Category: Political philosophy

Politics in an age of advanced technology

Technology has transformed and deformed our long-evolved political order and it is likely to do more of that. A technologically enabled economic and financial system has certainly diminished the regulatory power of the state. Goods, services, and people can now move easily across continents, not always under the control of governments. Pictures, words, ideas, and information are massively channeled within and between political systems, often defying the power of states but also often abetting it. At the same time, the state’s tools of surveillance and repression have become definitely more effective. Its military strength has vastly increased and can be projected over wider distances. We notice, thus, a diminution of state power in some respects, but also an increase in others.

It’s worth returning at this point to an almost forgotten classic: Jacques Ellul’s masterwork The Technological Society (La technique) of 1954 which anticipated much of this development. With respect to the technological transformation of both economics and the state, Ellul wrote at the time: “The fact that the economy and the state are reciprocally joined is technically founded in such a way that the two tend to become aspects of the same phenomenon, a phenomenon which, moreover, is not the result of a simple accretion of previous phenomena. It seems to me particularly important to emphasize this new character. Because of the existence of techniques we are beyond the problems of ordinary étatism or of socialism. It is not the simple phenomenon of the growth of power or the struggle against capitalism which is decisive here. We are witnessing the birth of a new organism, the technical state.” (Quoted from the English translation of 1964, pp. 196-197)

In describing this development, Ellul emphasizes the distinction between the technological machinery (implements, tools, and instruments) and the techniques we have developed to produce, use, and interact with this machinery. For Ellul our society is, first and foremost, a society of techniques, rather than strictly speaking a technological society. (The title of the English version of Ellul’s book is thus potentially misleading.) He anticipates in this way by twenty years Michel Foucault’s famous examination of disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish. Ellul’s “technique” and Foucault’s “disciplines” are, indeed, closely allied notions. Where they differ is that Ellul pays more attention to the way techniques interact with technology.

The two agree, however, in the way they see human beings embedded in the resulting social order and determined by it rather than as independent, autonomous agents. Ellul writes: “Let no one say that man is the agent of technical progress … and that it is he who chooses among possible techniques … He is a device for recording effects and results obtained by various techniques … He decides only in favor of the technique that gives the maximum efficiency.” (p. 80) Ellul commits himself thus to a technological determinism that certainly needs scrutiny. Is he right, for instance, when he adds later on: “It was not the public which demanded air travel and television. Technical progress created these things, and they were technically diffused and imposed on the public.” (pp. 212-213) It is true that the public did not demand air travel or television before their invention. But this does not mean that they were “imposed” on it. We are dealing rather with the creation of new desires based on others that are more fundamental and that are certainly not the product of technical manipulation. First, there was the desire motivating the inventors of these devices. Then came the new possibilities created by their inventions and these, in turn, stirred previously dormant desires in the public. Without our more basic drive to move and our basic desire for visual stimulation, these inventions might not have taken off. But Ellul is right when he concludes that all that is natural and that is natural in us gets transformed in the technological society. “Economic technique tends less to eliminate the natural than to integrate it … But when the natural is integrated, it ceases to be natural. It is an element of the mechanism, an element which must play its role.” (p. 217)

Ellul’s is, however, not only a technological determinism but also an economic one. He believes that in the technological society “maximum efficiency” and “utility” are the determining factors. He writes accordingly: “The development of techniques is responsible for the staggering phenomenon of absorption by economics of all social activities.” (p. 158) And he adds: “Economic life, not in its content, but in its direction will henceforth entirely elude popular control. No democracy is possible in the face of a perfect economic technique. The decisions of the voters, and even of the elected, are oversimplified, incoherent, technically inadmissible. It is a grave illusion to believe, that democratic control or decision-making can be reconciled with economic technique.” (p. 162) And it follows for Ellul that: “Popular will can only express itself within the limits that technical necessities have fixed in advance.” (p. 209) But then the question is what we understand by efficiency and utility. For a medieval Christian, the erection of a cathedral would have been useful in a way in which it is no longer for us and constructing it with the help of craftsmen and prayer would have been the most efficient way to do so. Usefulness is, after all, a transitive notion. Things are never useful in themselves but always for something else. So, the question becomes what our technology is meant to be useful for and that may not be determined by technology itself.

Ellul has few illusions as to where technological development will take us. “History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are much more disastrous than the lack of technique would have been. These effects must exist alongside those effects which were foreseen and expected and which represent something valuable and positive.” (p. 105) Among the secondary effects of technological development are extensive new means of social control. “The techniques of the police,” he writes, have as their necessary end the transformation of the entire nation into a concentration camp. This is no perverse decision on the part of some party or government.” He is using this provocative language in order to indicate the coming of what we would now call the surveillance state. “To be sure of apprehending criminals, it is necessary that everyone be supervised. It is necessary to know exactly what every citizen is up to, to know his relations, his amusements, etc. And the state is increasingly in a position to know these things.” (p. 100)

Ellul is convinced that technological development will go on to shape and reshape our political order. Differences in the theories of government will not make much difference to this. Capitalism and communism, democratic and non-democratic systems of government will all be affected in the same way. “The structure of the modern state and its organs of government are subordinate to the techniques on not dependent on the state. If we were to consider in turn each of the indispensable services of the modern state, we would find that they are becoming more and more alike, regardless of the theories of government under which they operate.” (p. 271)

Critical questions are certainly appropriate concerning Ellul’s claims. For one thing, he ignores non-technological factors that direct and inhibit technological development. Among these are the environment, the availability or poverty of resources, financial constraints, as well as the beliefs of those creating and using technological means. Ellul, moreover, does not see that there might be alternative technologies available and that, hence, choices exist in what kind of technology to develop. (See Andrew Feenberg, Alternative Modernities). He also fails to take into account that concentrations of power may lead to a new dispersion of power and that dispersed power has always within it a disruptive potential. (See Sluga, Politics and the Search for the Common Good, chapter 8)

The Nation State is Dead – despite what its advocates say

Globalization is out and nation states are in, if you believe the agitators. The reality is, however, quite different. The nation state was never a happy construct and technological change has undermined it once and for all. But what comes next? Justified anxieties about where we are going and what globalization will bring us have cast the idea of the nation state in a new, unexpectedly rosy light. It’s, however, a false and deceptive light.

Rana Dasgupta has written a terrific article for The Guardian explaining the demise of the nation state, why it is unlikely to come back, and what to do about it. Don’t miss it.

The demise of the nation state

After decades of globalisation, our political system has become obsolete – and spasms of esurgent nationalism are a sign of its irreversible decline. By Rana Dasgupta

The Guardian, Thu 5 Apr 2018 01.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 5 Apr 2018 13.08 EDT

What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that “the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt”; in Italy, “the collapse of the establishment” in the March elections has even brought talk of a “barbarian arrival”, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.

But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian “solutions” are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious “purification” (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).
What is the relationship between these various upheavals? We tend to regard them as entirely separate – for, in political life, national solipsism is the rule. In each country, the tendency is to blame “our” history, “our” populists, “our” media, “our” institutions, “our” lousy politicians. And this is understandable, since the organs of modern political consciousness – public education and mass media – emerged in the 19th century from a globe-conquering ideology of unique national destinies. When we discuss “politics”, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is “foreign affairs” or “international relations” – even in this era of global financial and technological integration. We may buy the same products in every country of the world, we may all use Google and Facebook, but political life, curiously, is made of separate stuff and keeps the antique faith of borders.

Yes, there is awareness that similar varieties of populism are erupting in many countries. Several have noted the parallels in style and substance between leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. There is a sense that something is in the air – some coincidence of feeling between places. But this does not get close enough. For there is no coincidence. All countries are today embedded in the same system, which subjects them all to the same pressures: and it is these that are squeezing and warping national political life everywhere. And their effect is quite the opposite – despite the desperate flag-waving – of the oft-remarked “resurgence of the nation state”.

The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.

Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.

The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.

