selves (according to which a rational or higher self exercises control over the empirical or lower self) is harmless at the level of the single individual, its transition to society is fatal.160 The higher self becomes identified with institutions, churches, nations, races, states, classes, parties who may exercise compulsion to rationalize the irrational section of society.161 This is how what had begun as a doctrine of freedom turned into a doctrine of authority.162 Yet Berlin does not restrict his criticism to the rule of experts that mis-represents its oppressive authority as a brand of freedom. In this seminal essay, positive liberty does not only refer to the idea of individual self-mastery and its subsequent perversion into a defense of authoritarian rule. Instead, positive liberty is used by Berlin to designate any collective conception of freedom, including democratic self-government and participation in popular sovereignty. And at certain crucial moments, Berlin uses the democratic designation of positive liberty and one which refers to something close to a pure totalitarian doctrine interchangeably. As a result, the freedom that involves participation in the government of ones society, which he otherwise seems to want to affirm as genuine and worthy, becomes entangled with rational monism in Berlins text. In Two Concepts, Berlin asserts that the answer to the question Who governs me? is logically distinct from the question How far does government interfere with me? It is in this
159 160 161 162

Berlin, Two Concepts, 145. Ibid., 150. Ibid. Berlin, Introduction, xliv.

91 difference that the great contrast between the two concepts of negative and positive liberty, in the end, consists. Berlin immediately substitutes democracy and individual liberty for positive and negative liberty, respectively. And he offers, The desire to be governed by myself, or at any rate to participate in the process by which my life is to be controlled, may be as deep a wish as that of a free area for action, and perhaps historically older. But it is not a desire for the same thing. A critical slippage follows: For it is this the positive conception of liberty: not freedom from, but freedom to to lead one prescribed form of life which the adherents of the negative notion represent as being, at times, no better than a specious disguise for brutal tyranny.163 Berlin has moved rather seamlessly from a democratic meaning of positive liberty, linked to participation in government, to one which concerns the freedom to lead one prescribed form of life. The collapse of democratic freedom and monism has the rhetorical effect of sullying the former with the authoritarian connotations of the latter. A similar confusion appears in the final section of the essay in which Berlin sums up his argument. I do not say that the ideal of self-perfection whether for individuals or nations or churches or classes is to be condemned in itselfIndeed, I have tried to show that it is the notion of freedom in its positive sense that is at the heart of the demands for national or social self-direction which animate the most powerful and morally just movements of our timeBut equally it seems to be that the belief that some single formula can in principle be found whereby all the diverse ends of men can be harmoniously realized is demonstrably false.164 In these few lines, Berlin shifts from a meaning of positive liberty as self-perfection to one of national self-direction and finally to one which involves belief in a single harmonious

163 164

Berlin, Two Concepts, 130-1. Ibid., 169.

92 solution. It is evident that these concepts are not interchangeable; a morally just social movement can agitate for the right to participate in self-direction without endorsing the view that perfection is possible or that there exists a clear formula for ordering human affairs. Yet as in the previous example, Berlin mixes notions of democratic self-government with the idea of rational monism, which he casts disparagingly. This conflation not only tarnishes democratic freedom by association. It also maintains a strict alignment between on the one hand, positive freedom (in which Berlin includes democratic self-government) and monism and, on the other, negative freedom and pluralism, thereby foreclosing the question of the possible relationship between democracy and pluralism. Without diminishing the significance of this foreclosure, I want to argue that Berlins tendency to collapse democratic self-government into authoritarianism must be understood in terms of his specific historical moment and the practical political dangers he sought to expose in his writing. That is, when Berlin, writing in 1958, applies the label positive liberty to both a democratic understanding of collective freedom and to the monistic imposition of a single way of life, he is in effect repeating a totalitarian discourse he wants to expose, and reject. That discourse is one which justifies oppressive rule through the rhetoric of collective freedom. Although Berlin sometimes seems to be uncritically echoing, without fully interrogating, the association between monistic authority and positive liberty (including democratic freedom), his motivation is clear. Berlin always understood the Two Concepts essay to be an intervention into a specific political crisis of his time. Commenting on it some years later, he acknowledged that perhaps he had not adequately articulated the degree to which the concept of negative liberty bore its own dangers and could, like positive liberty, be used to justify deeply troubling (though

93 different) political programs. Yet he maintained that the rhetoric of positive liberty was his target precisely because it appeared to be the rising force at present. And he argued in 1969 that it continues to play its historic roleas a cloak for despotism in the name of wider freedom.165 In light of Berlins own critical purposes, then, we can see that when he collapses positive liberty, including democratic participation, into authoritarian monism, this collapse is a repetition of the very gesture that he takes aim at. Yet because he fails to explicitly critique the totalitarian discourse that links the monistic imposition of a single way of life to collective freedom, the possibility of pluralistic democracy cannot emerge within Berlins framework. Berlins deep concern with the oppressive totalitarian regimes of his age shapes not only his treatment of positive liberty, but also his more general portrait of politics. That portrait figures politics as an activity of the monistic state, a necessary evil toward which we should be wary. This is not surprising, especially in light of Berlins personal experiences as a Russian Jew in the first part of the 20th century,166 but the equation of political power with overreaching state authority contributes to his strong emphasis on privacy and relative neglect of the question of whether participatory politics and not only protections from interference might honor the plurality of values and the difficult choices it requires. Instead, Berlin defines political rights as precisely safeguards against intervention by the state.167 Our political rights consist most
165 166

Berlin, Introduction, xlvii.

Berlin witnessed the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent coup as a child in Petrograd and credited this experience with giving him a lifelong horror of physical violence. Jahanbegloo, Conversations, 4. And although Berlins family moved to England when he was 10, where he remained except for a year spent in the U.S. during WWII, his grandfathers, an uncle, an aunt, and three cousins were killed by the Nazis in Riga in 1941.

Berlin, Two Concepts, 124. At the end of the Two Concepts essay when Berlin asks, What would make a society truly free? and answers the question with reference, first, to rights that can regarded as absolute, so that all men, whatever power governs them, have an absolute right to refuse to behave inhumanly and second, to certain frontiers of inviolability that should not be trespassed. Neither answer offers any provisions for citizen

167

94 essentially, then, in our ability to be free from politics, rather than in our access to public power or our ability to participate in the political decisions by which our lives are shaped. While Berlin is certainly justified in his concern with the coercive power of the state, his reduction of politics to that coercive power helps to script in advance the appeal of limited government and individual freedom from politics. When politics is understood first and foremost as a bastion of monism, pluralism is figured as something which exists outside the domain of the political namely, in the private sphere and stands in need of protection from encroachment by government. It is not only by aligning politics with monism that Berlin pushes pluralism into a nonpolitical domain; he also does so when he names the pluralism that concerns him value pluralism. By framing pluralism specifically in terms of values, Berlin performs his own turn to ethics a turn that tends to minimize pluralisms possible political import. Although this turn is not the return to moral absolutism with which many of his contemporary liberal readers wish to credit him, Berlins adoption of an ethical vocabulary for his discussion of pluralism is nonetheless significant. To appreciate its significance, it is helpful to recall that Berlins writings on value pluralism emerged in the wake of an early 20th century political discourse that advocated a specifically political pluralism. In the contemporary American context, political pluralism is most often identified with a branch of post-war political science associated primarily with the work of Robert Dahl, yet there existed an earlier generation of self-described pluralists whose ideas bore little resemblance

involvement in politics; they equate freedom with safeguards rights or frontiers that insulate individuals from whatever power governs them.

95 to Dahlian pluralism.168 This earlier group, which is more of a cluster of thinkers than a coherent school, took inspiration from William James pluralistic philosophy of radical empiricism and sought to apply his insights politically. Anglo-American political pluralists such as Arthur Bentley, Ernest Barker, Harold Laski, John Figgis, and Mary Parker Follett were influenced by James evocation of a varied, dynamic and diverse multiverse which challenged philosophical absolutism by insisting on the irreducibility of difference. They built on James metaphysical approach to critique absolutist unity in politics. Specifically, they challenged both the theoretical and practical political focus on the state and its sovereignty. Laski declared, What the Absolute is to metaphysics, that the state is to political theory.169 These early political pluralists focused on an awareness of and consideration of difference and group life below the level of the state.170 Although these pluralist thinkers did not share a common program for political change, they all sought to develop creative institutional designs that would multiply political sites in layers between individual citizens and the state. Follett, who advocated a robust federalism animated by new conceptions of modes of association, insisted, Life is a recognition of

168

For discussions of this earlier generation of pluralist thinkers, see especially David Schlosberg, Resurrecting the Pluralist Universe, Political Research Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1998) and his entry titled The Pluralist Imagination in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. John Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See also Kirstie McClure, On the Subject of Rights: Pluralism, Plurality, and Political Identity, in Dimensions of Radical Democracy, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992). Scholsberg credits McClure with recognizing affinities between these early pluralists and contemporary thinkers who advocate a pluralist politics. Avigail Eisenbergs book, Reconstructing Political Pluralism (Albany, NY: State University of NewYork Press, 1995) offers a good introduction to some of these thinkers, whose ideas she draws on to interrupt the communitarian/liberal deadlock of the 1980s. For a sampling of some of the writings from the early pluralist era, see Paul Q. Hirst, ed. The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G.D.H. Cole, J.N. Figgis and H.J. Laski (London: Routledge, 1989). Harold Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), 6. David Schlosberg, The Pluralist Imagination, 1.

169 170

96 multitudinous multiplicity; politics must be shaped for that.171 While Cole supported guild socialism, Figgis argued for a state that was an association of associations dedicated to helping citizens maintain such groups, and Laski advocated federal arrangements with plural authority, all of these thinkers pursued versions of what Kirstie McClure has dubbed distributive sovereignty.172 The existence of this prior discourse of political pluralism reminds us that treating pluralism exclusively as a matter of values, as Berlin does, is by no means the only possibility. If, contra Berlin, pluralism is approached first and foremost as an ineradicable dimension of political existence, as it was by the inter-war political pluralists, it directs us toward considerations of how political power might be more equitably distributed among a diverse citizenry and how institutional entities might be multiplied to better reflect the texture of a pluralist society.173 Political pluralism can also be explored, as it has been in William Connollys recent work, as a democratic project that involves pluralizing or enhancing the diversity of cultures, identities, and beliefs we presently recognize and creating opportunities for the public articulation of these newly emergent constituencies. These varied democratic responses to pluralism go un-pursued by Berlin, largely because he restricts pluralism to the category of values and forwards a deeply skeptical (and monist) vision of politics itself.
171 172 173

Mary Parker Follett, The New State (New York: Longman Green and Co., 1918), 291. Kirstie McClure, On the Subject of Rights: Pluralism, Plurality, and Political Identity, 116.

One of the challenges Berlins thinking poses to such a pursuit apart from his framing of pluralism as a matter of values is that his writings exhibit little interest in or awareness of associational collectivities. While it is true, as many commentators have pointed out, that Berlin does not forward an atomistic understanding of the individual he envisions social and cultural formations as wholes that serve the crucially important social function of belonging. Berlin, The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West, 38. Nowhere in his work does Berlin explore the sorts of differentiated and associative relations that lie off the map of the singular individual/holistic culture dyad upon which his work implicitly relies.

97 Berlins work, however, also bears affinities with the political pluralist tradition that preceded him; it is not simply a departure from it. In fact, if we place Berlins writing alongside political pluralist arguments that preceded and succeeded him rather than reading him exclusively through the lens of liberal political theory new resources, which push in the direction of pluralistic democracy, come to the fore. In particular, the anti-paternalist and antiinstrumentalist strains of Berlins political theory suggest that Berlin could serve as an unexpected ally for those committed to a vision of pluralistic democracy. When Berlin condemns intrusive rule by the state over individual lives, he directs his criticism largely at the paternalistic character of extensive state control. He argues, All paternalistic governments, however benevolent, cautious, disinterested, and rational, have tended, in the end, to treat the majority of men as minorsThis is a policy which degrades men174 He claims that the tendency to view human needs in their entirety as those of the inmates of a prison or a reformatory or a hospital, however sincerely it may be held, is a gloomy, false, and ultimately degraded view, resting on denial of the rational and productive nature of all, or even the majority of, men.175 In these passages and elsewhere Berlin attacks the despotic character of governments which treat citizens as children or inmates who require intensive supervision and guidance for their own good. He charges such approaches with misunderstanding and demeaning humans, who are creative and self-directing beings.176 Although Berlins focus is on how paternalistic policies deny individuals negative liberty, the

174 175 176

Berlin, Introduction, lxii. Berlin, Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century, 35. Ibid.

98 larger point he makes about the degradation that is inherent in rule by experts who claim to do for men what they cannot do for themselves has democratic implications.177 It points to the possibility that expert rule also offends against the abilities of ordinary people to participate in self-governance. The challenge Berlin levels at an infantilizing view of citizenship that subjects the majority of people to intrusive governance by those who know better resonates with democratic claims made on behalf of the right of all citizens to participate in political-decision making, not only by granting their consent or allocating their power to a representative elite, but by enjoying sufficient access to institutions which enable direct citizen action. Berlins objection to political rule by experts refuses not only the image of citizens as minors or patients. He also suggests that the very understanding of politics as a domain of expertise is flawed, because politics is not primarily a technical matter involving the selection of the best means for achieving identified ends. Instead, politics is about the conflict over ends. Concerning social and political theory, Berlin writes that these studies spring from, and thrive on, discord. He continues, Someone may question this on the ground that even in a society of saintly anarchists, where no conflicts about ultimate purpose can take place, political problems, for example constitutional or legislative issues, might still arise. But this objection rests on a mistake. Where ends are agreed, the only question left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines like arguments between engineers or doctors.178 Although Berlins characterization of science as a purely technical endeavor is surely questionable, his larger point about the nature of political problems is nonetheless important.
177

Berlin, Two Concepts, 151. Berlin declares paternalism to be an insult to my conception of myself as a human being, determined to make my own life in accordance with my own (not necessarily rational or benevolent) purposes (152). Ibid., 118.

178

99 Political questions, he insists, are not primarily instrumental. They are questions concerning which among the plurality of incompatible and even incommensurable ends we wish to pursue, rather than questions of how to achieve already-determined ends. The juxtaposition of political with technical questions makes conflict over ends the very essence of politics. Such conflict is not capable of resolution by experts or machines. Nonetheless, Berlin argues, we are frequently tempted to assimilate politics to technique. Writing approvingly of the great philanthropic foundations of the West that attempt to alleviate suffering through the use of men and money, experts and equipment, Berlin argues that there is a troubling tendency difficult to avoid, but disastrous to assimilate all mens primary needs to those that are capable of being met by these methods: the reduction of all questions and aspirations to dislocations which the expert can set right.179 Based on Berlins distinction between political and technical matters, we can appreciate that when political questions undergo such a reduction, it results in the suppression or denial of value conflict. Understanding politics as a technical activity of experts assumes that the ends of political action, the values we want to honor and pursue in our social arrangements, are already determined, rather than objects of continuing controversy. Berlins insistence that politics entails conflict over ends is significant because it complicates the tendency considered above, in which politics seems to be bound up with monism. If Berlin recognizes that political life at the most fundamental level concerns a diversity of ends and the conflicts between them, then monism is not intrinsic to political organization as such, but appears instead as a problematic strategy for containing the pluralistic

179

Berlin, Political Ideas, 35.

100 character of politics itself. Pluralism, then, is not simply cast outside of the political domain by Berlin, but appears as an imperiled characteristic of the political. Put differently, although Berlin sometimes pits value pluralism against the monistic tendencies of various political orders, this opposition need not be read as a claim about the nature of politics. Viewed in light of the assertion that politics properly understood concerns a multiplicity of competing values or ends, Berlins identification of monism with both democratic rule and the state more generally can perhaps be understood as the articulation of a worry over the suppression of pluralism intrinsic to politics. Berlins distinction between technical, means-oriented matters of expertise and political matters which concern the conflict over ends installs disagreement at the heart of the political. Contra dominant Rawlsian and Habermasian approaches which endeavor to restrict the entry of plural values into the political realm, Berlins position suggests that such projects are misguided, insofar as discord is endemic to any form of political life that has not been reduced to a species of technical expertise. The acceptance of disagreement, contest, and conflict as intrinsic features of politics is suggested (though not fully articulated) by Berlins identification of politics with debate over conflicting and even incommensurable ends, rather than the selection of means. Such a view can inspire a pluralist democratic approach that understands politics to involve associative struggles over the organization of shared conditions. Thus, while Berlin put his arguments against paternalism and the instrumentalization of politics in the service of his liberalism, this is not the only possibility. Indeed, I would suggest that if we, like Berlin, seek to critically respond to present political conditions, we must take seriously what Berlin did not namely, the liberal ultra-individualism he disregarded as a

101 relatively minor force in 1969.180 And a critical response to that problem (which was not Berlins own) can benefit from creative efforts to marry Berlins pluralist disposition to an associative democratic conception of politics. Pluralistic democracy can find surprising but considerable sustenance in Berlins work. His anti-paternalist sentiments in conjunction with his understanding of politics as inherently conflictual can lend support to a vision of associative democracy that seeks to give public expression to pluralism, by fostering multiple sites for citizen debate, disagreement, and decision. And as I have already suggested, if we forgo the foundationalist aspirations of many of Berlins recent liberal readers, it becomes possible to regard the tension between pluralism and absolutism that marks Berlins thought not as a problem to be overcome but as an illustration of the very structure of democratic politics a politics that is sure to be enhanced by the capacities for imaginative sympathy and critical judgment that Berlin also explores and celebrates. In addition, Berlins appreciation of the creative powers by which human beings give shape to an indeterminate universe invites a new understanding of the boundary-drawing that establishes certain individual rights, for example, as inviolable. Such an understanding recognizes the necessity of frontiers that establish certain rights or protections as non-negotiable yet reminds us that these boundaries are the results of political decisions, rather than given by nature or morality. Accepting the humanly-made character of the limits we give to total pluralism means recognizing both their fundamental instability and our own accountability for their creation, protection or revision. Pluralistic democracy, with its focus on citizens capacity to self-govern,

180

Berlin. Introduction, xlvi.

102 entrusts to democratic forms of action responsibility for the invention, maintenance and reworking of liberal limits.

103 Chapter 3 Michel Foucault and the Limits of the Care of the Self In light of the democratic dangers posed by the return to morality, which I tracked in relation to Isaiah Berlins thought, the work of Michel Foucault would seem to constitute a much needed antidote. Foucault, after all, is famous and, by some, reviled for refusing to formulate his analyses in terms of strong normative prescriptions.181 Major strands of his scholarship are dedicated to exposing the complex and even sinister implications of what are widely regarded as clear signs of moral development.182 And his striking analysis of normalization warns of the way in which social control is accomplished through value-laden classifications such as the normal and the deviant. Whatever its faults, Foucaults work surely mounts a major challenge to absolutism, by reminding us of the historical character of even apparently self-evident standards and by foregrounding the exclusions and violences that lurk within claims to moral progress.

181

Nancy Fraser, for example, critiques Foucaults theory of power for being normatively neutral. Because Foucault does not offer any independently justified norms, he is unable to explain why resistance to existing configurations of power is needed: Only with the introduction of normative notions could he begin to tell us what is wrong with domination and why we ought to oppose it. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 29. Jrgen Habermas approvingly cites Fraser on this point and faults Foucaults cryptonormative approach for failing to answer the question,Why fight at all? Jrgen Habermas, Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 284. A similar complaint is made by Mark Bevir, who claims that Foucault gives us an undifferentiated concept of power that deprives us of the tools to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forms of power. Mark Bevir, Foucault and Critique: Deploying Agency against Autonomy, Political Theory 27, no. 1 (1999). For Michael Walzer, Foucault is, ultimately, a nihilist, because he gives us no reason to believe that new social arrangements will be better than the ones we now live with. Nor, for that matter, does he give us any way of knowing what better might mean. Michael Walzer, The Politics of Michel Foucault, Dissent 30 (1983), 487.

For example, his work in the first volume of The History of Sexuality disturbs the conventional liberatory narrative according to which Victorian sexuality, marked by profound repression, was historically overcome in favor of greater sexual freedom. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1976). And his analysis of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish at the very least unsettles the conventional wisdom that views practices of punishment as evolving over time in the direction of ever-greater humanity. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

182

104 Foucault remains skeptical of the moral-universalistic idiom, yet significantly, he affirms the importance of the category of ethics. Making present a distinction, traceable to Aristotle, between morality, on the one hand, and ethics, on the other, Foucault argues that morality typically involves a set of values and rules of action prescribed to individuals while the ethics of subjectivation concerns the manner in which one forms oneself as an ethical subject.183 On the basis of this imperfect typology,184 Foucault performs his own turn to ethics in his late work, investigating ancient Greco-Roman ethical practices and considering the possible significance of an ethics of self-care for the present. In these writings and interviews, Foucault is fascinated by rapport a soi, or the relationship of the self to itself, which he defines as ethics proper and as the site of the practice of freedom. This foray into ethics, considered as a matter of human freedom, seemed to mark a major departure for Foucault, whose previous work provided a landmark analysis of disciplinary society as the setting for the production of obedient, useful subjects. Foucault was now concerned explicitly with freedom, whereas his earlier work seemed to do nothing so well as track the ways in which modern power can induce unfreedom. Moreover, he approached freedom on what might be called a micro-level, in terms of an ethics of individual selfstylization, while he had previously focused on vast networks of power and the effects of largescale phenomena such as institutions and discourses.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 25-29.
184

183

Foucault acknowledges that command morality and the ethics of subjectivation coexist in practice: Every morality, in the broad sense comprises the two elements I have just mentioned: codes of behavior and forms of subjectivation. Yet he maintains that one of these two elements usually dominates such that the morality/ethics distinction remains useful (The Use of Pleasure, 29).

105 Foucaults inquiry into the category of ethics invites us to consider the meaning of what Foucault calls politics as an ethics.185 Does ethics, understood in terms of care of the self, harbor political potential? Might an ethics centered on the project of self-constitution be more amenable to the practice of associative democratic politics than those revived species of moral absolutism considered in Chapter 2? Could the ethics of self-care, which Foucault links to the multiplication of styles of subjectivity beyond the type of individuality encouraged by the state, counter the monistic impulses which captured Berlins concern? In pursuit of these questions, it is necessary to begin with a close analysis of the turn to ethics within Foucaults work. What possible relation exists between the analysis of modern power for which Foucault is most famous and his inquiry into the aesthetics of existence? What is at stake in Foucaults identification of care of the self as a practice of freedom? If freedom is always immanent to the domain of power, as his earlier work proposed, what is the connection between the care of the self, understood as a practice of freedom, and those peculiar forms of power disciplinary and bio that Foucault so deftly theorized? This chapter focuses on the relationship between Foucaults analysis of modern power and his exploration of ethics. I am interested in what leads Foucault to devote his attention to the care of the self, and to frame that activity as an exercise of freedom. I suggest that the category of the subject which so dominates Foucaults oeuvre, sets up the terms in which he explores human freedom, so that freedom is conceived mainly as a practice undertaken by individual subjects in reflexive relation with themselves. This conception of freedom, centered on the individuals project of self-creation, tends to obscure the importance of a specifically democratic
Michel Foucault, Politics and Ethics: An Interview, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 375.
185

106 practice of freedom in which a plurality of subjects combine together in an effort to transform shared conditions. Despite this tendency, I show that Foucaults own analysis of power reveals though without fully theorizing the significance of such associative democratic action. Could Foucaults work on disciplinary and bio power contain an important and overlooked political critique that points the way toward an appreciation of collective democratic action? Although Foucaults theory of subjectification is well known, there is an aspect of his account of modern forms of power that is rarely noticed: namely, his work suggests that certain types of power tend to diminish the political potential of human association. The processes of individualization and massification, which Foucault associates with disciplinary and bio power, respectively, are best read, I argue, as processes which exert de-politicizing effects on human collectivities. Drawing out this aspect of Foucaults thought clarifies the political problems his work diagnoses and highlights the limits of an individualized ethical response to them. I show that Foucaults own account of power implicitly forwards a conception of associative democratic activity and I argue that such activity constitutes a more promising mode of resistance to contemporary operations of power than does the reflexive ethics Foucault openly championed.

I. Foucaults Theory of Power and the Problem of Freedom The theory of modern power, for which Foucault is perhaps best known, disputes the traditional juridical understanding, which likens power to an object that is possessed and which

107 functions as a prohibition on those who do not have it.186 In place of this common-sensical understanding, Foucault articulates a conception of power characterized by ubiquity, activity, and productivity. Power is figured as a network which runs through the whole social body.187 It is omnipresent, rather than a stable, locatable entity: Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybodys hands, never appropriated as a commodity or a piece of wealth.188 According to Foucaults model, power is exercised rather than possessed.189 Powers exercise is not primarily repressive. The view of power as repression is a wholly negative, narrow, skeletal conception that has been curiously widespread. This framework identifies power with a law which says no, but Foucault counters, If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? Rather, what makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply

Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 98. The conception of power that Foucault critiques is central to notions of political sovereignty that depict individuals as possessors of a commodity-like power that is partially or completely ceded in order to establish political authority. On this view, power is understood to belong to a centralized authority with the force of the negative on its side, a power to say no. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 85. But Foucault declares, We must eschew the model of the Leviathan in the study of power, noting that in political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Foucault, Two Lectures, 102; see also The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 88-9.
187 188 189

186

Michel Foucault, Truth and Power, in Power/Knowledge, 119. Foucault, Two Lectures, 98.

For a helpful discussion of Foucaults theory of power that situates it in relation to other theories of power in the field of political science, see Peter Digeser, The Fourth Face of Power, The Journal of Politics 54, no. 4 (1992).

108 the fact that it doesnt weigh on us only as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasures, forms knowledge, produces discourse.190 Powers productivity extends to individuals. Against the conventional view which imagines the individual as a sort of elementary nucleus which power then acts upon, Foucault insists that the subject should be understood as an effect of power. There are not first individuals, and then subsequently, the intervention of a power which shapes, alters, or limits those individuals. Rather, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals.191 The individual, as an effect of power, is not to be misunderstood as an inert target, however. Individuals, constituted in and through power, are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. This simultaneity is captured by the term assujettissement (variously translated as subjection, subjugation, and subjectivation), which Foucault uses to describe the way in which power inaugurates the subject. The term is meant to capture an essential ambivalence: power is the source of our constitution as subjects in both senses of the word.192 If, as Foucault tells us, power is everywhere, where or what is freedom? And if power is responsible for making subjects, what does this mean for our understanding of human
190

Foucault, Truth and Power, 119. In The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Foucault also contends that power holds good in part because it is self-concealing: power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms (86). Foucault, Two Lectures, 98.

191 192

Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 60. Foucault also refers to the double-meaning of the term in a later essay: There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in James Faubion, ed., Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3, Power (New York: The New Press, 1994), 331.

109 agency? The difficulty of these questions seems only to increase when one turns to Foucaults analysis of disciplinary power in particular and the figure at the center of that analysis: the prison. Although Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison focuses on the development of new penal practices, beginning in the mid 1700s, which involve the meticulous control of the operations of the body, its theory of discipline is more far-reaching than the books subtitle suggests.193 The new micro-physics of power on display in the modern prison, which aims to effect a relation of docility-utility by increasing the forces of the body in economic terms of utility and diminishing the same forces in political terms of obedience,194 is not confined within prison walls.195 Indeed, Discipline and Punish is most forceful and unsettling when the modern prison comes to serve as a potent symbol of the larger phenomenon Foucault calls disciplinary society.196 The primary disciplinary techniques of surveillance and normalization, Foucault suggests, operate not only within the prison, but throughout the social world. The docile and useful subject is coaxed into existence by a meticulous and detailed regulation, the supervision of the smallest fragment of life and of the body.197 And it is the fact of being constantly seen,

193 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 140. Unlike earlier forms of punishment, which were designed to produce physical pain, this new penality treats the body as an instrument or intermediary rather than its final object (11). For this reason, it also claims the honor of being more humane than earlier practices of public torture. 194 195

Ibid., 138.

At a minimum, Foucault positions the modern prison as one relatively enclosed institution among many, all of which have discipline as their principle of internal functioning (216). He explains, The prison is like a rather disciplined barracks, a strict school, a dark workshop, but not qualitatively different (233). Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 209. Ibid., 140.

