:: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 ::

Hobbes, the Liberal State and the Birth of Republican Protection: Part Two

The Foucauldian Reading of Hobbes:

Foucault’s reading of Hobbes, over twenty years ago offers an interesting contrast to the usual neo-liberal interpretations that proliferate today. Hobbes is a central figure in Foucault’s process of reflection on war and violence and he claims to do “exactly the opposite of what Hobbes wanted to do in Leviathan.” Foucault proceeded in the opposite direction than most when he stated that “Rather than raising the problem of the central soul (of the Sovereign), try to study instead the multiple, peripheral bodies, bodies established as subjects, through the effects of powers.” By rejecting the idea of having to consider this object, the state or the Sovereign, as the direct organisational principle of the individuals, Foucault favoured a sort of basic atomism. Yet immediately after, he stated that at least “the individual does not form a sort of primitive atom.” The individual is an effect of power. Of what Power? Of “regional powers that are exercised through infitesimal techniques and tactics.”

Foucault refused to start from the top and always preferred “starting from the bottom.” Yet, at the same time, he refused to start from the bottommost point, the individual, apolitical construct born much later in the liberal individualism of the 18th century; he started from micro-sociological structures that create the basic collective disciplines, and thus Power. “families,” “the medical profession,” “public notables,” etc. In the end, global domination, the centralised power of the state, was not pluralized, but on the contrary, pluralised regional domination is globalised. It is not my desire to reconcile Foucault and Hobbes; but I think it is of interest to see how the inversion of Hobbes that Foucault claimed he was engaged in was in fact highly Hobbesian.

Foucault criticised Hobbes’ construction of Leviathan; however, the key to the construction of Leviathan, as we have seen, is to be found in the deconstruction of Behemoth, in other words in the problem Hobbes sought to deal with in his reflections on the English Civil War – what happens to Sovereignty when the Sovereign disappears?

Returning to the notion of “regional power” in Foucault, it should be noted that in every civil war, or serious political disturbance, is made up of strategic choices by local or individual regional powers aimed at the survival of these powers in the absence of protection from a higher level. As for the individual, he or she is the result of a secession at the smallest level, naturally “atomic” and biologically (though not strategically) indivisible. The individual level is not a “state of nature” for humankind. If the individual under threat is no, longer a sovereign level in the organisation of protection, the secession of madness (schizophrenia), or the delirious reorganisation of the outside world (paranoia), or political suicide, can still intervene as the final protest of strategic sovereignty, the protest of the basic interior collective. The individual is a sovereign authority culturally, in other words strategically but not naturally or biologically.

This does not tell us what kinds of strategies and powers are involved at each scale. But in a revolutionary process, strategies are deployed everywhere, at every level, and provide lines of flight of new resistance for the imagination. Each civil war can be at once or contradictorily a war of class secession and a war of community secession. There are class secessions, but also secessions of provincial sovereignty, of individual survival strategies. In the space-time of the death threat, some types of provisional legitimacy are established with amazing speed and whatever their name may be, in every disturbance they quickly become tools for communicating the situation, the people involved, the stakes, the threats to security. Sometimes they disappear, other times they become historically sovereign identities.

Leviathan and Behemoth:

Behemoth is the story of the cycle of the English Civil War and Commonwealth considered as a revolution, in other words as the movement of a planet returning to its point of departure after a complete voyage around the sun. It describes a crisis that topples the royal power only to reinstate it at the end. The crisis itself is considered to be a deconstruction of sovereignty into its elements.

Hobbes is convinced that the best for the sovereign is embodied in the absolute monarchy, a preference that can already be found in the work of Bodin, who was the first to describe the sovereign in the “Six Books of the Republic” in 1576. Absolute monarchy already was an established progressive French myth at the time. Richelieu was trying to concretise and fulfil it with Louis XIII in order to bring to an end all the powers based on the medieval orders. Charles I tried to imitate this absolutism when he ceased convening Parliament, an act that was immediately interpreted as tyrannical. While remaining an absolutist, Hobbes nevertheless remained attached to the Christian idea that power came “from God, and through the people, under God, to the Sovereign,” or in this case to the king. From there power is passed around like a hot potato that cools off the farther away it is from the king (if his power is weak). It would be logical to consider that distancing oneself from the king implies distancing oneself from the people and God. In fact for Hobbes, even if power originates in the people, the only real trace of this mythical provenance lies in the power of the king. We would say today that the provenance is systemic. His theoretical conviction is that the more absolute the power of the sovereign, the closer it is to the functional contract between the Sovereign and the people. This contractual schema could also serve to legitimise the absolute power of a political party (eg the Bolsheviks).