More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell. Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth. But Libya is only one of many countries that appear whole only on maps. Since 1989, barely 5% of the world’s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million war deaths in that time. And, as we know from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, the ensuing vacuum can suck in firepower from all over the world, destroying conditions for life and spewing shell-shocked refugees in every direction. Nothing advertises the crisis of our nation-state system so well, in fact, as its 65 million refugees – a “new normal” far greater than the “old emergency” (in 1945) of 40 million. The unwillingness even to acknowledge this crisis, meanwhile, is appropriately captured by the contempt for refugees that now drives so much of politics in the rich world.
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The crisis was not wholly inevitable. Since 1945, we have actively reduced our world political system to a dangerous mockery of what was designed by US president Woodrow Wilson and many others after the cataclysm of the first world war, and now we are facing the consequences. But we should not leap too quickly into renovation. This system has done far less to deliver human security and dignity than we imagine – in some ways, it has been a colossal failure – and there are good reasons why it is ageing so much more quickly than the empires it replaced.

Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone. The reason the nation state was able to deliver what achievements it did – and in some places they were spectacular – was that there was, for much of the 20th century, an authentic “fit” between politics, economy and information, all of which were organised at a national scale. National governments possessed actual powers to manage modern economic and ideological energies, and to turn them towards human – sometimes almost utopian – ends. But that era is over. After so many decades of globalisation, economics and information have successfully grown beyond the authority of national governments. Today, the distribution of planetary wealth and resources is largely uncontested by any political mechanism.

But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge the end of politics itself. And if we continue to think the administrative system we inherited from our ancestors allows for no innovation, we condemn ourselves to a long period of dwindling political and moral hope. Half a century has been spent building the global system on which we all now depend, and it is here to stay. Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.

If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale. The current political system must be supplemented with global financial regulations, certainly, and probably transnational political mechanisms, too. That is how we will complete this globalisation of ours, which today stands dangerously unfinished. Its economic and technological systems are dazzling indeed, but in order for it to serve the human community, it must be subordinated to an equally spectacular political infrastructure, which we have not even begun to conceive.

It will be objected, inevitably, that any alternative to the nation-state system is a utopian impossibility. But even the technological accomplishments of the last few decades seemed implausible before they arrived, and there are good reasons to be suspicious of those incumbent authorities who tell us that human beings are incapable of similar grandeur in the political realm. In fact, there have been many moments in history when politics was suddenly expanded to a new, previously inconceivable scale – including the creation of the nation state itself. And – as is becoming clearer every day – the real delusion is the belief that things can carry on as they are.

The first step will be ceasing to pretend that there is no alternative. So let us begin by considering the scale of the current crisis.
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Let us start with the west. Europe, of course, invented the nation state: the principle of territorial sovereignty was agreed at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The treaty made large-scale conquest difficult within the continent; instead, European nations expanded into the rest of the world. The dividends of colonial plunder were converted, back home, into strong states with powerful bureaucracies and democratic polities – the template for modern European life.
By the end of 19th century, European nations had acquired uniform attributes still familiar today – in particular, a set of fiercely enforced state monopolies (defence, taxation and law, among others), which gave governments substantial mastery of the national destiny. In return, a moral promise was made to all: the development, spiritual and material, of citizen and nation alike. Spectacular state-run projects in the fields of education, healthcare, welfare and culture arose to substantiate this promise.

The withdrawal of this moral promise over the past four decades has been a shattering metaphysical event in the west, and one that has left populations rummaging around for new things to believe in. For the promise was a major event in the evolution of the western psyche. It was part of a profound theological reorganisation: the French Revolution dethroned not only the monarch, but also God, whose superlative attributes – omniscience and omnipotence – were now absorbed into the institutions of the state itself. The state’s power to develop, liberate and redeem mankind became the foundational secular faith.

During the period of decolonisation that followed the second world war, the European nation-state structure was exported everywhere. But westerners still felt its moral promise with an intensity peculiar to themselves – more so than ever, in fact, after the creation of the welfare state and decades of unprecedented postwar growth. Nostalgia for that golden age of the nation state continues to distort western political debate to this day, but it was built on an improbable coincidence of conditions that will never recur. Very significant was the structure of the postwar state itself, which possessed a historically unique level of control over the domestic economy. Capital could not flow unchecked across borders and foreign currency speculation was negligible compared to today. Governments, in other words, had substantial control over money flows, and if they spoke of changing things, it was because they actually could. The fact that capital was captive meant they Governments could impose historic rates of taxation, which, in an era of record economic growth, allowed them to channel unprecedented energies into national development. For a few decades, state power was monumental – almost divine, indeed – and it created the most secure and equal capitalist societies ever known.

The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era. As a result, states have been forced to shed social commitments in order to reinvent themselves as custodians of the market. This has drastically diminished national political authority in both real and symbolic ways. Barack Obama in 2013 called inequality “the defining challenge of our time”, but US inequality has risen continually since 1980, without regard for his qualms or those of any other president.

The picture is the same all over the west: the wealth of the richest continues to skyrocket, while post-crisis austerity cripples the social-democratic welfare state. We can all see the growing fury at governments that refuse to fulfil their old moral promise – but it is most probable that they no longer can. Western governments possess nothing like their previous command over national economic life, and if they continue to promise fundamental change, it is now at the level of PR and wish fulfilment.

There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority. This will arise as the natural continuation of existing technological processes, which promise new, algorithmic kinds of governance to further undermine the political variety. Big data companies (Google, Facebook etc) have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance. Now they are the primary gatekeepers of social reality: membership of these systems is a new, corporate, de-territorialised form of citizenship, antagonistic at every level to the national kind. And, as the growth of digital currencies shows, new technologies will emerge to replace the other fundamental functions of the nation state. The libertarian dream – whereby antique bureaucracies succumb to pristine hi-tech corporate systems, which then take over the management of all life and resources – is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy.

Governments controlled by outside forces and possessing only partial influence over national affairs: this has always been so in the world’s poorest countries. But in the west, it feels like a terrifying return to primitive vulnerability. The assault on political authority is not a merely “economic” or “technological” event. It is an epochal upheaval, which leaves western populations shattered and bereft. There are outbreaks of irrational rage, especially against immigrants, the appointed scapegoats for much deeper forms of national contamination. The idea of the western nation as a universal home collapses, and transnational tribal identities grow up as a refuge: white supremacists and radical Islamists alike take up arms against contamination and corruption.

The stakes could not be higher. So it is easy to see why western governments are so desperate to prove what everyone doubts: that they are still in control. It is not merely Donald Trump’s personality that causes him to act like a sociopathic CEO. The era of globalisation has seen consistent attempts by US presidents to enhance the authority of the executive, but they are never enough. Trump’s office can never have the level of mastery over American life that Kennedy’s did, so he is obliged to fake it. He cannot make America great again, but he does have Twitter, through which he can establish a lone-gun personality cult – blaming women, leftists and brown people for the state’s impotence. He cannot heal America’s social divisions, but he still controls the security apparatus, which can be deployed to help him look “tough” – declaring war on crime, deporting foreigners, hardening borders. He cannot put more money into the hands of the poor who voted for him, but he can hand out mythological currency instead; even his poorest voters, after all, possess one significant asset – US citizenship – whose value he can “talk up”, as he previously talked up casinos and hotels. Like Putin or Orbán, Trump imbues citizenship with new martial power, and makes a big show of withholding it from people who want it: what is scarcer, obviously, is more precious. Citizens who have nothing are persuaded that they have a lot.
These strategies are ugly, but they cannot simply be blamed on a few bad actors. The predicament is this: political authority is running on empty, and leaders are unable to deliver meaningful material change. Instead, they must arouse and deploy powerful feelings: hatred of foreigners and internal enemies, for instance, or the euphoria of meaningless military exploits (Putin’s annexation of Crimea raised the hugely popular prospect of general Tsarist revival).