196 197

110 of being always able to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.198 This practice of surveillance, exemplified most fully by Benthams Panopticon, is coupled with disciplinary powers other great instrument, normalization.199 Normalization refers to a system of reward and punishment in which the power of the Norm operates as a minimum threshold, as an average to be respected, or as an optimum towards which one must move. The norm individualizes by quantifying and hierarchizing all differences in relation to the norm; it differentiates by distributing behaviors and individuals along a scale of value. It is, of course, also homogenizing; the norm works by exercising a constant pressure to conform to the same model.200 The genius of surveillance and normalization as techniques of disciplinary power lies in their minimization of force: It is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.201 This efficient and light power induces a subject that assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.202

198

Ibid., 187. According to Benthams plan, a central tower overlooks multiple cells occupied by inmates who cannot see or communicate with one another but are under the perpetual gaze of a guard. The principle of such power is that it is visible and unverifiable the watch tower is always visible, yet inmates do not actually know whether they are being observed at any given moment. As Foucault puts it, Like surveillance and with it, normalization becomes one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age. Ibid., 184. Ibid., 180-4. Ibid., 202. Ibid., 202-3.

199

200 201 202

111 But the modern prisoner is not alone in assuming responsibility for the constraints of power, on Foucaults telling. This is because disciplinary techniques such as surveillance can be detached from any specific use and applied to the reform of prisoners, the treatment of patients, the instruction of schoolchildren, the confinement of the insane, the supervision of workers and so on.203 Indeed, according to Foucault, the power exercised through surveillance was destined to spread throughout the social body; its destiny was to become a generalized function.204 In other words, there has been a historical shift from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance. This shift corresponds to the birth of disciplinary society.205 If the production of docile, useful, normal subjects does not only take place within the confines of the prison but characterizes our institutional world or society more generally, isnt this reason to despair? If the power that is everywhere is a power that tends to render the subject the source of her own subjection, isnt this in some important sense a foreclosure of freedom? Many readers have posed these and similar questions to Foucault, arguing that disciplinary society, within the analysis Foucault provides, amounts to such an exhaustive and complete system of control that there seems to be little chance of resistance, much less of

203 204 205

Ibid., 205. See also 202. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 209.

112 freedom in any active, creative sense.206 Indeed, what can freedom mean in a world characterized by the omnipresence of power?

II. Thinking Freedom Immanently Although Foucault expressed shock concerning the categorization of this thinking as deterministic,207 it is perhaps not surprising that some interpreters read Foucaults work this way. His whole approach to the concepts of power and freedom undermines some of our most cherished and familiar ways of thinking. In particular, Foucault challenges conventional liberal beliefs in the sovereignty of the individual and the equation of liberation with freedom. Understanding these critical features of his thought is a necessary preliminary to pursuing the further question of what Foucault might mean when he says, I firmly believe in human freedom.208 First, Foucaults presentation of the subject as an effect of power directly counters those views that depict freedom as the property of a (semi) sovereign individual. There is no autonomous, self-founding subject on the Foucauldian landscape. His subject is, from the

206

Nancy Hartsock, Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women? in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Linda Alcoff, Feminist Politics and Foucault: The Limits to a Collaboration, in Crises in Continental Philosophy, ed. Arleen Dallery and Charles Scott (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990). Hartsock asserts that Foucault get[s] rid of subjectivity and thereby robs feminism of the project that involves constituting ourselves as subjectsof history (170). Alcoff contends that Foucaults account of power lacks an adequate theory of resistance and undercuts possibilities for effective resistance to domination (70).

207

See for example, Interview with Actes, in Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3, in which Foucault declares, I am flabbergasted that people are able to see in my historical studies the affirmation of a determinism from which one cannot escape (399). Elsewhere Foucault insists, The idea that power is a system of domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom cannot be attributed to me. Michel Foucault,The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom, in Paul Rabinow, ed. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1, Ethics (New York: The New Press, 1994), 293 (hereafter cited as ECS). Foucault, Interview with Actes, 399.

208

113 beginning, embedded in a vast network of power relations; she is dependent upon power for her very constitution as a subject. Unlike traditional liberal conceptions which imagine a free individual who in some sense exists prior to or apart from society and whose freedom inheres in this independence, Foucault posits a human subject who is always simultaneously undergoing and exercising power. While this description remains somewhat ambiguous, it clearly serves as a challenge to the image of the individual as an ultimate source and origin point, a being whose freedom resides in her sovereignty. Foucaults second major challenge, directed at the idea of freedom as liberation, is perhaps even more profound. For there are many thinkers who, like Foucault, question the salience of the notion of the sovereign individual, yet remain attached to the idea of liberation in some form. Charles Taylor, for example, working in a decidedly humanist vein, contests the overly atomized view of individuals that informs much of the liberal tradition, but he also insists on a liberatory conception of freedom. In fact, he makes the following criticism of Foucault: He wants to discredit as somehow based on a misunderstanding the very idea of liberation from power. But I am arguing that power, in his sense, does not make sense without at least the idea of liberation.209 Before taking up Taylors objection, which claims that Foucaults theory of power is incoherent due to the absence of any idea of liberation, lets consider two ways in which Foucault contests the understanding of freedom as liberation. First, he is critical of the notion of liberation because it often involves an idea of human nature as the object of emancipation. As Foucault endeavored to show in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, what we understand to be
209

Charles Taylor, Foucault on Freedom and Truth, in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1986), 92.

114 the deepest truth about ourselves our sexuality, for example is itself the effect of elaborate operations of power and not a given essence waiting to be released from the strictures of repression. So there is for Foucault, no true self or true nature to be liberated. He explained in a late interview, I have always been somewhat suspicious of the notion of liberation, because it if it is not treated with precautions and within certain limits, one runs the risk of falling back on the idea that there exists a human nature or base that, as a consequence of certain historical, economic, and social processes, has been concealed, alienated, or imprisoned in and by mechanisms of repression.210 Foucault also critiques the idea of liberation as an escape from power relations altogether, which underlies the liberal concept of negative freedom. On that view, liberty consists in the removal of constraints and the securing of an area outside the workings of power. No such area exists in the Foucauldian universe; power is everywhere. So although Foucault recognizes that there are events that can be considered acts of liberation in some sense as when a colonized people attempts to liberate itself from its colonizers what such liberation enables is the creation of new power relationships, not an escape from power altogether.211 The conventional view of liberation and negative liberty that Foucault counters is one in which power is

210

Foucault, ECS, 282. But see Judith Butlers discussion of Foucaults Introduction to Herculin Barbin. Butler convincingly argues that in the Barbin text we see Foucaults sentimental indulgence in the very emancipatory discourse his analysis in The History of Sexuality was meant to displace. According to this Foucaultian model of emancipatory sexual politics, the overthrow of sex results in the release of a primary sexual multiplicity (96). Butler argues that there is also an unresolved tension in The History of Sexuality itself, because although Foucault argues that there is no sex in itself which is not produced by complex interactions of discourse and power, he occasionally invokes the idea of bucolic and innocent pleasures that exist prior to the imposition of various regulative strategies (97). Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. 91-106. Foucault, ECS, 284.

211

115 understood as wholly repressive and freedom consists in overthrowing its prohibitions and establishing a zone beyond its reach. Returning now to Taylors objection that Foucaults notion of power requires the idea of liberation, and does not make sense without it, we can identify the core conviction underlying this statement. It is the belief that power is freedoms opposite. According to this dominant conception, power is essentially constraining and freedom consists in the removal of constraint. Where there is freedom, there is not power, and vice versa. This central tenet of liberal thought guides Taylors reading of Foucault. Within a framework that treats power and freedom as mutually exclusive, Foucaults claim that power is everywhere and in some sense inescapable, can only spell death to freedom, since it means that liberation from power is impossible. Foucault, however, argues that the ubiquity of power does not mean that there is no freedom, because power and freedom are not opposed in the way liberal thought supposes them to be. What, then, is their relation? What is freedom on Foucaults view, if it is not liberation from power? Sometimes Foucault claims that power relations are, by definition, relations between free subjects: Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are available.212 Here, to be free seems to mean not to be determined, in the sense that the subject engaged in a relation of power, even one over whom power is exercised, still has several courses of action open to her. This seems to be the sort of freedom Foucault has in mind when he describes power as a set
212

Foucault, The Subject and Power, 342.

116 of actions upon actions. That is, power incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; it releases or contrives, makes more probable or lessbut it is always a way of acting upon one or more acting subjects by virtue of their being capable of action.213 There are no inert targets of power, on Foucaults telling. Power relations, by Foucaults definition, exist between and among subjects who are capable of acting. In addition to depicting freedom as a characteristic of the subjects engaged in power relations in the sense that they are (albeit unequally) capable of action, Foucault also speaks of freedom in a slightly more abstract sense as a force that meets and challenges power. Although not wholly opposed to one another, freedom and power are the terms of an essential agonism that animates every social relationship.214 Here, freedom and power are presented as coparticipants in a struggle: The power relationship and freedoms refusal to submit cannot therefore be separatedAt the heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential antagonism, it would be better to speak of an agonism of a relationship that is at the same time mutual incitement and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.215 Foucault depicts the freedom-power relation as a play between forces.216 Freedom counters the exercise of power, the attempt to structure the field of possible action with it own

Ibid., 341. Here Foucault links this notion of power as action upon actions to the idea of government in terms of its broad meaning in the 16th century, as modes of action designed to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. Power, as a conduct of conducts is a question of government.
214 215 216

213

Ibid., 345. Ibid., 342.

See Paul Pattons essay concerning Charles Taylors claim that Foucaults notion of power does not make sense without at least the idea of liberation for an insightful reading of the way power and freedom share a common nature as forces in Foucaults work. Patton argues that the relationship between power and force in Foucaults earlier texts parallels the relationship between power and freedom in the later works, such as The Subject and

117 intransigence.217 Freedom is figured as powers perpetual and indispensable adversary, as that which assures that power relations are mobile, reversible and unstable.218 This mutual engagement between freedom and power is also what Foucault seems to be referring to when he declares that within power relations, resistance comes first.219 By defining power relations in terms of struggle and resistance, Foucault attempts to refute the claim that the omnipresence of power amounts to entrapment: If there are relations of power in every social field, this is because there is freedom everywhere.220 But Foucault also distinguishes power relations, in which there is necessarily the possibility of resistance from what he calls states of domination.221 While power relations are mobile, reversible and unstable, there are states of domination in which the power relations, instead of being mobile, allowing the various participants to adopt strategies modifying them, remain blocked, frozen.222 Domination pertains when power relations are fixed in such as way

Power. Paul Patton, Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom, Political Studies 38, no. 2 (June 1989), esp. 272-4. Patton is responding to Charles Taylor, Foucault on Power and Freedom, Political Theory 12, no. 2 (1984).
217 218 219

Foucault, The Subject and Power, 342. Foucault, ECS, 292.

Foucault, Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1, Ethics, 167. See also Part 4, Chapter 2 on Method in History of Sexuality, vol. 1 where Foucault claims, Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power (95).

220

Foucault, ECS, 292. See Leslie Paul Thiele, The Agony of Politics: The Nietzschean Roots of Foucaults Thought, American Political Science Review 84, no. 3 (1990) for an interesting discussion of the valorization of struggle in Foucaults work that traces it to Nietzsches agonism. Although Thiele claims that Foucault politicized what Nietzsche had internalized: the will to struggle, I am arguing that Foucault did not go far enough in the direction of politicization, since he continued to locate much of the will to struggle in the selfs relation with itself and did not provide an account of collective struggle, which I believe his own analysis of modern power demands. Foucault, ECS, 292. See also The Subject and Power, 346 where Foucault also relies on a contrast between mobility and fixity to differentiate power and domination. Ibid., 283.

221

222

118 that they are perpetually asymmetrical.223 This distinction between power relations in which there are always possibilities of changing the situation and states of domination in which a field of power relations has been blocked is critical.224 It underlies Foucaults insistence that we cannot get outside of power relations, and it also makes legible the new problem he poses to us: How might we play these games of power with as little domination as possible?225 Still, Foucaults efforts to theorize freedom as immanent to power relations raise a number of difficult questions. For example, Foucault asserts that power relations always involve subjects who are capable of acting, yet his own account of disciplinary power describes the ways in which human subjects can be rendered docile and obedient. Is the disciplined subject capable of acting, and not simply behaving? Foucaults oft-repeated idea that power always entails resistance does not seem to take seriously the existence of disciplined subjects who are, in Foucaults terms, the principle of their own subjection. Why should we assume that such subjects will resist, that disciplinary power will be met by the intransigence of freedom? Foucaults tendency to treat freedom as given or guaranteed is curious, since he also argues that the soul is born out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint such that subjects may discipline themselves toward docility and utility.226 Wendy Browns critique of Foucault on this point attributes a curious optimism, even volunteerism to him that allows him to believe
223 224

Ibid., 292.

Foucault, Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity, 167. The distinction, however, also invites one to ask whether our social world is characterized more pervasively by states of domination than Foucault himself suggests. For example, although Foucault utilizes the language of power in his work on disciplinary institutions, might it also be argued that some of them function as sites of rigid, asymmetrical, blocked relations? Foucault, ECS, 298. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 29.

225 226

119 that insofar as power always produces resistance, even the disciplinary subject is perversely capable of resistance.227 Foucaults discussions of the power-freedom relation also tend to have a strangely naturalistic tenor; power and freedom are treated as given elements in a peculiar sort of physics: Where there is power, there is resistance228 Many of his statements concerning power and freedom make no mention of human subjects at all and he provides few examples of what freedom or resistance look like, especially in the context of disciplinary society.229 For those who are not inclined to accept the pervasiveness of resistance as an article of faith, Foucaults relative silence concerning the specific types of resistance that might be enacted by subjects within disciplinary society only extends the gap that seems to separate Foucaults analysis of the intricate workings of disciplinary power from his frequent declarations of the freedom that pervades power relations. The outline I have given above does not exhaust Foucaults thinking about human freedom, however. His late work on ethics is of particular interest to his readers because Foucault approaches the ethics of self-care through the lens of freedom, interpreting ancient
227

Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 63-4. Brown credits this view in part to Foucaults insistently nonpsychic account of power, practices and subject formation and his lack of attention to what might constitute, negate or redirect the desire for freedom. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 95.

228 229

Jon Simons, for example, asserts that resistance is drastically undertheorized in his work Simons, Foucault and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1995), 83. Thomas Dumm argues otherwise, suggesting that Foucault is best read precisely as a theorist of freedom, even going so far as to claim that Discipline and Punish is at root a book about the practices of freedom and the conditions that bear upon those practices in the modern era (78). In my view, Dumms sophisticated reading of Foucault does not make good on this claim, largely because he supposes that understanding the conditions of [freedoms] internment is, on its own, a theory of freedom (19). It is only on such a basis that Dumm can non-ironically declare that Discipline and Punish is about the practices of freedom. In addition, while Dumm rightly emphasizes Foucaults late interest in freedom as a concrete practice he fails to interrogate what Foucaults picture of ethics shares with the liberal view Dumm criticizes for regarding the individual as the exclusive site of freedom (5). Thomas Dumm, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), 78.

120 aesthetic pursuits of self-creation as a practice of freedom. How one practices freedom, within this framework, is manifest in what we might call ones comportment, and this manner of comporting oneself is itself the achievement of a demanding reflexive relationship. In Section 4 of this chapter I examine Foucaults turn to ethics in more detail, in order to ask: What is the significance of conceiving of freedom as a practice? What does it mean to understand that practice in terms of the care of the self? Most importantly, I ask how it is that Foucault, who persistently questioned our belief in the autonomous individual and the very possibility of liberation from power, ends up, in his late work, entangled in the conventional view of freedom as sovereignty. Why does Foucault, who invites us to imagine freedom as a practice rather than an absence or a secure state of affairs, continue to tether freedom to an individual subject who experiences his freedom in relative independence from others? Before turning to these questions, however, I want to offer a closer reading of Foucaults analysis of disciplinary power and bio power. Doing so allows us to approach the problem of freedom from a somewhat different angle. If Foucaults explicit account of freedom and resistance is rather underdeveloped, as I indicated above, might we instead ask, what sort of resistance seems to be called for by the political problems his analysis of power brings to light? What practices of freedom could agonally engage with the forms of power that define the present?

III. Disciplinary Power, Biopower, and De-politicized Collectivities In a lecture given at the Collge de France in 1976, after the French publication of Surveiller et Punir and before the appearance of the English translation, Foucault offered the

121 following description of disciplinary power: I would say that discipline tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and if need be, punished.230 This statement serves as a particularly distilled formulation of the account of disciplinary power put forth in Discipline and Punish. It captures succinctly an essential but often overlooked feature of Foucaults analysis of discipline: the idea that individualization is a strategy for the dissolution of multiplicity. Disciplinary power works by individualizing. It is not simply a micro-physical power that acts upon already-constituted individuals, transforming them into subjected and practiced bodies.231 Rather, discipline makes individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals as both its objects and as instruments of its exercise.232 And this production of individuals follows a certain form. It occurs through procedures of decomposition.233 What does this mean? As Foucault depicts it, discipline works by fragmenting, by breaking down complex pluralities into single entities. Separation and differentiation are the techniques of a power that dissolves multiplicity and substitutes for it a collection of separated individualities.234 But how are separated individualities brought into existence? What is involved in the processes of decomposition that Foucault links to individualization? And what exactly is this
230

Foucault, March 17, 1976 lecture in Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France 1975-6, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 242. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 138. Ibid., 170. Ibid. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.

231 232 233 234

122 multiplicity that is being decomposed? The earliest model of disciplinary power that Foucault examines the plague-stricken town of the late 17th century helps to illustrate how a multiplicity of men is dissolved into individual bodies. Here, the mechanisms of partitioning and observation work together to establish an order composed of isolated individuals. The measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town included strict spatial partitioning, the division of the town into distinct areas, each of which was to be supervised by an authority who keeps it under surveillance. Everyone was to be ordered to stay indoors; houses were to be locked from the outside by a syndic. The families would receive food via a system of pulleys and tunnels without communicating with the suppliers and other residents. In this town, inspection functions ceaselessly, through a complex hierarchical arrangement of authorities who assure that the gaze is alert everywhere. The significance of this enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, Foucault explains, is that it constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.235 The quarantined town is, of course, a response to a specific, dire medical crisis, and as such, might be considered an exceptional situation that is not particularly illuminating for thinking about the operation of power more generally. But Foucault argues that the style of order the strictly governed plague-stricken town attempts to realize, and the methods it employs to do so, are essential elements of a political dream that greatly outlived the threat of the plague, and persists to this day. This dream, of a meticulous tactical partitioning that assigns to each individual his proper place is distinguishable from an alternative political dream also motivated by the real or imagined threat of contagion. That other political dream, centered
235

Ibid., 195-7.

123 on the figure of the leper, is the dream of a pure community. But the arrest of the plague corresponds to a different ideal, that of a disciplined society. The crucial difference between these two visions of social-political life is that the fantasy of a pure community, for which the leper stands as a potent symbol, supports a massive, binary division between one set of people and another while the objective of a thoroughly disciplined society calls for multiple separations.236 Foucault presents subsequent panoptic institutions as the sites in which these two different projects binary exclusion and individualizing division combine and function together. The 19th century witnessed the application of disciplinary techniques of partitioning to the space of exclusion, in accordance with the principle, individualize the excluded. These arrangements functioned according to a double mode involving both binary branding and exile (mad/sane, normal/abnormal, etc.) and the tactics of individualizing mechanisms. These internment institutions were designed to treat lepers as plague victims.237 In the prison, for example, the partitioning techniques of the plague town reappear, where they play a critical role in dissolving multiplicity. Partitioning is essential to the operation of the disciplinary machinery, assuring that each individual has his own place; and each place its individual.238 This particular organization of space responds to the following directives:

236 237

Ibid., 197-199.

Ibid., 199. The principle of confinement is at work in the construction of military barracks, factories, and boarding schools, all of which utilize a monastic model in order to increase productivity and facilitate supervision, but Foucault argues that disciplinary techniques have spread beyond these specific, enclosed spaces (209). Ibid., 143. Both enclosure and partitioning exemplify the distribution of individuals in space, which Foucault describes as the first instance of disciplines operation. Yet while enclosure only sometimes characterizes the workings of disciplinary power, partitioning is absolutely essential, on Foucaults account (141-3).

238

124 Avoid distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyse confused, massive or transient pluralitiesOne must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation239 This statement makes clear that the division of space into individual places and the assignment of persons to these places is not only a technique for tracking that makes it possible at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, but even more significantly, a technique for keeping individuals apart from one another. What is at stake is not only know[ing] where and how to locate individuals but the staving off of a possible threat posed by their circulation, coagulation, and concentration. The disciplinary space that is always, basically, cellular is space that enforces solitude and prohibits association.240 The construction of disciplinary space, or the art of distributions is closely connected to surveillance. The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation241 and the division and partitioning of space supports such observation. Foucaults reading of the Panopticon illustrates the link between the architecture and visibility: according to the panoptic schema, all that is neededis to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker, or a schoolboy. This cellular arrangement is not only a means of enclosure, however. It is also a method of exposure. The cells are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.242

239 240 241 242

Ibid., 143. Ibid. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 200.

125 The visibility that characterizes the individual under surveillance is one-sided. While he is constantly observed by a supervisor, he is prevented from coming into contact with his companions. The possibilities for interaction are denied; the inmate is a participant in a nonreciprocal sensory relationship: He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.243 It is the division and separation preventing contact that guarantees order, according to Foucault. And as the following passage makes clear, order is opposed to all forms of associational or collective life: If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that can slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude.244 One of the striking features of this statement is the range of phenomena gathered under the sign collective effect. The operation of surveillance within disciplinary space aims to create a series of differentiated and discrete individualities so as to destroy the potential for, among other things, noise, waste, a crowd, bad influences, exchanges, planning. Discipline seems to target both expressions of disorder contagion, chatter, distractions, theft and the activities that accompany purposeful group organization exchange, plot, coalition.

243 244

Ibid. Ibid.

126 The discipline that constitutes a collection of separated individualities and thereby diminishes the collective effect that might otherwise emerge from multiplicity is no longer restricted to specific, enclosed spaces such as the prison. For on Foucaults account, discipline has spread beyond the edges of society.245 This shift, between a schema of exceptional discipline to one of generalized surveillance246 can be understood as a triumph of the political dream linked to the phenomenon of the plague. No longer limited to places of confinement modern leper colonies discipline and its techniques of segmentation and observation are detached from these exclusionary projects and now course throughout society. Foucault declares, On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social quarantine to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of panopticism.247 If our contemporary society evinces an attachment to the political dream of perfect discipline inspired by the threat of the plague, what does this mean, exactly? We know what discipline aims to produce: docile, useful bodies, so invested by the effects of discipline that they are part of its mechanism. But what is the nightmare that counters this political dream? What does discipline counter, disable or thwart? The most direct answer Foucault offers seems to be found in the statement that opened this section of the chapter: discipline dissolves multiplicity. But what is multiplicity? On the one hand, multiplicity seems to stand for disorder, or the unregulated, uncontrolled commingling of people and objects. This conception of multiplicity is at work in
245 246 247

Ibid., 209. Ibid. Ibid., 216.

127 Foucaults account of the plague-stricken town; here, disciplinary segmentation and supervision aims to sort out every possible confusion. The plague stands as the ultimate representation of disorder because of the illness and death it spreads as well as the disregard for prohibitions that fear and death can induce. Discipline appears as the antidote for potential anarchy, the state of affairs celebrated in the idea of the festival, which also grew up around the plague. What the festival celebrates and embodies suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect is exactly what discipline opposes with its strict partitioning and observation.248 But the multiplicity that discipline aims to dissolve does not seem to be purely anarchical. In Foucaults description of the Panopticon and its techniques for assuring order, which I quoted at length on page 114, discipline opposes not only chaos but also forms of organized rebellion. Plotting, planning and coalition are prevented by a form of power that keeps individuals apart from one another and catches them in a trap of visibility. Discipline limits signs of disorder such as noise and theft, but it also makes much less likely collective organizing of any kind. Multiplicity the name of disciplines other refers not only to a state of lawless unrest, I argue, but also to the possibility of political association. This claim finds support in a section of Discipline and Punish in which Foucault discusses the development of disciplinary methods in response to two great processes of the 18th century, population growth and industrialization. The appeal of discipline, Foucault explains, lay in its ability to solve a number of problems which the old economy of power was unequipped to address. Specifically,

248

Ibid., 197. Foucault also opposes discipline to unruliness when he says that Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of contagions, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder (198).

128 discipline could reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena: reduce what, in a multiplicity, makes it less manageable than a unity.249 The first description Foucault offers of how discipline renders multiplicity manageable seems to confirm a reading that identifies multiplicity with disorder: Discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions. Here, discipline is the power that limits transience, assigns places, and generally works to eliminate confusion. But the next sentence reveals that discipline opposes not only confusion but a counter-power born of association: [Discipline] must also master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions.250 This complex statement begins with the claim that certain forces are brought into existence whenever an organized multiplicity is formed. The meaning of organized multiplicity is somewhat ambiguous, but as I read it, Foucault is not simply referring to any large gathering of people, brought together for whatever purpose, but rather, to an organized plurality of people whose combination results in forces that would not otherwise exist. Since Foucault is clearly not talking about an already disciplined (separated and observed) collection of individuals, but to a collective entity that discipline must try to master, organized multiplicity seems to name a form of association that generates power through many people joined together. This reading is supported by the rest of the statement, in which Foucault describes these forces that are created

249 250

Ibid., 219. Ibid.

129 by organized multiplicity as productive of counter-power which resists the dominating power of discipline. This counter-power, in turn, has among its effects agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, and coalitions. These forms of association, what Foucault calls horizontal conjunctions, are precisely what disciplinary power attempts to neutralize and master, in order to prevent the generation of a counter-power. I suggest that we understand the counter-power created through horizontal conjunctions as akin to what Hannah Arendt calls simply power, defined as action in concert.251 Foucaults counter-power term attempts to name the forces which are born of an organized collectivity working together. What the above passage makes clear is that it is a mistake to understand discipline simply as a mechanism that orders otherwise disorderly people and things. Discipline counters not simply chaos, but the possibility of an organized multiplicity and its democratic power. As we have already seen, the primary techniques by which disciplinary power deals with the possible effects of this associative counter-power are the delineation of multiple divisions and the establishment of detailed surveillance. I would now like to suggest that we understand these disciplinary practices as anti-contagion mechanisms of a very general sort. If we think of contagion not only in terms of its medical signification but as a metaphor for all sorts of dangerous interactions between individuals, then we can recognize discipline as a set of techniques that aim to limit human contact, in an effort to prevent not only illness but the generation of forces and counter-power that Foucault analyzes above. Beyond the plague town and the modern hospital, discipline functions to limit not literal contagion, but the mingling

251

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 162, 244.

130 of human bodies that can facilitate the transmission of any number of things sympathy, criticism, rage. Such transmissions run the risk of constituting a multiplicity whose counterpower can produce collective effects revolts, coalitions, agitations. Discipline targets all forms of contagion, in order to prevent the establishment of horizontal conjunctions and their possible resistances. Foucaults narrative of the historical shift from punishment as a public spectacle to a system of imprisonment contains within it an illustration of the more expansive notion of contagion that I am developing. The public executions that were at the center of penal practice up to the 18th century frequently involved disturbances around the scaffold, popular agitations caused by punitive practice.252 Although the people were meant to serve as the witnesses, the guarantors of the punishment, they frequently expressed rejection of the punitive power.253 Their disturbances often took the form of general illegality people stopped working, the taverns were full, fights broke out, authorities were abused but the real problem was this: The people never felt closer to those who paid the penalty than in those rituals intended to show the horror of the crime and the invincibility of power; never did the people feel more threatened, like them, by a legal violence exercised without moderation or restraint.254 What became a political danger for the authorities was the solidarity of a whole section of the population with those we would call petty offenders, a solidarity that was constantly expressed through resistance to searches,

252 253 254

Ibid., 60, 62. Ibid., 58, 59. Ibid., 63.