However, one can argue that the acceptance of the functional imperfection of the contract between sovereign and people is the foundation of true democracy, since the people are in a position to review the contracts they have made with their representatives. It is also clear that the possibility of constant review of these contracts is necessary given perpetual economic and social changes that arise from scientific and technical advances. But such progress did not yet exist at that time. Democracy might have been necessary to correct annual variations in harvests due to climactic changes or the whims of trade, but a monarch independent from oligarchies, concerned for his people and well informed on both agricultural and commercial questions, could also have played the same role. Scientific and technical progress, along with the constant and unpredictable transformations it causes, make democracy more attractive.

It was impossible for Hobbes to say that Parliament represented the people when he analysed the rise of parliamentary power in its revolt against Charles I. Not that the causes of representation eluded him, but it did not apply, considering that Parliament was only convened by order of the king, not by the people. Parliament, moreover, was hardly a separate power, but part of a whole made up of the sitting king and the two houses he convened. It then become easy for Hobbes to show that the Rump Parliament that took over the sovereign power after the king's death was merely an oligarchy; the power of the Protector Oliver Cromwell only tyranny (in the antique sense of an anti-aristocratic dictator); the power of the officers and armies after Cromwell’s death, merely a superior strength but not a supreme power. General Monk, who finally summoned the king, at the end of the cycle, after the abdication of Richard Cromwell, the heir; merely returned to power the only possible popular and divine sovereignty,

Hobbes’ thought here does not dismiss democracy as an illusion, but rather the illusory representative institutions that in the form of elected civil or military populism can quietly restructure sovereignty to benefit the reign of tyrannical oligarchies. What Hobbes’ denounces is the “Empire’s secret,” the secret of Empire, which always betrays the Commonwealth.

Force and Protection:

In contemporary terms, we would say that the contract of protection between the people and the sovereign-king is established for an indefinite period of time, but that it becomes void if the person in charge loses his ability to protect his subjects. If the Sovereign fails to provide adequate protection, it amounts to a breach of contract. Since the protective function is based on violence, losing control of that force, losing his monopoly or evident superiority, would imply the loss of his role as protector and thus to his end as sovereign. At that point, everyone regains history her natural right to self-protection and society falls back into the “state of nature”, unless a new sovereign protector appears.

This seems to open the door to all types of collaboration and opportunism until one looks more closely at the sentence that clearly states that the enemy must have won a final victory and the forces of the sovereign can no longer continue to fight. In Hobbesian terms, Gaullism had the particular quality of insisting that the war in France was not over and that a handful of Free French, the forces of the French Republic, continued to fight. Citizens must decide for themselves, or in their sovereign debates, whether of not the battle is over and whether the forces of the republic continue to fight. Hobbes could tell that the exiled nobles flocking to the court of a dispossessed king, who held a claim to the English throne in France, lacked the strength of citizens and were no longer fighting.

As is stand, this brief passage from Leviathan, which is at the heart of the approach found in Behemoth (written and published much later), is probably the centrepiece of the perplexity of Hobbes. However it is not a question of rational decision in the sphere of danger; theoretically it is not as the responsibility of the sovereign is that of an automaton. For Hobbes the sovereign, the Commonwealth, the Republic, the state. Were not a proprietary monarchy to which loyalty is due by inheritance, but instead an “artificial animal” or even an “artificial man” created by natural man. Hobbes stated this in the opening pages of Leviathan. The Sovereign is no more responsible for his protective function that a computer is responsible for its memory and programmes. The clock can be dismantled and rebuilt in order to understand how it works, but this does not change the way in which it works.

Causes of War:

A key point in the theoretical perplexity of Hobbes is the definition of precise moment when government power is totally destroyed during a civil war. The reference here is to Behemoth, a work that was written after the restoration of the monarchy in England at the time Hobbes had nothing left to fear. The king, his protector, forgave him his escape from France, but never authorised an official publication in England of the work with the controversial subject matter. The new work, however, contrary to his flight and exile, was a theoretical work rather than a “practical” conceptualisation. What is the best moment to destroy the Sovereign and for what reasons? For Hobbes, in Behemoth, the power of the Sovereign self-destructs under the Commonwealth. With the late publication of this book in 1669, Hobbes had the leisure to theorise freely without the fear of falling prey to courtly intrigues. For Hobbes, the struggle of every person against everyone else appears prior to the death of the monarch in the form of the quarrels between politico-religious factions and it was followed by the parliamentary disorder that bore a strong resemblance to general war.