But let us not imagine that these strategies will quickly break down under their own deceptions as moderation magically comes back into fashion. As Putin’s Russia has shown, chauvinism is more effective than we like to believe. Partly because citizens are desperate for the cover-up to succeed: deep down, they know to be scared of what will happen if the power of the state is revealed to be a hoax.
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In the world’s poorest countries, the picture is very different. Almost all those nations emerged in the 20th century from the Eurasian empires. It has become de rigueur to despise empires, but they have been the “normal” mode of governance for much of history. The Ottoman empire, which lasted from 1300 until 1922, delivered levels of tranquillity and cultural achievement that seem incredible from the perspective of today’s fractured Middle East. The modern nation of Syria looks unlikely to last more than a century without breaking apart, and it hardly provides security or stability for its citizens.

Empires were not democratic, but were built to be inclusive of all those who came under their rule. It is not the same with nations, which are founded on the fundamental distinction between who is in and who is out – and therefore harbour a tendency toward ethnic purification. This makes them much more unstable than empires, for that tendency can always be stoked by nativist demagogues.

Nevertheless, in the previous century it was decided with amazing alacrity that empires belonged to the past, and the future to nation states. And yet this revolutionary transformation has done almost nothing to close the economic gap between the colonised and the colonising. In the meantime, it has subjected many postcolonial populations to a bitter cocktail of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, war, corruption and ecological devastation.

If there are so few formerly colonised countries that are now peaceful, affluent and democratic, it is not, as the west often pretends, because “bad leaders” somehow ruined otherwise perfectly functional nations. In the breakneck pace of decolonisation, nations were thrown together in months; often their alarmed populations fell immediately into violent conflict to control the new state apparatus, and the power and wealth that came with it. Many infant states were held together only by strongmen who entrusted the system to their own tribes or clans, maintained power by stoking sectarian rivalries and turned ethnic or religious differences into super-charged axes of political terror.

The list is not a short one. Consider men such as Ne Win (Burma), Hissène Habré (Chad), Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethiopia), Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea), Muhammad Suharto (Indonesia), the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Moussa Traoré (Mali), General Zia-ul-Haq (Pakistan), Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), the Kings of Saudi Arabia, Siaka Stevens (Sierra Leone), Mohamed Siad Barre (Somalia), Jaafar Nimeiri (Sudan), Hafez al-Assad (Syria), Idi Amin (Uganda), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire) or Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe).

Such countries were generally condemned to remain what one influential commentator has called “quasi-states”. Formally equivalent to the older nations with which they now shared the stage, they were in reality very different entities, and they could not be expected to deliver comparable benefits to their citizens.

Those dictators could never have held such incoherent states together without tremendous reinforcement from outside, which was what sealed the lid on the pressure cooker. The post-imperial ethos was hospitable to dictators, of course: with the UN’s moral rejection of foreign rule came a universal imperative to respect national sovereignty, no matter what horrors went on behind its closed doors. But the cold war vastly expanded the resources available to brutal regimes for defending themselves against revolution and secession. The two superpowers funded the escalation of post-colonial conflicts to stupefying levels of fatality: at least 15 million died in the proxy wars of that period, in theatres as dispersed as Afghanistan, Korea, El Salvador, Angola and Sudan. And what the superpowers wanted out of all this destruction was a network of firmly installed clients able to defeat all internal rivals.

There was nothing stable about this cold war “stability”, but its devastation was contained within the borders of its proxy states. The breakup of the superpower system, however, has led to the implosion of state authority across large groups of economically and politically impoverished countries – and the resulting eruptions are not contained at all. Destroyed political cultures have given rise to startling “post-national” forces such as Islamic State, which are cutting through national borders and transmitting chaos, potentially, into every corner of the world.

Over the past 20 years, the slow, post-cold-war rot in Africa and the Middle East has been exuberantly exploited by these kinds of forces – whose position, since there are more countries set to go the way of Yemen, South Sudan, Syria and Somalia, is flush with opportunity. Their adherents have lost the enchantment for the old slogans of nation-building. Their political technology is charismatic religion, and the future they seek is inspired by the ancient golden empires that existed before the invention of nations. Militant religious groups in Africa and the Middle East are less engaged in the old project of seizing the state apparatus; instead, they cut holes and tunnels in state authority, and so assemble transnational networks of tax collection, trade routes and military supply lines.
Such a network currently extends from Mauritania in the west to Yemen in the east, and from Kenya and Somalia in the south to Algeria and Syria in the north. This eats away the old political architecture from the inside, making several nation states (such as Mali and the Central African Republic) essentially non-functional, which in turn creates further opportunities for consolidation and expansion. Several ethnic groups, meanwhile – such as the Kurds and the Tuareg – which were left without a homeland after decolonisation, and stranded as persecuted minorities ever since, have also exploited the rifts in state authority to assemble the beginnings of transnational territories. It is in the world’s most dangerous regions that today’s new political possibilities are being imagined.

The west’s commitment to nation states has been self-servingly partial. For many decades, it was content to see large areas of the world suffer under terrifying parodies of well-established Western states; it cannot complain that those areas now display little loyalty to the nation-state idea. Especially since they have also borne the most traumatic consequences of climate change, a phenomenon for which they were least responsible and least equipped to withstand. The strategic calculation of new militant groups in that region is in many ways quite accurate: the transition from empire to independent nation states has been a massive and unremitting failure, and, after three generations, there needs to be a way out.
But there is no possibility that al-Shabaab, the Janjaweed, Seleka, Boko Haram, Ansar Dine, Isis or al-Qaida will provide that way out. The situation requires new ideas of political organisation and global economic redistribution. There is no superpower great enough, any more, to contain the effects of exploding “quasi-states”. Barbed wire and harder borders will certainly not suffice to keep such human disasters at bay.
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Let us turn to the nature of the nation-state system itself. The international order as we know it is not so old. The nation state became the universal template for human political organisation only after the first world war, when a new principle – “national self-determination,”, as US President Woodrow Wilson named it – buried the many other blueprints under debate. Today, after a century of lugubrious “international relations”, the only aspect of this principle we still remember is the one most familiar to us: national independence. But Wilson’s original programme, informed by a loose international coalition including such diverse visionaries as Andrew Carnegie and Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia), aimed for something far more ambitious: a comprehensive intra-state democracy designed to ensure global cooperation, peace and justice.
How were human beings to live securely in their new nations, after all, if nations themselves were not subject to any law? The new order of nations only made sense if these were integrated into a “society of nations”: a formal global society with its own universal institutions, empowered to police the violence that individual states would not regulate on their own: the violence they perpetrated themselves, whether against other states or their own citizens.

The cold war definitively buried this “society”, and we have lived ever since with a drastically degraded version of what was intended. During that period, both superpowers actively destroyed any constraints on international action, maintaining a level of international lawlessness worthy of the “scramble for Africa”. Without such constraints, their disproportionate power produced exactly what one would expect: gangsterism. The end of the cold war did nothing to change American behaviour: the US is today dependent on lawlessness in international society, and on the perpetual warfare-against-the-weak that is its consequence.

Just as illegitimate government within a nation cannot persist for long without opposition, the illegitimate international order we have lived with for so many decades is quickly exhausting the assent it once enjoyed. In many areas of the world today, there is no remaining illusion that this system can offer a viable future. All that remains is exit. Some are staking everything on a western passport, which, since the supreme value of western life is still enshrined in the system, is the one guarantee of meaningful constitutional protection. But such passports are difficult to get.

That leaves the other kind of exit, which is to take up arms against the state system itself. The appeal of Isis for its converts was its claim to erase from the Middle East the catastrophe of the post-imperial century. It will be remembered that the group’s most triumphant publicity was associated with its penetration of the Iraq-Syria border. This was presented as a victory over the 1916 treaties by which the British and French divided the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves – Isis’s PR arm issued the Twitter hashtag #SykesPicotOver – and inaugurated a century of Mesopotamian bombing. It arose from an entirely justifiable rejection of a system that obstinately designated – during the course of a century and more – Arabs as “savages” to whom no dignity or protection would be extended.