131 the pursuit of informers and attacks on inspectors.255 Foucault states, It was the breaking up of this solidarity that was becoming the aim of penal and police repression. And this interest in destroying solidarity eventually led to calls for the abolition of public executions, since out of the ceremony of the public execution, out of that uncertain festival in which violence was instantly reversible, it was this solidarity, much more than the sovereign power that was likely to emerge with redoubled strength.256 The public character of these early executions provided conditions conducive to the creation of solidarity. As Foucaults account highlights, the gathering together of many people in a public space to witness the sovereigns punishment is a situation that encourages the cultivation and transmission of dangerous sentiments. Whether it is the sympathy born of feeling close to the criminal or a sense of injustice concerning the severity of the penalty, such reactions are more likely to arise when the punishment is seen by all and are more likely to spread among a large group present together in common space. If enthusiasm is infectious, so too are many other feelings outrage, pity, fear as well as thoughts, complaints, and aspirations. These sentiments and ideas become a political danger if widely transmitted and developed into the basis of relations of solidarity among many individuals. The public square is an environment especially conducive to this contagion. Disciplinary space, with its cellular partitioning and constant monitoring, attempts to prevent the circulation of individuals and the thoughts, criticisms and sentiments they bear, because contagion can foster resistance.

255 256

Ibid. Ibid.

132 These reflections on contagion are meant as amplifications of the claim with which I began this section of the chapter: disciplinary power must be understood as producing effects primarily upon human collectivities. Partitioning and surveillance are mechanisms by which discipline dissolves multiplicity into many separate, obedient individualities. Both enclosed disciplinary institutions and disciplinary society more generally employ techniques of division and supervision that seek to limit interaction and association. Organized multiplicity and its counter-power are what discipline opposes. By individualizing, discipline makes the creation of horizontal conjunctions less likely. It divides and objectifies, and in so doing, produces conditions which are inhospitable to the creation of relations of solidarity. Such conditions are fostered today by the increasing diffusion of surveillance cameras in cities around the world, now justified in terms of anti-terrorism efforts and homeland security.257 Coupled with previously unimaginable technological innovations, such as cell phone location-tracking and face recognition technology, present-day surveillance confirms and extends Foucaults analysis of this peculiarly modern form of power. The continued disciplinary division of public space, as in recent efforts by the Bush administration to limit political protest to remote designated free speech zones, and subject protesters in other, undesignated locations (such as New Yorks Central Park) to arrest, is a de-politicizing strategy that aims to prevent and contain the potential power generated by associational activity.

257

For example, Chicago now boasts the most advanced surveillance system of any city in the U.S. The system is notable not only for its breadth (2500 cameras throughout the city) but for its smart computers, which alert police whenever a particularly threatening activity is caught by a camera for example, anytime someone lingers outside a public building. In response to complaints by civil rights advocates upon the announcement of the surveillance program, Mayor Daley responded, Were not inside your home or business. The city owns the sidewalks. We own the streets and the alleys. See Chicago Moving to Smart Surveillance Cameras, New York Times, Sept. 21, 2004.

133 The contemporary salience of Foucaults analysis of the Panopticon and its mechanisms can scarcely be overstated. But in addition to tracking the emergence of disciplinary techniques, Foucault also theorizes a second kind of power, whose appearance he dates to the late 18th century. This new power is exercised over life or over man insofar as he is living being. Whereas disciplinary power addressed itself to the individual-as-body, this other power directs itself at a different entity, the population, which it ushers into existence and strives to regulate. Foucault argues that the new nondisciplinary power does not replace discipline but can be articulated with it. This second kind of power does not take the place of disciplinary power, because it exists at a different levelon a different scale, and makes use of very different instruments.258 The core difference between these two kinds of power, as Foucault theorizes them, is the very different ways they act on large groups of people. Like discipline, this new technology also acts on what Foucault calls multiplicity but it configures it quite differently. Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species. To be more specific, I would say that discipline tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and if need be, punished. And that this new technology that is being established is addressed to a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on.259

258 259

Foucault, March 17, 1976 lecture, Society Must Be Defended, 239-252. Ibid., 243.

134 This passage makes clear that Foucault conceives of both disciplinary power and what he dubs biopower as directed at collectivities, at a plurality of human beings.260 Discipline works by breaking apart or dissolving this manyness into a number of individualized bodies. But biopower performs a seemingly opposite move: it configures multiplicity as an undifferentiated mass. Biopower is concerned with a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they may not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted the population.261 Among the biological processes associated with this population that biopower attempts to regulate and control are birth and mortality rates, longevity, migration, and illness. As Foucault notes, these are phenomena that become pertinent only at the mass level, at the level of demographics and statistics. They are phenomena which are aleatory and unpredictable when taken in themselves or individually, but display constants at the general, mass level. Consequently, the interventions biopower makes are not directed at training individual bodies but at using overall mechanisms to achieve overall states of equilibration or regularity.262 Without investigating here the nuances of Foucaults account of biopower, I want to draw attention to the link Foucault establishes between disciplinary power and bio power. These two contemporary forms of power target multiplicity. While discipline works in an individualizing
260

In The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 biopower is an umbrella term that refers to both disciplinary power directed at individual bodies and regulatory power directed at the population at large. The era of biopower is defined by two directions, or two poles: The disciplines of the body and the regulation of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed (138-9). In later work, biopower becomes the name Foucault uses to describe this second, nondisciplinary power. See March 17, 1976 lecture in Society Must Be Defended, 239-263.
261 262

Foucault, March 17, 1976 lecture in Society Must Be Defended, 245. Ibid., 246.

135 mode, biopower is massifying, that is, directed not at man-as-body but man-as-species.263 Although their effects may seem rather opposed, I argue that they converge in their political effects. Both a collection of separated individualities and a population or mass are depoliticized forms of human plurality. One addresses humans as isolated and useful bodies; the other submerges them into large-scale biological processes. Discipline atomizes; biopower amasses. Both work against forms of multiplicity that are associative in character. In the essay The Subject and Power, Foucault connects these two technologies of power to the functioning of the modern state. The state is a site of the convergence of disciplinary efforts to create useful and docile bodies and biopower technologies aiming to regulate the processes of a living mass. Foucault states, Id like to underline the fact that the states power (and thats one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and totalizing form of power.264 He goes on to refer to the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures as a political double bind.265 While Foucault does not really elaborate on the meaning of this double bind, I would like to suggest that we understand it in terms of the de-politicizing effects enacted on collectivities by both disciplinary and bio power. The former segments groups of people into discrete and efficient bodies and the latter reduces humans to elements in a statistical mass. The double bind threatens to restrict the configuration of multiplicity to these two forms. What the double bind makes very difficult is the creation of horizontal conjunctions or relations of association which bring into existence a collectivity whose members are both connected to and differentiated from one another.
263 264 265

Ibid., 243. Foucault, The Subject and Power, 332. Ibid., 336.

136

IV. Ethics as the Care of the Self How does this reading of Foucaults analysis of power alter our understanding of his work on ethics? Does care of the self look different if we view it from the perspective of the double bind created by disciplinary and bio power? I claim that it does, because an appreciation of the way these forms of power function by individualizing and massifying collectivities draws attention to the limits of an ethics of self-care as a strategy of resistance. A project of self-creation, while perhaps valuable, cannot adequately address the depoliticizing effects of modern power, which concern the configuration of plurality. But in order to show that this is so, it is necessary to look more closely at Foucaults work on ethics. What exactly is the care of the self? If is to be understood as a practice of freedom, what does this practice involve? In pursuing these questions, it is helpful to bear in mind how Foucault himself cast his final work on ethics. As he presented it, the work on care of the self seemed a crucial amendment to, or qualification, of his previous thought. He explained his interest in care of the self in terms of a shift of emphasis: Perhaps Ive insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others, and in the technologies of individual domination, in the mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself by means of the technologies of the self.266 In another interview on his turn to ancient ethics, Foucault describes his fascination with aesthetic self-creation in terms of the practices of liberty that, together with practices of subjection,

266

Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1, Ethics, 225.

137 constitute the subject.267 These comments invite Foucaults readers to interpret his ethical work as the much-longed-for answer to the problems posed by his earlier analysis of the production of compliant subjects.268 If his previous work focused on how subjects are constituted, the inquiry into ethics seems a hopeful attempt to consider the constituting capacities of subjects.269 Although the majority of Foucaults work on ethics focuses on the details of GrecoRoman ethical life (as evidenced in texts ranging from the first Platonic dialogues to the major texts of late Stoicism), his interest is not merely historical. In addition to presenting the work on ethics as a turn toward the problem of freedom in a general sense, Foucault also insisted that we need an ethics today.270 Although he rejects the possibility of importing ancient ethical practices into the present, he does not present his investigations as simply matters of antiquarian curiosity. His remarks affirm the contemporary value of treating oneself and ones life as a work

267

Michel Foucault, The Aesthetics of Existence, in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (Cambridge: Semiotext[e], 1996), 50-1.

268

Jane Bennett, for example, says of Foucaults late work on ethics: A moment of freedom survives within subjectivity after all, it seems (656). Jane Bennett, How Is It Then That We Still Remain Barbarians? Foucault, Schiller, and the Aestheticization of Ethics Political Theory 24, no. 4 (1996). Thomas Osborne notes that the aesthetics of existence attracts considerable interest because it is regarded as one of the few things that Foucault is avowedly in favor of (46). Thomas Osborne, Critical Spirituality: On Ethics and Politics in the Later Foucault in Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue Between Genealogy and Critical Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1999).

One possible way of conceptualizing Foucaults turn to ethics, then, is to think of it as corresponding to one side of the ambivalent structure of subjectification, with subjectification referring, as it does for Judith Butler, to the idea that power both initiates the subject and constitutes the subjects agency such that the subject is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power (but significantly and partially both). Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), 17.
270

269

He explains, Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on. Michel Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, in Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 1, Ethics, 255-6.

138 of art, for example, even though he maintains that contact with the past cannot provide a readily-applicable model for the present.271 Foucaults inquiry into ancient ethics cannot be separated from his conviction that we need a new ethics, even if he insists that such an ethics must be genuinely new. But why does Foucault say that we need an ethics today? The possible contemporary significance of ethics and specifically of an ethics centered on an aesthetic/ascetic self-relation, is expressed in Foucaults presentation of care of the self as a way of controlling and limiting power.272 That this is the way Foucault thinks about the role of ethics in the present is clear from the following passage: Power relations are not something that is bad in itself, that we have to break free of. I do not think that a society can exist without power relations, if by that one means the strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others. The problem then, is not to try to dissolve them in the utopia of completely transparent communication [referring to Habermas] but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible.273 Ethics, defined by Foucault as the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself, rapport a soi is presented as an integral part of what might enable individuals to minimize domination. In connection with rules of law and management techniques (about which Foucault says
271

Foucault states that his interest in ancient ethics must not be mistaken for recourse to lost foundations: Nothing is more foreign to me than the idea that, at a certain moment, philosophy went astray and forgot something, that somewhere in its history there is a principle, a foundation that must be recovered. Foucault repeatedly emphasizes that contact with the past may produce something, but it must be emphasized that it would be something new. Foucault, ECS, 294-5. But Foucault also suggests that an ethics of the care of the self may be particularly relevant for the present: If I was interested in Antiquity it was because for a whole series of reasons, the idea of morality as obedience to a code of rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared. And to the absence of morality corresponds, must correspond, the search for an aesthetics of existence. Foucault, An Aesthetics of Existence, 49. As Paul Veyne argues, Foucault believed that in the modern world, it was impossible to ground an ethics. Under these conditions, one element of Greek ethics, namely, the idea of a work of the self on the self might be capable of acquiring a contemporary meaning (7). Paul Veyne, The Final Foucault and His Ethics, Critical Inquiry 20 (1993). Foucault, ECS, 288. Ibid., 298.

272 273

139 almost nothing), the ethical self-relation is offered as one of the means by which power relations can be altered in the direction of greater flexibility and openness. Keeping in mind this suggestion that an ethics of self-care can assist in re-shaping power relations, let us examine in more detail Foucaults exploration of the care of the self as a practice of freedom. The first striking feature of this work is the very idea of freedom as a practice. What does it mean to consider freedom as an activity, rather than a possession or attribute? Unlike views which hold that individuals are free, whether by virtue of a natural gift granted to humankind or the possession of a set of rights secured by government, the notion that freedom is a practice means that it is never simply won, firmly established once and for all. Freedom is not an automatic result that follows from the removal of constraints, nor is it the birthright of man or the gift of good government. Instead, freedom is a doing. It is this notion of freedom as an activity that underlies Foucaults remark: Liberty is a practiceThe liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee themI think it can never be inherent in the structure of things to guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom.274 We are confronted with the claim that freedom cannot simply be provided to us or established with certainty. Freedom is fragile; it exists only in its exercise, is guaranteed by nothing but itself. The practice vocabulary conveys that freedom is in some sense an ongoing activity, rather than a static condition or a state achieved once and for all by a subject. How does the ethics of self care fit in with this conception of freedom? As Foucault presents it, ethics is the practice of freedom: The Greeks problematized their freedom, and the
274

Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge, and Power, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3, Power, 354-5. He explains, So there may, in fact, always be a certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraints, to loosen or even to break them, but none of these projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it will be established by the project itself.

140 freedom of the individual, as an ethical problem. And he goes on to specify that ethics, for the Greeks, was itself an activity: Ethos was a way of being and of behavior. It was a mode of being for the subject, along with a certain way of acting, a way visible to others. While this mode of being involves extensive work by the self on the self, a persons ethos is externalized and evident in everything he does what he wears, the way he walks, how he responds to events. Ethos, as the concrete form of freedom is on display for others: A man possessed of a splendid ethos, who could be admired and put forward as an example, was someone who practiced freedom in a certain way.275 Ones freedom is put to use in the development of a particular style of existence that is visible to others.276 Aligning ancient ethics with freedom enables Foucault to establish a key distinction between morality and ethics. Whereas morality centers on rule-following, ethics is not primarily about obedience to a code but a certain craftsmanship of the self. In the Introduction to The Use of Pleasure, for example, Foucault contrasts morality, defined as the set of values and rules of action prescribed to individuals and their corresponding conduct with the ethics of subjectivation, the manner in which one forms oneself as an ethical subject.277 Foucault is careful
275 276

Foucault, ECS, 286.

The emphasis on creating an ethos that is manifest in a visible mode of existence may appeal to Foucault as an alternative to a hermeneutic understanding of the self, critiqued in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. There Foucault sought to show that sexuality understood as the epitome of interiority is itself produced by (and in turn, furthers) discursive practices that seek to uncover a true self hidden beneath appearances. See Claire Colebrook, Ethics, Positivity, and Gender: Foucault, Aristotle and the Care of the Self, Philosophy Today 42, no. 1 (Spring 1998) for a Foucauldian reading of Aristotles Ethics that emphasizes its pre-hermeneutic character. Colebrook argues that Aristotles notion of the virtues challenges or sits uneasily with a hermeneutics of the self because the object of ethics for him is not the self (intentions, will, the soul) but activities and practices.

Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, 25-32. In an interview, Foucault repeats this claim: There is another side to the moral prescriptions, which most of the time is not isolated as such, but is, I think, very important: the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself, rapport a soi, which I call ethics, and which determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions. Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, 263.

277

141 to recognize command morality and the ethics of subjectivation as typologies that in practice coexist: Every morality, in the broad sense comprises the two elements I have just mentioned: codes of behavior and forms of subjectivation.278 Nonetheless, Foucault asserts that in certain moralities the main emphasis is placed on the code, on its systematicity, its richness, its capacity to adjust to every possible case and to embrace every area of behavior, while in others, the strong and dynamic element is to be found in the forms of subjectivation and practices of the self.279 Foucault associated the former type of morality with Christianity and the latter with antiquity: Moral conceptions in Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity were much more oriented toward practices of the self and the questions of askesis than toward codifications of conducts and the strict definition of what is permitted and what is forbidden.280 Although he insists that he is not seeking in antiquity an ethics that could be superimposed on the present, Foucault is clearly drawn to ethics defined in terms of practices of the self as a possible alternative to moralities that emphasize the codification of conducts. How the ethics-morality distinction plays out within contemporary Western cultures for Foucault, however, is not entirely clear. At times, Foucault seems to suggest that we are already in a postmoral era, having left behind the idea of morality as a universalizable code of rules,281 while in

Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 29-30. Foucault explains that all morality entails a relationship to the self and that this relationship can be examined via 4 major categories: ethical substance, mode of subjectivation, ethical work and telos.
279 280

278

Ibid., 30.

Ibid., 30. Foucault also contrasts the central imperative of ancient ethics, Take care of yourself with the later Christian focus on renunciation of the self as the means to salvation. Part of what fascinates Foucault about ancient ethics seems to be its treatment of the self as an object of development and transformation rather than disavowal. Foucault, An Aesthetics of Existence, 49.

281

142 other places he speaks in less certain terms, suggesting we are still beholden to a morality that privileges rule-following: We have inherited a secular tradition that sees in external laws the basis for morality. We seek rules for acceptable behavior in relations with others.282 But regardless of the degree to which we understand the present to be within a Christian-influenced moral paradigm or somehow beyond it, Foucaults inquiry into ancient ethics is clearly an investigation of the possibilities that inhere in an ethics of reflexive self-creation and transformation, understood in contrast to traditional moralitys stress on obedience to universal, external laws. The first two important elements of Foucaults work on ethics, then, are the inquiry into freedom as an activity, in which the practice of freedom is defined in terms of a demanding reflexive relationship that gives rise to a style of being evident in everything one does, and second, the distinction between ethics (as precisely a practice of freedom) and morality (as obedience to a code). The third significant feature of Foucaults ethical work is its aestheticism. The practice of self-care is largely a practice of self-creation, for the care of the self refers not to the nurturing of an already constituted self but to the very processes by which the self is brought into existence as a distinctive entity to be recognized by others. This self is a creative production, according to Foucault. Once one accepts that the self is not simply given to us, there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.283 In the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault offers a clear statement of his understanding of the arts of existence: What I mean by the phrase [arts of existence] are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform
282 283

Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 228. Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, 262.

143 themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.284 Although he here claims that the arts of existence have been of unquestionable importance in our societies, elsewhere Foucault laments that in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldnt everyones life become a work of art?285 Foucault uses the idea of aesthetic self-creation to further his distinction between Christian-influenced morality and what he calls ethics. He argues that the ethical cultivation of ones own life as a work of art was the central moral problem in antiquity, while later Christian moralities privileged the principle of obedience such that morality took on increasingly the form of a code of rules.286 This contrast is deepened by Foucaults depiction of ancient, aesthetically-oriented ethics as concerned with the cultivation of singular being, rather than focused on processes of normalization involving a pattern of behavior for everyone.287 Foucault also describes the aesthetic ethics of self-creation as a matter of personal choice, that is lacking any relation to the juridical per se, an authoritarian system or a disciplinary structure. At the heart of these comparisons is the idea that Christian-based moralities work by imposing a general code of conduct that is supported both by the penalty of the norm and of law. Ancient ethics, on the contrary, operates relatively independently of any social or at least legal
284 285

Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 11.

Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, 261. Foucault also depicts an aestheticized self-relation as specifically modern in his essay, What is Enlightenment? He explains that to be modernis to take oneself as the object of a complex and difficult elaboration, a view he associates with Baudelaires dandyism. Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1, Ethics, 311-2. Foucault, An Aesthetics of Existence, 49. Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, 254.

286 287

144 institutional system, and values the singularity embodied in the attempt to live a beautiful life rather than compliance with a universal model or set of rules.288 The ancient occupation with aesthetic self-formation was, Foucault reminds us, a matter of constant practice and regulated occupation, not merely a principle or attitude.289 And this work was understood to involve the establishment of a relation with oneself that is characterized by domination, mastery, arkhe, and command.290 Foucault explains, The effort that the individual was urged to bring to bear on himself, the necessary ascesis, had the form of a battle to be fought, a victory to be won in establishing a dominion of self over self, modeled after domestic or political authority.291 Self-mastery as the specific mode in which care of the self is enacted is the fourth major feature of the ethics Foucault examines. The dynamics of domination of oneself by oneself, or enkrateia, rests on a number of related assumptions about the self. First, the self is understood as the site of an agonistic struggle that requires the constitution of part of oneself as a vigilant adversary who confronts and attempts to subdue the inferior appetites that threaten to overtake the self. In classical Greek thought, the role assumed by the self in combating ones own pleasures and desires is likened to that of a fighting soldier or
Foucaults aestheticism leads Pierre Hadot to worry that Foucault might have been advancing a cultivation of the self which was too purely aesthetic that is to say, I fear, a new form of dandyism, a later-twentieth century version. Pierre Hadot, Reflections on the notion of the cultivation of the self, in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. Timothy Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1991), 230. For a compelling argument on the indispensability of the aesthetic to ethics, which responds to Richard Wolins and Terry Eagletons attacks on the aesthetic character of Foucaults thought, see Jane Bennett, How Is It, Then, That We Still Remain Barbarians? Although I agree with Bennetts central claim that the cultivation of sensibility is essential to ethics and that those who panic over aestheticization frequently assume that if one does not endorse a command ethics one has no ethics at all, Bennett moves too quickly from Foucaults care of the self to care of the world, apparently assuming that the former directly leads to or somehow entails the latter.
289 290 291 288

Foucault, The Hermeneutic of the Subject, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1, Ethics, 94-5. Foucault, ECS, 286-7. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 91.

145 wrestler.292 This conception of an agonistic struggle within the self supposes that what is to be fought is not a different, ontologically alien power but rather part of oneself. On Foucaults telling, victory within the terms of this ethical struggle was not imagined as the complete expulsion of desires, but instead the setting up of a solid and stable state of rule of the self over the self.293 The desires and pleasures did not need to disappear; what was required was that one construct a relationship with the self that is of the domination-submission, commandobedience, mastery-docility type.294 And this relationship of mastery that one establishes with oneself is, in early Greek culture, frequently likened to two other schemas of rule: domestic and political life. According to the first analogy, a man must rule his desires as if they were servants, establishing the masters authority and assuring a soul as well-managed as an ordered household. On the second political analogy, well-known to us from Platos Republic, the best parts of the individual must rule over the inferior elements in a relation that is a microcosm of the citys ideal authority structure.295 This last point concerning the connections between self-rule and political-rule brings us to an important distinction that Foucault makes concerning Greek and Roman understandings of self-mastery as an ethical pursuit. The ancient Greek view, articulated repeatedly by Plato, was that care of the self as a kind of self-rule was a precondition for the effective rule of others296:
292 293 294 295

Ibid., 65-7. Ibid., 68-9. Ibid., 70.

Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 71-2. See also The Genealogy of Ethics where Foucault discusses the idea that virtue consists in exercising upon oneself as exact a mastery as that of a sovereign against whom there would no longer be revolts (272).
296

Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 73.

146 The exercise of political power required, as its own principle of internal regulation, power over oneself.297 Dominion over himself qualified a man to exercise his mastery over others. The most kingly man was king over himself.298 This belief in the necessity of self-rule for political rule is illustrated by the figures of the tyrant and the good political leader that appeared in much ancient political thought. The tyrant exemplifies the man who, incapable of mastering his own passions, was prone to abuse his power and harm his subjects, while the ideal political ruler is one whose self-rule moderated his rule over others.299 On Foucaults telling, then, the Greeks understood there to be a strong connection between the relationship one forged with oneself and how one interacted with others. As he explains it, I think the postulate of this whole morality was that a person who took proper care of himself would, by the same token, be able to conduct himself properly in relation to others and for others.300 This characterization is intriguing, of course, because it suggests that the care of the self should be understood as a socially and perhaps politically significant activity, and not simply as an exercise in solipsism. The Greek interpretation of the intersubjective significance of the reflexive relation is troubled, however, by the fact that this connection is conceptualized, on Foucaults account, through the category of rule, so that it is rule over oneself that prepares one to rule others well. This particular formulation of the link between self-mastery and intersubjective relations is not particularly promising for those who, like Foucault, are interested

297 298 299 300

Ibid., 81. Ibid. Ibid., 80-1. Foucault, ECS, 287.

147 in the contemporary problem of how to play these games of power with as little domination as possible. It is for this reason that Richard Flathman argues that Foucaults late work displays a subtle but important preference for Roman over Greek ethics. Foucault describes a central shift between Greek and Roman practices of self-care, according to which concern for the self became a universal principle that was independent of political life.301 While Plato consistently presented self-rule as a requirement for rule of the city, taking care of yourself for its own sake emerges with the Epicureans, Foucault tells us, and becomes something very general with Seneca, Pliny, and so on: everybody has to take care of himself.302 As Foucault constructs it, when mastery over oneself becomes something that is not primarily related to power over others, the relation to the other that this supposes is much less non-reciprocal than before.303 While the Greeks conceived of self-mastery as necessary in order to rule others well (a view that implies a dissymmetrical relation to others), the Romans effected a dissociationbetween power over oneself and power over others.304 Although Foucault never directly says so, Flathman argues that this dissociation informs an implicit endorsement of Roman, as compared to Greek, ethics. According to Flathman, who admits that this is a

301 302 303 304

Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 235. Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, 260. Ibid., 267.

Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, 267 and Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 95.

148 contestable reading of Foucault, it is the separation of self-rule from the question of the rule over others that constitutes the appeal of Roman ethics for Foucault.305 If Flathman is correct, and Foucault finds the Roman divorce of self-mastery from mastery over others in some sense appealing, this does not so much resolve the question of the connection between the reflexive relation and self/other relations as deepen it. For on Foucaults telling, the Roman version of care of the self understood that pursuit as something done for its own sake, an undertaking relatively detached from ones relations with others. While this way of imagining the care of the self may have the merit of detaching the rule of oneself from rule over others, it does not offer an alternative framework for understanding how the relationship one constructs with oneself can guide, transform or otherwise impact ones relationships with other selves. Foucault never provides his own argument for how an ethics of self-care might bear on interpersonal, social, or political relations, even as he suggests that such an ethics has a part to play in the transformation of power relations in the present. For this reason, the specter of solipsism remains close at hand, as even Flathman admits: Souci de soi has a self-referential, introspective, possibly narcissistic quality or character.306 And some of Foucaults comments, such as Care for others should not be put before the care of oneself. The care of the self is ethically prior in that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior307 only raise more questions about the possible interplay between care of oneself and care for others.

305

Richard Flathman, Freedom and its Conditions: Discipline, Autonomy, Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2003), 22-4. Ibid., 25. Foucault, ECS, 287.

306 307

149 Nonetheless, several of Foucaults readers have tried to argue that the care of the self is not only non-solipsistic but that it is in some sense inherently political. William Connolly, for example, contends that Foucauldian self-artistry has a critical role to play in developing democratic political culture and posits a chain of relations in which the care of the self is linked to what he calls micropolitics which is, in turn, linked to macropolitics.308 On this view, an ethical sensibility cultivated through tactics applied by the self to itself is in some sense the condition of possibility for transforming our interpersonal, social and political relations with one another. Although I think Connollys approach still assumes too readily that the relationship one crafts with oneself is the starting point from which to work on the modification of other relations of varying sorts,309 he at least attempts to theorize the possible connections between self-care and other kinds of care.310 Interpreters of Foucault such as Jon Simons and Thomas Dumm tend to talk about the ethics of self-care as if it, on its own, were a way of affecting broader political change. Simons, for example, asserts, Perhaps there is no more pressing political need than arts of the self through which people detach themselves from current subjectivities.311 And Dumm

308

See Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) esp. Chapter 6, An Ethos of Engagement.

For example, see Connollys description of arts of the self regarding issues surrounding euthanasia in which one part of your subjectivityworks on the other parts in order to bring about a shift in sensibility that may, in turn, have effects on the micropolitics or even molarpolitics in which one participates. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 146-9. In this respect, and in others, Connolly goes far beyond Foucault, who, as weve seen, does not really theorize the possible connections between the relationship one has with oneself and ones relations with others, whether personal, social or political. In addition, Connolly also departs from Foucault by assigning to self-care a task that is already rather other-directed: You engage in self-artistry in order to render yourself more open to responsive engagement with alternative faiths, sensualities, gender practices, ethnicities, and so on. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 146.
311 310

309

Simons, Foucault and the Political, 123.