For Hobbes, parliamentary conflict was not the cause of the destruction of the Sovereign; religious conflict was. Himself a believer, Hobbes despised all religious influence in political matters for a theological reason that he clearly established, but one that we can consider to be a strategic reason given his treatment of the subject. The Papal ambition to dominate the Holy Roman Empire as well as the Emperor’s ambition to control the clergy and the Pope, each had been part of Christianity since Constantine the Great. Christian anti-clericalism exists and is much more virulent than the weakened form prevalent in the secular nation-state. What is sometimes forgotten is that this criticism, fundamental for the temporal power of the clergy, is directly related to questions of war and peace, to the defence of the republic of peace, to Christianity, in other words to peace in Europe. The criticism does not bear on the temporal power of the clergy, but on the use of its spiritual power to send people into military conflict, a completely different story that can be considered to be simony. Selling the sacraments and indulgence is only one aspect of simony. Another would be to lead men to war through an re-alignment of the doctrine of Christ meant to organise predatory force, a salaried offensive army.

The most established form of simony, selling sacraments, comes from the ordinary corruption of the Church by the sympathetic and peaceful values of commerce, which make it a financial power. A second logic lies behind this prohibition; it also seeks to maintain the uniquely pacific qualities of Christianity and its hostility towards any incidence of violence and hatred. This is part of the fundamental programme of Christianity, just as it is for Buddhism. The Church is not supposed to accumulate riches by selling its sacraments, because if it did, it would become a worldly power capable of stockpiling wealth, defending it treasury, hiring mercenaries to protect it, making money by using these warriors to exploit others, in short, of living and dying by the sword, like a nation.

This capability is reserved for the king or the Emperor, and this strategic prohibition concerns both the accumulation of wealth (coins bearing the likeness of Caesar must return to Caesar through taxation) and the use of war (Caesar raises taxes to fund a campaign). Holding back taxes, withholding from Caesar the objects that bear his image is an act of war. This was not contrary to a certain Jewish vision of the realm of the Messiah, but was condemned by Christianity. There is another more perverse way to establish a rich, violent and political Church through the direct use of the discourse of salvation; the Church should not exercise its pastoral and mystical abilities to induce the faithful to sacrifice (even freely) their life for the clergy. The origins of the modern conflicts that developed in the 16th and the 17th centuries during the Reformation can be found in the medieval conflict between the Pope and the Emperor. The central position of the Catholic Church in questions of war and peace between Christians or Christian kingdoms as well as with the rest of the world was a question that was debated throughout the middle Ages. The “temporal” and “spiritual” powers accused each other of provoking (unjust) wars between Christians and each claimed the sole right to enforce the peace that both God and human reason desired. The righteousness of a crusade for Christianity was more problematic than a jihad for Islam.

The apparently extreme modernity of Hobbes comes from the process of the emergence of the anti-clerical medieval state. In 1324 in his Defensor Pacis, Marsilius of Padua sought to shake the foundations of the Vatican’s claim for pre-eminence. He argued that, from the beginning, control of the Holy Roman Empire was passed down by election (election by princes some of whom were German prince-bishops) and not at all by papal decree. The Pope in Rome could only confirm the vote and, Marsilius wrote, “he does not make the Emperor anymore than the Bishop of Rheims makes the King of France.” Using a method similar to the one Hobbes would later choose, Marsilius decided that the origin of sovereign power can be more clearly verified in its mechanisms, by its means of renewal and real transmission, than in any legend surrounding its foundation.

By the 14th century, Religious authority and political power were separated by method, though this separation was obviously for theological purposes specific to Christianity. It was also, more concretely, a predatory and financial question. How much money can be taken from the faithful out of fear of war, religious respect, or by protection of arms? How much from the threat of excommunication, fear of damnation and the right of absolving sins held by the clergy? Violence and security on the one hand, threat of damnation and promise of heaven on the other, are the two principle means of acquiring wealth during the Middle Ages. For Marsilius of Padua, this predatory duality is the cause of war within the Christian world. The duality of financial power necessarily leads to a bipolar military situation. In Italy the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, were the opposing parties. The Pope exceeded his rightful domain when he attempted to dominate the Emperor by religious means and to dominate the Christian world with the Crusades, or the “fires of excommunication.”

Marsilius of Padua had already defined peace, order and unity within the state in terms of coercion, and it is the monopoly of control over this coercion that the function of the unique sovereign (an oligarchy, civil assembly or monarch) is a sufficient condition for peace. The cause of the civil war lies in the Papacy’s ambition to establish the clergy as a legitimate force against the more properly political power. Marsilius struck out against “the false opinion of certain bishops of Rome and their perverted desire to acquire the rule that is their due, as they say, from the full powers invested in them, according to them, by Christ, this is the sole cause, as we have established, of the trouble of discord in the state or nation.” He goes on to attack the Papacy with a single-mindedness that made him the most intellectually challenging critic of the Pope until Luther.