The era of national self-determination has turned out to be an era of international lawlessness, which has crippled the legitimacy of the nation state system. And, while revolutionary groups attempt to destroy the system “from below”, assertive regional powers are destroying it “from above” – by infringing national borders in their own backyards. Russia’s escapade in Ukraine demonstrates that there are now few consequences to neo-imperial bagatelles, and China’s route to usurping the 22nd-richest country in the world – Taiwan – lies open. The true extent of our insecurity will be revealed as the relative power of the US further declines, and it can no longer do anything to control the chaos it helped create.
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The three elements of the crisis described here will only worsen. First, the existential breakdown of rich countries during the assault on national political power by global forces. Second, the volatility of the poorest countries and regions, now that the departure of cold war-era strongmen has revealed their true fragility. And third, the illegitimacy of an “international order” that has never aspired to any kind of “society of nations” governed by the rule of law.
Since they are all rooted in transnational forces whose scale eludes the reach of any one nation’s politics, they are largely immune to well-meaning political reform within nations (though the coming years will also see many examples of such reform). So we are obliged to re-examine its ageing political foundations if we do not wish to see our global system pushed to ever more extreme forms of collapse.

This is not a small endeavour: it will take the better part of this century. We do not know yet where it will lead. All we can lay out now is a set of directions. From the standpoint of our present, they will seem impossible, because we have not known any other way. But that is how adical novelty always begins.
The first is clear: global financial regulation. Today’s great engines of wealth creation are distributed in such a way as to elude national taxation systems (94% of Apple’s cash reserves are held offshore; this $250bn is greater than the combined foreign reserves of the British government and the Bank of England), which is diminishing all nation states, materially and symbolically. There is no reason to heed those interested parties who tell us global financial regulation is impossible: it is technologically trivial compared to the astonishing systems those same parties have already built.

The history of the nation state is one of perennial tax innovation, and the next such innovation is transnational: we must build systems to track transnational money flows, and to transfer a portion of them into public channels. Without this, our political infrastructure will continue to become more and more superfluous to actual material life. In the process we must also think more seriously about global redistribution: not aid, which is exceptional, but the systematic transfer of wealth from rich to poor for the improved security of all, as happens in national societies.

Second: global flexible democracy. As new local and transnational political currents become more powerful, the nation state’s rigid monopoly on political life is becoming increasingly unviable. Nations must be nested in a stack of other stable, democratic structures – some smaller, some larger than they – so that turmoil at the national level does not lead to total breakdown. The EU is the major experiment in this direction, and it is significant that the continent that invented the nation state was also the first to move beyond it. The EU has failed in many of its functions, principally because it has not established a truly democratic ethos. But free movement has hugely democratised economic opportunity within the EU. And insofar as it may become a “Europe of regions” – comprising Catalonia and Scotland, not only Spain and the UK – it can help stabilise national political upheaval.

We need more such experiments in continental and global politics. National governments themselves need to be subjected to a superior tier of authority: they have proved to be the most dangerous forces in the nation-state era, waging endless wars against other nations while oppressing, killing and otherwise failing their own populations. Oppressed national minorities must be given a legal mechanism to appeal over the heads of their own governments – this was always part of Wilson’s vision and its loss has been terrible for humanity.
Third, and finally: we need to find new conceptions of citizenship. Citizenship is itself the primordial kind of injustice in the world. It functions as an extreme form of inherited property and, like other systems in which inherited privilege is overwhelmingly determinant, it arouses little allegiance in those who inherit nothing. Many countries have made efforts, through welfare and education policy, to neutralise the consequences of accidental advantages such as birth. But “accidental advantages” rule at the global level: 97% of citizenship is inherited, which means that the essential horizons of life on this planet are already determined at birth.

If you are born Finnish, your legal protections and economic expectations are of such a different order to those of a Somalian or Syrian that even mutual understanding is difficult. Your mobility – as a Finn – is also very different. But in a world system – rather than a system of nations – there can be no justification for such radical divergences in mobility. Deregulating human movement is an essential corollary of the deregulation of capital: it is unjust to preserve the freedom to move capital out of a place and simultaneously forbid people from following.

Contemporary technological systems offer models for rethinking citizenship so it can be de-linked from territory, and its advantages can be more fairly distributed. The rights and opportunities accruing to western citizenship could be claimed far away, for instance, without anyone having to travel to the west to do so. We could participate in political processes far away that nonetheless affect us: if democracy is supposed to give voters some control over their own conditions, for instance, should a US election not involve most people on earth? What would American political discourse look like, if it had to satisfy voters in Iraq or Afghanistan?

On the eve of its centenary, our nation-state system is already in a crisis from which it does not currently possess the capacity to extricate itself. It is time to think how that capacity might be built. We do not yet know what it will look like. But we have learned a lot from the economic and technological phases of globalisation, and we now possess the basic concepts for the next phase: building the politics of our integrated world system. We are confronted, of course, by an enterprise of political imagination as significant as that which produced the great visions of the 18th century – and, with them, the French and American Republics. But we are now in a position to begin.

Rana Dasgupta is the author of two novels and a non-fiction portrait of twenty-first-century Delhi. His next book, After Nations, will appear in 2019.
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The Common Good

Michael Shirrefs, an Australian researcher and journalist, and his wife came to visit me for an interview. We talked about politics, America, European unity and disunity, and finally the question whether we still have a concept of the common good. How does it look in Trump’s America where billionaires from the president down preach populism but are always ultimately, it seems, in pursuit of their self-enrichment? Do the Europeans still have a sense of a common destiny? Or is the project of a European Union now moribund – reduced to an increasingly unattractive bureaucratic order?

Answers don’t come easily. We find ourselves politically today in a state of exceptional uncertainty. Our world has become so multi-faceted that we find it increasingly difficult to say with confidence where we are and where we are going. To pick one example. The future of every country, including the US and China, will depend very much on the training and education of their young. But do we have a comprehensive view of the strengths and weaknesses of the educational systems of the US and China to be able to say where they will be relative to each other in the next generation? Our world is changing so quickly (in population size, technology, and environmental conditions) that the concepts we have used for so long to make sense of our political reality are losing their grip. Contemporary, manipulated mass “democracy” is no longer democracy in the classical sense. “Freedom” is no longer being free except in narrowly circumscribed situations. And even “politics” is no longer politics as we have known it without its capacity for cooperatively determining a common good. But we lack alternative, new concepts for describing adequately where we are. We find ourselves, in other words, in an empire of disorientation.

This is also the hour for political reflection and awareness or, to put it more ambitiously, the hour of political philosophy. Politics, in the truest sense, is the search for a common good, for a common understanding of the world that allows us to navigate our co-existence. Our question is whether we can revitalize this kind of politics and motivate a sense of the common good relevant for where we are now. We should not expect the political philosophers to tell us what this good will consist in. There is no fixed good to be determined once and for all through expert philosophical reasoning. There are, rather, many different ways to conceive this good and they are not all compatible with each other. Our search for security, for instance, may clash with our desire for freedom, our wish for progress with our adherence to tradition, our desire for justice with our need for liberality and forbearance. Politics is the appropriate domain in which we weigh such choices and affirm this or that common good.

There is a danger in finding ourselves in a world where the parameters of human existence are fixed. That is the totalitarianism Hannah Arendt has warned us about – an anti-political condition in which the cooperative search for the common good has been cut off. In Arendt’s view, this totalitarianism – exemplified in the last century by Soviet Communism and German National Socialism – is by no means a thing of the past. She does not assume that we are political by nature and by necessity. Being political is, rather, for her a human capacity that may atrophy. We may not yet be at this point. It appears offhand that the dark cloud of totalitarianism has receded, at least temporarily, from our coastline. But our new digital media with their potential for large-scale social control may still bring it back and now in an updated and streamlined form.

Totalitarianism is, however, not the only threat we face. Another is the possibility of a chaotic world in which we have abandoned the search for a common good in favor of an unconstrained free-for-all. A complete individualism is, perhaps, an impossible thing. We are social beings right from the moment we are born. We would not even be able to establish ourselves in our individuality without the use of language which exists always and only in the space between us. For all that, the neglect of the need for a common ground and a common good, can still create both misery and chaos.