150 declares that Foucault provides us with a new political theory of freedom which redefines politics as an activity of self-constitution.312 In the next section, I argue that this activity of self-constitution, which Foucault identifies as the practice of freedom, is an inadequate strategy for contending with the depoliticizing effects of disciplinary and biopower that I traced in Section 3. A conception of freedom as a collective and cooperative practice borne of relations of association is indispensable for envisaging a mode of resistance that could begin to challenge the workings of modern power. However appealing the idea of working on oneself may be, the political problems of individualization and massification that Foucault saw cannot be satisfyingly addressed this way.

V. Beyond the Self: Horizontal Conjunctions and Associative Democratic Politics Approaching the self as an object of intensive and ongoing work by which one attempts to achieve an ethos that is good, beautiful, honorable, estimable, memorable and exemplary might initially seem a promising intervention into the effects of disciplinary power.313 If disciplinary power has the production of a docile, useful subject as one of its central objectives, then wouldnt the subjects re-shaping of herself, to the extent she finds it possible, serve as an important complication of the functioning of discipline? Might the establishment of a reflexive relationship in which the self is taken as the object of a careful, artistic elaboration challenge the effects of a power that works by surveying and normalizing? Isnt the cultivation of singularity

312

Dumm, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom, 3. John Rajchman also offers, I suggest that Foucault may be the philosopher of freedom in a post-revolutionary time. Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 50. Foucault, ECS, 286.

313

151 the best antidote to power that induces obedience and conformity? In this vein, Foucault declares, We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries.314 Isnt an ethics of self-care, in which the self is approached as material to be transformed through creative work, one way of participating in this dual operation of refusal and invention? Part of the appeal of positioning Foucauldian ethics as the source of potential resistance to disciplinary power lies in the elegance of this formulation. As Richard Flathman describes it, Foucaults work sets up a contrast between the self-discipline embodied in Greco-Roman techniques of the self and the dominating disciplines of disciplinary society.315 It is as if ethics stands for a kind of good discipline that might oppose, or at least re-work, bad discipline. In Flathmans terms, Foucaults late texts develop the idea of self-discipline as a counterdiscipline that resists cultural, social and political discipline.316 If self-discipline and dominating discipline are both disciplines forms of power that act locally and materially on the minute details of human existence to produce particular, ongoing effects what exactly distinguishes them from one another? It would seem at first glance to be their respective sources. Self-discipline has a reflexive structure; it is imposed by the self on the self. On the other hand, the disciplinary power that Foucault theorizes in Discipline and Punish and other works from that period, seems to emanate from sites of institutional authority: schools, armies, prisons, factories. But this easy distinction between self- and externally-imposed discipline cannot hold, since one of the characteristic features of disciplinary
314 315 316

Foucault, The Subject and Power, 336. Flathman, Freedom and its Conditions, 13. Ibid., 33.

152 power of the dominating type is precisely its ability to be taken up and internalized by the subject. The disciplinary techniques Foucault chronicles are effective precisely because they are not simply exercised upon subjects from without, but assumed by subjects who learn to regulate themselves even in the absence of any visible authority. If disciplinary power is a type of power that functions by making the human subject the principle of his own subjection, doesnt the distinction between good (self-imposed) discipline and bad (externally-imposed) discipline become untenable? When is ascetic self-care a practice of freedom and when is it the quiet, light operation of disciplinary power? The difficulties posed by this question are never addressed by Foucault, as Jean Grimshaw notes.317 Foucaults language, however, hints at part of the problem: his discussions of ancient ethics refer repeatedly to the self as the source and object of ethical practice whereas this term is nearly absent from his work on disciplinary power. In those texts, the subject is everywhere; the self hardly ever appears. This difference in vocabulary suggests that the self is the name reserved for a form of being that pre-dates disciplinary power and the processes of subjectification that attend it. (Foucault dates the origins of disciplinary power to the 16th century). If this is so, if the self and the subject are not synonyms, then it becomes necessary to ask: how is care of the self undertaken by self who is a disciplinary subject? When is the deliberate fashioning of oneself a way of countering disciplinary normalization and surveillance, and when is it the recapitulation of those operations?

317

Grimshaw, Practices of Freedom in Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions Between Foucault and Feminism, ed. Caroline Ramazanoglu (New York: Routledge, 1993).

153 While keeping the difficult question of the relation between self-discipline and disciplinary power in mind, I want to focus attention on a related but distinct problem that emerges from Foucaults late work on ethics. My central concern is the degree to which freedom as an activity and a mode of resistance is associated with the individual and her project of selfmaking. By contrast with the objection sometimes made to Foucaults ethics, my point here is not that Foucault puts forward an atomistic conception of the individual. His work as a whole, along with his remarks about techniques of the self as culturally embedded, reflect an understanding of human subjects as deeply situated.318 However, while the individual is understood as located within a particular social context that cannot be abstracted away, the practice of freedom, as Foucault theorizes it, is located primarily in a reflexive relationship of that situated self to itself. There is no sense of freedom as a collaborative practice undertaken with others. Other subjects figure as the culture, society or social group that serve as the backdrop for the subjects fashioning of himself. They do not appear as fellow actors or partners in resistance. One possible response to this challenge is to assert that such a line of thought is beyond the scope of the project Foucault set for himself. In 1982 Foucault provided the following summary of his scholarly work: My objectivehas been to create a history of the mode by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.319 Within that framework, the inquiry

318

Foucault stresses that the techniques of self-care available to an individual are themselves cultural products: If I am now interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, society, and his social group. Foucault, ECS, 291. Foucault, The Subject and Power, 326.

319

154 into ancient ethics is part of an attempt to consider how the subject is constituted through practices of liberty in addition to practices of subjection.320 Perhaps looking to Foucault for a more cooperative or collective account of freedom is to impose on him a task that is not his own. But as I have tried to show, Foucaults own analysis of power renders his individualized account of freedom as the care of the self problematic. The aesthetic/ascetic project of selfcreation and transformation that Foucault identifies with the practice of freedom is not an adequate basis for resisting disciplinary power or bio power, because both forms of power produce effects primarily upon collectivities. It is not the single individual that is the target of these types of power so much as it is the possibility of horizontal conjunctions. Disciplinary power and bio power, in their distinct but complementary ways, domesticate and contain the potential that resides in human multiplicity. Foucaults studies of disciplinary and bio power compellingly illustrate the ways in which these forms of power operate by constituting manageable collectivities, whether as a series of isolated individuals or an undifferentiated population. Foucaults insights into the individualizing and massifying mechanisms by which the potential of group association is minimized provide an opportunity for theorizing collaborative democratic action which resists the de-politicization of multiplicity. This opportunity is unfortunately not taken up by Foucault, whose lifelong focus on the singular subject pushes him toward an individualized, ethical notion of freedom that cannot, on its own, effectively engage with modern power. What Foucaults work on ethics assumes, at least implicitly, is that work upon oneself will lead to the transformation of our relations with others and perhaps our collective existence

320

Foucault, An Aesthetics of Existence, 50-1.

155 more broadly. Although popular therapeutic doctrine instructs us that you begin to change the world by changing yourself, we ought not to accept this idea too readily. If, as Foucault himself argues, one of our tasks today is the creation of new subjectivities and if it is also the case that the subject can constitute itself in an active fashion only in accordance with models available in his culture, society, and his social group, then the creation of genuinely new types of subjectivity cannot occur absent collective supports that challenge habitual forms of behavior. Although taking oneself as the object of an aesthetic elaboration may seem like an important intervention into the mechanisms of discipline that aim to produce a useful and docile subject, a project of ascetic self-transformation, in the absence of efforts to forge alliances among plural selves, is too readily available for capture by disciplinary power. Treating the relationship to the self as ontologically prior to all other relations and as the privileged site of freedoms practice runs too high a risk of supporting atomization and isolation. And even if reflexive ethical practice does not become the handmaiden of disciplinary powers de-politicizing project, there is nothing in the ethics of self-care that is addressed to the question of how to alternatively organize multiplicity, so that it is something other than a series of individuals or an aggregate mass. A similar problem re-appears concerning biopower. In some ways, the creation of a singular self may be a valuable counter to power that effaces all individual distinction in favor of ever greater generality. Doesnt the creation of oneself as a work of art seem like an important way of resisting massification? Perhaps. But an ethics of self-care does not, on its own, offer insight into how plurality might be re-shaped. (At the most, it suggests that many individuals engaged in self-making will additively amount to a transformed collectivity.) While the attempt

156 to work upon oneself in order to display an exemplary ethos is admirable, it is not an activity that can adequately address the effects enacted by discipline and biopower upon human multiplicity. Those effects require something more than the ethical practice of freedom, focused on the self as a work of art. They call for a democratic practice of freedom which is collaborative in character. Despite the paucity of democratic resources in Foucaults work on ethics, some of his other writings seem to offer support for an account of associative democratic activity. The brief document Confronting Governments: Human Rights, is one of the most suggestive. Written and delivered by Foucault in 1981 at an international conference in Geneva concerning the situation of Vietnamese boat people, the statement is notable for the notion of solidarity that it forwards.321 Articulating one of the principles that guided this initiative as well as similar transnational political projects undertaken by organizations such as Airplane for El Salvador, Doctors without Borders, Terre de Hommes, and Amnesty International, Foucault declares, There exists an international citizenship that has its rights and its duties, and that obliges one to speak out against every abuse of power, whoever the author, whoever its victims. After all, we are all members of the community of the governed, and thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity.322 The rest of the statement supports the idea that solidarity, when expressed in collective initiatives like those listed above, is able to produce effects that would not be possible
321

Foucault was working with other activists affiliated with Mdecins du Monde and Terre de Hommes (two international humanitarian organizations). They were responding to reports of tens of thousands of people who had fled Vietnam and were being attacked in the Gulf of Thailand by pirates and kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed. Governmental inaction led to the activists proposal to send a fleet of nongovernmental ships, including one of their own, to the area to protect the boat people. For a discussion of this event and Foucaults statement, see Thomas Keenan, The Paradox of Knowledge and Power: Foucault on the Bias in Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), 156.

Foucault, Confronting Governments: Human Rights in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3, Power, 474.

322

157 for individuals acting independently of one another. While Foucault repeatedly uses the expression private individuals in this piece to characterize those involved in these solidaristic organizations, this terminology is meant to indicate that they are individuals who hold no special offices or positions of authority. While they are private individuals, their ability to effectively intervene in the sphere of international policy is the result of speaking together, an activity made possible by the establishment of these initiatives. The critical point is that relations of solidarity enable ordinary citizens to engage in a struggle with existing governments who have attempted to reserve a monopoly for themselves.323 This depiction of the potential that resides in relations of association is reminiscent of the claim found in Discipline and Punish concerning the counter-power generated out of organized multiplicity.324 The cultivation of relations of solidarity, or the establishment of horizontal conjunctions, is a strategy that challenges the workings of discipline and biopower by reconstituting multiplicity as an association rather than a collection of separated individualities or an indistinguishable mass. While the idea of solidarity is relatively underdeveloped in Foucaults work, I think it offers greater possibilities for the transformation of the power relations than does a focus on self-care. Solidarity, as an anti-partitioning and anti-massifying tactic, enables the generation of a collective counter-power that might contend with forces

323 324

Ibid., 474, 475.

See Keenan, The Paradox of Knowledge and Power: Foucault on the Bias for an elegant reading of this text as the source of a radical theory of rights, in which intervention creates the right to intervene, enacts the right to act, initiates the right to initiate (171, 160).

158 working in the direction of greater disciplining of the individual and regulation of the population.325 But the picture of associative democratic politics I am defending is not only a means of resisting contemporary forms of power. Or, rather: it is not simply a negative mode of resistance, because the collaborative efforts of democratic collectivities are productive and creative; they bring new things into the world. Like Foucaults ethical self-care, cooperative democratic politics is best understood as a creative activity, a practice or a doing. But it is a practice that differs from Foucaults ethical freedom not only because it is associative or collective in character, but because it is oriented toward a different object. This practice of democratic freedom is less concerned with the elaboration of a self or selves than with the construction of a common world. World in the sense I am using it, along with the notion of world-building, are ideas developed by Hannah Arendt, for whom the term world or common world signifies the tangible and intangible in-between that links individuals to one another, binding them together yet keeping them separate, like the table around which a group of people sit. This in-between, which I consider more fully in Chapter 4, is comprised of both material objects and the web of human relationships. It both relates and separates us from one another. The common world is understood to be humanly produced, not simply given; it is created. Recently, Michael Warner

Foucaults preface to Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus hints at the importance of solidaristic relationships that resist both individualization and massification. Describing the text as a manual on the art of living, Foucault says that it instructs the following: Do not demand of politics that it restore the rights of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to de-individualize by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization (xiv). Foucault, Preface, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983).

325

159 has borrowed the Arendtian notion of world-making to theorize a queer politics that is beyond gay marriage. He draws attention to what he calls the world-making activity of queer life both past and present in order to challenge contemporary gay political movements emphasis on the right to marriage. That state-centered project, with its potentially normalizing effects, threatens to overtake the queer world-making project, which consists in creative efforts to establish alternative ways of life and shared cultures that do not simply replicate existing dominant forms.326 Although Foucault never uses the language of world-making, his work displays an appreciation for the collaborative creation of common ways of life and culture. Warners emphasis on the countercultural dimensions of queer life mirrors Foucaults own analysis of the limits of a rights-based approach to gay politics. In a 1981 interview on the subject of gay politics, Foucault argued, It is not only a matter of integrating this strange little practice of making love with someone of the same sex into preexisting cultures; its a matter of constructing cultural forms.327 He further explains that he is referring to culture in the large sense, a culture that invents ways of relating, types of existence, types of values, types of exchanges between individuals which are really new and neither the same as, nor superimposed on, existing cultural forms.328 This approach to gay politics takes the invention of other ways of life rather than the pursuit of legal rights or the constitution of the self as the central task.

326

Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Foucault, The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1, Ethics, 157. Ibid., 159-60.

327

328

160 In another interview, also from 1981, Foucault explains, To be gay, I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try to define and develop a way of life.329 This way of life is something shared and invented; it is a creative and collaborative production. And its development, Foucault explains elsewhere, is something that affirms gays not simply as an identity but as creative force.330 This force is what, perhaps, partly contributes to the perception of gays as a threat to an existing dominant order. Foucault suggests that we are more comfortable with images of homosexuality as a kind of immediate pleasure or simple sexual gratification because it cancels out everything that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship, things that our rather sanitized society cant allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unseen lines of force. I think thats what makes homosexuality disturbing; the homosexual mode of life, much more than the sexual act itself.331 My claim is that it is through cooperative struggle involving the formation of new alliances and the instantiation of shared modes of life that the de-politicizing effects of modern power can best be challenged. It is not only in relation to gay politics that Foucault articulates a notion of world-making that is important for associative democratic politics. His interpretation of the Polish Solidarity movement also depicts political struggle as a creative undertaking that generates real effects on collective existence. When speaking of the accomplishments of the movement, Foucault

329 330 331

Foucault, Friendship as a Way of Life, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1, Ethics, 138. Foucault, Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity, 164. Foucault, Friendship as a Way of Life, 136.

161 clarifies that he is less interested in the freedoms and rights that may have been won at a given moment, than in an experience the Poles had, an experience which destroyed their previous belief that the invention of new social relations was impossible.332 What the political experience of the Poles demonstrated was that social change becomes possible when hatred and opposition are transformed into creative forces. Foucault describes this transformation first as the public articulation of what were previously private grievances: The Poles discovered something they knew but had never been able to bring fully into the light of day their shared hatred of the regime. That hatred was formulated in public words and texts and converted into the creation of something new and shared in common.333 I want to affirm the moments in Foucaults work that are oriented toward associative, collaborative world-making rather than self-constitution. It is the creation of something new and shared in common that lies at the heart of associative democratic politics. On this view, the practice of freedom involves the construction of relations of association and the generation of a creative force or counter-power that can re-shape shared conditions. This exercise of freedom is world-making both because of the horizontal conjunctions or new relationships it involves, which themselves contribute to the transformation of collective existence, and because of the other effects such alliances can produce: new cultural forms and ways of life that can serve as sites of creative resistance to dominant powers. The practice of freedom that can agonally contend with disciplinary and bio power is one that strives to re-constitute multiplicity in politically promising ways in the form of alliances
332

Foucault, The Moral and Social Experience of the Poles Can No Longer Be Obliterated, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3, Power, 467. Ibid., 468.

333

162 and associations and that takes the transformation of common conditions rather than the transformation of the individual self as its guiding aspiration. While I do not want to suggest that a clear boundary divides the individual practice of self-creation from the collective practice of world-making, such that they are wholly distinct undertakings, I do want to insist that there is a significant difference between an account of freedom that takes the selfs reflexive relation as the starting point and one which begins from relations of association between individuals. Moreover, I would suggest that the development of new subjectivities, which Foucault calls for, is best pursued not through focused ascetic practices performed on the self, but through efforts to collaboratively create the shared conditions and common cultures that could nurture the emergence of these new subjectivities.334 Of course, the reach of discipline and biopower into evermore domains of human life poses serious obstacles to the activities of associative democratic politics. The increasing privatization of public space, the ubiquity of surveillance technologies, and the intensification of all sorts of massifying mechanisms (whether public opinion, the consumer index or red states) are just some of the features of contemporary existence that weigh heavily on the ability of individuals to establish lines of solidarity or undertake cooperative resistance efforts. Nonetheless, these forms of power exert their primary effects on multiplicity; they work by depoliticizing human plurality, and they can only be seriously challenged within those terms. We need to de-partition disciplinary space, to cultivate certain kinds of political contagion, to refuse membership in masses by presenting ourselves as speaking and acting, and not merely

334

I elaborate on this claim in Chapter 5.

163 biological, beings. To struggle with discipline and bio-power is to engage in associative democratic politics.

164 Chapter 4 The Perils of Good Conscience: Hannah Arendts Worldly Ethics If Foucaults work reveals, without fully pursuing, the significance of associative democratic politics, Hannah Arendts theory of cooperative political action would appear to be an important supplement. Foucaults ethical turn toward the care of the self, I have argued, fails to address the dual problems of individualization and massification he diagnoses. Could Arendts theory of politics as a collaborative endeavor among co-actors contribute to thinking about specifically democratic responses to those problems? Arendts own concern with the threats posed by atomization and massification invites us to ask whether her account of associative politics might speak to the challenges opened up by Foucaults analysis but not effectively engaged by this foray into ethics. But is an inquiry into Arendts theory of political action a dramatic turn away from the question of ethics? Judging by the claims of some of her readers, it would certainly seem to be. Among the many objections leveled at Hannah Arendts distinctive political theory, the charge of amoralism appears with relative frequency. According to Seyla Benhabib, for example, Arendt fails to provide politics with much needed normative foundations.335 Likewise George Kateb argues that Arendts attempts to conceptualize politics as a realm that is either not charged with moral purposes (politics as imagined in the light of the polis) or is made moral only from an indissociable connection to a political artifice, a constitution (modern politics) is deeply

335

Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996), 193.

165 flawed.336 Both Kateb and Benhabib worry that without the recognition of some incontrovertible moral principles that set the terms of political life, politics is stripped of the necessary safeguards that prevent it from lapsing into a sheer battle of wills. In their view, political arrangements must instantiate moral principles that enjoy a deeper ontological status than those political arrangements themselves.337 Much like Isaiah Berlins readers who seek to construct out of his account of value pluralism a moral minimum that can serve as an absolute which sanctions liberal political designs, many of Arendts critics are driven by the conviction that politics stands in need of meta-norms.338 Thus, Katebs displeasure with Arendts challenge to absolute morality conveys more than a disagreement with her unique political theory; it also expresses a general orientation which assumes that politics requires grounding in an extrapolitical and uncontestable domain.339 The animating worry behind such positions is that without moral constraints inaugurating and constraining political designs, there is nothing to prevent politics from its worse excesses, exclusions and violences. What Arendts political theory fails to recognize, say her
336 337

George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983), 85.

See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), esp. 147, where she invokes a hierarchical relationship between politics and morality, arguing that the boundaries of the moral community and those of the political community do not overlap and I would argue that they must be kept distinct. The particularities of political communities must always be subject to the universal principles that define what Benhabib calls the moral community. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992), 45. Benhabib begins here by noting that the ethical position of a defender of communicative ethics such as herself involves a strong commitment to the norms of universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity. Yet she goes on to specify that these are actually meta-norms, and thus enjoy a different ontological status from the specific norms of a way of life: In instances where there is a clash between the meta-norms of communicative ethics and the specific norms of a moral way of life, the latter must be subordinated to the former. See Kimberly Hutchings, From Morality to Politics and Back Again: Feminist International Ethics and the Civil Society ArgumentAlternatives 29 (2004) for an insightful reading of how Benhabib establishes non-negotiable standards for political exchange, despite making claims concerning her theorys lack of idealized strictures on discursive content.
339 338

Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 85.

166 critics, is that politics needs more than the immanent limits provided by what Kateb terms a political artifice; politics must be born out of and continually structured by moral truths, external to the play of politics. This chapter seeks to complicate the portrait of Arendts work as amoral, by showing that although Arendt does indeed refuse to posit a moral absolute as the ground of political life, her thought is nonetheless animated by a powerful ethical vision. The uniquely Arendtian ethics that I bring to the fore poses important challenges to both the absolutism and individualism encountered in the name of ethics and tracked in Chapters 2 and 3. In contrast to characterizations of Arendt which depict her as simply severing the political from the ethicomoral, I demonstrate that her understanding of politics is imbued with a strong ethical sensibility. The alternative ethical orientation I draw out of her work, which centers on care for the world, is a promising opening for imagining how ethics might enhance rather than imperil associative democratic activity.

I. The Problem of Obedience The historical event of Nazi totalitarianism serves as the starting point for Arendts reflections on morality. The regimes unprecedented crimes constituted a profound break in tradition, the wake of which we continue to live within today. It was the horrible originality of totalitarianism that Arendt claimed had exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment.340 What was particularly horrifying was that in less than six

340

Hannah Arendt, Understanding and Politics in Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994), 309-10.

167 years Germany laid waste the moral structure of Western society341; previously indisputable moral rules and standards seemed to be abandoned with relative ease. Introducing a 1965-6 lecture course titled Some Questions of Moral Philosophy, Arendt quotes from Winston Churchills statement, Scarcely anything, material or established, which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital has lasted. She continues: Among the many things which were still thought to be permanent and vital at the beginning of the century and yet have not lasted, I chose to turn our attention to the moral issues, those which concern individual conduct and behavior, the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong, and which were invoked to judge or justify others and themselves, and whose validity were supposed to be self-evident to every sane person, either as a part of divine law or natural law. Until, that is, without much notice, all this collapsed almost overnight, and then it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs, and manners, which could be exchanged with another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people.342 What the moral collapse that attended Nazism seemed to reveal, then, was the disturbing fragility and malleability of all moral standards. The experience of Nazism, Arendt suggests, forces the recognition that moral commandments are far from self-evident. Precepts of morality may enjoy no greater ontological status than those practices we recognize as constructed and conventional, such as table manners. The total collapse of all established moral standards in public and private life in Hitlers Germany testifies to the dangerous precariousness of beliefs and practices once assumed to be reliable constants.343 For this reason, the true moral issue raised by Nazism is not, Arendt argues, the actions of Nazi leaders, but the behavior of ordinary people who demonstrated a disturbing capacity
341 342

Hannah Arendt, The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany in Essays in Understanding, 248.

Hannah Arendt, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 50 (hereafter cited as SQ). Arendt, SQ, 52.

343

168 for adaptation, as they abandoned previously held moral standards and laws in order to comply with the orders issued by a criminal regime. It is this phenomenon, in which morality collapsed into a mere set of mores manners, customs, conventions to be changed at will that constitutes the true moral issue of Nazi totalitarianism and Adolf Eichmann is the figure who embodies it.344 As Arendt writes, The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that there were so many like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.345 How could a normal man how could so many normal men participate in unprecedented atrocities? Arendts famous answer is that such participation has something to do with a failure to think. Sheer thoughtlessness is what predisposed Eichmann to become one of the greatest criminals of the period.346 What sort of thoughtlessness does Arendt have in mind? Significantly, she suggests that Eichmanns curious, quite authentic inability to think is indistinguishable from his fidelity to duty.347 In other words, Eichmann was thoughtless precisely insofar as he obeyed whatever law, command, or order was put to him. Throughout his trial he maintained that what he had done was a crime only in retrospect, and he had always been a lawabiding citizen, because Hitlers orders, which he had certainly executed to the best of his ability,

344 345

Ibid., 54.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 276. Ibid., 287-8.

346 347

Hannah Arendt, Thinking and Moral Considerations in Responsibility and Judgment, 159 (hereafter cited as TMC).

169 had possessed the force of law in the Third Reich.348 In his interviews with police and on the stand before the court, Eichmann defended himself against charges of crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity with the claim that he had simply obeyed the law and done his duty. His skills in adaptation and obedience were once again on display in the trial itself, where, as Arendt reported, He functioned in the role of prominent war criminal as well as he had under the Nazi regime; he had not the slightest difficulty in accepting an entirely different set of rules. He knew that what he had once considered his duty was now called a crime, and he accepted the new code of judgment as though it were nothing but another language rule.349 Just as he had earlier adjusted to the requirements of the Nazi regime, he took on a new, contrary set of rules and followed them well. Eichmanns unwavering fidelity to authority as such may have been the truest expression of his thoughtlessness. The fundamental problem with obedience, even obedience to correct moral standards or precepts, according to Arendt, is that people become attached to the mode of obedience itself. It is the activity itself that is problematic, apart from the substance of the laws, maxims, or orders being obeyed. That is, what people get used to is not so much the content of the rules, a close examination of which would always lead them into perplexity, as the possession of rules under which to subsume particulars. In other words, they get used to never making up their minds.350

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 276. Eichmanns belief in law-abidingness was so complete that he apologized in court for the two exceptions he had made during the Nazi regime, when he had helped a half-Jewish cousin and a Jewish couple (137). Obedience to law was of such ultimate importance to Eichmann that he stated in a police examination that he would have sent his own father to death if that had been required (42).
349 350

348

Arendt, TMC, 159.

Arendt, TMC, 178. See also Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 177 (hereafter cited as LOTM I).

170 This unthinking state, she suggests, is something that individuals grow accustomed and habituated to and even desire. Yet this attachment to the possession of rules constitutes a precarious and vulnerable state. With the inclination toward obedience in place, it is easy enough to abolish old standards, provided a new code is offered. Arendt argues, The faster men held to the old code, the more eager they will be to assimilate themselves to the new one.351 The implication is that the prolonged practice of unquestioning rule-following inculcates in humans a tendency, willingness, and even longing to obey that persist independent of any particular content. The experience of adhering to conventions and laws without subjecting them to examination prepares individuals to accept and adjust to even the complete reversal of an existing code, Arendt argues. This is precisely what happened in Nazi Germany when basic commandments of Western morality were reversed, such as Thou shalt not kill352 and were met with no overwhelming resistance.353 It is for this reason that Arendt rejects moral systems focused on the elaboration of commands.354 This rejection follows from her concern with the habituation into obedience, which inclines us to submit to authority too readily.

351 352 353

Arendt, TMC, 178. Arendt, LOTM I, 177 and TMC, 178.

Arendt, Religion and Politics, in Understanding and Politics, 383. Arendt also points out that the sequel to this event the reversal of the reversal, the fact that it was so surprisingly easy to re-educate the Germans after the collapse of the Third Reich, so easy indeed that it was as though re-education was automatic should not console us either. It is actually the same phenomenon LOTM I, 177-8.
354

Kantian morality does not escape Arendts critique. Despite the significant differences between Kants focus on autonomous law-giving and those moralities in which commands are externally given, Arendt says that Kant brought the concept of obedience through a back door with the notion of an imperative issued by reason that requires obedience from the will. SQ, 72.