In his own way, Hobbes continues the arguments of Marsilius of Padua against excommunication, a political weapon especially when used against sovereigns, but he goes a step further in describing the noxious effects of the clergy. Not only does he consider its very acts as a type of simony, a means of earning money from the sacraments, but also he sees them as a break from the essence of Christianity, which generally speaking avoids taking Caesar’s place and refuses to establish an “earthly kingdom.” Hobbes notes “ In sum, the power of excommunication cannot be extended further than the end for which the Apostles and pastors of the Church received their commission from our Saviour; which is not to rule by command or coercion, but by teaching and directing men in the way of salvation…Excommunication therefore, when it wanted the assistance of the civil power…is without effect and consequently ought to be without terror. The name of fulmen excommunication is proceeded from an imagination of the bishop of Rome, who first used it, that he was king of kings as the heathen made Jupiter king of the gods.”

Hobbes inherited the medieval critique of the Papacy that formed the basis of the Reformation laid by Luther (who rejected the traffic of indulgences) and the anti-Papist Anglican tradition – the simplest form of association between Christianity and national state modernity. However, Hobbes went much further than most Protestants as he was not only against the Catholic Church, but against any clergy group that would establish itself as a political power, in other words as a violent order, contrary to the precepts of Christ: “The Kingdom of Christ is not of this world; therefore neither can his ministers, unless be they kings, require obedience in His name.”

For Hobbes, human beings naturally prefer life over death. International or internal wars, however, can break out due to the intervention of Churches despite the restrictive force sovereigns use to found internal peace. These Churches can create and incite a fear that is greater than the fear of death, the fear of eternal death, or hell. They make men capable of giving their life, or taking that of others, out of their fear of damnation. Each time this method appears, it is because the clergy, either Roman Catholic, Puritan or Protestant, claim royal or imperial power, in other words they attempt to compete with the powers of the Sovereign that were rationally established by the end of the war of each person wages against all others. The clergy thus, become a danger for the Commonwealth and the principal enemy of the peace.

For Hobbes the preservation of civil society depends on justice and justice depends on the right over life and death, as well as the right to administer other rewards and punishments of lesser importance, rights that are held by those who hold sovereignty over the Commonwealth. Here lies the fundamental Hobbesian critique of the clergy: “It is impossible a Commonwealth should strive and stand where any other than the Sovereign hath a power of giving greater rewards than life and of inflicting greater punishments than death.” By promising eternal life or eternal death, the ambitions of superiority that a global religious power entertains over a politico-military power cause the destruction of sovereign institutions and the disappearance of all protection. They provoke the war of everyone against everyone else. For Hobbes, the Sovereign did not disappear because of Cromwell, but because of the religious motivations of the opposing armies.

The End of the Sovereign:

One can debate as to when exactly the sovereignty disappeared during the course of the English Revolution. One could argue that in this vein, it was when many different clergies such as the Catholics, Presbyterians and Puritans, claimed the right to make proclamations in competition with the king, the right to define rewards greater than life and punishments greater than death. Out of all the different religious groups, only the Anglicans declared themselves not to be in competition with the kings, while rejecting the simonaic power of the Pope. It is only partially true that Hobbes recognised the legitimacy of the power of sovereign protection Cromwell attributed himself as Lord Protector. The dictator resolved the religious problem by establishing religious freedom for all except the Papists.

Even if greater disorder ensued from the king’s death, the destruction of the Sovereign was not symbolised by the rise of Cromwell to power with the support of the “New army” of his agitators elected by the soldiers. The Roundheads, the army of Cromwell, constituted the Sovereign. A global philosophical definition of the destruction of the Sovereign only appeared at the end of the cycle, following the death of Oliver Cromwell, with the split into a triple power: the power of the Protector Richard Cromwell, of the Parliament and of the New Model Army in early 1659. This marked the end of the protective function. These three camps were aligned in alliances of two against one. They were thus, less a separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches (as found in the powers of Montesquieu and Locke a century later) than a representation of the state of nature, of the war of every person against all others. This merits further consideration. In a state crisis, a three-way war is a simplified version of a war with an infinity of sides, and the stage of a three-way war can be defined as a recurring paradigm that accompanies the disappearance of the protective function. It has occurred in Lebanon, Bosnia and Colombia: it also appeared in the crisis of 69 AD that almost destroyed the Roman Empire after the death of Nero. The three-way war can be considered the characteristic moment in the destruction of the Sovereign.