Europe illustrates the difficulties we face. Its people have lived together for millennia but they have also been separated from each other for millennia by language, tradition, culture, religion, and political affiliation. They have fought each other in terrifyingly destructive wars. For that reason there has also already existed for some time the idea of a unified Europe. 150 years ago, Nietzsche, for instance, was writing of the sickness of European nationalism and his desire to be a good European. After 1945 and the devastations of the Second World War, the Europeans finally seemed to have found a way to make common cause. What united them was their shared belief that the horrors of the past must not be repeated. But that conviction has begun to fade and now the political unification of Europe appears imperiled because of a lack of common purpose. National identity seems to be the best, the Europeans can fall back on.  I agree with Nietzsche that this would be a terrible option. But a new common ground can be found only when the Europeans recognize their diversity as one of their distinctive features and make that the base of their common understanding.

Capitalism and Democracy. A Lesson from Hong Kong

The rise of Xi Jinping has made Hong Kong democrats increasingly nervous. But the main threat to their goal to make Hong Kong more democratic does not even come from the authorities in Beijing; it comes from their own home-grown capitalists. The case of Hong Kong raises broad questions about the state of global politics and the future of democracy.

When I last visited Hong Kong, I had a chance to talk to some of the young political activists who have come to the world’s attention through their prolonged occupation of the central section of Hong Kong. But what did they really stand for? I discovered that, though they had acted together in 2013, they were, in fact, divided into three separate factions. The most radical among them were calling for Hong Kong independence; a second group was seeking to assure Hong Kong’s local autonomy; and a third group was pushing for democratic reforms. At the time, I thought that the democratic activi sts had the best chance (and perhaps the only chance) to realize their ambitions. But since then, some of their leaders have been sent to jail and some of their elected representatives have been expelled from the Hong Kong legislature. These actions were taken by local authorities — though, probably, under some pressure from Beijing. But it is noteworthy how readily the Hong Kong authorities acted in tune with Beijing’s wishes.

Since Xi Jinping has come to power the mainland government has inserted itself more and more openly in the affairs of Hong Kong. This month, on March 4, 2018, a leading member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party’s Politburo warned a delegation of Hong Kong law makers: “Using the high degree of autonomy to reject, fight and erode the central government’s comprehensive jurisdiction is absolutely not allowed.” He added: “[Hong Kong] needs to manage the relationship between one country and two systems well … strictly act in accordance with the constitution and Basic Law … and organically meld the central government’s comprehensive jurisdiction with [the city’s] high degree of autonomy.” This restated Xi Jinping’s own call in October of last year for an “organic” melding of Beijing’s authority with the city’s semi-autonomous powers in order to assure Beijing’s “comprehensive jurisdiction” over Hong Kong.

In the same spirit, Wang Huning, Beijing’s new, powerful propaganda chief, has warned Hong Kong in the last few days that “no act that jeopardizes the Basic Law or Hong Kong’s long-term prosperity and stability can be tolerated … The central government also has zero tolerance of Hong Kong independence, and it must be seriously tackled, or even suppressed.” And he encouraged the people of Hong Kong to strengthen their “patriotism and sense of national identity.” They needed to understand that “the nation’s fate is closely related to them, and that … Hong Kong youth’s future and the country’s development are also inseparable.”

Beijing’s determination to bring about a re-unification with Taiwan has contributed to the anxiety of Hong Kong’s democratic activists. Right now, the mainland government is trying to lure Taiwan by offering it favorable trade and economic terms. But if these sweeteners fail to work, the mainland could move forcibly to seize the island. The message appears to be that the Taiwanese may go on enjoying their capitalist way of life but that they must submit themselves to the comprehensive jurisdiction of Beijing. General Han Weiguo, a People’s Liberation Army ground force chief, said a few days ago that the PLA hoped Taiwan’s problem could be solved peacefully, as soon as possible. “Taiwan should be unified, not by force, but peaceful means. But that doesn’t mean the problem could be postponed indefinitely. It should be solved as quickly as possible.” Taipei needed to appreciate the urgency of resolving the issue, Han said. Resolving the “Taiwan problem” is seen as a major step in achieving Xi’s goal of “national rejuvenation.”

While the central government keeps repeating the mantra of “one country, two systems” in addressing itself to Hong Kong, it is becoming increasingly uncertain how the mainland authorities want to interpret this dualism. Hong Kong has lived with some such dual arrangement for a long time. As a British creation it was governed directly from London without any democratic pretensions. At the same time, the colonial authorities allowed a completely unregulated capitalism to flourish. This dual arrangement of political impotence and economic freedom has proved largely unproblematic to the local capitalists. With the end of colonial rule, they quickly transferred their loyalty to Beijing. In their minds the formula “one country, two systems” means: we are willing to go along with Beijing’s political demands as long as we are left to go on minting money. And for their own economic reasons the Beijing authorities have been willing to accept this division of labor.

To return to the Hong Kong activists and their unsuccessful push for more democracy. They quickly found out that they were opposed not only by the central government but just as much by the Hong Kong capitalists who could see nothing but political conflict with Beijing and bad business at home in the agitation. The story is of interest for the rest of us, because it throws light on the relation of capitalism and democracy. We are often told that the two go naturally and, indeed, necessarily together. Hong Kong teaches us a different lesson.

And here is a nice update to this item from the South China Morning Post on March 18 concerning Li Ka-Shing, one of Hong Kong’s richest men:

"It has been common for Hong Kong’s billionaires to cultivate close personal relations with China’s top leaders. The scale of their investments on the mainland was seen as a mark of patriotism, especially during the early years when the country was opening up and badly needed overseas investors.
 
Li was among the first group of Hong Kong’s super-rich who won Beijing’s trust and in return were gradually able to reap the rewards of investing in the huge mainland market.

Li had an impressive list of peers at the time: Henry Fok Ying-tung, Beijing’s confidante who was elevated to the post of vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; Y.K. Pao, “shipping king” and founder of Hong Kong’s World-Wide Shipping Group; Pao’s son-in-law Peter Woo Kwong-ching, former chairman of Wharf Group and one of the four candidates to become the city’s first chief executive after the 1997 handover; and Cha Chi-ming, the well-known industrialist and philanthropist who donated much to the country’s aerospace science development and other projects, and one of whose sons, Payson, was once the boss of the ill-fated Asia Television. 

The list goes on, but these were among the most prominent tycoons who forged lifelong friendships with top leaders such as Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao."

“The Owl of Minerva” – Where are we right now in philosophy? In need of a revolution.

Hegel famously wrote that the owl of Minerva starts its flight at dusk. He meant to say that philosophy, far from being avant-garde, is, in some ways, always behind its time. For first comes reality and only then, belatedly, comes our understanding of it. Our words and theories are always chasing after the facts.

But it appears that our philosophizing is now more seriously falling behind reality. We have entered an age of profound technological change. And this is affecting, in turn, our entire social and political reality. No aspect of human life is any longer stable. The tremors are passing certainly also through the academy. The humanities that were once at the center of academic life seem to be losing their footing. But our philosophers feel and see nothing. They are living in their homespun cocoon of familiar questions and topics and are happy when they have one of their papers published in a professional journal with a minute and diminishing readership.

This has not always been so. Both the “analytic” and the so-called “Continental” tradition in philosophy – the two movements that are still the main sources of our current philosophizing – had once a vitality and importance that is now sadly lacking. They related directly to the most pressing issues of their time: the crisis of mathematics and natural science that began in the late nineteenth century, the shaking up of our traditional conceptions of consciousness and the mind due to  psychology and linguistics, the cultural, moral, and political upheavals of the twentieth century. I often think that there was once a heroic age in analytic philosophy in which Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap and others in their company systematically changed the contours of the subject. Similarly, we can make out a heroic period in the broadly differentiated field of Continental philosophy. From Nietzsche, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Sartre and Foucault (and again others in their company) these thinkers grappled with the most difficult issues of their time.

We may be too much in awe of this singularly creative moment in philosophy that began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and lasted till the last quarter of the twentieth. But we are already half a century beyond that point and our reality is no longer the same. We are undergoing a revolution in all dimensions of our existence and we need a revolution in our thinking, too.