171 Importantly, then, Arendts reflections on the moral collapse wrought by Nazi totalitarianism are not simply laments over the destruction of previously taken-for-granted moral categories and standards, as if the ideal world would be one in which they once again functioned reliably. Rather, what totalitarianism brings to light for Arendt are the grave dangers inherent in compliance as the mode through which individuals relate to laws and norms. This mode was flawed all along, although its true consequences became evident only in the events of Nazism. Command morality is also unsuitable for the kind of practice of politics that lies at the heart of Arendts work. Although Arendt frames the issue of obedience to a moral code primarily in terms of individual thoughtlessness and its evident dangers, it is also possible to construct out of her work an argument for the incompatibility of codified morality with participatory politics in which citizens act cooperatively as equals. A traditional understanding of morality as a set of absolute precepts to be followed (even if those precepts are in some sense correct) is antithetical to the activity of politics as Arendt conceives it. To understand why this is so, it is important to recall that politics, for Arendt, is the site of the practice of associative freedom. Arguing against Western philosophers in general and liberals in particular, Arendts work defends a conception of freedom as public, political and worldly. Contrary to common beliefs that freedom begins where politics ends,355 Arendt argues that the field where freedom has always been knownis the political realm.356 Freedom is experienced in public with fellow citizens who act and speak together under conditions of profound equality. Although rule of one kind or another is often assumed to be the
Arendt, What is Freedom? in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 149.
356 355

Ibid., 146.

172 central modality of politics, Arendt disputes this view. She argues instead that rulership is best understood as an attempt to evade the difficulties of free action, itself the essence of politics. Because action under conditions of plurality tends to produce unpredictable and haphazard effects that leave us feeling unfree or acted upon in the course of events initiated by our acting, we are inclined to turn away with despair from the realm of human affairs and to hold in contempt the human capacity for freedom.357 Political and philosophical thought demonstrates its own despair and contempt, Arendt claims, by seeking a substitute for action, an alternative mode of doing that allows for the experience of control.358 The belief that men can lawfully and politically live together only when some are entitled to command and the others forced to obey is the purest expression of this substitution.359 The structure of rule attempts to evade the excesses of action undertaken by a plurality of agents by establishing a division between those who know and are fit to command and those others who are fit only to execute orders, or do. With Arendts conception of political freedom and critique of rulership in mind,360 we can appreciate the extent to which command-based morality is incompatible with forms of

357 358 359

Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 233-4 (hereafter cited as HC). Ibid., 220.

Ibid., 222. Arendt argues here that the escape from action into rule is exemplified by Plato, who, in order to ensure that the beginner would remain the complete master of what he had begun, introduced a division between beginning (archein) and achieving (prattein), which according to Greek understanding were interconnected (222). Eschewing the original interdependence of action the fact that a beginner or leader must enlist the help, the co-acting of his fellow men Plato severs the link between beginning and achieving: The problem, as Plato saw it, was to make sure that the beginner would remain the complete master of what he had begun, not needing the help of others to carry it through (222, 189, 222). Platos solution was to split archein and prattein into two separate activities, assigned to two distinct entities: the ruler and the ruled. Arendt declares, Action as such is entirely eliminated and has become the mere execution of orders (223). A plurality of potential actors is replaced by a population divided hierarchically between those who know and those who do, with actors as such (those who both know and do) absent altogether. Patchen Markell argues that Arendts critique of rule is more complex than has been recognized; her aim is not to celebrate those phenomena that are conventionally understood as rules opposites change, interruption, openness

360

173 political life constituted through associative speech and action. Insofar as command morality fosters in individuals the habit of obedience, it prepares them for political existence structured by a division between rulers and ruled. The compliance expected and encouraged by traditional moral systems parallels the deference to authority that supports regimes in which some rule and others obey. But the habit of obedience even to a good moral code cannot cultivate in citizens the capacities required for co-acting with political peers. The practice of political freedom, in which individuals join together and introduce something new into the world, involves equality among citizens who neither rule nor are ruled, as well as collective creativity and spontaneity. Fidelity to a codified system of morality trains individuals to submit to authority, but does little to foster the abilities that would allow them to participate in collective world-building projects that follow the logic of freedom rather than the logic of rule.361

II. Selbstdenken and the Activation of Conscience Arendts critical account of the dangers implicit in command morality, however compelling, does not necessarily address other, less absolute or rule-bound conceptions of

and novelty over and against the stability, order, closure, and continuity associated with rule (2). Instead, the point of Arendts critique of rule and recovery of beginning is to prise apart phenomena that the idea of rule has taught us to see as inseparably connected (5) for example, the assumed link between relationships of subordination and stability, regularity, continuity. Markells brilliant reading of Arendt also stages an intervention into contemporary democratic theory. He suggests that the paradox that democratic theorists have identified in the relationship between democracy and rule may be best understood neither as a problem to be solved nor as a limitation to be accepted, but rather as a symptom of the ongoing dominance of political theory and practice by the idea of rule (5). The matrix of oppositions within which contemporary democratic theory conducts itself is what Arendts critique of political rule attempts to bring into view (2). Patchen Markell, The Rule of the People: Arendt, Arch, and Democracy, APSR 100, no. 1 (2006).
361

The assumption that obedience is a political virtue is attacked by Arendt repeatedly, who argues that the notion of obedience, properly applicable to life only in the nursery and under conditions of slavery, has come to infect our understanding of politics as a strictly hierarchical activity in which some rule and others obey. See Arendt, Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship, in Responsibility and Judgment, 47-8 (hereafter cited as PR).

174 morality. In regard to forms of morality or ethics that do not have as their focus the formulation of universal rules to be enacted, Arendts insights into the hazards of obedience would seem to lose their salience. Recall, for example, the distinction Foucault draws between morality as a set of rules of action and those ethics-oriented moralities in which the emphasis is on the forms of relations with the self. Does Arendts dismissal of the moralities Foucault terms codeoriented leave room for other ethical possibilities? Indeed, for Arendt repeatedly argues that thinking and the reflexive relationship it involves are morally significant. In this section, I will explore Arendts claim that thinking and its side effect, conscience, constitute a meaningful alternative to command morality an alternative that partially echoes Foucaults ethics in its focus on the selfs relationship to itself. Yet as I will show in Part 3 of this chapter, Arendt sharply distinguishes such moral care for the self from political care for the world. Although I attenuate this contrast somewhat, I contend that Arendtian care for the world amounts to a powerful democratic ethical sensibility. In order to develop this argument, however, and appreciate the comparison Arendt draws between morality and politics, we must begin by examining her somewhat surprising suggestion that the activity of thinking has moral import. She declares: the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and the skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain, that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.362

362

Arendt, PR, 45.

175 Arendt suggests that a more reliable moral resource than attachment to a code, at least in the context of a criminal regime, is the very activity of critical thinking. This is the same claim hinted at in her introduction to the volume of Life of the Mind devoted to thinking: Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever comes to pass or attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually condition them against it?363 Thinking for oneself or Selbstdenken, which Arendt depicts as the source of conscience, is meant to serve as a potential challenge to the experience of mass conformity in moral matters under Nazism.364 The term Selbstdenken indicates not only that thinking is performed in solitude, but that it entails a release from conventional wisdom in which the familiar is de-familiarized: Practically, thinking means that each time you are confronted with some difficulty in life you have to make up your mind anew.365 It is the practice of making up your mind anew, or in Arendts gloss on Kant, simply the habit of using your own mind that disinclines one toward accepting or complying with whatever appears with the stamp of authority.366

Arendt, LOTM I, 5. This suggestion begs the question: how universal is the activity of thinking? Arendt puts it pointedly: Ifthe ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to demand its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be (LOTM I, 13. See also TMC, 166). Although Arendt insists that thinking is not a prerogative of the few but an ever-present faculty of everybody (TMC, 187), she also claims that the inability to think is also an everpresent possibility for everybody scientists, scholars, and other specialists in mental enterprises not excluded (LOTM I, 191).
364

363

Arendt defines Selbstdenken as thinking for oneself in On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing, in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest Books, 1970), 7-8. According to Arendt, Lessings work exemplified Selbstdenken or independent thinking. Lessing, Arendt claims, understood thinking as another mode of moving in the world of freedom. Arendt, LOTM I, 177.

365 366

Arendt, Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 32. In these same lectures, Arendt also defines Selbstdenken as thinking for oneself, which she claims is essential for understanding why enlarged thought in which one disregards private subjective conditions in favor

176 If the activity of making up ones own mind can act as a guard against wrongdoing, it is because thinking is connected for Arendt to the functioning of conscience. Her claim is that the more we are accustomed to being in thoughtful dialogue with ourselves, the less willing we will be to do something that would strain that reflexive relationship. When we follow the insights of conscience we do so in recognition of the fact that we shall have to live together with ourselves.367 Acting on the basis of conscience, a byproduct of thinking, we endeavor to maintain personal integrity.368 Arendt often quotes a Socratic proposition from the Gorgias to explain the self-relation that lies at the heart of thinking and conscience: It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me.369 Although this statement contains a reference to the self as being one, Arendt notes that this is hardly unproblematic,370 since the very notion of harmony (or disharmony), which lies at the center of the statement, is meaningless unless there exists some difference: Nothing that is identical with itself, truly and absolutely One, as A is A, can be

of more general thinking is not the same as empathy (43). Here Arendt seems to use the terms critical thinking and judgment interchangeably.
367 368 369

Arendt, PR, 45. Arendt, TMC, 189 and LOTM I, 193.

Arendt, TMC, 181. See also Civil Disobedience in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1969), 62; SQ, 90-93, 100; Collective Responsibility in Responsibility and Judgment, 151-3; The Twoin-One in LOTM I, esp. 181; Truth and Politics in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 244-5.
370

Arendt, TMC, 184.

177 either in or out of harmony with itself.371 Significantly, the self is not just one. Thus, a difference is inserted into my Oneness.372 This difference in oneness manifests itself in the form of an inner dialogue. Although thinking inevitably entails a withdrawal from the world as it appears and a bending back toward the self,373 such withdrawal is not an experience in passivity, but is characterized by sheer activity. This activity consists in a special kind of speech, the dialogue of the two-in-one. The state of solitude in which thinking occurs, is one in which we are never alone, but are together with ourselves.374 Such togetherness takes the form of a soundless dialogue of me with myself375 in which I speak with myself about whatever happens to concern me.376 In the Theaetetus, Socrates explains dianoeisthai, or what it means to think a matter through: I call it a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. And Ill explain it to you though I am not too sure about it myself. It looks to me as though this is nothing else but dialegesthai, talking something through, only that the mind asks itself questions and answers them, saying yes or no to itself377
371 372 373

Arendt, LOTM I, 183. Arendt, SQ, 100; LOTM I, 183.

Arendt, LOTM I, 22. Arendt repeatedly characterizes thinking as an activity that by nature interrupts all others to such an extent that the moment we start thinking on no matter what issue we stop everything else. Thinking for Arendt requires a cessation of the worldly activities with which we are otherwise occupied, and it is this genuine experience of the stop-and-think, with its attendant mental withdrawal from immediate appearances, that, according to Arendt, must have inspired the philosophical two-world theories (TMC, 164-5; LOTM I, 22-3). Although we do not do so in any literal sense, it is as though we moved into a different world when we think. As part of this movement, we disregard what is given to the senses at present in order to engage with a re-presentation of something or someone actually absent. It is for this reason that the otherwise soundless and invisible activity of thinking can be recognized by others as a kind of absentmindedness, an obvious disregard of the surrounding world (LOTM I, 72).
374

Arendt, On the Nature of Totalitarianism in Essays in Understanding, 358. Here, as elsewhere, Arendt argues that we become one only when we are recognized by others. Arendt, LOTM I, 74, 31. Arendt, SQ, 97-8. Arendt, SQ, 91.

375 376 377

178

Thinking, then, is a way of talking something through with oneself. Yet as Arendt theorizes it, the question-and-answer of the inner dialogue described by Socrates would seem to be unending. The yes or no Socrates refers to above will only issue forth new questions, for on Arendts account, the process of thought is resultless.378 It does not lead to propositions, commandments or final definitions.379 The absence of such outcomes may be especially frustrating or perplexing due to the common error that involves mistaking the quest for meaning for the search for knowledge.380 If one looks to the thinking activity to generate something akin to cognitive truth, it will surely disappoint, since it produces no end result that will survive the activity.381 Yet thinking is not merely unproductive of concrete results; it actually has a destructive quality, on Arendts telling. This is because the activity of thinking consists primarily in calling into question accepted ideas, standards and guidelines. The question-and-answer method undertaken in the internal dialogue is one of interrogation in which commonplace understandings are considered anew. As Arendt explains, To think means to examine and question; it always

378 379 380

Arendt, TMC, 167. Ibid.

Drawing on Kants theorization of Vernunft and Verstand, which Arendt translates unconventionally as reason and intellect, respectively, Arendt argues that these two faculties coincide with two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing, and two altogether different concerns, meaning, in the first category, and cognition, in the second. Arendt, LOTM I, 14. As Arendt explains it, the intellect, in its drive to knowledge, desires to grasp what is given by the senses, but reason (Vernunft) wishes to understand its meaning. Ibid., 57. If we have difficulty grasping the distinction here, Arendt would argue this is likely due to a pervasive basic fallacy according to which we interpret meaning on the model of truth (LOTM I, 15).
381

Arendt, LOTM I, 123.

179 involves that shattering of idols of which Nietzsche was so fond.382 The nature of genuine thinking lies in the continual probing of seeming verities. Thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil.383 Does this mean that thinking as such is good for nothing?384 No, because thinking appears useless only if viewed from the perspective of Verstand and its desire for stable truths. What if the value of thinking resides in the activity as such? This is precisely the original and challenging point Arendt puts to us: In response to the unavoidable question, How can anything relevant for the world we live in arise out of so resultless an enterprise? Arendt offers, An answer, if at all, can come only from the thinking activity, the performance itself.385 The experience of talking things through with oneself may not lead to certainties of any kind, but it is a significant activity nonetheless, because of the relationship with oneself that it fosters and sustains. But if the performance of thinking does not provide us with a final code of conduct or an allegedly final definition of what is good and what is evil, it is also not entirely resultless,
382

Arendt, SQ, 103. Arendt is also fond of Socrates description of thinking as a wind that sweeps over terms and ideas we typically take for granted. It is the work of thought to unfreezewhat language, the medium of thinking, has frozen. See TMC, 172-6 and LOTM I, 171, 174-5.

383 Arendt, TMC, 176. Despite its undermining effects, our longing for rules to follow sometimes infects the very activity of thinking. The desire to find results that would make further thinking unnecessary can lead us astray such that we mistake the destruction wrought by thinking for a simple reversal. Thinking is equally dangerous to all creeds, and, by itself, does not bring forth any new creed, but our wish for a creed of some kind any kind can prompt us to mistake the defrosting performed by thinking for simple reversal. Thus, Arendt argues, the quest for meaning, which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all accepted doctrines and rules, can at every moment turn against itself, as it were, produce a reversal of the old values, and declare these as new values. When this occurs, the negative results of thinking will then be used as sleepily, with the same unthinking routine, as the old values (TMC, 177). Arendt argues here that nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current, so-called positive values to which it remains bound. Such nihilism may be seen as an everpresent danger of thinking. 384 385

Arendt, TMC, 166. Arendt, TMC, 167.

180 since Arendt credits it with generating conscience as a side effect. 386 Another Socratic proposition from the Gorgias sheds some light on how the activity of thought is linked to conscience: It is better to be wronged than to do wrong. Together with the proposition referred to earlier, in which Socrates speaks of the possibility of being out of harmony with himself, these Socratic insights illuminate the workings of conscience. Understanding that the self is a two-in-one is a prerequisite for making sense of Socrates claim that it is better to suffer wrong. 387 Because I am my own partner, I would be wise to refrain from doing anything that would strain that partnership.388 In other words, the reason it would be better to suffer a wrong than to commit one is that I must live with myself. If I commit a crime against another, I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in unbearable intimacy.389 The counsels of conscience, Arendt argues, are fundamentally concerned with avoiding participation in anything that would put into jeopardy my life-long relationship with myself. For the sake of that relationship, it would be better to be harmed that to harm another, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer. 390 Conscience emerges as a side effect or byproduct that attempts to preserve conditions that allow for the thinking process of inner dialogue to continue over time.391 As Arendt articulates it, the self that we all are must take care not to do anything that would make it
386 387 388 389 390 391

Ibid. Ibid., 183. Arendt, SQ, 90. Ibid. Arendt, TMC, 185.

Arendt refers to conscience as a side effect and moral side effect in LOTM I, pp. 191-2, and as a byproduct of thinking on LOTM I, 193.

181 impossible for the two-in-one to be friends and live in harmony.392 By issuing self-set limits, conscience attempts to protect the relationship of the two-in-one that is necessary for thought393 and this relationship is specifically one of friendship. That is, with the guidance of conscience we see to it that the two who carry on the thinking dialogue be in good shape, that the partners be friends.394 The soundless dialogue of thinking requires not just that there be difference within the self that the self be two but also that the two present in solitude be on speaking terms.395 Thus, when conscience articulates itself in the form of This I cant do, the refusal serves partly to ensure that I can live in peace with myself.396 Because man contains within himself a partner from whom he can never win release, he will be better off not to live in company with a murderer or liar.397 Such company is undesirable because it threatens the reflexive friendship that enables thought: Who would want to be the friend of and live together with a murderer?

392 393 394

Arendt, LOTM I, 191. Arendt, SQ, 101.

Arendt, LOTM I, 187-8 and TMC, 185. See Arendts posthumously published essay Philosophy and Politics for an extended discussion of inter-personal friendship as a particular kind of dialogue which doesnt need a conclusion in order to be meaningful and which involves talking about something that the friends have in common such that each friend understands how and in what specific articulateness the common world apprears to the other. Arendt suggests here that what Socrates did politically was try to make friends out of Athens citizenry. Arendt, Philosophy and Politics, Social Research 57, no. 1 (Spring 1990), esp. section titled Dialogue between Friends, 82-86.
395 396 397

Arendt, SQ, 92. Arendt, SQ, 78; LOTM I, 191. Arendt, Truth and Politics, 245.

182 Not even a murderer. What kind of dialogue could you lead with him?398 Arendts suggestion is that wrongdoing threatens to introduce a basic contradiction into the 2-in-1, a conflict that would destroy the friendship required for thinking as such.399 The novel structure of Arendts argument should by now be clear: where conscience exists, it arises out of the thinking activity itself, and functions in the service of that activity. Where thinking produces conscience as its side effect, this effect loops back, working to preserve and sustain its own origin.400 Conscience, as Arendt theorizes it, is not an everpresent voice of God or the lumen naturale within, but something that is roused only if and when a man goes home and faces the witness who awaits him, his partner in the two-in-one of thinking.401 Conscience is a way of caring for the self, but the reflexive relation at its center is quite unlike the one that defined Foucaults self-care. While the rapport a soi that Foucault defined as ethics consisted in the mastery of the self by another part of the self, the form of self-care Arendt names conscience is directed at enabling a dialogic partnership. Arendt refuses to cast

398

Arendt, TMC, 185. See also LOTM I, 188. In both of these texts, Arendt offers a quote from Shakespeares Richard III as an example of the kind of dialogue that characterizes a soul that is not in harmony but at war with itself. Arendt, TMC, 185; LOTM I, 189.

399

Arendt, Truth and Politics, 245. Arendt describes the 2-in-1 relationship both as a matter of friendship and of non-contradiction. For example: The dialogue of thought can be carried out only among friends, and its basic criterion, its supreme law, as it were, says: Do not contradict yourself. Arendt, LOTM I, 189. The language of friendship seems preferable to that of non-contradiction, however, since the latter can give the impression that complete agreement or identity between the 2-in-1 is the aim of conscience, when in fact, some difference, though not conflict, is necessary in order for questioning and answering to occur. Friendship expresses this better, I think, than does the logic-bound idea of non-contradiction.

The difficulty, of course, is that conscience requires thinking as its precondition. In LOTM I, Arendt explains that conscience is active only in those who participate in silent intercourse with themselves, yet also acknowledges that a life without thinking is quite possible. Thus, conscience cannot be assumed (190-1). Socrates argument concerning the superiority of suffering over committing harm, for example, will be applicable only to people who are used to living explicitly with themselves. Arendt, Collective Responsibility, 157.
401

400

Arendt, LOTM I, 190.

183 conscience in terms of rule, even rule over the self.402 The two-in-one that conscience works to preserve is a relation between friends who talk through whatever comes to pass, rather than a two-in-one operating through the modes of dominance and submission.403 The refusal to participate in anything that would violate ones sense of personal integrity, in an effort to remain on good terms with oneself, is exemplified for Arendt by nonparticipants under Nazi rule. Although an isolated and mute minority, those who refused to go along with what was demanded of them by the Nazi regime rejected both the instructions of the state and the apparent opinion of respectable society in favor of their own ability to tell right from wrong.404 The refusal to participate in this context was most often a refusal to personally play a role in a highly organized system of violence that would continue to function with or without ones individual involvement.405 Those who did not comply with orders in effect declared, Not by my hand. While tremendous horrors would likely persist, they would not
402

Her theorization of willing, however, recognizes a two-in-one relation that is characterized by a split between two equals one who commands and one who obeys. Arendt conceives of the will as engaged in a merciless struggle in which command is frequently met with resistance, such that the will is divided against itself (SQ, 119-122). For her most sustained discussion of the will, see Arendt, Life of the Mind, vol. 2, Willing.

403

In this respect, conscience as care of the self is closer to Bernard Williams understanding of integrity than to the care of the self explored by Foucault. Williams idea of integrity constitutes his major intervention into utilitarian ethics, signifying the importance and moral validity of abstaining from certain acts (even when such abstention might lead greater overall harm to others) on the grounds that participation in them would result in significant consequences for ones self-identity. Although Arendts discussions of conscience are always closely tied to the subject of thinking, which plays no role in Williams ethical theory, a concern with saving the self from profound inner conflict is common to both. See Bernard Williams, A Critique of Utilitarianism, in Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973). SQ, 104. Arendts example here is of two peasant boys who refused to be drafted into the S.S and were executed as a result. In a letter written to their parents, they stated, We two would rather die than burden our conscience with such terrible things. We know what the S.S. must carry out. Arendt comments on those who refused to comply with Nazism: their ability to tell right from wrong remained intact, and they never suffered a crisis of conscience. This seems partly a matter of scale, however, since Arendt hints at the potential power of mass non-compliance: We have only for a moment to imagine that would happen to any of these forms of government [dictatorships] if enough people would act irresponsibly and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. Arendt, PR, 47.

404

405

184 receive aid from this individual. Although such acts remained exceptional, Arendt finds in them significant meaning: For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybodys grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that it could happen in most places but it did not happen everywhere.406 It is the fact of non-compliance that Arendt isolates for praise. Non-participation in the context of sanctioned evil, though rare, testifies to an independence of thought that stands in stark contrast to Eichmanns unwavering commitment to obedience. Arendts answer to the question she poses in reference to Nazism, In what way were those few different who in all walks of life did not collaborate and refused to participate in public life, although they could not and did not rise in rebellion?407 is that those who acted morally in the context of Nazism did not do so out of fidelity to any system. Rather, those who relied on systems to guide them were the first to yield and simply exchanged one system of values for another. What distinguished the nonparticipants was not their faithfulness to a code that others had abandoned but the fact that they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds.408 And the precondition for such conscientious refusal is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse

406 407 408

Arendt, Eichmann, 232-3. Arendt, PR, 43-4. Arendt, PR, 44.

185 with oneself, that is, to be engaged in the silent dialogue between me and myself, which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking.409 Certainly Arendts explorations of thinking and conscience as alternatives to command morality raise a number of questions. For example, as George Kateb has pointed out, Arendt seems to exaggerate the sense in which the counsels of conscience are exclusively about concern for oneself. Although it may be reasonable to say that when we act on the basis of conscience we do so at bottom in order to preserve our personal integrity most especially in those cases where our non-participation concerns a policy or practice that will occur with or without our direct involvement410 Kateb convincingly asserts, its hard to see how anyone could say he would feel intolerable pain if he harmed others, unless he has an exceptional sensitivity to the pain of others.411 Indeed, Arendt tends to treat conscience as if it were only a matter of avoiding selfreproach and in so doing overlooks the extent to which self-reproach is itself premised upon seeing the wrong as a wrong, and that such an understanding very likely depends on an

409

Arendt, PR, 44-5. Arendt also refers here to the nonparticipants as independently judging. The relationship between thinking and judging is beyond the scope of my inquiry here, although it is important to note the difficulties Arendts work presents for any effort to neatly map the two faculties in connection to one another. In certain texts, Arendt treats thinking and judging as near-synonyms, most notably in her Lectures on Kant, where she uses critical thinking and judging seemingly interchangeably in her discussion of enlarged thought (43; see also PR). More often, however, Arendt insists on thinking and judging as separate faculties, with thinking functioning as an enabling force on judgment due to its purging effect. In The Life of the Mind Arendt depicts the destruction inherent in the thinking activity as having a liberating effect on another faculty, the faculty of judgment. Here judging too is a by-product of thinking: The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge: it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly (192-3). Arendts central examples of conscientious objection are non-participants in the Nazi regime and the Vietnam War, whose individual refusals to go along with orders could not prevent horrific large-scale acts of violence from taking place. A defense of non-participation in acts that one finds morally objectionable but will occur nonetheless is offered by Bernard Williams in his refutation of utilitarianism. See A Critique of Utilitarianism, in Utilitarianism: For and Against, esp. 97-118. Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 101.

410

411

186 awareness of, or even an exceptional sensitivity to, the harmful effects a particular act can have on others. Arendts discussions of conscience also sometimes imply the existence of something like an inner compass that becomes activated if one undertakes the thinking activity. That is, there is an implicit assumption in Arendts work that thinking with and by oneself entails not only the dissolution of commonplaces into perplexities, which guards against simple compliance with authority, but also the recognition of certain acts as morally wrong in the wake of this examination.412 Although Arendt insists that no final code of conduct will result from the thinking activity, she does suppose that someone who is accustomed to carrying on the inner dialogue of thought will not want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer.413 But should we believe that such an insight will necessarily result from talking things through with oneself?414 Finally, it can be objected that Arendt neglects the social and cultural dimensions of conscience. Are the limits we identify for ourselves quite as self-set as Arendt portrays them to be? Arent our conceptions of what is morally right and wrong shaped largely by our
412

Arendt offers a sketch of the conception of conscience she seems to endorse when she contrasts Plato with Socrates. While for Plato, morality was a matter of seeing something imperishable and divine outside yourself, in the case of Socrates, no special organ is needed because you remain within yourself and no transcendent standard, as we would say, or nothing outside yourself, received with the eyes of the mind, informs you of right and wrong. Arendt, SQ, 91.

413

Arendt, TMC, 167, 185. In a letter to Arendt, her friend and editor Mary McCarthy questioned whether it made sense to rely on the individuals choice of with whom one wishes to keep company. In response to Arendts claim that I dont want to spend my life in the company of a murderer, McCarthy writes, The modern person I posit would say to Socrates, with a shrug, Why not? Whats wrong with a murderer? And Socrates would be back where he started. Arendt, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1995), 22. Quoted by Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 177. Benhabib, for example, dubs Arendts conception of conscience quasi-intuitionist because she seems to assume that meaningful moral insights follow from the activity of thinking. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 190.

414

187 particular historical setting? Even if we endeavor to scrutinize dominant beliefs, wont the very terms of our critical thinking be drawn from a repertoire of concepts and ideas circulating within our own cultural context, rather than simply self-generated? Arendt does partially recognize that moral insights are not purely individual. For example, when she discusses the variations that exist between individual notions of right and wrong, she also acknowledges the variations that exist between countries and centuries. This recognition would indicate that even the subjective counsels of conscience are situated within and shaped bythe individuals larger social and cultural context.415 Moreover, Arendts work as a whole challenges any conception of individual identity that would sever the self from its relations to others. In fact, Arendt is at pains throughout her writings to stress human intersubjectivity as the basis of even the intimate relationship we have with ourselves. For example, she argues that the friendship one has with oneself is modeled on the friendship we experience with others and that the inner freedom we know in willing is premised on worldly experiences of freedom in the company of others.416 In the context of the discussion of conscience, Arendts attention elsewhere to the worldly basis of inner life is important because it complicates Arendts own habit of depicting conscience as the highly individualized source of moral guidance. Might conscience be better understood not as a self-generated starting point but
415 416

Arendt, SQ, 101.