Hobbes, thought of human beings “retuning to the state of nature” as he was able to observe them at work during the English Civil War, whose disorder allowed concrete analyses of the human nature of politics. A naturally peaceful and happy, therefore good, humanity for Hobbes, was a myth. Humankind appeared neither naturally good nor evil but naturally “strategic.”. This might simply mean that control of the limbic system by the frontal lobes is characteristic of our species; but that does not eliminate the limbic system. According, to what remains implicit in Hobbes, we would rather interpret the return to chaos as a strategic choice that all collective or individual “people” must make when faced with just such a situation, when it becomes urgent to recover the use of violence that was the protective faculty of the absent sovereign. This faculty had merely an alienation of violence to ensure a smooth functioning of security and peace through the artificial person of the Sovereign.

To put it briefly: a crisis within the state should not be confused with a return to the state of nature. It would be more appropriate to say that the foundation of the state reappears at the microsociological level. Since the 18th century we have been used to mentioning social classes as one of the divisions of reality. There are no social classes in Hobbes. Moreover, in our, modern crisis between communities, class distinctions often disappear or their secessionist logic is suppressed as illegitimate or unconscious; the right of the Plebe to return to the Aventine Hill in Rome seems unthinkable. Only communities appear to have the right to secede. Class-consciousness and class struggle vanish in this way even during Civil Wars. A number of civil wars showed class consciousness or class struggles playing a full role to such an extent, that since 1848 or at least since the Paris Commune, it has become our habit to think that struggle between rich and poor classes lies at the heart of all of contemporary civil war and that suspending this struggle is the essence of democracy. Classes as well as communities are fighting to change the hierarchy. But struggles between communities and their adjournment have nothing to do with democracy defined as class warfare. They can even prevent its foundation from being laid.

:: Conrad Barwa 9:16 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Hobbes, the Liberal State and the Birth of Republican Protection: Part One

“It is impossible that a Commonwealth should stand where no one else but the Sovereign hath a power of giving greater rewards than life, and of reflecting greater punishments than death.”

From: Leviathan, Chapter XXXVIII

In the absence of a declared enemy, the most formidable enemy one must face in politics is disorder. Chaos comes first; the ordered world is second and always under threat. Disorder is present everywhere, like liberty, and this type of threat is never lacking as long as an elite brings it to the fore. This is the case today, although only because neo-liberal ideology paradoxically considers disorder to be positive and order negative, the equivalent to an abuse of power. Yet the representation of disorder as something harmful was the original source of the political desire for order.

The Divine State:

For the ancient Egyptians as for the Sumerians, beginnings held great importance, but there was also a wide variety of cosmogonies, the past was open to an infinite variety of beginnings. They did not have a single genesis, but multiple ones; in fact, as many geneses as were necessary to explain the birth of all phenomena. The order of creation from the local organisations in the Nile valley or the Sumerian city-villages did not proceed from the state. On the contrary, the state came from the growing proliferation of the order of creation and only then from centralised rationality. Finally it was the establishment of Pharaoh’s power as a sort of god, or the power of the Semitic conquerors of Akkad above the Tigris and Euphrates, or of the mountain and nomadic tribal regions that imposed centrality.

The “memory” of an aggregate of microcosms preceding the centralised cosmos of the state in both the Sumerian and Egyptian religions. This “memory” was defined as a system of struggle between two representations of politics and power. The first tended towards the autonomy of productive forces and their concentration under the economic rationality of the temples, their partial predation through the clergy, master of the silos and legitimised by their regulatory economic function. The other tended to impose the violent needs of a centralised predatory power favouring elites through armed force. The “centralisation of the gods” and therefore of economic and political power, could have taken place in two ways in Egypt: through the domination of the local clergy promoting its god, the local god then becoming the sun-god, like Amon-Ra; or through the invention of a single god by the central political authority. Like the sun spreading its life-giving rays equally to all men, Aton, created by Amenophobis IV, became Akhenaton, and limited the political ambition of Amon’s clergy in favour of a divine form of the Republic without the clergy. The struggle between these two rival Suns was merciless. Aton was quickly defeated. Egypt and Sumeria did not place the military arts at the heart of their power; they continued to consider the cosmos as the management of a natural and radiant combination of water and earth providing exceptional economic resources, while disorder was located in the destruction of dykes, discord between cities or city-states, violence, obscurity and invasion.