This is a good and a bad moment for philosophy. Good, because it gives room for adventurous spirits. Bad, because such spirits may not turn up and the subject may dwindle into scholastic irrelevance. Not all the great philosophers of the past have been academic teachers. It is always possible that the most productive philosophical thinking will once again take place outside the academy.

There is, surely, something presumptuous in trying to tell others how they should conduct themselves philosophically. It is also useless. If we want philosophy to take a different course, we have to take it ourselves and, perhaps, others will do the same. The best I can do is to say in a few words, how I myself mean to proceed at this point.

  1. Say “No” to the formalism that holds our thinking in such a straightjacket. We need to overcome our preoccupation with the Kantian conception of philosophy as a “purely conceptual” inquiry. This must be our objective, in particular, in ethics and politics – a move away from abstract normative theorizing into a diagnostic form of ethical and political thinking.  Even logic and mathematics may be thought of in concretely natural terms as a human and historical practice. Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics can provide us with clues. Why should we think that a late eighteenth century thinker can be our major philosophical guide in the twenty-first century?
  2. Practice a determined realism – by which I don’t mean an attachment to metaphysical realism but keeping a philosophical eye on the actual, concrete, historical facts. That kind of realism will also be aware of the limits of our understanding of our reality- particularly when it comes to history, society, and politics. Think of varieties of localized skepticism as realistic options.
  3. Develop a philosophy of technology. It is technology that is changing our world. We need to think about the technical instruments but also of the techniques of their use. We need to look also at the social and political effects of technological change. We need to study how technology affects and changes the distribution of power, its dispersion and concentration. We need to have an eye on the destructive potential and side-effects of technological development both in the natural and the cultural domain.
  4. Make politics your first philosophy. We must conceive political philosophy as a comprehensive inquiry into human existence and look at all aspects of philosophy in a political manner. But this requires a broad conception of politics, one that treats politics and ethics as distinct but connected strata.

“The Owl of Minerva” – Where are we right now in philosophy? In need of a revolution.

Hegel famously wrote that the owl of Minerva starts its flight at dusk. He meant to say that philosophy, far from being avant-garde, is, in some ways, always behind its time. For first comes reality and only then, belatedly, comes our understanding of it. Our words and theories are always chasing after the facts.

But it appears that our philosophizing is now more seriously falling behind reality. We have entered an age of profound technological change. And this is affecting, in turn, our entire social and political reality. No aspect of human life is any longer stable. The tremors are passing certainly also through the academy. The humanities that were once at the center of academic life seem to be losing their footing. But our philosophers feel and see nothing. They are living in their homespun cocoon of familiar questions and topics and are happy when they have one of their papers published in a professional journal with a minute and diminishing readership.

This has not always been so. Both the “analytic” and the so-called “Continental” tradition in philosophy – the two movements that are still the main sources of our current philosophizing – had once a vitality and importance that is now sadly lacking. They related directly to the most pressing issues of their time: the crisis of mathematics and natural science that began in the late nineteenth century, the shaking up of our traditional conceptions of consciousness and the mind due to  psychology and linguistics, the cultural, moral, and political upheavals of the twentieth century. I often think that there was once a heroic age in analytic philosophy in which Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap and others in their company systematically changed the contours of the subject. Similarly, we can make out a heroic period in the broadly differentiated field of Continental philosophy. From Nietzsche, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Sartre and Foucault (and again others in their company) these thinkers grappled with the most difficult issues of their time.

We may be too much in awe of this singularly creative moment in philosophy that began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and lasted till the last quarter of the twentieth. But we are already half a century beyond that point and our reality is no longer the same. We are undergoing a revolution in all dimensions of our existence and we need a revolution in our thinking, too.

This is a good and a bad moment for philosophy. Good, because it gives room for adventurous spirits. Bad, because such spirits may not turn up and the subject may dwindle into scholastic irrelevance. Not all the great philosophers of the past have been academic teachers. It is always possible that the most productive philosophical thinking will once again take place outside the academy.

There is, surely, something presumptuous in trying to tell others how they should conduct themselves philosophically. It is also useless. If we want philosophy to take a different course, we have to take it ourselves and, perhaps, others will do the same. The best I can do is to say in a few words, how I myself mean to proceed at this point.

  1. Say “No” to the formalism that holds our thinking in such a straightjacket. We need to overcome our preoccupation with the Kantian conception of philosophy as a “purely conceptual” inquiry. This must be our objective, in particular, in ethics and politics – a move away from abstract normative theorizing into a diagnostic form of ethical and political thinking.  Even logic and mathematics may be thought of in concretely natural terms as a human and historical practice. Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics can provide us with clues. Why should we think that a late eighteenth century thinker can be our major philosophical guide in the twenty-first century?
  2. Practice a determined realism – by which I don’t mean an attachment to metaphysical realism but keeping a philosophical eye on the actual, concrete, historical facts. That kind of realism will also be aware of the limits of our understanding of our reality- particularly when it comes to history, society, and politics. Think of varieties of localized skepticism as realistic options.
  3. Develop a philosophy of technology. It is technology that is changing our world. We need to think about the technical instruments but also of the techniques of their use. We need to look also at the social and political effects of technological change. We need to study how technology affects and changes the distribution of power, its dispersion and concentration. We need to have an eye on the destructive potential and side-effects of technological development both in the natural and the cultural domain.
  4. Make politics your first philosophy. We must conceive political philosophy as a comprehensive inquiry into human existence and look at all aspects of philosophy in a political manner. But this requires a broad conception of politics, one that treats politics and ethics as distinct but connected strata.

How to do political philosophy

We can distinguish three styles of political philosophy: (1) abstract normative theorizing, (2) political realism, (3) diagnostic practice.

My claim is that abstract normative theorizing is a dead end and that normative political considerations have to be based on an understanding of the political realities. Normative political thinking thus presupposes political realism. But how well do we actually understand the political realities? And what are the epistemic constraints on political philosophy? Political thinking as a diagnostic practice sets out to examine that question. It is evident that an understanding of the political realities presupposes diagnostic practice.

Abstract normative theorizing about politics has had a long history and is still the dominant form of political philosophy today. Normative political philosophers typically ask: What is the best form of political order? The polis (city-state)? The empire? The nation state? What is the best form of government? Monarchy? Democracy? The Republic? What is the standard for judging political actions? Justice? Legality? Legitimacy? Plato, Aristotle, and John Rawls characteristically proceed in this manner. In the Republic Plato seeks to show through philosophical reasoning that the rule of philosopher-kings is best. By the same kind of reasoning Aristotle seeks to establish in his Politics that the Greek polis is the best form of political order. And John Rawls seeks to establish in a similar fashion in his Theory of Justice that actions and institutions are just when they implement his two basic rules.

Raymond Geuss has in recent years made a strong case against normative theorizing of this kind. In his book Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton 2008) Geuss writes: “Political philosophy must be realist.” (p. 9) It must be concerned in the first instance, he adds, “not with how people ought ideally (or ought ‘rationally’) to act … but rather with the way the social, economic, political etc. institutions actually operate.” (Ibid.) It must recognize that “politics is in the first instance about action and the context of action, not about mere beliefs or propositions.” (p. 11) It must accept that “politics is historically located,” (p. 13) It must also understand that “politics is more like the exercise of a craft or art” than an application of a theory. (p. 15) Its exercise depends on skill rather than theoretical understanding.