On friendship, see Arendt, LOTM I, 189; on freedom, see Arendt, What is Freedom? 148. Richard Flathman overlooks this important feature of Arendts thinking when he claims that Arendt located what we might call the ur-plurality, the foundation and genesis of all other pluralities, within individual persons themselves. Richard Flathman, Pluralism and Liberal Democracy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 56. Although it is true that plurality is not only a property of the world for Arendt, but also a characteristic of our inner lives, I think Flathman mis-reads Arendt when he asserts that inner plurality is the foundation of worldly plurality. Instead, worldly, intersubjective plurality is primary; the two-in-one within us points to the plurality all around us. Arendt, LOTM I, 187. Indeed, as Arendt presents it, the relationship we have with ourselves is a reflection of the relations we have with others, and not the other way around. See also Part 4 of this chapter where I caution against understanding thinking and acting as consequential stages.

188 as a complex production resulting from ones intersubjective experiences and the (conflicting) moral ideas of ones culture, as they are worked over by a unique individual engaged in the thinking activity? I would suggest that we understand Arendts tight tethering of conscience to the selfs reflexive relation as an expression of her interest in locating an independent moral resource that does not simply echo dominant beliefs and behaviors. Arendts depiction of conscience as a byproduct of Selbstdenken is meant to testify to the possibility of non-conformity in moral matters. The specter of the Holocaust, which guides all of Arendts moral investigations, reminds us of the profound dangers associated with mass compliance with the orders of government or the sentiments of majority opinion. Arendts highly individualized approach to conscience is an expression of her quest for a non-deterministic approach to morality, one which affirms the possibility of individual moral evaluation, even in the face of powerful majorities. Her exaggerated emphasis on the individual alone as the source and object of conscientious (non)action should be understood as part of an effort to identify a moral faculty that saves moral/immoral conduct from being merely a function of ones surroundings.417 Arendts attempt to identify and affirm the possibility of non-conformist moral action pushes her to stress the individual character of conscience too strongly. She does not adequately acknowledge that some concern with the fates of others is involved in identifying something as
417

As Arendt repeatedly points out, the postwar trials make sense only if it is assumed that people retain the capacity for independent thought even in the midst of near-total compliance and under the pressure of superior orders. Despite laws and norms that collude to demand and otherwise encourage what would be considered criminal acts in most other contexts, the trial of a Nazi functionary assumes the possibility of non-obedience. Indeed, Arendt describes postwar trials in the following way, What we have demanded in these trials, where the defendants have committed legal crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be at complete odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them. Arendt, Eichmann, 295.

189 wrong in the first place or the extent to which ones independent thinking is shaped by the larger environment of which one is a part. Yet I argue that these points of inattention do not diminish the power of Arendts corollary argument, which builds on a comparison between the care for the self embodied in conscience and the care for the world that she considers properly political. Even in light of the challenges mentioned above, which suggest that conscience is less self-centric than Arendt indicates, the core distinction that guides Arendt to declare conscience unpolitical remains salient. Caring for oneself, even if not the sum total of conscience, is importantly different from caring for the world. It is to this political mode of care that I now turn.

III. Care of the World and Collective Responsibility In the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self; in the center of political considerations of conduct stands the world.418 Arendts 1968 statement can be read as her answer to the ages-old question posed by Aristotle, How far should the good man and good citizen be distinguished? Arendts suggestion, which she repeats throughout her work, is that the good man is fundamentally concerned with the state of his own conscience, or the preservation of personal integrity, while the good citizen is oriented toward worldly or shared conditions. Self and world refer to the differing objects belonging to the domains of morality and politics, respectively. Despite the complications I introduced above, which suggest that the type of moral concern Arendt identifies with conscience is not exclusively created by or focused on the individual self, I want to argue that the contrast Arendt constructs between conscientious self418

Arendt, Collective Responsibility, 153.

190 interest and political engagement is nonetheless revealing and worth taking seriously. It brings to light important differences between actions undertaken primarily in an effort to maintain ones sense of personal integrity and actions undertaken with the help of others in an effort to transform collective conditions. In moral matters, Arendt says, we are concerned with the question of individual guilt and whether we can live with ourselves after having done this or that. While these are legitimate and very important questions, they are not fundamentally political.419 What does this mean? Genuinely political concerns have as their point of reference not ones inner life, the relationship of the two-in-one, but the world in the complex sense in which Arendt uses the term. To indicate how different this orientation is from the regard for the selfs integrity that informs conscience, Arendt revisits Socrates statement about it being preferable to suffer a wrong than to commit one from another angle: The political answer to the Socratic proposition would be What is important in the world is that there be no wrong; suffering wrong and doing wrong are equally bad.420 What Arendt effects here is a radical shift in perspective, away from the viewpoint of any single individual, for whom the question of personal culpability or victimization is paramount, and toward an alternative stance, imagined as that of the world itself.421 From that standpoint, the question of who did what to whom is less important than the
419

Hannah Arendt, The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? in Dissent, Power, Confrontation, ed. Alexander Klein (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 116.
420

Arendt, Collective Responsibility, 153. And in Civil Disobedience: Politically, on the contrary, what counts is that a wrong has been done; to the law it is irrelevant who is better off as a result the doer or the sufferer. Our legal codes distinguish between crimes in which indictment is mandatory, because the community as a whole has been violated, and offenses in which only doers and sufferers are involved, who may or may not want to sue (62-3).

421

See Lisa Dischs exploration of Arendtian perspectivalism as an alternative to Archimedean conceptions of objectivity in her book Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. chapters 1 and 3.

191 event of wrongdoing itself, which, on Arendts telling, impacts the common world that lies between us, in addition to producing effects on the particular individuals involved. She explains, once again in reference to the Socratic insight, If, however, we were to look at the propositions from the viewpoint of the world, as distinguished from that of the two gentlemen, we would have to say that what counts is that a wrong has been committed; it is irrelevant who is better off, the wrongdoer or the sufferer. As citizens we must prevent wrongdoing since the world we all share, wrongdoer, sufferer, and spectator, is at stake; the City has been wronged.422 When Arendt declares that in politics we are concerned with the world and not with ourselves,423 the contrast is between two different ways of regarding the same worldly event. For a morally alert conscience, what matters is abstaining from involvement in evil and the ongoing struggle to keep ones hands clean. From the position of the politically engaged actor, what matters is the wrong done to the community, apart from the questions of individual guilt or innocence.424 The distinction between these two outlooks means that the very standards of right and wrong for man as citizen and man as individual are not the same.425 For this reason, moral choices may appear irresponsible from a political perspective, since they are

422

Arendt, TMC, 182. See also SQ, where Arendt argues, The political concern is not whether the act of striking somebody unjustly or of being struck unjustly is more disgraceful. The concern is exclusively with having a world in which such acts do not occur (93). Arendt, The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? in Dissent, Power, and Confrontation, 116. Arendt, SQ, 126.

423 424 425

Arendt, On the Nature of Totalitarianism, 334. Arendt often cites Machiavelli when constructing the distinction between concern with the self and with the world. Machiavellis statement, I love my native city more than my own soul is treated by Arendt as exemplary of the concern she calls political. Arendt, Civil Disobedience, 61. Elsewhere, she explains, Machiavelli is more interested in Florence than in the salvation of his soul, and he thinks that people who are more concerned with the salvation of souls than with the world should be kept out of politics. Arendt, SQ, 80-1.

192 focused on the problem of living with oneself and not the world, neither its improvement or change.426 Arendts unique conception of world plays a critical role in her efforts to highlight the differences between the orientations she dubs moral and political. In the essay, What is Freedom? Arendt establishes the basic connection between politics (as the domain of freedom) and world when she argues that in politics not life but the world is at stake. World here stands in contrast to life, with life designating individual lives and the interests connected with them. The world is distinguishable from such individual lives because the world existed before us and is meant to outlast our lives in it.427 In addition to possessing a longevity that dwarfs the individual human life span, the world, on Arendts telling, is what is common to all of us. Arendt explains, public signifies the world itself; the world is what we share, and is distinguished from our privately owned place in it.428 But the world is not the globe; it is neither earth nor nature that Arendt refers to when she speaks of the common world.429 Rather, world names the human artifact or the fabrication of human hands, as well as the affairs which go on among those who inhabit the

426 427

Arendt, SQ, 79.

Arendt, What is Freedom? 156. For an especially rich interpretation of Arendts notion of world, see Lawrence J. Biskowski, Practical Foundations for Political Judgment: Arendt on Action and World Journal of Politics 55, no. 4 (1993). Although I think Biskowskis attempt to turn the disposition of amor mundi into a transcendental standard that can guide particular acts of judgment cedes too much ground to those critics who insist that normative foundations must be found to save Arendt from herself, his explication of world is insightful and important.
428 429

Arendt, HC, 52.

See Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendts Conception of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 303-4, n. 93 for a brief encapsulation of the various ways Arendt uses the term world throughout her work.

193 man-made world together.430 World is the term Arendt uses to describe both the world of things in which men move and the web of human relationships. The objective dimension of the world consists in the physical in-between, which is overlaid with a second, subjective in-between consisting of deeds and words. Arendt insists that for all its intangibility, this second in-between is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common.431 The world, then, is tangible and intangible, a collection of objects as well as the web of human relationships that results from action and speech. The world, in both of these dimensions, is not simply there as part of the structure of human existence. It is made, not given.432 The objective in-between is the result of the fabrication of human hands while the subjective in-between of words, deeds, and relationships owes its origin exclusively to mens acting and speaking.433 In other words, it is because men are endowed with a world-building capacity434 that the world, in the double sense of the human artifact and the web of relations, exists at all. Humans participate in world-building whenever they introduce something new into the in-between, whether that new something is a material object or speech or action that shapes the web of relationships in some way. The

430 431 432

Arendt, HC, 52. Arendt, HC, 182-3.

The world into which we are born would not exist without the human activity which produced it, as in the case of fabricated things, which takes care of it, as in the case of cultivated land; or which established it through organization, as in the case of the body politic. Arendt, HC, 22. Arendt, HC, 183.

433 434

Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 175. See also HC, 96. Arendt expresses the idea of world-building somewhat differently at the beginning of The Human Condition when she says that in addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, selfmade conditions (9).

194 political freedom experienced in acting together, the sharing of words and deeds is part of what constitutes our shared world.435 The world that men construct through their free action is common in a particular way; it is what is between individuals. The world, as an in-between, performs the connected but distinct tasks of relation and separation. By likening the world to a table located between those who sit around it Arendt stresses the dual function of such an in-between. Much like a table around which a group of individuals sit, the world connects people to one another, while also preserving distance between them. As Arendt puts it, the common world gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other.436 Another way of expressing this idea is to say that the world mediates relations between men. Mediation conveys both of the functions, relation and separation, that Arendt attributes to the world. The common world, with its mediating power keeps a community together.437 Without it, the situation resembles a sance in which the table around which people gather vanishes so that two people sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.438 This example illustrates the degree to which relation and separation, as qualities of the in-between, are intertwined. The world does not only bind people together, nor does it simply keep them

435 436 437 438

Arendt, HC, 198. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 53. Ibid.

195 apart. Rather, it does both at the same time, mediating between them so that they neither dissolve into radical isolation nor coalesce into a mass.439 Political activity is distinguished from moral activity because the former consists in caring for, tending to, and shaping the common world. Although an individuals conscience may be moved by recognition of worldly injustice, the style of response conscience engenders tends to be one of personal abstention. Arendt illustrates the difference between these two modes of response using the examples of civil disobedience and conscientious objection in an important 1969 essay.440 Countering her own earlier position, which conflated the two,441 Arendt now argues that while the conscientious objector is a single individual whose refusal to participate in a practice or policy reflects a desire to avoid dirty hands, the civil disobedient is always the member of a group engaging in concerted action that focuses on the state of the world rather than on the question of individual participation or non-participation in injustice. Making the case that we must distinguish between conscientious objectors and civil disobedients, Arendt draws on the figure of Henry Thoreau in her explication of the difference. Thoreaus refusal to pay his poll tax to a government that supported slavery was an expression of consciences moral obligation not to participate in the perpetuation of an evil, according to Arendt, but it was not an effort to transform social conditions as such. As evidence, Arendt cites Thoreaus essay on civil

439

Ibid., 58. Arendts worry over isolation and mass formation, which figures these phenomena as two sides of the same problem, is echoed by Foucaults analysis of the individualizing and massifying effects of disciplinary and bio power, which I explored in the previous chapter. At stake in both of their accounts, on my reading, is the possibility of associational relationships capable of generating democratic power.

Arendt, Civil Disobedience, in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harvest Books, 1972) (hereafter cited asCD). See Arendt,First Amendment and the Politics of Confrontation, in Dissent, Power, and Confrontation, 25 and 25n.
441

440

196 disobedience, where he explains the nature and extent of the responsibility that inspired his disobedience: It is not mans duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. Thoreau did not pretend that a mans washing his hands of it would make the world better or that man had any obligation to do so. He came into the world not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.442 Arendt concludes her interpretation of Thoreau with the declaration, Here, as elsewhere, conscience is unpolitical. It is not primarily interested in the world where the wrong is committed or in the consequences that the wrong will have for the future course of the world. It does not say, with Jefferson, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that of civil disobedients who, acting in public and as a group, express through their dissent, a wish to change the world.444 As such, civil disobedients enact what Tocqueville referred to as the art of associating together and are in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.445 By acting in the company of others, in public space, and with the transformation of a common world as their object, these civil disobedients exemplify the practice of political freedom as Arendt theorizes it. Civil disobedience, like other political activities, expresses the assumption of collective responsibility, which differs importantly from a concern with individual guilt. When Arendt looks to Socrates to explore the meaning of conscience, she explains, When Socrates stated that
442

Arendt, CD, 60, quoting Thoreau. See Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience in Walden and Civil Disobedience (New York: Penguin Books, 1960), 229. Arendt, CD, 60-1. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 94, 96.

443 444 445

197 it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, he clearly meant that it was better for him, just as it was better for him to be in disagreement with multitudes than, being one, to be in disagreement with himself. Politically, on the contrary, what counts is that a wrong has been done.446 Arendt distinguishes the concern with keeping ones hands clean by abstaining from wrongdoing from an interest in the common world where the wrong occurs along the axes of individual guilt and collective responsibility. Morality and politics, she insists, entail two very different standards of responsibility. Where all are guilty, no one is.447 This oft-repeated statement by Arendt reveals the key difference between guilt as an individualized phenomenon, and responsibility, which in its political form is always collective or shared. Guilt makes sense only if applied to individuals, that is, in reference to specific actions that can be traced to a particular person who is held accountable for them.448 Guilt always singles out;449 it is a matter of personal culpability. The guilt that attaches to an individuals actions is precisely what is at stake in those choices made in reference to conscience, where it is a matter of washing ones hands of injustice or violence. The focal point of conscientious non-participation is the avoidance of a specifically individual guilt which would seriously jeopardize a continuing relationship with oneself.450

446 447 448 449 450

Ibid., 62. Arendt, PR, 28 and Collective Responsibility, 147. Arendt, PR, 29. Arendt, Collective Responsibility, 148.

At least once Arendt seems to acknowledge that non-participation undertaken on a mass scale can constitute a kind of concerted collective action. She argues in reference to dictatorships, We have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act irresponsibly and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. Arendt, PR,

198 In addition to this fairly conventional understanding of what it means to be guilty or innocent of something, Arendt argues that there is also something called collective or political responsibility. This alternative notion of responsibility is implicitly expressed in Arendts counter to Socrates formulations, when she asserts, Politicallywhat counts is that a wrong has been done. That is, from the perspective of the world that lies between individuals, the question of individual guilt or innocence recedes to make room for a consideration of the effects wrongdoing has on a shared world. It is this concern with shared conditions, apart from an interest in individual culpability, which lies at the heart of political responsibility.451 When political responsibility is assumed, it cannot be enacted by refusing to personally engage in wrongdoing. The I cant enunciated by the conscientious objector is politically speaking, irresponsible because its standard is the self and not the world, neither its improvement or change.452 It may suffice as to protect one from guilt, but not from political responsibility, which concerns the state of the world, and not the cleanliness of ones own hands. We can see that political responsibility is a rather demanding standard of conduct. It asks us not only to refrain from personally committing a moral wrong, but to act on behalf of the world that relates and separates us. To be innocent requires a certain kind of abstention (which is why the counsels of conscience are negative, instructing us what not to do) but to be politically responsible requires that we do something, that we take action that expresses our care for the

47. This claim seems to suggest that conscientious non-participation, enacted by enough people at once, might be capable of producing world-building effects.
451

Arendt also uses the term political or collective responsibility to capture a temporal notion of responsibility, in which a group assumes responsibility for an historical inheritance. See Arendt, Eichmann, 298; also Collective Responsibility, 149. Arendt, SQ, 79.

452

199 world that we share. Such responsible action is collective in two senses: it is performed with others and it is oriented toward what is common. Arendt does not dismiss the question of individual guilt as insignificant. In fact, in her study of Eichmann and other essays from the period, Arendt works to salvage the notion of individual guilt from postwar assertions that individuals within the Nazi regime were no more than cogs in a machine. Against claims made by defendants in Nazi trials, that they should not be held personally responsible for the roles they played because If I had not done it, somebody else could and would have, Arendt insists that the notion of individual guilt maintains its salience even in the context of a criminal regime whose bureaucratic structure functions to obscure lines of accountability.453 Eichmanns trial was in some sense a success, Arendt argues, because it transformed a cog back into a man who could be called to account for his conduct.454 Indeed, it is the undeniable greatness of the judiciary that it must focus its attention on the individual person, and that even in the age of mass society where everybody is tempted to regard himself as a mere cog in some kind of machinery.455 Individual guilt, then, is hardly an expendable notion for Arendt. Her point is instead to warn us against mistaking individual innocence for the fulfillment of political responsibility. Political responsibility, with its more demanding standards of conduct, has a claim on all of us, to the extent that we must have an excuse if we forgo it. That is, it may be acceptable to focus on the avoidance of individual guilt in certain cases of extreme political repression that

453 454 455

Arendt, PR, 29. See Arendt, Eichmann, 289 and Collective Responsibility, 148.

Arendt, SQ, 57. Arendt speaks here of the almost automatic shifting of responsibility that habitually takes place in modern society, which comes to a sudden halt the moment you enter a courtroom.

200 make collective action nearly impossible, but in most contexts the preservation of personal innocence is not enough. We are accountable for more than this. It is only in a marginal situation of impotence that the abstention from evil (and corresponding individual innocence) can suffice: Powerlessness which always presupposes isolation is a valid excuse for doing nothing.456 Arendt declares, I think we shall have to admit that there exist extreme situations in which responsibility for the world, which is primarily political, cannot be assumed because political responsibility always presupposes at least a minimum of political power. Impotence or complete powerlessness, is, I think, a valid excuse.457 While valid, it is nonetheless an excuse. This means that the failure to act together on behalf of transforming common conditions, to lessen the wrongs that occur in the shared world, always requires giving an account for such failure. Political responsibility befalls everyone and except in grave cases, we are expected to make efforts to enact it. Whether one accepts Arendts vocabulary or not whether, for example, one agrees with her labeling the concern with individual guilt as moral and the concern with shared conditions political the distinction at the core of these parsings is profound and genuine. There is a significant difference between avoiding personal implication in wrongdoing and the assumption of responsibility in which one endeavors to care for the world. A contemporary example from the annals of consumerism may help illuminate the distinction. Consider the number of products that are marketed to American buyers as ethical alternatives to mainstream competitors, whether free trade coffee, recycled paper towels, sweatshop-free clothing, or hybrid cars. The choice to
456

Arendt, Collective Responsibility, 156. Just a page later, Arendt says that no moral, individual and personal standards of conduct will ever be able to excuse us from collective responsibility. Arendt, PR, 45.

457

201 purchase such products, which frequently cost more than their unethical competitors, may be commendable. Yet it would be a mistake, I think, to regard such choices as a kind of political action. For although the hope may be that the cumulative effect of ethical shopping will result in more companies adopting similar policies to keep up with market demand, voting with ones pocketbook is of limited political relevance in the absence of public efforts to address the underlying conditions connected to the production of such goods in the first place for example, unfair international trade and tariff policies, devastating practices of deforestation, the protection of unregulated or free trade zones, the absence of a progressive energy policy, and even more broadly, American materialism in general. I would argue that in many instances, the decision to engage in ethical consumerism is motivated by something like a desire to keep ones hands clean, that is, to avoid personal implication in a perceived injustice. While this is an understandable motivation and most likely preferable to purchasing whatever is cheapest or most readily available, it would be a mistake to imagine that by refusing to buy certain items one is engaged in political action. Buying the right products may save one from a guilty conscience, but unless it is coupled with participation in collective and public efforts to reform large-scale conditions, it does not answer the call to political responsibility.

IV. Crossing the Divide? From Conscience to Action If, as I have argued, Arendts delineation of the differences between caring for oneself and caring for the world and between individual guilt and collective responsibility illuminates a genuine distinction that we would do well to recognize, does this mean that the concerns of conscience are simply disconnected from collective political action? Is care for the self wholly

202 separate from care for the world, or it is possible to conceive of them as linked to one another in some way?458 If so, how? Although involving two distinct objects of care the self and the world, respectively morality and politics, as Arendt conceives them, correspond to two different activities that actually bear some striking similarities. Thinking, credited with the production of conscience as a moral faculty, and action, more or less the stuff of politics, share certain features that would seem to bring the domains of the moral and the political closer to one another. Despite Arendts own attempts to depict thinking and acting as wholly separate,459 I argue that the features they share plurality, speech, and non-obedience suggest that experiences of thinking by oneself and the experiences of acting with others may be mutually provocative of one another, due to the complementary skills and abilities each requires and develops. The first feature that links thinking and acting is the experience of plurality. Although the primary difference between thinking and acting would seem to lie in the solitude of the former and the collective character of the latter, plurality animates both thinking and acting. Each activity expresses in its own way the plurality that is the law of the earth. Free political action expresses plurality because it is always action in concert. Yet thinking, undertaken by a single individual, also manifests the basic truth of human plurality. The two-in-one that is manifest in thinking and which gives rise to conscience as a moral faculty is an echo, within individual
458

It may be noted that this question was not posed quite so directly in relation to Foucaults notion of care of the self in Chapter 3. This is because Foucaults understanding of the ethical self-relation privileges the dynamics of rulership and mastery, and therefore does not provide much of an opening for considering how the care of the self might be connected, for example, to the creation of horizontal conjunctions. She states, for example, there is no clearer or more radical opposition than that between thinking and acting. LOTM I, 71. At the bottom of this opposition is the claim that thinking occurs in solitude and involves a withdrawal from worldly appearances, while acting takes place in the company of others, amidst the human artifact and the web of relations that make up the world.

459

203 selves, of the plurality that characterizes worldly existence. Although the thinking process is one of duality, undertaken by two rather than many, even in this duality plurality is somehow germinally present insofar as I can think only by splitting up into two although I am one.460 The activity of thinking, in which we carry on a dialogue with ourselves, reveals that difference and otherness, which are such outstanding characteristics of the world of appearances as it is given to man in his habitat among a plurality of things, are the very conditions for the existence of mans ego as well.461 The germinal plurality found in thinking gives the lie to philosophical efforts to isolate man in the singular. For even when we are by ourselves, we find that we are in company, in the company of ourselves.462 Thus, plurality is evident even in the mental life of human beings. Plurality finds full expression only in politics, where individuals jointly engage in public speech and action and thereby manifest the equality-and-distinction that together characterizes the many who inhabit the earth. Yet even thinking, performed alone and in a mode of withdrawal from worldly appearances, does not escape the basic condition of plurality. We require the presence of another even for the seemingly private activity of critical reflection. As Arendt puts it, even if I were to live entirely by myself I would, as long as I am alive, live in the condition of plurality.463

460 461 462

Arendt, SQ, 106. Arendt, TMC, 184.

Arendt, SQ, 96. Here Arendt explains that the Socratic-Platonic description of the process of thinking seems to me so important because it implies, albeit in passing, the fact that men exist in the plural and not in the singular, that men and not Man inhabit the earth. Arendt, Philosophy and Politics, 86.

463

204 Worldly plurality the fact that we necessarily live among other beings both like and unlike ourselves constitutes the human condition in the profound sense that even our mental experience refers back to it: the Socratic two-in-one heals the solitariness of thought; its inherent duality points to the infinite plurality which is the law of the earth.464 Thus, the duality of the thinking process gestures toward a diverse manyness that is fully manifest only in the world of appearances and in the performance of speech and action, in particular. Nonetheless, even in the solitude of thought, men have an indication of plurality within themselves.465 This is proof enough that man exists essentially in the plural.466 The two-in-one relationship that defines the thinking experience and points to worldly plurality is the site of a second feature shared by thinking and acting: dialogic speech. The twoin-one is enacted as an interior dialogue, in which one part of the self speaks with another part of the self in an effort to understand the meaning of a worldly object or event. Thinking takes the form of metaphorical speech. That every thought process is an activity in which I speak with myself about whatever happens to concern me means that thought bears a certain resemblance to the speech that takes place in the public realm, where citizens express themselves and exchange opinions in dialogue with one another. Arendt argues not only that most political action is transacted in words467 but also that the activity of thoughtgoes on within ones self by means of words. That is, both thought and action transpire in and through speech, which

464 465 466 467

Arendt, LOTM I, 187. Arendt, Philosophy and Politics, 88. Arendt, LOTM I, 185. Arendt, HC, 26. See also 178, where Arendt states that most acts are performed in the manner of speech.

205 always requires a plurality of at least two. The speech that is enacted in political life is not only public in a way that thought never is, but it is also more complex than the inner dialogue of thought, because it takes place among a multiplicity of individuals who are irreducible to a twoin-one. Nonetheless, speech, as an exchange across difference through the medium of words, is common to thinking and acting. In both cases, speech expresses a dimension of plurality, whether it is the two-in-one of thought or the manifold humanity that is the law of the earth: The faculty of speech and the fact of human plurality correspond to each other, not only in the sense that I use words for communication with those with whom I am together in the world, but in the even more relevant sense that speaking with myself I live together with myself.468 The third and perhaps most important affinity between thinking and acting as moral and political undertakings, lies in their shared principle of non-obedience or no-rule. Although Arendt does not emphasize this connection to the same extent that she does their mutual tie to plurality, we have already seen how important the concept of non-obedience is to both activities. Critical thinking is in principle anti-authoritarian, and works to dissolve received rules and maxims into perplexities.469 It was this practice of thinking, which submits to scrutiny even widely-accepted ideas and authoritative commands, that seemed entirely absent from Adolph Eichmann, who insisted in his trial that he had done nothing more than faithfully obey the law of the land. Non-obedience, however, underlies political action no less than moral thought. Against the common assumption that political life requires a split between those who command and those who obey, Arendt argues for a specifically political form of equality that makes possible
468

Arendt, Philosophy and Politics, 85-6. See also HC, 178 where Arendt also discusses speech as the faculty that corresponds to plurality. Arendt, Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy, 38.

469

206 cooperative action, in which some may lead and others follow, but none command and none obey. Thinking and acting, then, in their different ways, embody the principle of nonobedience. Independent thinking or Selbstdenken is an activity of examination that stands in contrast to habitual adherence to prescribed rules and norms. Collective action is undertaken by political equals who relate to one another as co-actors and eschew the modes of dominance and submission. Another way of putting this point is to say that morality and politics, for Arendt, are both domains of freedom. Although it is important to distinguish political freedom, which is always public and collective, from the kind of freedom experienced in Selbstdenken, both activities are ones in which we forgo obedience, whether to conventional standards and rules or to authorities, and attempt to proceed in the spirit of beginning. Thus, while thinking is performed alone and can never have the world-building effects of free political action, to the extent that it is an experience of thinking without a banister, it manifests a distinctive type of freedom.470 Perhaps, as Arendt says in reference to Lessing, independent thinking for oneself is another mode of moving in the world in freedom.471 Freedom of thought is not exchangeable with the freedom of action, whose worldly quality shapes the shared in-between in ways mental activities never can, yet even Arendt suggests that understanding may be the other side of

The phrase comes from a statement made by Arendt at a conference in 1972 when mentions a metaphor that she has not published but kept for herself: I call it thinking without a banister. In German, Denken ehne Gelander. Arendt, Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt, in Melvyn Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World. (New York: St. Martins Press, 1979), 336.
471

470

Arendt, Thoughts About Lessing, 8.