The idea of a single god causing a single beginning of thaw world by means of a military victory at the summit of a pyramid of subordinate gods, appeared as the dominant administrative representation of empires: the divine-kings reigned over the priests like the Chief god ruling the gods, and the warriors dominated the workers condemned to the glebe. Conquerors, obviously, were anxious to rationalise centralised management of the irrigation and drainage systems, which river civilisations had carefully organised through up-and down-stream negotiations. The definition of order was state violence acting as a parasite on the power of the temples and the submission of peasants by means of hydraulic works. This model was reproduced by both the Akkadians, who lifted their god to the summit of the Sumerian-Akkadian Olympus, and by the Assyrians who elevated their god Mardouk. Even outside areas of fluvial culture, the Greeks’ described Zeus’ rise to power over the other gods after his victory over the Titan sons of the Earth. In Rome, after Roman military power overpowered the merchant Greek-city states and the Etruscan hydraulic cities, the triumph of Jupiter was the penultimate example of a versions of a divine and military Antiquity produced and re-produced over many millennia. Constantine’s conversion to Christianity followed by the spread of Islam under the Sultans, and the unification of Christendom during the Crusades, were the ultimate examples of this representation of universal divine states that owe part of their legitimacy to the centrality of war as a creator of peace.

Non-military order and multiple, non-centralised divinities can always appear as dis-order. The period of disturbance that have rhythmed imperial histroy from Antiquity to the present, obviously were re-current moments in the cycles of decomposition-recomposition of power. This is the way a very longstanding popular tradition of the biblical religions considered them. Disorder is only a new beginning because it potentially contains a variety of possible orders, a variety of scales of possible orders. Disorder always opens a new choice of degrees of order. Histroy can be seen as an infinite collection of these minute or enormous beginnings and new beginnings. Sovereignty is established by predatory violence or by means of the economy and the rational management of reserves.

The primary problem of contemporary disorder is that, for the first time perhaps, there is an ocean of disorder with no order in sight. This disorder does not initiate any order, simply a disorder that begins over and over again. Orders are given to us from on high, and from the heights of the major financial institutions. They don’t come from the president of the United States, a monarch with almost no power, but from the headless neo-liberal power. This single giant Empire that claims to order everything through disorder is usually called the “market”. Of course, we like disorder almost as much as we like order. Disorder is necessary, especially when a fixed principle of order exists to be transgressed, which is almost always the case. But order is always necessary because it provides protection. Obedience is not arbitrary and it is not solely motivated by terror or fear.

The Protection of a Mortal God:

From Hobbes to Carl Schmitt and the most recent theoreticians of the American Empire, the relationship between protection and obedience is said to remain the only explanation of Power. “Anyone who does not have the power to protect others does not have the right to require their obedience”;Anyone who does have that power can constantly incite obedience by all effective means that do not always have to be immoral; by guaranteeing protection and a quiet life, by educating, by invoking common interests against other people.” Consent creates power but power also creates consent.

This vision seems to define power as a product of obedience. But if one looks closely at what Hobbes wrote, obedience resulted from the consent of the people organising their protection as freely as they can. Even if he was convinced that absolute monarchy offered the most perfect protection for the people, he admitted that any form of Commonwealth assumed is made legitimate by the people in terms of protection. All people - and not just the weak – need civilised power as part of their lives; the need for protection comes before class distinctions and is therefore always produced as well as in class societies from classes of age or gender roles: "For the child ought to obey him by who it is preserved, because preservation of life being the end for which one man becomes subject to another, every man is supposed to promise obedience to him in whose power it is to save or destroy him.” (Leviathan, XX). Children need order because they need protection due to their initial weakness, and women, due to their maternal roles, and the elderly as well, due to their final weakness, and mature men, since they start to wear down, and youths, due to their rash spontaneity and lack of experience, and finally everyone needs order and protection, not a terrifying order that makes you prefer death to life, but an acceptable order, that makes happiness possible and even gives transgression the sense of a progression.

Protection naturally the only legitimate function of sovereignty, it begins with the relationship between parents and their children. Yet, according to Hobbes, it is not provided politically by a supreme saviour, but by what he calls the “multitude united in a single person” or “a mortal god to whom we owe our peace and protection” in other words “an artificial man”. The recipient of this artificial personality is known as the Sovereign: this is the great Leviathan, the biblical creature Hobbes associates with the state, with the Republic. Hobbes translates the word res publica – “public thing” in Latin” – as “Common-wealth” in English. He clearly states that this Sovereign can be the people as a whole, an elected assembly, or a monarch. Hobbes favours absolute monarchy as the form of sovereignty, but does not allow his own preferences to could the scientific development of his theory of power. Re-reading Hobbes holds the key to examining the modern consciousness of the sovereign state and the conceptions of the Republic contained therein.