Geuss writes provocatively: “In my view, if political philosophy wishes to be at all connected with a serious understanding of politics, and thus become an effective source of orientation or a guide to action, it needs to return from the present reactionary forms of neo-Kantianism to something like the ‘realist’ view, or, to put it slightly differently, to neo-Leninism.” (p. 99) But what does he mean by “neo-Leninism”? According to Geuss: “Lenin defines politics with characteristic clarity and pithiness when he says that it is concerned with the question that keeps recurring in our political life: ‘Who, whom?’ … Although Lenin’s formula is basically correct, it is perhaps too dense and needs to be developed or extended… First of all, the formula should read not merely ‘Who whom?’ but, rather, ‘’Who [does] what to whom for whose benefit?’ with four distinct variables to be filled in, i.e., (1) Who, (2) What, (3) To whom, (4) for whose benefit? To think politically is to think about agency, power, and interests, and the relations among these.” (pp. 22 and 25) And so Geuss concludes: “If one takes this extended Leninist model as the matrix of political philosophy, certain consequences would seem to follow. The first is that it would be a mistake to believe that one could come to any substantive understanding of politics by discussing abstractly the good, the right, the true or the rational.” (p. 28)

But is political realism sufficient or must we not also consider the epistemic conditions under which it proceeds and, more generally, the epistemic conditions for any kind of political theorizing? Three kinds of questions arise here. The most general is, of course, how and to what extent the inhabitants of the political field understand that field and their own locatedness in it. Every inhabitant of that field is positioned in a distinctive temporal and spatial location. This will affect their perception of the field as a whole; it will provide them with specific insights but also limit their range of vision. Politics is, moreover, an active enterprise and not simply one of understanding. We find ourselves committed to action under non-ideal cognitive conditions. That is, we are forced to act when we have no full grasp of the situation in which we find ourselves; we may be unsure of the thought and intentions of other political actors; and we can never be completely confident about the consequences of our actions.

Political theorists can suspend judgment in cases where political agents may be forced to act. They can time to assemble their knowledge of the political situation, of the thoughts and intentions of the political actors, and of the consequences of their actions and can do so with some degree of detachment. But even they are confined in their range of vision by the spatio-temporal location they occupy. They may find their access to the past obstructed by the lack of traces left over in monuments, documents, or memories; they may discover their capacity for comprehending the present in all its vivid detail to be limited; and like everyone else in the political field they are unable to look clearly into the future. They may lack adequate concepts to organize and describe the political field and its complex, ever shifting conditions. The outcome has to be that the insights of the political realist will inevitably tenuous. As for the political actors themselves, the political field will always be a domain of uncertainty and often of also of disorientation for the political realist.

The diagnostic approach will finally also throw a critical light on the claims of the normative theorizers. We will want to ask what powers of reason and intuition the normative theorists has to rely on to make his claim and what confidence we can have in these powers since they themselves are products of particular circumstances. And there will be the further question of how we are to imagine the use of those norms that the normative theorizer claims to have discovered. Both the way up to the norms and the way from them to their application needs to be critically examined.

For the normative theorist, political philosophy is closely linked to prescriptive ethics. It may even be branch or application of ethics to the political field. For the political realist, political philosophy will be a part of ontology and related to what is now known as social ontology. For the diagnostic practitioner, questions concerning our knowledge of politics are primary and political philosophy will, in the first place, be an epistemology of knowledge under non-ideal conditions.Read more

Can we define “populism”? Perhaps, but what is gained by this?

What is populism? The most serious mistake with this question is its (usually unspoken) assumption that where we have a single word there must be a single corresponding concept and that when we use the word to refer to a diverse number of things they must share a single common property however different they may look. Thus, when we call all kind of things and all number of people “populist,” you can be certain that they all have one and the same property in common. We are dealing thus with a single concept that, with some ingenuity, can be defined. We can call this the Platonic fallacy. In his dialogues Plato regularly proceeds in this way. He asks “what is justice?”, “what is holiness?”, “what is beauty?” and assumes that in each case there is a single thing – the idea of justice, of holiness, or of beauty – in which just, holy, and beautiful things participate. An alternative to this “essentialist” view holds that general terms mark similarities between the things to which they are applied or, in more complex cases, that they mark overlapping series of similarities between them. In the latter case we can speak of a “family resemblance” between those things. Two things called by a common name may belong to the same family – and thus be called by the same name – without having any significant similarities in common as long as they are part of a chain of overlapping similarities. Terms applying to social phenomena are best understood as family-resemblance notions.

We should resist then also an essentialist account of populism – or more correctly of the term “populism.” Two recent attempts at providing such an account can help us to illustrate what is problematic in essentialism. In an already widely published book (What is Populism? 2017) the political theorist Jan-Werner Müller offers us an intriguingly simple characterization. Populism, he writes, is anti-pluralism. But this will not do for a number of reasons. We might say, first of all, that anti-pluralism is something wider than populism, that populists maybe anti-pluralist but that anti-pluralists need not be populists. The great dogmatic religions, for instance, are inherently anti-pluralist since each one of them demands total acceptance of an entire set of doctrines. Exclusive social castes and classes, like the Indian Brahmin and the European high aristocracy, are also typically anti-pluralist since they will accept only those who are like themselves. But there is a second and deeper reason for questioning Müller’s formula. It is that human society is inherently pluralistic. This is true even in the most doctrinaire forms of religion. The novelist Peter DeVries once pointed this out when he wrote humorously of the Dutch evangelicals of the American Midwest: “One Dutchman a Christian, two Dutchmen a church, three Dutchmen heresy.” Closer inspection will always bring out that the adherents to the same dogmas will nevertheless interpret them in significantly different ways. The reason is due to “the indeterminacy of meaning” (as philosophers have called the phenomenon) which brings it about that two speakers using the same words will inevitably give them different meaning. If that is so, then what Müller calls “anti-pluralism” is in effect not opposed to all plurality, since that is effectively impossible; it is, rather, a discriminatory view which quietly accepts some kinds of plurality and rejects others. The important question will then be which differences serve as the base for discrimination and which do not. So, defining populism as anti-pluralism is always possible, but it leaves us with a notion that is more or less empty and thus not very useful.

In Populism. A Very Short Introduction (2017), Cas Mudde and Cristόbal Rovira Kaltwasser define populism with another simple formula. They define it “as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonist camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This is a little more substantive than Müller’s definition but not by much. Both definitions are, in fact, too formulaic to be of much practical use. Mudde-Kaltwasser seem to realize this because they are well aware of how open-ended the notions of “the people” and “the elite” are. But they assume that in different contexts, these notions will be fleshed out in one way or another and we will then have different substantive embodiments of populism. By calling populism a “thin-centered ideology” they mean to say, moreover, that “populism in itself” has little ideological content; but they assume once again that in its various embodiments it will acquire such content. All forms of populism have thus in their view one essential quality in common, but in actual reality they will vary though only in supposedly accidental characteristics. We can say in addition, just as in the case of Jan-Werner Müller’s formulation, that this leaves us with serious questions concerning the adequacy of the formula. The fundamental idea of a confrontation between a pure people and a corrupt elite is so general that it seems to fit many kinds of situation that we would not necessarily want to describe as populist; it seems to apply class conflict as conceived in the Marxist tradition but, in fact, also to every other form of revolutionary conflict. It fits, for instance, Nietzsche’s account of the slave revolt in morality in his Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche is writing there of the collapse of ancient classical Greco-Roman civilization. Nothing can stop Mudde-Kaltwasser from insisting that the rise of Christianity was also a populist event. But we need to ask ourselves whether this way of using terms is illuminating. To treat all confrontations between a lower and a higher social class as populist appears much too broad to be of interest.

We should admit, instead, that there is no simple formula that can help us to understand populism. Populism is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. We are, perhaps, better off trying to describe characteristic cases of populist politics. I

The place of America — in political philosophy

For those living in the United States, the conditions of American politics will, for obvious reasons, be of some interest. But given the economic, political, and military power of the US it is not surprising to discover that American politics is scrutinized all over the world. When one looks at the International media, it is striking how much attention they pay to American affairs.

Does this mean that American politics has also a particular interest for political philosophy? Well, certainly, as an exemplar of politics for American students of political philosophy. John Rawls’ classic Theory of Justice seems to have largely America in view, despite its aspirations of providing a universal theory.

It is also said that America’s political history provides a blueprint for the natural and perhaps even inevitable political development of other places in the world. In this story, the American republic and American democracy are assumed to be suitable paradigms for political order and practice everywhere else. But is this assumption realistic or will countries like China, for instance, always be following their own trajectory and one that does not necessarily lead to American style democracy? We must not forget that historically different countries have served as political models — ancient democratic Athens, Imperial Rome, and Revolutionary France. The role of America as a model for political development is by no means set in stone.