207 action insofar as it too makes a new beginning472 by forgoing those commonplaces that usually serve as banisters. What thinking and action share, despite their differences, is release from relations of obedience.473 What is the significance of my assertion that plurality, speech and non-obedience link thinking and acting to one another? These shared elements suggest that the process of thinking, in which one mentally engages with difference through the medium of words and in a spirit of non-obedience, and the process of acting, in which one encounters plural others through speech and in relations of no-rule, may work to incite and mutually encourage one another. In other words, despite their differences, which Arendt frequently notes, both activities draw on similar abilities, which, if cultivated, may be transferable. Might the habit of Selbstdenken, in which one dissolves rules and norms by talking things through with oneself develop in the thinker a taste for plurality, speech and non-obedience in their more worldly forms? Similarly, could the experience of cooperative political action produce effects on the life of the mind by fostering in individuals the ability and desire to affirm plurality, to participate in speech, and to forgo relations of rule, not only in the context of a political community, but in ones own quest for meaning? Might the
472

Arendt, Understanding and Politics, 321. Although Arendt is here discussing understanding, she uses the term in such a way that it seems indistinguishable from thinking, even relying on the same Verstand/Vernunft distinction mentioned earlier. Understanding, like the activity she calls thinking is engaged in a quest for meaning, rather than knowledge. In this essay Arendt places special emphasis on understanding as a means of reconciling oneself with the reality of totalitarianism a concern that is more muted in her discussions of thinking, where the focus seems to be on thinking as a source of moral insight. The similar abilities required for and developed by both thinking and acting help to explain what Arendt means when she says that thinking assumes political significance only in marginal situations. Those few who refused to participate in the Third Reich while unable to bring about its downfall nonetheless in their very thoughtfulness manifested certain capacities that seemed otherwise lost during the period. That is, in dark times, when the public realm is obscured or destroyed, the activity of thinking serves as a dim reminder, in mental form, of the human abilities to encounter plurality and engage in speech across difference, free from relations of rule. To be sure, the solitary experience of thought is but a shadow of the plurality, dialogue and non-obedience that is fully realized in worldly encounters with others in the public realm. In dark times, however, thoughtfulness and its expression in conscientious refusal testify to important human capacities worth cultivating and celebrating.

473

208 activities of thinking and acting be understood as provocative of, rather than contrary to, one another? If the moral insight born of thinking can somehow inspire political action, if the concern with individual innocence can be transformed into an assumption of collective responsibility, how does this occur? I have argued that there are certain affinities between thinking and acting namely, plurality, speech, and non-obedience that might facilitate movement between the two activities. But if this is possible, certain dangers that Arendt locates in the thinking activity must be overcome or otherwise negotiated. This is because the activity of thinking always threatens to pull us away from the world that needs our concern. Thinking entails a withdrawal from the world of appearances into a reflexive relation with oneself and therefore runs the risk of exacerbating what Arendt diagnoses as an epidemic of the modern age: world alienation. Modern subjectivism, or the withdrawal from the world into the self, which Arendt traces back to Galileo and the loss of belief in the adequacy of human senses to reveal reality, is expressed by modern philosophys exclusive concern with the self and the attempt to reduce all experiences, with the world and other human beings, to experiences between man and himself.474 In light of Arendts diagnosis of modern solipsism, thinking as a reflexive activity undertaken with and by oneself seems more likely to contribute to the problem of world alienation than to counter it. But is it somehow possible to guard against the dangers present in the thinking activity? Is there a practice or style of thinking that will be less prone to furthering world-alienation? For an answer to these questions, one must turn again to Socrates. He is, as we
474

Arendt, The Human Condition, 254. See also 293 on the world loss of modern philosophy.

209 know, the source of those statements Arendt looks to time and again to illuminate the meaning of conscience, thought and their interconnection. But Socrates is important to Arendt beyond having uttered these phrases; his very life serves as an example of a way of thinking that is paired with a deep engagement with rather than estrangement from the world and its plurality. Socrates is a model for Arendt because he is an example of a thinker who was not a professional, who in his person unified two apparently contradictory passions, for thinking and acting not in the sense of being eager to apply his thoughts or to establish theoretical standards for action but in the much more relevant sense of being at home in both spheres and able to move from one sphere to the other with the greatest apparent ease, very much as we ourselves constantly move back and forth between experiences in the world of appearances and the need for reflecting on them.475 Part of what makes Socrates a model, then, is that his gift for thought did not serve to isolate him from the city or its citizens. Rather, Socrates demonstrated a practice of thinking that remained tethered to the world such that he was able to move with ease between solitude and the company of others. Unlike professional philosophers, who tend to turn what should be a temporary experience of withdrawal into a permanent condition, Socrates embodies a style of reflection that does not leave the world behind. As a thinker, he remained a man among men, who did not shun the marketplace, who was a citizen among citizens.476 His legacy to us lies not

Arendt, LOTM I, 167. See Kimberley Curtis, Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 52-63 for a smart discussion of Socrates as a model of thinking in the world. Curtis also explicitly contrasts Socratic thinking with the deformation professionelle that Arendt attributes to Martin Heidegger, who did not, strictly speaking, move back and forth between the world of the visible and the world of the invisible (63). Dana Villa also treats Socrates and Heidegger as representative figures of the great potential and grave dangers of thinking, respectively. Villa, The Banality of Philosophy: Arendt on Heidegger and Eichmann in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
476

475

Arendt, LOTM I, 167.

210 only in having demonstrated what it means to teach others how to think, rather than what to think, but in his very life, which combined thinking with worldly engagement. Arendt offers an important interpretation of the specific sort of movement Socrates partook in, as he shifted in and out of the spheres of thinking and acting. In her lectures on Kants political philosophy, where she traces the origins of critical thinking to Socratic midwifery in Athens, she offers the following description of his activities in the city: What he actually did was make public, in discourse, the thinking process that dialogue that soundlessly goes on within me, between me and myself; he performed in the marketplace the way the flute-player performed at a banquet.477 When Socrates moves between the spheres of thinking and acting, then, he is not simply shifting between two wholly different activities. The speaking with others in public, for which Socrates is most famous, is itself a way of bringing thinking out of solitude and into the world. As a citizen among citizens, Socrates endeavored to transform the inner dialogue of the 2-in-1 into the public exchange of ideas among a plurality of individuals. Arendts suggestion that Socrates made public the thinking process hints at how thinking and conscience might come to inspire political action. To explore further whether the plurality, speech and non-obedience in their full, political reality might have something to do with making public the mental experiences of plurality, speech and non-obedience, it is helpful to consider again Arendts Civil Disobedience essay. As I recounted earlier in this chapter, the essay hinges on Arendts contrast between care of the self and care of the world, which she draws on in order to distinguish conscientious objection from civil disobedience. Although Arendt argues that conscientious objection centers on the preservation of an individuals integrity
477

Arendt, Lectures on Kant, 35-6.

211 and is entirely different from civil disobedience, itself an example of the collective practice of political freedom, she also suggests that the gap between the two is not unbridgeable. Disputing the conflation of conscientious objection with civil disobedience, Arendt introduces a key term: opinion. Civil disobedients, Arendt argues, are organized minorities, bound together by common opinion. Their concerted action springs from an agreement with each other, and it is this agreement that lends credence and conviction to their opinion, no matter how they may originally arrived at it.478 In other words, while someone may originally arrive at an opinion in solitude, this opinion becomes an object of discussion and potential agreement (or disagreement) upon entering into the public realm. And it is on the basis of common opinion that citizens can organize and undertake concerted action together. This trajectory would indicate that the insights of an active conscience can perhaps motivate collective political projects, if only these insights can find public expression. The above description of the process of publicity suggests that one can develop an opinion through the activity of thinking with and by oneself, which may or may not then be exchanged with others in a public setting. However, later in the same essay, Arendt uses the term opinion to refer to something that can be generated only in a context of open discourse with others. Here, opinion is the political counterpoint to conscience. Having already declared conscience to be unpolitical, Arendt offers a caveat of sorts, suggesting that conscientious objection can become politically significant. How might this occur? Arendt continues, saying that such significance can be achieved when a number of consciences happen to coincide, and the conscientious objectors decide to enter the marketplace and make their voices heard in public. But then we are no longer
478

Arendt, Civil Disobedience, 56.

212 dealing with individuals, or with a phenomenon whose criteria can be derived from Socrates or Thoreau. What has been decided in foro conscientiae has now become part of public opinion, and although this particular group of civil disobedients may still claim the initial validation their consciencesthey actually no longer rely on themselves alone. In the market place, the fate of conscience is not much different from the fate of the philosophers truth: it becomes an opinion, indistinguishable from other opinions.479 Here, an insight of conscience becomes an opinion in the course of its being articulated publicly, in the company of others. What was decided alone, by consulting ones conscience, is not yet an opinion, because opinions emerge only when a plurality of individuals make their voices heard in public. This conception of opinion as a specifically public phenomenon is consistent with Arendts other writings, most notably On Revolution, where she argues that in 20th century American politics the opinions of the people are indeed unascertainable for the simple reason that they are non-existent. Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate and where no opportunity for the forming of opinion exists, there may be moodsbut no opinion.480 Arendt suggests in Civil Disobedience that the transformation of conscience into opinion through the process of public debate has a role to play in shifting from a moral to a political register, from a stance of conscientious objection to participation in civil disobedience. If this is so, the shift cannot simply be a quantitative one. That is, the difference between a conviction held by a conscientious individual in solitude and those discovered to be held in common by a collectivity is more than a matter of numbers. Although Arendt acknowledges that

479 480

Arendt, Civil Disobedience, 67-8.

Arendt, On Revolution, 268-9. Margaret Canovan clarifies that for Arendt, opinion is necessarily public: Opinions arise when citizens actually confront one another in a public space, look from their different angles at a matter of public concern, and hear what the others have to say. In other words, opinions are formed between people rather than inside of each of them (635). Margaret Canovan, Politics as Culture: Hannah Arendt and the Public Realm, History of Political Thought 6, no. 3 (1985).

213 strength in numbers can empower dissenting minorities, the process of publicity does more than reveal the extent of individuals agreement with one another. Opinion formation and exchange in public can assist in politicizing a moral insight by facilitating the recognition of a new object the common world. For moral concern with the self, born out of a sense of what one can and cannot live with having done, to become politically significant, it is not enough for each individuals concern to be voiced publicly. There must also be a re-orientation, away from the question of individual integrity and toward the state of the shared world. I would suggest that we understand the exchange of opinion in which we, like Socrates, make public the activity of thought by talking through with others matters we also talk through with ourselves as an enabling condition for assuming collective responsibility for the world. In other words, it is by sharing our own thoughts, and more importantly, by listening to those of others, that the common world can come into view. The very activity of public debate encourages a translation of our own subjective insights into terms that will resonate with those whom we address. The need to appeal to others pushes us to see what were once personal matters in a broader perspective; one cannot make public arguments simply on the basis of what an individual self is or is not willing to live with having done. As a result, the attempt to communicate with others rather than simply with oneself always pushes us in the direction of considering matters from vantage points other than our own.481 When we do so, the world,

481

On this point, see Arendts discussion of opinion and representative thinking in Truth and Politics 241-2. Arendt speaks of forming an opinion as a process in which one makes present to ones mind a number of standpoints, being and thinking in my own identity where I am not. Here Arendt uses the same conceptual framework of enlarged thought that she associates elsewhere with judging to define the activity of opinionformation. Although my argument here emphasizes the actual articulation and exchange of opinion in public with others, this is not a denial of the imaginative dimensions of opinion formation. Nonetheless, the ability to make present varied viewpoints in ones own mind is surely enhanced by the material experience of listening to the diverse opinions of others.

214 insofar as it is common, begins to be illuminated. And as we receive the opinions of others, who also struggle to make their claims publicly resonant, we are better able to appreciate the world that lies between us, connecting and separating us from one another. In those moments when the world is revealed as a common object between people, we are invited to assume collective responsibility for it. If thinking is not to seduce us into a permanent state of withdrawal, we must always struggle to make the leap into publicity. It is only by making this leap, by trying, like Socrates, to live among others in our polity as well as with ourselves, that the common world can come into view as an object of our concern. When we participate in public debate, the question of what is best for oneself and ones own integrity is supplanted by the question not only of what is best for us but of what is best for the world that preceded and will outlive us. When we speak and act in relation to this question, together with others, we are engaged in the political act of building and caring for that world. It would be a mistake to imagine Arendtian thinking as preparation for political action, as if one began by establishing a certain sort of reflexive relation with oneself and subsequently moved beyond it and out into the world. This is a flawed representation of the relationship between thinking and acting because for Arendt, worldly phenomena always enjoy an ontological priority over the activities that make up the life of the mind. In fact, Arendt consistently portrays the relationship we have with ourselves as a consequence or reflection of our worldly existence, rather than the other way around. As we saw earlier, Arendt depicts the two-in-one of thinking as something that points to worldly plurality and is a germinal form of that existential plurality that is the law of the earth. Worldly plurality is primary and gives

215 shape to even our most inner experiences. Arendt similarly depicts other aspects of the selfrelation as secondary to our intersubjective relations: I first talk with others before I talk with myself, examining whatever the joint talk may have been about, and then discover that I can conduct a dialogue not only with others but with myself as well.482 And she argues that although we experience something like inner freedom, we first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.483 Given the primacy Arendt grants to worldly activities, coupled with her concern over the subjectivism of the modern era, we should be careful not to imagine thinking and acting as chronologically ordered steps. Rather, as I have been arguing in this chapter, we would do better to envision them as mutually provocative, tethered to one another by the elements of plurality, speech and non-obedience. Engaging in the mental activity of talking things through with oneself can inspire talking things through with others, just as the experience of independent thought in which one does forgoes obedience to customary rules can cultivate a desire to experiment with relations of non-obedience between individuals. On the other hand, participation in collective political action with ones peers can engender an appetite for plurality, speech and non-obedience as they are manifest in Selbstdenken. Political engagement is capable of enriching ones mental life and critical thinking develops abilities that can be put to political use. Despite the essential reciprocity of the relationship between thinking and acting, I have stressed the importance of the leap into publicity because like Arendt, I believe that the tendency to withdraw into the self and its concerns is a serious problem at present, one that

482 483

Arendt, LOTM I, 189. Arendt, What is Freedom? 148.

216 requires varied and creative forms of resistance. And as I have been arguing throughout the dissertation, the turn to ethics in contemporary political thought often supports, rather than counters, such withdrawal. Yet when the selfs reflexive relationship with itself entails the commendable activity of critical thinking, making public ones thinking, as part of an exchange with other citizens, can help draw attention to the world that needs our care. Although this task is by no means easy in the context of contemporary political arrangements, it is only by struggling to experience the worldly dimensions of plurality, speech and non-obedience that these activities can become less endangered. What is vital above all is that those who partake in the thinking activity, who reflect with and by themselves on the events, ideas, and objects of the world, not confuse that activity, or the conscience born of it, for political action undertaken cooperatively with others who assume collective responsibility for the world.

V. Beyond Terra Firma: For an Ethics of Amor Mundi By way of conclusion, I would like to suggest that Arendts effort to delineate a specifically political form of care directed at the common world amounts to the articulation of a distinctive ethical orientation. This implicit ethical vision serves as an alternative to both traditional command moralities and the morality of conscience with its focus on personal integrity. In other words, Arendt does not endeavor to empty politics of moral or ethical content per se as Seyla Benhabib and others have argued. Rather, she attempts to specify an ethical sensibility that is uniquely suited to democratic political life. For this reason, the stark contrast she sometimes draws between the morality of conscience and the activities and concerns of

217 politics is best read as a distinction between two competing ethical orientations, rather than as one between ethics and non-ethics or between morality and non-morality. The uniquely political ethics that animate Arendts work, which challenge a moral tradition centered on the selfs relation to itself and the claim to personal innocence, is captured by the phrase amor mundi. Amor Mundi, or love of the world, is the name Arendt originally intended to give to her seminal book, The Human Condition and it is an idea that informs all of her work.484 As I read it, the phrase is meant to describe an emotional investment in something other than our own individual lives specifically, in the world that is around and between us. This sensibility, indispensable to politics, is rare in contemporary life, as love of the world (which Arendt recognizes in the thought of Copernicus and the anti-rationalism of the Renaissance) was the first to fall victim to the modern ages triumphal world alienation.485 But amor mundi continues to manifest itself sporadically in acts that take sides for the worlds sake, such as the practices of civil disobedience in the 1960s and 1970s which were motivated not primarily by concern for oneself but by concern for the world we share.486 The 20th century

484

See the letter written to Karl Jaspers by Arendt on August 6, 1955 in Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926-1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 263-4.

485 Arendt, HC, 264. Arendt notes approvingly Max Webers discovery concerning capitalism, the insight that an enormous, strictly mundane activity is possible without any care for or enjoyment of the world whatever, and activity whose deepest motivation, on the contrary, is worry and care about the self. Ibid., 254 (italics added). 486

George Kateb argues to the contrary that Arendt does not adequately recognize the moral outrage animating those political movements she admired, such as the opposition to the Vietnam War. Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 109. Although its true that in the Civil Disobedience essay Arendt portrays such disobedience as at least in part a matter of citizens protesting the unconstitutionality of governmental practices, she also draws out there the difference between caring for the self and caring for the world as a framework for distinguishing conscientious objection from civil disobedience. Civil disobedience, then, is not emptied of moral content, as Kateb would have it. Rather, its revealed by Arendt to be inspired by amor mundi. Elsewhere, Arendt refers to the moral dimensions of the student movement, without specifying what sort of morality she means to indicate. Arendt, On Violence, 130. Given her descriptions of those political projects as examples of associative freedom, it seems unlikely that she means by morality here the individuals concern with maintaining personal integrity.

218 political movements Arendt praises as fine examples of the political were hardly devoid of moral or ethical impulses. Instead, the collective action advanced in the name of justice, equality or non-violence embodied precisely the ethics of amor mundi. It is through the activities of politics that we express amor mundi. We give evidence (or non-evidence) of our love of the world through the choices we make about organizing our collective life: education, for example, is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.487 In contrast to the affective sensibility embodied in the morality of conscience, in which the focus is on caring for oneself by maintaining clean hands, political engagement evinces its own unique form of emotional attachment and investment. In politics, energy centers on something which inter-est, which lies between people, discovered in the course of engaging with others in public.488 Politics, in the performative and collaborative sense elaborated by Arendt, in which new words, acts, and relations are added to the intangible common world, is a practice born of care for the world. This care or amor, although a prerequisite for political engagement, is further fostered and deepened by participation in the world-building activities of politics, as individuals acquire the experience of acting together on behalf of something common. The ethical sensibility captured by the words amor mundi is an alternative to ethical projects that center on the self, whether that project is one of elaborating oneself as a work of art in a Foucauldian vein or preserving the sanctity of ones conscience in the tradition of Thoreau. Arendts point is not to dismiss the varied reflexive relations we create with ourselves as

487 488

Arendt, The Crisis in Education in Between Past and Future, 196. Arendt, HC, 182.

219 irrelevant her deep fascination with the life of the mind reveals otherwise but to alert us to the costs associated with taking self-concern to be the sum total of ethical life. Amor mundi, though a powerful ethical sensibility, is not a determinate foundation. It does not supply universal precepts or substantive directives that might be looked to as the basis for organizing political life. For this reason, it likely will not satisfy readers who seek in Arendts work normative foundations that can act as extrapolitical constraints on political activity. Benhabibs lament over the normative lacuna489 afflicting Arendts thought can seem strange, given that Arendt does forward a distinctive ethical sensibility. But it is clear that such a sensibility by no means guaranteed to exist and always up to us to enact cannot perform the function Benhabib looks to morality to perform. What Benhabib seeks and fails to find in Arendts political theory, and what her own political theory claims to provide, are meta-norms which are beyond politics, capable of determining in advance the appropriate shape and scope of political activity.490 To be sure, Arendt does not advocate an anything-goes view of politics. Her work remains haunted by the phenomenon of Nazism and its reminders of the great evils that can be committed in the name of politics. More generally, Arendt is deeply attuned to the importance of political institutions whose constraining effects can also be the enabling conditions of democratic action. Yet Arendt does not endeavor to identify moral absolutes that are envisioned as shaping and limiting the political realm from without. Why not? Because to do so is to deny the human origin of our political arrangements, which are not reflections of moral truths revealed in an

489 490

Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 193. Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992), 45.

220 extra-political domain, but creative and contingent productions, expressions of our worldbuilding capacity. Katebs plea posed in relation to Arendts work asks: what can assure us that action as speech will nottransgress moral limits? We might respond, as Arendt would: our assurances will necessarily be of our own making, in accordance with the limits we ourselves generate within the immanent field of politics. If we assume as Kateb does that assurance can come only from a readily-discoverable set of moral limits that simply awaits instantiation, Arendts political theory will surely disappoint. But if Arendt is right when she argues that people like Eichmann simply traded one moral code for another, then perhaps moral limits are not the secure ground of democratic politics that Kateb and other critics of Arendt imagine them to be. Amor mundi is an ethical sensibility, not a moral foundation. As such, it is not a metanorm out there to be discovered and identified, but a mode of care to be enacted.491 We display our love of the world when we act together out of regard for that peculiar entity that lies between us and is distinguishable from our privately owned place in it. The ethics of amor mundi offers no guarantees; in contrast to the idea of moral limits, it does not promise to act as an external guard against the dangers of political life. Instead, it beckons us with the claim of collective responsibility, which we are free to assume or refuse.492 Nonetheless, it remains a powerful
491

Understanding ethics as a matter of enactment is hinted at by Arendts few references to principle. In What is Freedom? she writes, The manifestation of principles comes about only through action; they are manifest in the world as long as action lasts, but no longer. Such principles are honor or glory, love of equality, which Montesquieu called virtue or distinction or excellencebut also fear or distrust or hatred. Freedom, she claims, is the actualization of principle in action (152). See Garrath Williams essay, Love and Responsibility: A Political Ethic for Hannah Arendt, Political Studies 46, no. 5, (1998). Williams argues that the idea of principle is central to the powerful ethical core that informs Arendts thought. Action in concert is inspired by a shared principle, which is distinguishable from individual motive. As I argue in relation to Isaiah Berlins work in Chapter 2, even the moral foundations Kateb and Benhabib envision as beyond the play of politics remain dependent upon human action. That is, all moral precepts (even those

492

221 ethical resource. Its significance lies in the invocation of a fragile entity in need of our care and concern. Answering the call implicit in this political ethic means stretching beyond our individual selves and toward what is common. It means struggling to make public the joys of plurality, speech and freedom.

imagined as somehow prior to politics) actually await enactment by humans who commit to them. Declaring certain moral principles as the ground of political life expresses a fantasy in which moral conduct is somehow guaranteed through the delineation of first principles. We would do better to recognize the fragility of all value commitments, which forever depend on forms of human agency.

222 Chapter 5 Conclusion: Toward an Ethics of the Common Object The preceding pages have explored the democratic significance of various strains of ethical thought. Guided by a commitment to associative democratic politics, the readings of Isaiah Berlin, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt offered here track the potential dangers posed and supports offered to such politics by competing ethical orientations. In particular, I have argued against what I call the democratic costs of both moral absolutism and ethical individualism. The return to morality, which I examined in relation to Berlins writings, frequently misconstrues political creations as moral truths, thereby diminishing the importance of cooperative democratic action through which individuals jointly endeavor to shape collective existence. An insistence on extrapolitical moral absolutes tends to render democratic actors secondary if not superfluous, by imagining certain value commitments as given or guaranteed, rather than articulated, affirmed or challenged by citizens within the immanent field of politics. In addition, the privileging of the individual as the subject and object of ethics, even when intended as a means of resisting extant power relations, as in the work of Michel Foucault, does not facilitate the creation of the types of associational relationships that might be capable of altering shared conditions. An ethics focused on the cultivation of the individual self may hold intuitive appeal, but unless it is coupled with energetic efforts to create new intersubjective relationships, it threatens to draw individuals further away from the collective conditions that call for their attention and care. Finally, in response to the troubling implications of both absolutism and individualism, I explored the significance of an ethical orientation, developed out of Hannah Arendts work, which centers on the assumption of collective responsibility for shared

223 conditions. An ethics oriented toward the world that relates and separates us is important for associative democratic politics because it seeks to inspire collaborative action on behalf of a common object. As a mode of care, the worldly ethics I elaborate does not reassure with the promise of a moral ground, but instead invites us to act in concert with others out of regard for the world we share. By way of conclusion, I hope to sharpen these arguments by elaborating their relevance for contemporary democratic theory. In addition to the specific interventions made with regard to the work of Berlin, Foucault, and Arendt, the analysis of the turn to ethics developed in this project has significance for the theory and practice of democracy more broadly. Can the practice of democratic politics really do without the positing of some moral absolutes? Might an ethics of self-cultivation contribute to, rather than enervate, associative democratic undertakings? And if amor mundi is an ethics worthy of affirmation, how would we begin to develop and nourish it in the present, when so many forces would seem to conspire against it?

I. Reconsidering Absolutism: Ethical Claims in Political Life What does it mean to argue against moral absolutism on the grounds that such absolutism is harmful to democratic politics? Theoretical efforts to identify a moral minimum that provides parameters for our political arrangements are troubling, I have claimed, because they mischaracterize what are contingent political achievements as necessary moral facts. The re-turn to morality, though meant to reassure with the promise of standards or limits located beyond the horizon of politics, actually encourages a false sense of security because it effaces the indispensable role played by human actors who enunciate, defend or resist the establishment of

224 certain standards or limits in public life. Figuring politics as the expression of moral truths independent of our allegiance or commitment obscures the extent to which our political arrangements originate in and remain dependent on undetermined human action. But does this critique of moral absolutism amount to the demand that political contest be stripped of all arguments made in the name of principles, ideals or values? Is the assertion that political life be understood as unsanctioned by external moral authority tantamount to an argument for the strict autonomy of the political and the banishment of ethico-moral claims from the public realm? Clearly not. Even if such a restriction were somehow possible, it would deprive associative democratic politics of much of its energy and appeal. On all sides of contentious issues, democratic actors regularly invoke powerful moral principles in defense of their positions and projects. Ethico-moral concepts contribute significantly to the repertoires of political actors who seek to address potential constituencies and build support for their activities. Indeed, many of the most effective and inspiring social movements in recent history movements that exemplify the practice of associative democratic politics have been animated by what Wendy Brown calls a galvanizing moral vision.493 The civil rights movement in the United States, for example, often opposed racial segregation as a specifically moral wrong. How then can my criticism of the theoretical quest for moral absolutes in politics be squared with the

493

Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 22. Having argued previously against the substitution of moral truth for political struggle, Brown is interested here in paying closer attention to the difference between a galvanizing moral vision and a reproachful moralizing sensibility. Brown suggests that active moral struggles against subordination are characterized by their relatively open and democratic character; their tendency not to vest the evil they are fighting in persons or even in social positions but rather in social arrangements and institutions; and the relative abstractness of their motivating principle its lack of cultural specificity or attachment to a particular people (26). Moralism, on the other hand, Brown codes in Nietzschean terms as a recrimination against the life force that action or power represents which seeks to make the world in its own self-image and thus reproves everything tainted with power. Brown further suggests that moralism is a symptom of the loss of total critique and the hope for total transformation in political life.

225 powerful effects moral ideals have had in inspiring associative democratic politics, past and present? When political actors invoke ethico-moral concepts in the appeals they make to potential allies and opponents, their mode of public address implicitly acknowledges that those concepts (and the policies or programs the actors have rhetorically linked to them) stand in need of the allegiance and action of other citizens. For a particular ideal or principle, however righteous, to find expression in policies and practices depends finally on the mobilization of fellow democratic actors. A claim made in the public realm regardless of the principles or moral goods cited is always a claim that seeks the agreement and support of other citizens. This is so even if the public appeal made by a particular constituency involves positing some good or value as absolute and beyond the play of politics (as is the case in many religiously-inspired forms of activism on both the left and right). While the declaration of a particular ideal as absolute and uncontestable may have negative consequences for coalition-building,494 such a declaration in the domain of politics nonetheless remains at bottom an appeal for the assent and engagement of other citizens. In other words, even democratic actors who interpret their own political activity as an effort to realize transcendent moral goods in public life inevitably enter into an arena of political contestation in which supposed moral certitudes enjoy no guarantee apart from the action (or inaction) of citizens who work to enunciate that ideal and see it expressed, however imperfectly, in social arrangements.

