"But the worst and final form of alienation, toward which indeed the others tend, is man's alienation from his own self. In a society that requires of man only that he perform competently his own particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can - usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten."
William Barrett
In a democracy political power is always the power of the people as a collective body. In light of the diversity within a democracy, what would it mean for citizens legitimately to exercise coercive political power over one another? Rawls’s test for the acceptable use of political power in a democracy is his liberal principle of legitimacy:
Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason (PL, 137).
According to this principle, political power may only be used in ways that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse. The use of political power must fulfill a criterion of reciprocity: citizens must reasonably believe that all citizens can reasonably accept the enforcement of a particular set of basic laws. Those coerced by law must be able to endorse the society’s fundamental political arrangements freely, not because they are dominated or manipulated or kept uninformed.
The liberal principle of legitimacy intensifies the challenge of legitimacy: how can any particular set of basic laws legitimately be imposed upon a pluralistic citizenry? What constitution could all citizens reasonably be expected to endorse? Rawls’s answer to this challenge begins by explaining what it means for citizens to be reasonable.
Reasonable citizens want to live in a society in which they can cooperate with their fellow citizens on terms that are acceptable to all. They are willing to propose and abide by mutually acceptable rules, given the assurance that others will also do so. They will also honor these rules, even when this means sacrificing their own particular interests. Reasonable citizens want, in short, to belong to a society where political power is legitimately used.
Each reasonable citizen has her own view about God and life, right and wrong, good and bad. Each has, that is, what Rawls calls her own comprehensive doctrine. Yet because reasonable citizens are reasonable, they are unwilling to impose their own comprehensive doctrines on others who are also willing to search for mutually agreeable rules. Though each citizen may believe that she knows the truth about the best way to live, none is willing to force other reasonable citizens to live according to her beliefs, even if she belongs to a majority that has the power to enforce those beliefs on everyone. After all, Rawls says mentioning the Inquisition, oppressive use of state power will be necessary to unite a society around any comprehensive doctrine, including the comprehensive liberalism of Kant or Mill (PL, 37).
One reason that reasonable citizens are so tolerant, Rawls says, is that they accept a certain explanation for the diversity of worldviews in their society. Reasonable citizens accept the burdens of judgment. The deepest questions of religion, philosophy, and morality are very difficult to think through. Even conscientious people will answer these questions in different ways, because of their particular life experiences (their upbringing, class, occupation, and so on). Reasonable citizens understand that these deep issues are ones on which people of good will can disagree, and so will be unwilling to impose their own worldviews on those who have reached conclusions different than their own.
Rawls’s account of the reasonable citizen highlights his view of human nature. Humans are not irredeemably self-centered, dogmatic, or driven by what Hobbes called, “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power” (1651, 58). Humans have at least the capacity for genuine toleration and mutual respect.
This human capacity raises the hope that the diversity of worldviews in a democratic society may represent not merely pluralism, but reasonable pluralism. Rawls hopes, that is, that the religious, moral, and philosophical doctrines that citizens accept will themselves endorse toleration and accept the essentials of a democratic regime. In the religious sphere, for example, a reasonable pluralism might contain a reasonable Catholicism, a reasonable interpretation of Islam, a reasonable atheism, and so on. Being reasonable, none of these doctrines will advocate the use of coercive political power to impose religious conformity on citizens with different beliefs.
The possibility of reasonable pluralism softens but does not solve the challenge of legitimacy: how one law can legitimately be imposed on diverse citizens. For even in a society of reasonable pluralism, it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to endorse, say, a reasonable Catholicism as the basis for a constitutional settlement. Reasonable Muslims or atheists cannot be expected to endorse Catholicism as setting the basic terms for social life. Nor, of course, can Catholics be expected to accept Islam or atheism as the fundamental basis of law. No comprehensive doctrine can be accepted by all reasonable citizens, and so no comprehensive doctrine can serve as the basis for the legitimate use of coercive political power.
Yet where else then to turn to find the ideas that will define society’s most basic laws, which all citizens will be required to obey? For Rawls, there is only one source of fundamental ideas that can serve as a focal point for all reasonable citizens of a liberal society. This is the society’s public political culture.
Since justification is addressed to others, it proceeds from what is, or can be, held in common; and so we begin from shared fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture in the hope of developing from them a political conception that can gain free and reasoned agreement in judgment (PL, 100–01).
The public political culture of a democratic society, Rawls says, “comprises the political institutions of a constitutional regime and the public traditions of their interpretation (including those of the judiciary), as well as historic texts and documents that are common knowledge” (PL, 13–14). Rawls looks to fundamental ideas implicit, for example, in the constitution’s list of individual rights, in the design of the society’s government, and in the historic decisions of important courts. These fundamental ideas from the public political culture can be crafted into a shared political conception of justice.
Rawls’s solution to the challenge of legitimacy in a liberal society is for political power to be exercised in accordance with a political conception of justice. A political conception of justice is an interpretation of the fundamental ideas implicit in that society’s public political culture.
A political conception is not derived from any particular comprehensive doctrine, nor is it a compromise among the worldviews that happen to exist in society at the moment. Rather, a political conception is freestanding: its content is set out independently of the comprehensive doctrines that citizens affirm. Reasonable citizens, who want to cooperate with one another on mutually acceptable terms, will see that a freestanding political conception generated from ideas in the public political culture is the only basis for cooperation that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse. The use of coercive political power guided by the principles of a political conception of justice will therefore be legitimate.