The notion that the Republic is born as an idea with Hobbes is debatable, but by taking this strategic point, it is possible to show that the Republic cannot be born without a revolution and that Hobbes, through his method of analysis, also considered a crisis involving the entire state as the most fertile moment for a theory of power. By revolution, I mean a type of mass popular movement that braves death out of love for the common good, during which deep-set popular convictions are expressed and make possible the desire to renew society, the state and happiness. This renewal can take place as a return to origins or as an innovation, but in either case, it uses archetypal representations of the political imagination, like Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, which have been revered separately since ancient times. Those who live through such circumstances know that a revolutionary process is characterised by the brilliant intelligence and passionate enthusiasm of the agents who “spring from the people”, the immediate emergence of new thoughts and new talents. Like them or not, revolutions are definite historical objects, although they lack sufficient theorisation (requiring too many social sciences to be mobilised to do so). No one tries to theorise during a revolution because everyone is far too occupied elsewhere. Afterwards it is often too late. The moments are too fleeting, either because the revolution “succeeds”, or because it is “suppressed”; the end result quickly seems so commonplace that any study seems to take this end result – the new institutions, new laws, new ethics, that triumph or suppression have stabilised – as its point of departure, whereas the richness of a revolutions resides in heady rational improvisation. Lawmakers and social observers follow. But even without a theory of movement, the revolutionary moment is necessary, I would argue for the creation of Republics of our modern period.

We need to return to the moment when the representation of the Republic first emerged, as well as its separation from feudal disorder and from absolute monarchy. Reading Hobbes, one can explore a number of certainties concerning what should be maintained in today’s Republic (the French sense of a popular sovereignty following the royal decapitation by the Jacobins) as a source for imagining the future and as a reality of the contemporary world. Not that the essence of the Republic will be found at the end of this return to the origin, and then follow like any other fundamentalism by definition. On the contrary, this journey to the origins, to the beginning of a genealogy, can best serve to locate the values and structures that have remained common to each democratic and republican tradition, as opposed to the offshoots that have become degenerate versions of what they sought to replace. The origins of the French Republic lie in England. The French did not invent everything; the English were the first to decapitate a king and proclaim a Republic. They were the first while restoring the monarchy, to start the move towards a democracy.

Hobbes is one of the rare early Enlightenment thinkers who wanted to include civil war, disorder and chaos in his thought. Such a move brings him that much closer to our contemporary concerns. He assimilates the “state of nature” to a war pitting each person against all the others, which seems to be the very form of violence that has threatened humanity since the end of the bipolar world destroyed the static, menacing and protective architecture of the East-West Cold War – the double, global Leviathan. Hobbes, moreover, is not a Cartesian and can act as a check on the logical rationalism that sometimes prevents us from grasping the re-emergence of dark, primordial social objects. When Descartes said, “I think therefore I am” Hobbes who hated metaphysics said, “I think therefore matter thinks”. Hobbes like Socrates is an ironist. Contrary to Socrates, however, he is extremely dogmatic in appearance and thinks he understood everything and explained it all –not phenomena but his own method.

Hobbes examines the notion of power, exclusively from an analytical and theoretical standpoint. “I speak not of Man, but, abstractly, of the seat of power,” For Hobbes, Plato was a dreamer and mideveal scholars were absurd dogmatists who wanted to combine Aristotile and the Scriptures. He considered himself ready to turn “away from this fantastic obscurity”. He claimed after others, that homo homini lupus in order to base his theory of power on something other than the idea that humans as angels to each other since the Incarnation of Christ. To forge peace from war, man must reason at least as much as, and even more than, those who forge war from peace. Through his empirical observations and his constant topic, the Chronicle of the disorder and the crisis of the Revolution and the English Commonwealth, Hobbes is an anthropologist of irrevocable decisions in the sphere of danger. He is in this sense a strategist in the same way that Sun Tzu, Tacitus and Clausewitz can be seen as members of this “profession.”

Hobbes believed he had introduced material stability and rigour of the physical or biological sciences into the study of power, while in fact he merely profited from the crises of the English monarchy as an experience of Chaos. He claimed to offer a theoretical analysis of the state, entirely furnished by the history of the cycle, apparently self-contained of the English Revolution. Through use of his own doctrine he assimilated it into the decomposition of an artificial mechanism of its own parts. His first steps towards the Enlightenment can be found in this method, whose inspiration he received from Galileo and Gassendi, providing his thoughts with the mechanistic rigour of the period. This approach obliged him to “dismantle the clockwork” considering the machine of the state as an artifact, an “artificial man”. Or rather a machine made of men. When searching for the rights of the state and the obligations of its citizens, he wrote, one must act “as if the Commonwealth were dissolved,” in other words consider what is most natural in men, what makes them capable or incapable of forming governments, and “how those who wish to gather and form a Commonwealth should be disposed”. Like a naturalist, Hobbes examined the parts and the whole with the same concern for nomenclature as an entomologist or a mechanic. Each piece or morsel of the dismembered state was given a name and a function. Nothing, not even the king, escaped the cruel bite of his scalpel and functionalist classifications.