494

For example, certain forms of absolutism may make it difficult for those who are undecided or ambivalent to find identification with a movement in need of their support. Staking out a position that decries all others as irrational, wrong or simply immoral may be effective in energizing those with whom one already agrees but will likely be less so in creating new alliances or persuading the as-yet unconvinced. For a discussion of this problem, see Alan Keenan, Generating a Virtuous Circle, in The Politics of Moralizing (New York: Routledge, 2002).

226 The view of democratic politics I am forwarding, then, is not one that seeks to ban moral ideals or ethical idioms from the public realm. Morally charged principles may in fact be indispensable for calling citizens to action. (As Ive already suggested, for example, the ideal embodied in the notion of amor mundi bears important potential for associative democratic politics.) But this vision of democratic politics, which recognizes the invocation of ethico-moral goods as a feature of political claim-making, does not support the theoretical quest for a moral minimum that would be understood as governing the political realm from without. The positions we articulate as political actors may be enriched by reference to ethical ideals and principles that resonate with those whom we address, but as always, such positions acquire authority as the result of the agreement and support of democratic co-actors and not by virtue of an extrapolitical sanction.495 The desire for a moral minimum that can ground and constrain political life is certainly understandable. Yet the lure of stability with which moral absolutism tempts us also serves as a disavowal of human responsibility. In light of this problem, we might conceptualize the limits that guide democratic political life or that we think ought to guide that life not as the unmediated extension of truths found in an authoritative moral domain, but as human inventions, in need of our attention, revision and critique. Seeing the rights and procedures that serve as limits on total pluralism as products of world-building activity might actually serve to spur democratic participation. To affirm the constructed and contingent character of such limits is

495

For an account of political claim-making that has been formative of my own thinking on the subject, see Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. 171-177. Zerilli argues that political claims bear a fundamentally anticipatory structure: we posit the agreement of others, that is, we perform an act of closure. Whether others do agree, however, is another matter, and part of the openness of democratic politics itself (171).

227 neither to deny their importance nor to exaggerate their malleability. It is to insist on the groundless character of politics itself, as an enterprise born out of what is the simultaneous gift and burden of freedom.496 To appreciate the difference between an orientation that assumes politics should take its bearings from transcendent moral absolutes and one which understands politics to be a privileged site of human creativity and inventiveness, it is helpful to return, first, to a moment in the thought of Leo Strauss. The Introduction to Natural Right and History, which I discussed in relation to Berlins work in Chapter 2, opens with Strauss quoting from the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.497 Strauss deploys this famous passage as part of a lament over the erosion of belief in natural right. He wonders, Does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it still hold those truths to be self-evident?498 For Strauss, these well-worn lines from the Declaration serve as a reminder of an earlier, better time, when American citizens understood their political regime to be the expression of self-evident truths. The Declaration testifies to the existence of natural right, which serves to authorize the American system of positive law. By referencing self-evident truths, the document acknowledges that the new polity is not a mere human invention but an expression of transcendent principles.

496

Hannah Arendt, What is Freedom? in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1954), 153; Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 159. Leo Strauss, Introduction, in Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 1. Ibid.

497 498

228 While the language of self-evidence would seem to support Strauss claim that the Declaration recognizes the importance of moral absolutes which serve to sanction the political order, in Hannah Arendts hands, the same passage acquires a subversive meaning. In On Revolution, as part of a prolonged discussion of the problem of authority, namely, the search undertaken by those responsible for founding a new polity for a so-called higher law that would give sanction to positive, posited laws,499 Arendt cites the same lines from the Declaration. Although she notes that the passage appeals to a transcendent source of authority in the form of self-evident truths, Arendt also draws attention to the somewhat incongruous phrase, We hold these truths to be self-evident.500 This curious formulation, and the Declaration as a whole, Arendt argues, combines the notion of agreement with that of an absolute.501 That is, while the very notion of self-evident truths seems to indicate that such truths exist beyond disclosure and argument, the specification that we hold them to be so suggests otherwise.502 If these truths are simply self-evident, why explicitly posit agreement in the form of we hold? Is this reference to agreement an implicit recognition of self-grounding character of political foundation? The very same lines that signaled for Strauss the extent to which political order is rooted in natural right are appropriated by Arendt to support a vision of politics that privileges the contingent act of mutual agreement over the appeal to transcendent authority.

499 500 501 502

Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 182. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 193.

229 Bonnie Honig has persuasively argued that Arendts creative reading of the Declaration tends to dismiss its essentialist moments in order to render it a purely performative act.503 That is, Arendt places tremendous pressure on the performative part of the documentthe we holdwhile downplaying the constative elements of the text, such as the reference to selfevident truths, so that the Declaration can support her retheorization of authority for a nonfoundational politics.504 In the process, Arendt disambiguates the Declaration.505 Such disambiguation, I would argue, does not afflict Arendt alone, however. Strauss performs a strikingly similar gesture, though to contrary effect; he ignores entirely the performative force of the We hold in order to foreground and celebrate the subsequent reference to self-evident truth. The positing of mutual agreement, which Arendt highlights, completely disappears on Strauss telling. One possible response to these two highly selective readings is to seek out a third interpretation which better appreciates the uneasy pairing of performative and constative elements that characterizes this text and perhaps the very aporia of founding itself. This strategy is pursued by Honig in her reading of Jacques Derrida. But it is also worth pausing to consider the very different effects generated by Strauss and Arendts contrary treatments. Honig convincingly argues that what Arendt provides in her treatment of the Declaration of Independence is a powerful fable of founding. That is, Arendts privileging of the Declarations performative dimension is hardly accidental; the story she tells is in the service of

503

Bonnie Honig, Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic, APSR 85, no. 1 (1991), 97, 101. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 97.

504 505

230 a particular understanding of politics. And so too is the fable Strauss gives us. Arendts fable supports a picture of political arrangements as non-necessary creations invented and sustained by human actors in the absence of transcendent guarantees. Strauss fable, on the other hand, imagines political designs to be the direct expression of absolutes that exist apart from, and above, the activities of human agents. As fabulist objects, these renderings do not simply describe; they seek to inspire. Whether Arendts non-foundationalist fable holds more appeal than Strauss absolutist fable depends largely on the commitments and assumptions we bring to them. But it has been my contention throughout this project that the practice of associative democratic politics will receive its richest sustenance from a view which honors the moment of public enunciation We hold as the very essence of politics.

II. The Democratic Self What does it mean to argue, as I have, that projects of self-cultivation advanced in the name of ethics also pose problems for the theory and practice of associative democratic politics? I have suggested that treating the individual as the subject and object of ethics runs the risk of pulling selves away from the development of new relationships among others relationships that bear greater potential for modifying existing configurations of power than does concentrated work on the self. But does this line of argument overlook the extent to which associational democratic relations are more likely to be developed by particular sorts of selves? Might individuals who attempt to cultivate non-normative styles of subjectivity also be drawn to participation in collective projects designed to challenge reigning normative regimes? And arent certain dispositions and sensibilities installed at the level of the individual enabling (or

231 alternately, discouraging) of democratic engagement? If so, then might the care of the self and care of the world be less contrary pursuits than I have supposed? William Connolly, whose work was encountered in several chapters of this project, has insisted on the importance of Nietzschean-Foucauldian arts of the self for pluralist democracy. Connolly argues that it is partly through deliberate working on the self that citizens are rendered more open to the challenges of democratic life. Self-artistry, he claims, does not aim at creating a self-indulgent self but is instead directed at the cultivation of forebearance and generosity. Connolly suggests that arts of the self have an important preparatory role to play in democratic culture; thoughtfully and modestly working on oneself has the potential to loosen the vengeful, anxious, or stingy elements of ones identity and render one more open to responsive engagement with alternative faiths, sensualities, gender practices, ethnicities and so on.506 Connolly, then, forwards a strongly dialogic understanding of the relationship between the self and the world, and between the relationship of the self to itself and those relationships forged among multiple selves. Have I overlooked the importance of these interconnections in arguing that an ethics centered on the care of the self is unlikely to enhance associative democratic politics? Put bluntly, has my critical intervention into ethical individualism rested on a false separation of the self and the world? My point has not been to argue for a strict divide between the reflexive relationship one has with oneself and the complex relationships that characterize democratic activity directed at common conditions. Instead, it has been to complicate a common way of thinking about the
506

William Connolly, An Ethos of Engagement, in Why I am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 145-6.

232 dialogic relation between self and world. That is, what I have tried to call into question is not the fundamental insight which regards individuals and their relational environment as mutually dependent. Instead, I have wanted to bring attention to a prevalent assumption that attends this insight not only in works of contemporary theory but within American culture more broadly and consists in the belief that the reflexive self-relation is the privileged starting point for affecting change in larger-scale conditions. This view, I would wager, is particularly appealing for a highly individualistic culture such as the U.S. Although the call to work on oneself in order to render that self less obedient or less defensive (among other possibilities) is surely a demanding one (and is importantly at odds with prevailing modes of egoistic and conformist individualism), that call very likely rings more familiar and practicable than does a call to join in collective democratic efforts with others. And that familiarity is problematic, for even if the task of self-care holds more ready appeal for contemporary subjects, it alone cannot produce meaningful collective effects. Thinkers who celebrate the care of the self as a mode of resistance tend to assume that too much follows from the cultivation of a certain kind of self. Even, for example, if one succeeds in fostering greater generosity in oneself, as Connolly suggests, this quality cannot on its own generate significant effects on the common world; that inevitably requires action with others. Now, surely collective action can benefit from the generous spirits of its participants. Generosity may allow one to cooperate with others toward whom one might otherwise have been hostile. Or perhaps it will spark efforts to make a particular governmental policy or practice more exemplary of the principle of generosity. But nothing proceeds automatically as a result of self-care. For the work performed on oneself to be politically meaningful always requires what I referred to in Chapter 4 as a leap into publicity.

233 Moreover, even if it is self-cultivation we are after, with the hope of fostering more varied and less normalized individuals, it is not necessarily the case that such self-cultivation is best pursued directly, by opting to take up arts of the self. Suppose that one affirms, with Foucault, that the creation of new forms of subjectivity is an important counter to the disciplinary mechanisms that induce conformity in ever-more sophisticated ways. It does not follow from the identification of the project, however, that these new forms are best sought through deliberate efforts to work on oneself. That is, if we embrace what Richard Flathman calls complementarism the view that robust and widely distributed individualities are productive of group and institutional life, and the latter support and stimulate individualities,507 we should consider not only Connollys claim that certain kinds of self-care might aid a vibrant democratic politics, but also explore the possibility that the multiplication of styles of subjectivity depends significantly on collaborative world-building projects. In other words, we ought to ask whether associative democratic politics can help provide the institutional and cultural supports that allow for the emergence of new subjectivities. Michael Warners astute analysis of queer counterpublics, considered briefly in Chapter 3,
Richard Flathman, Willful Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 8. Flathman contends that complementarism is correct in its claim that individuality and plurality are interwoven and advantage one another. Yet Flathmans subsequent claim runs counter to my own, for Flathman asserts that the complementarisms that dominate in liberal theory and practice (which he does not name specifically) tend to too readily assume that [individualities] will be taken care of by, will themselves come along with, group and associational life (8). My point, spurred on by a commitment to associative democratic politics that Flathman would likely view with skepticism, is instead that it is too frequently assumed that the focused cultivation of individualities will additively result in an invigorated and transformed public life. Concerning Flathmans professed complementarism, Ronald Beiner argues that Flathmans rhetoric of self-making and the notion that it should be the ideal of liberal politics to leave individuals as much as possible to their own devices reinscribe the idea that individuals can make a life for themselves in abstraction from social relations and larger political realities. In other words, although Flathman openly avows the truth of complementarism, which resists an atomistic understanding of self-constitution, his favored minimalist vision of politics seems to imply just such a picture of self-constitution. Ronald Beiner, The Fetish of Individuality: Richard Flathmans Willfully Liberal Politics, in Skepticism, Individuality and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman, ed. Bonnie Honig and David Mapel (Minnepolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 117.
507

234 emphasizes the indispensable role such publics play in enabling the development and appearance of non-normative selves. The world-making project of queer life involves the elaboration of knowledges, places, practices, languages and learned modes of feeling that make possible new, queer styles of subjectivity.508 The power of Warners analysis lies in his insistence on the public and worldly quality of sexuality itself. Even that aspect of identity that we take to be the most personal and private what gives a particular individual sexual pleasure is shaped and fostered socially. Sexual freedom, Warner argues, involves more than mere freedom of choice; it requires access to pleasures and possibilities, since people commonly do not know their desires until they find them.509 In other words, the emergence of non-normative individualities (sexual and otherwise) requires the elaboration of a common world that can nurture those individualities into existence. While dominant cultures of privacy push us to believe, for example, that your sexuality sprang from your nature alone, Warner urges us to appreciate the degree to which all sexualities whether dominant or minority are enabled by public sexual cultures rather than simply discovered or invented by an individual.510 The project of multiplying forms of subjectivity depends significantly on the existence of public supports.511
508

Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: The New Press, 1999), 177, 139. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 179.

509 510 511

George Kateb, in a decidedly different vein, argues that the self-conscious crafting of individuality is a project that requires the support of democratic culture. Starting from the position that democracys most elevated justification lies in its encouragement of individuality, Kateb argues that the exemplary forms of individuality explored by Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman are possible only within a democratic setting: a political artifice sustains these thinkers admirable individualities (78, 105). The very doctrine of self-fashioning is indebted, Kateb argues, to democratic society, which dissolves the mystique of authority and exposes much that was once considered natural to be convention (100). Yet the individualities elaborated by these thinkers would seem to be self-defeating, since they often involve skepticism toward, if not withdrawal from, the very political system that serves as their condition of possibility. While democracy is presupposed for the emergence of the kind of self idealized by

235 This is an insight that Foucault himself articulated, though without fully pursuing it. In an interview conducted on the subject of his late work on ethics, Foucault clarified that the care of the self through which an individual attempts to craft a distinctive way of being is not without its enabling conditions and constraints. The care of the self should not be imagined as a radically insular or independent activity undertaken by its practitioner. Rather, the techniques, models, and aspirations that characterize the ethics of self-care are themselves cultural products: I would say that if I am now interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models he finds in his culture, and are proposed, suggested, imposed on him by his culture, his society, his social group.512 What Foucault seems to recognize in this moment that the conditions of possibility for the ethical practice of self-care are publicly constituted allows us to appreciate associative democratic politics as potentially enabling of new subjectivities. If self-constitution is a project that cannot be abstracted away from the cultural settings in which it is undertaken, then participation in collaborative world-building projects may be an important, though indirect, way of supporting the emergence of more varied and less compliant selves.

Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, they place little value on the practice of citizenship. Thus, the democratic political artifice which is recognized as essential to the project of non-conformist individuality, appears strangely vulnerable. Kateb does not seem particularly worried by this, noting that as long as there are countless people willing to take part [in democratic activities], there can be no duty to do so, no matter how sharply indebted one felt (105). Assuming democratic participation by countless others (who do not come to disdain or outgrow the democratic system as do those most honorific individualists) allows Kateb to remain undisturbed by the prospect that the individuality he cites as democracys greatest achievement might also contribute to its ruin. George Kateb, Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics, in The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
512

Michel Foucault, The Ethics of Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, in Paul Rabinow, ed., Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 1, Ethics (New York: The New Press, 1994), 291.

236 I have argued that associative democratic politics, in which citizens engage in action in concert, is indispensable for addressing collective conditions. The transformation of the common world cannot simply be the additive result of many individuals working on themselves; it requires forging relations of solidarity and undertaking cooperative modes of action and speech. But I am also suggesting that the world-building effects of democratic activity can contribute to the conditions under which individuals engage in arts of the self. In other words, self-constitution can be helpfully conceived of as an indirect enterprise, pursued not only by conscious focus on oneself as an object of care, but also through engagement with others that is directed at changing social conditions in ways that they are more amenable to individual flourishing.513 Many forms of democratic activism might contribute indirectly to enriching the social environment in which arts of the self are taken up. For example, democratic efforts such as the Indymedia movement, designed to promote less homogenous and corporate media outlets, may have the important side effect of multiplying the range of images, ideas and projects with which individuals can find identification and meaning. Greater economic equality, sought by Living Wage activists and others, might allow for more people to experiment with arts of the

That famous philosopher of the public, John Dewey articulated a dialogic understanding of self and society, affirming the importance of self-creation while stressing its indirect character. As Richard Schusterman argues, although Dewey gives teleological priority to the individual, society precedes and shapes its constitutionThis social construction of the self is central to Deweys argument that personal self-realization requires an active public life: If the mental and moral structure of individuals, the pattern of their desires and purposes depend largely on the habits, thoughts, and values that society encourages, then improving our society seems essential to improving the quality of the selves we realize. Richard Schusterman, Pragmatism and Liberalism Between Dewey and Rorty, Political Theory 22, no. 3 (1994), 400; quoting John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (New York: Capricorn, 1929), 81. In this article and another on Hilary Putnam and Stanley Cavell, Schusterman draws attention to Deweys argument for the indirect character of self-creation. See also Schusterman, Putnam and Cavell on the Ethics of Democracy, Political Theory 25, no. 2 (1997). Dewey famously articulates a holistic understanding of the public, yet his insights into the ways in which self-constitution might be pursued more obliquely than is usually supposed could be extended in support of a more pluralistic understanding of publics, such as the one offered by Michael Warner who also suggests that transforming oneself is itself a kind of public activity insofar as it depends upon the elaboration of a commonly accessible world. Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 71.

513

237 self as they are relieved of the pressure that attends the daily struggle for economic survival. Organized efforts to reform the American two-party system have the potential to enrich the repertoire of publicly voiced political positions that individuals can draw on in cultivating their individual characters. In other words, all of these world-building projects can contribute to enriching the conditions under which selves labor to modify themselves. Even William Connolly, whose work argues passionately for the democratic importance of arts of the self, cannot help but acknowledge the extent to which such arts remain dependent on collective world-building projects. One example, concerning the issue of euthanasia, is particularly striking in this regard. The hypothetical case Connolly describes is meant to illustrate the relevance that working on yourself has for democratic engagement. He describes an individual you who engages in an inner struggle over end-of-life issues, a struggle which challenges your previously unquestioned belief in death as a purely natural or religious matter. This process of negotiation, which involves not simply inner dialogue but a complex and perhaps ineffable activity in which one part of your subjectivity begins to work on other parts, leads to a reappraisal that, in turn, affects the micropolitics in which you participate. Yet while Connollys example describes an individual who is admirably vigilant in negotiating what was heretofore nonnegotiable, that this belief became rethinkable was not the result of her labors alone. Instead, political activity made public a claim the right to die that was not previously legible, and this in turn prompted her reconsideration. Connolly follows Foucault and labels this activity of reconsideration arts of the self, yet this naming might mislead readers regarding the extent to which the personal transformation he delineates on his own account is made possible by democratic world-building activities. Introducing this example Connolly writes,

238 Suppose you habitually assume that death must come when God or nature brings it. A new political movement by those who claim the right to doctor-assisted death when people are in severe pain or terminally ill shocks you to the coreBut later, when the shock of the new demand wears away, your concern for the suffering of the dying in a world of high-tech medical care opens a window for the exploration of other possibilities.514 What Connolly describes here actually testifies to the importance of democratic mobilizations that make public a problem and a claim not previously legible. His own example reveals the extent to which purportedly individual arts of the self are parasitic on the world-building activities of democratic life. Working on ourselves is always an activity shaped by the discursive possibilities which circulate in the public world. Recognizing this can perhaps deepen our interest in associative democratic politics, not only for its potential power to alter shared conditions, but for the contributions it might make to ushering in new and unexpected individualities.

III. Amor Mundi and its Sources This project has cast a critical eye on the turn to ethics by arguing, first, that this turn is in some cases a return to morality that devalues the importance of citizen action by casting certain principles, values, or limits as extrapolitical givens that exist apart from the articulation and mobilization of democratic actors. Second, I have tried to show that an ethical orientation focused on the project of self-constitution, though not simply opposed to associative democratic politics, runs the risk of misrepresenting self-cultivation as itself a form of political activity, when the latter always requires the co-participation of others who direct their energies toward a

514

Connolly, An Ethos of Engagement, 146-7.

239 worldly object of concern. Yet the intent of these interventions has not been a disavowal of ethics per se. As I claimed in Chapter 4, an ethical sensibility that centers on care for the world is potentially energizing of associative democratic politics. As an alternative to moral foundationalism, amor mundi is a fragile ethical possibility that comes into being when it is freely enacted. And in contrast to the ethics of self-care, amor mundi is an ethical orientation that inspires us to tend to some aspect of the world that lies between us. An ethics focused on care of the world faces up to the contingency of our democratic practices and institutions while also insisting on the importance of collective responsibility. But where does this ethical sensibility come from? Where does it appear? These questions are particularly pressing since so many features of contemporary politics in the U.S. seem inhospitable if not hostile to democratic action that embodies care for the world. Official channels of government offer few opportunities for ordinary citizens to gather together and participate in discussion and decision concerning public matters, while associational activities that take place outside of the state apparatus are continually threatened by vigilant policing efforts.515 Moreover, the dominant rhetoric of mass-mediated electoral politics in this country appeals persistently to citizens self-interest, doing little to bring into view the public world as

515

A New York Times article, for example, recently reported on the use of proactive arrests, covert surveillance, and psychological tactics at political demonstrations that took place at the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002. A proposal to use undercover officers to secretly monitor political gatherings was also discovered, although the NYPD claims it was not adopted. As the same article reports, the power of police to engage in such monitoring was tightly controlled between 1985 and 2003 as the result of a lawsuit in the 1960s by political activists who claimed that undercover officers interfered with their ability to express their opinions. Since 2003 many of the restrictions on undercover monitoring that were established in that case have been abandoned, at the request of the city. This is just one contemporary example of what Michael Rogin calls the tradition of political repression in the U.S. repeated and coordinated state efforts to disrupt and render ineffectual citizen association. See Police Memos Say Arrest Tactics Calmed Protest, in New York Times, March 17, 2006; Michael Rogin, Political Repression in the United States, in Ronald Reagan: The Movie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

240 common object or to cultivate a sense of concern for this entity. How might the ethics of amor mundi find expression, here and now? An ethical sensibility cannot simply emerge out of thin air. An ethics of amor mundi would seem to depend largely on the existence of institutional spaces and practices that allow democratic actors to assume and enact collective responsibility. Doesnt an ethics oriented toward care of the world require political structures that foster such care and provide opportunities for its exercise? Yet isnt it also the case that the very institutions that might serve to cultivate care of the world seem to depend on such an ethics already being in existence if they are to come into being at all? We are here in the midst of one of the powerful paradoxes famously identified by Rousseau in The Social Contract. Rousseaus theorization of political founding stresses the extent to which ethics and institutions are mutually dependent upon one another; each one seems to presuppose the other as its condition of possibility. The establishment of a sound democratic system of self-rule, Rousseau explains, seems to require individuals who exhibit a social spirit already oriented toward the common good. Yet that orientation would itself seem to be the result of democratic organization: For a newly formed people to understand the wise principles of politics and to follow the basic rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit which must be the product of social institutions would have to preside over the setting up of those institutions; men would have to have already become before the advent of law that which they become as a result of the law.516

516

Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), Book 2, Chapter 7.

241 Does this vicious circle admit of an escape? Translated into the terms of this project, if an ethics of amor mundi might help to inspire and strengthen associative democratic politics, doesnt such an ethics also emerge in and through that very politics? Where, then, does this leave us? Although Rousseaus paradox, I would argue, cannot be overcome, it can be attenuated. The impasse he describes, while genuine, rarely if ever confronts us so starkly. The mutual dependence of ethics and institutions colors every creative political act, every attempt to begin anew, but it is not the fatal trap that Rousseaus rendering might suggest. This is because we are not in the position of performing an ex nihilo political founding. The situation evoked by Rousseau gains much of its drama from the fact that it is depicted as one in which new laws, practices, and procedures must be invented from scratch, in the absence of any pre-existing supports whether ethical or institutional. We, thankfully or not, do not live in such a vacuum. Finding ourselves in the midst of things means that we can do more than wish for a Rousseauvian Legislator who will set things in motion for us.517 In media res, Rousseaus riddle loosens its grip a bit. For we do not face an empty political landscape that forces us to make an impossible choice between ethics and institutions. Even if it is a minority feature of contemporary politics in the U.S., we nonetheless can find the ethical sensibility of amor mundi already expressed in institutional life. We witness it when members of environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and Earth First! engage in public acts of protest and advocacy
517

For two provocative readings of the democratic significance of the Rousseauvian Legislator, see Steven Johnston, Encountering Tragedy: Rousseau and the Project of Democratic Order (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) and Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Both Johnston and Honig portray the Legislator as the deus ex machina in a founding fiction that would seem to threaten the democratic credentials of the order he founds (Johnston, 52). Johnston reads this fiction as disabling of democratic politics because it tends to ascribe the task of maintenance rather than innovation to its citizens (71). Yet Honig locates unexpected potential in Rousseauss myth, arguing that the foreigness of the foreign-founder might be read as a marker of the laws alienness to the people who live by it. This sense of alienation, Honig contends, might be worth preserving insofar as the positive side of alienationmarks a gap in legitimation, a space that is held open for future refoundings, augmentations, and amendment (30-1).

242 that direct attention toward the fate of the natural world that is our home. The group No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes exhibits its care for the world by challenging the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border through direct action that works to create conditions at the border which are hospitable to migrants.518 The more than a million houses that have been built by Habitat for Humanity serves as a material reminder of its volunteers care for the human artifice that constitutes one aspect of the common world. Globally, several populist movements (involving some combination of NGOs, unions, and political parties) have successfully challenged governmental privatization policies by insisting on the recognition of water and energy as specifically public goods.519 In these cases and many others, the ethical and the institutional cannot be detached from one another; care for the world is enacted in and through democratic (counter) institutions.520 They are already imperfectly combined.

518

The organization, a coalition consisting of several pro-immigration groups throughout the Southwest, describes its mission in the following way: We embrace an action plan that includes movable desert camps, support of migrant aid centers, maintenance of water stations, Samaritan patrols that search the desert for migrants in need, and advocacy on behalf of migrant-related issues. See www.nomoredeaths.org.

519

See David Hall, Emanuele Lobina, and Robin de la Motte, Public Resistance to Privatization in Water and Energy, Development in Practice 15, no. 3 and 4 (2005) for a thorough discussion of the struggles that have taken place in a number of countries, both developed and developing, over attempts at privatization.

As I use it here, counter institution refers to an organization located outside the official institutional matrix that serves as a venue for the experiences of discussion, decision-making and action among citizens. Counter-institutions in this sense are roughly synonymous with the semi-autonomous associations and organizations of what is sometimes called democratic civil society. These counter-institutions have also been conceived of as a parallel polis, an idea borrowed from the Czech Charter 77 movement. The notion of a parallel polis is meant to signify the cultivation of democratized practices and institutions that would shadow those of the state: information networks, forms of education, trade unions, foreign contacts, and economy. See J. Peter Euben, The Polis, Globalization, and the Politics of Place in Democracy and Vision, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William Connolly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 282. Counter-institution has also been used describe an official political institution that has the paradoxical function of undermining or disrupting the workings of the state. In his study of Machiavelli, Miguel Vatter uses the term to designate those institutions of the Roman republic the tribunes and the practice of public accusation that guard freedom by preserving a place of discord in the body politic. Miguel Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machiavellis Theory of Political Freedom (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000).

520

243 Whether we join in the activities of these existing organizations or take inspiration from them to create new ventures, we are far from the abstract and empty space of Rousseuvian political beginnings. That we are already located within a messy universe of ethical-institutional entities means that we do not need to imagine the task before us as one of radical invention, confronting us with an irresolvable riddle: ethics or institutions? We are in the middle of things, and this might turn out to be a good place to be. While associative democratic activities seem to be a muted feature of contemporary political life, they nonetheless do exist. It is surely easier to lament or despair over present conditions, but a commitment to associative democratic politics calls for something else. It requires us to take sustenance from the supports that are already in existence, so that we might begin where we are.

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