Another possibility is that because of its wealth and power the US is still serving the role of an avant-garde nation. Whatever happens here politically and economically, will eventually manifest itself in other parts of the world. So, if we find extreme forms of capitalism in the US or a deterioration of democratic life, similar forms of corruption are to be expected elsewhere. One immediate application of this thought is that the rise of Donald Trump signals a process that may extend to the rest of the world and has to be therefore of interest to political philosophy.

 

Why China matters – also in political philosophy

China is also becoming increasingly powerful in the economic, political, and military field with implication for the entire global balance of power. Finally, and not least important, China is one of the world’s richest civilizations with a continuous history of more than two thousand years. Its philosophers, writers, and visual artists deserve our recognition and admiration.

There are in addition some special reasons why political philosophers should pay attention to China. Our political philosophy has tended so far to be narrowly focused on our own Western tradition. It focuses till today almost exclusively on the Greeks of the classical age, the Romans of the Imperial age, and on European politics from the sixteenth century onwards with the addition, more recently of US American politics. As far as other political traditions are concerned, our political philosophers have either ignored them or simply applied their Western concepts and theories to the rest of the world. We have become used, for instance, to take just one example, to speak of the Chinese Empire projecting in this way our conception of the Roman and modern European empires to China. But are they really the same? The Chinese name for their state is “zhongguo” which means “middle realm” and thus speaks of a geographical order, not of a dominion. And were the Chinese rulers “emperors” in the same sense as the Romans? The Chinese emperor or “huangdi” was primarily a mediator between heaven and earth, whereas the Roman emperors were typically military commanders, as their title already indicates.

The classical Chinese philosophers have concerned themselves extensively with political matters and we would do well to study their writings – both for their intrinsic interest and asking ourselves to what extent they can illuminate contemporary Chinese politics. Is it, for instance, the case, as has been suggested, that the Communist Party of China has, in fact, recreated the Confucian bureaucratic order?

In looking at China, we may also discover that it operates with a very different large-scale picture of political history. Our Western view of that history has been, certainly since the Enlightenment, of political development as a linear, progressive movement. This may not be the predominant Chinese view. Luo Guanzhong’s historical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdom’s, written in the 14th century, tells the story of the disintegration of the “empire” and the rise and fall of local kingdoms at the end of the Han dynasty. The novel begins famously with the words: “Unity succeeds with division and division follows unity. One is bound to be replaced by the other after a long span of time. This is the way with things in the world.” The words suggest a cyclical course of development and this picture appears particularly apposite with respect to Chinese history in which the unity of the realm and its divisions have been a recurrent theme. We need to look, perhaps, at the preoccupation of China’s present rulers with the unity of China, and hence their obsession with the hankering for independence in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in this light.

Politics as a field of imperfect cognitive states

Our epistemologists have been thinking about knowledge for a long time and about how to define it. The standard view is that knowledge is justified true belief; but that hardly settles the matter since all three terms – justification, truth, and belief – are in need of further clarification. When it comes to the question where knowledge is to be found, we have tended to look at mathematics, or physics, or at cases where an object is clearly perceived under ideal conditions.

But in social and political life we are rarely dealing with knowledge in this sense. In these domains we encounter conjectures, surmises, guesswork, “convictions,” presumption, suspicion, interpretations, attempts to make sense, etc. I am particularly interested in states of uncertainty and disorientation because these seem to prevail now in our politics.

I have argued in Politics and the Search for the Common Good that politics is inherently a domain of uncertainty. Uncertainty affects all aspects of political life and brings about its characteristic volatility. Disorientation, on the other hand, is a malady that disrupts politics and can destroy political institutions. But the two are connected and for this reason we will need to look at them and their interrelation. We are uncertain when we don’t know (don’t know for sure) what has been, what is, or what will be. The difficulty we have in separating news from “fake news,” information from misinformation exemplifies this condition. We are disoriented, on the other hand, when we don’t understand what has been, what is, or what will be because we lack adequate words and concepts to do so. Our inability to analyze our current condition, to say what kind of political transformation we are experiencing and what might come after may count as an illustration. Though similar in some respects and interrelated as they are, uncertainty and disorientation belong, nonetheless, to different cognitive registers: one concerns our knowledge, the other our understanding.

We need to distinguish, however, between uncertainty and the feeling of uncertainty and likewise between disorientation and the feeling of being disoriented. The two are easily confused. The feeling is something that may or may not attach itself to an actual state of uncertainty or an actual condition of disorientation. But it is a secondary (and second-level) psychological state that relates to a primary (first-level) cognitive condition. We may be objectively uncertain about what is to come but feel confident that we know. In other words, we think we know when we really don’t. It is then said that we suffer from a sense of false certainty. False certainty is a common feature of political life and it goes hand in hand with its indubitable uncertainties. In his book Fire and Fury Michael Wolff writes that Donald Trump’s White House staff and members of his cabinet had become aware after a few months of “the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes.” What holds for uncertainty, applies also to disorientation. We may feel that we understand what is going on, when this is, in fact not so. Disorientation is, in this respect, like dementia. Disoriented as we are we may still believe, just like the demented, that we are doing fine, are of clear mind, grasp what is going on, have things in hand.

We need to distinguish, moreover, between perceptual and conceptual forms of disorientation for it is the latter that is characteristically at stake in politics. We may be disorientated when we wake up in an unfamiliar room or when we are caught in a dense fog. Then we don’t know whether to turn left or right and find ourselves frozen in place. Even in the case of perceptual disorientation we must, of course, distinguish between being and feeling disoriented. Waking up in an unfamiliar pitch-black room we may still believe that we understand its lay-out but then bump unexpectedly into a wall. But both being perceptually disoriented and feeling perceptually disoriented are different from not knowing how to describe our situation adequately or not being able to act politically in an appropriate way because we lack the concepts for analyzing where we are and where need to go.

To make these distinctions does not mean to downplay the importance of feelings of uncertainty or disorientation in politics. Such feelings of uncertainty and disorientation may generate unease, anxiety, even nausea and these can stop us from acting or can drive us into precipitous action. But such feelings are still secondary to actual states of uncertainty and disorientation which have a far more direct impact on what happens. Actual uncertainty and disorientation, instead of creating anxiety, are often accompanied by opposite feelings of certainty and orientation, the resulting smugness may have an even more devastating effect than felt uncertainty and disorientation.

These insights have been captured well in Plato’s Republic. In its seventh book we read of humans living in an underground cave – an allegory for social and political life as we know it. Tied down, hand and foot, the inhabitants of the cave can see only shadows on the wall before them, not what produced them and also not the world beyond their cave. They are not only ignorant of the things beyond their range of vision, they are also unable to understand their own situation and they can also therefore not conceive of any alternative to their pitiful state. If anyone of the inhabitants of the cave manages to turn around and sees what produced the shadow play, he will, however, be “pained and dazzled and unable to see the things” whose shadows he had seen before. (514c) And if he should actually reach daylight, he will be dazzled once more until his eyes have adjusted to the above ground reality. But should he return into the darkness of the cave, he would once again be confused and “behave awkwardly and appear completely ridiculous.” (517d) There are thus for Plato two states of political disorientation: the first when one comes from the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge and the second when one returns from this light into the darkness of human social life. The inhabitants of the cave are convinced that they know and understand reality, but they are, in fact, familiar only with shadows and lack the concepts to understand their actual situation. They are both ignorant and disoriented but feel all the while certain and oriented. By contrast, the one who escapes from the cave will at first be thrown into a state of confusion. His felt uncertainty will make him realize that he lacks the words to understand reality as it is. He will be moved therefore to acquire the concepts necessary to describe how things are and in what way the world of common human life is one of illusion. But when he returns to the human habitat and encounters the false certainties of its inhabitants, he may not fare well. They may deride and resent him and even seek to get rid of him in order to preserve their precious illusions.