However, the object of his research, the state, turns out not to be a whole, as his method would have it, nor is it a finished project like a clock. It is an evolving machine, constantly dismantled in part and partially perfected by human art, imagination and liberty. A makeshift machine in constant evolution. The mechanistic method he preached, therefore is not exactly the one he practised in his analysis of the English crisis. His explanatory conclusions were all the more precarious in that he put the chaos of nature, the raw material of political order, at the heart, not only of his subject (power) but of his method; the analysis of construction though the destruction of power.

In practise, Hobbes proposes a dialectical analysis of conflict. In theory he is not far from a much more complex historical materialism than the mechanistic materialism of Gassendi. Expressed in terms of a regression to the state of nature, some of his approaches are innovative choices of properly strategic decisions. This is what he said in De Cive, in 1642, concerning the regression to war which pits each person against everyone else in the disorder of a civil war: “In the mutual fear that each man feels, everyone has the freedom to use his natural faculties in order to preserve his life and limbs as much as possible.” This freedom, this right with no theological foundation, is a natural power of humankind. In strategic terms this would translate as follows: in situations of crisis. Human freedom to use these “natural faculties” (instead of the “artificial faculties” proposed by the state) is a human strategic capacity. Not as a “natural individual” but as a responsible person from the start, potential citizen is capable of providing an “artificial” power of defence and collective protection. In times of crisis each person has a can-will-should-know-how that must be defined not only as the faculty to choose the most “micro” level of organising the Sovereign – the family or even the individual – but not the state. This regression to the individual level is a special case, but it is within human capacity in general to choose a new level of sovereignty’ and moreover to support a new type of sovereignty (monarchy, oligarchy or Republic). Freedom is a human strategic capacity: it can lead to chaos, to a revolution or to political reform.

:: Conrad Barwa 9:22 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003:

There is an excellent interview with Chuck Lewis at the Center for Public Integrity and Bill Moyers at PBS about The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, which is meant to supplement the Patriot Act of 2001. Some of the provisions in this (still "secret") proposed new legislation are truly frightening - including stripping citizenship for contriubting (knowingly or unknowingly) to organizations that fund terrorism; and secret arrests. The Department of Justice has issued the following response to the Moyer's story leaking the proposed legislation. An actual copy of the confidential prosposal is also available at PBS.

I was thinking about one of my student's comments a few days back when she argued that people are not shocked by the violation of their rights because we gradually come to accept daily invasions of privacy through advanced technology. I think this is certainly a wise point and makes it all the more necessary for those who are concerned about and believe in their right to privacy (and other civil liberties) to fight that much harder and to resist what is going on under the guise of increasing security. While I personally commend such a struggle, I am skeptical about the liberal premises on which the struggle is based.

As a political theorist/scientist, I believe that I can say the current trajectory of the United States and its domestic war on terrorism is already well mapped out. What we see here is a refinement and elaboration of what Foucault labelled Polizeiwissenschaft, the science of policing. The techniques of developing an exhaustive and detailed knowledge of a "population of individual subjects" were first pioneered by the Prussian state in the period following the Thirty Years War. Although Plato had argued that the state is not and should not seek to administer individualized attention to its subjects, there is a legacy in Western culture of "pastoral politics" that stems from the secularization of ecclesiastical government.

The science of policing goes hand in hand with liberal societies -- it is the dark side of the liberal moon that sustains the illusions of individual rights, the rule of law, and a minimalist government. Nevertheless, the intensification of this science will not necessarily lead to dramatic increases in security. The failures of the state to protect its citizens and property on 9/11 were not a consequence of a lack of technology or surveillance -- the failures were due precisely to an excess of technology and surveillance. The generation of white noise from excessive policing of the population inhibited the state from properly assessing and interpreting the most important threats. There were too many layers of bureaucracy and surveillance for the intelligence gathered to result in prevention. Terrorists always operate in this noisy realm, it is their best cloak -- terrorists often understand the potential and limitations of technology better than the states they threaten.

Despite our foresight that the "war on terror" will completely fail, we should not be optimistic about what is to come. The law in liberal societies will almost always give way to the concern for order in times of crisis. The concept of a strong civil society that guarantees civil liberties is a liberal conceit, it will fall apart when push comes to shove -- push will come to shove if there is another major terrorist incident. The problem is not so much that the current Bush administration is irresponsible, incompetent, or invasive, but that there is no alternative science of government for liberal societies in crisis. We kid ourselves if we think that civil liberties would be more secure if Gore had been selected as President. In other words, an alternative mode/technology of governance outside of the science of policing, has yet to be formed. This failure is a failure of the discipline of political science -- particularly American political science which has spent far too much energy singing the praises of its own regime and assuming a tutelary role to other states around the world.

:: Vikash Yadav 1:19 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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