The three most fundamental ideas that Rawls finds in the public political culture of a democratic society are that citizens are free and equal, and that society should be a fair system of cooperation. All liberal political conceptions of justice will therefore be centered on interpretations of these three fundamental ideas.
Because there are many reasonable interpretations of “free,” “equal” and “fair,” there will be many liberal political conceptions of justice. Since all the members of this family interpret the same three fundamental ideas, however, all liberal political conceptions of justice will share certain basic features:
These abstract features must, Rawls says, be realized in certain kinds of institutions. He mentions several demands that all liberal conceptions of justice will make on institutions: a decent distribution of income and wealth; fair opportunities for all citizens, especially in education and training; government as the employer of last resort; basic health care for all citizens; and public financing of elections.
The use of political power in a liberal society will be legitimate if it is employed in accordance with the principles of any liberal conception of justice. By Rawls’s criteria, a libertarian conception of justice (such as Nozick’s in Anarchy, State, and Utopia) is not a liberal political conception of justice. Libertarianism does not assure all citizens sufficient means to make use of their basic liberties, and it permits excessive inequalities of wealth and power. By contrast, Rawls’s own conception of justice (justice as fairness) does qualify as a member of the family of liberal political conceptions of justice.
SEoP
Agamben follows Carl Schmitt in his definition of the sovereign act; as already indicated, however, he adds to the combination of appropriation, distribution, and production —wherein Schmitt saw the function of the nomos as mediating between the state, the judiciary and the economy— the creation of a state of exception, which would take place simultaneously to the establishment of the legal order. This allows Agamben to shift Schmitt’s focus from the State to the camp. For the exception materializes in spaces that stand outside the law, as he points out in his interpretation of the ban as the original act of the sovereign. On the other hand, these spaces assume different forms in the course of Western history. They change in parallel to the relation in which “bare life” stands to the sovereign or the exceptional case stands to the rule. Now, according to Agamben, it is decisive for modernity that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life —which is originally situated at very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity. In this sense, the sovereign exception is the fundamental localization (Ortung), which does not limit itself to distinguishing what is outside and inside, the normal situation and chaos, enter into those complex topological relations that make the validity of the juridical order possible”. 3 Cf. For different ways of conceiving of the law, see Bär and Deuber-Mankowsky, “Wie viel Glaube ist im Staat? Ein transdisziplinärer Austausch zwischen Kultur- und Rechtswissenschaft”: 89-111. Acta Poetica 361, 2015, pp. 49-69 59 the margins of the political order— gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction (9). The conclusion is that sovereignty —whose original function of decision consists in the discrimination between “bare life” and the political, zoe and bios, or more simply, nature and culture— switches from the State to the camp. Agamben interprets the camp as the territorialization of the exception. This explains the claim that the camp is the nomos of modernity. It is, of course, assumed that one shares Agamben’s diagnosis according to which the exception increasingly becomes the rule; only then is one in a position to grasp the whole scope of Agamben’s apocalyptic vision. Behind the evocation of a “biopolitical catastrophe” hides the same anxiety which drove Schmitt to defend the state of order —the fear of the intermingling of nature and culture, death and life, the fear of anarchy and chaos. The elevation of the camp to the matrix of modernity rests upon the thin basis of Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of justice as nomos and the claimed nexus of justice, order and territory. The additional interpretation of the sovereign act as the original political relation of the ban, opens up a narrow range of combinatory possibilities out of which Agamben delineates the history of the West. This history follows the logic of violence inscribed in the ban and is correspondingly a history of decline.4 4 The first possibility consists in the success of the state of indifference which accompanies the exception through the differentiation of inside and outside and private and public (in Hannah Arendt’s sense). This is the case in the Greek polis, in which, according to Agamben, a differentiation was made between the domain of the oikos as the domain of zoe, appearing here as “bare life”, and that of the polis as the domain of political life. “In the classical world, however, simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined —as merely reproductive life— to the sphere of the oikos” (Agamben 1995: 2). Agamben refers to Aristotle’s differentiation of the “oikonomos (the head of an estate) and the despotes (the head of the family), both of whom are concerned with the reproduction and the subsistence of life (2) from the politicians, who are concerned with the political. The contribution of women to the preservation of life is not taken into account, and the question of a possible overlap of gender differences with the differentiation of nature and culture is ignored. In modernity, the “taking-of-land” in the “exception” [Ausnahme], quite literally, is materialized in the establishment of camps. With this, Agamben also claims, the exception becomes the rule. The modern is characterized by the unmediated elevation of political space above that of bare life. I quote from Homo Sacer: One of the theses of the present inquiry is that in our age, the state of exception comes more and more to the foreground as the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to become the rule. When our age tried to grant the un-localizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentration camp. The camp —and not the prison— is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos (20). In this perpetual state of exception, we are all, according to Agamben, virtual “homines sacri” (115), all potential Jewesses and Jews, whom the author designates as “the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people and of the bare life that modernity necessarily creates within itself, but whose presence it can no longer tolerate in any way” (179). The second possibility is that the differentiation is not wholly successful and that a zone comes into being in which this indistinguishability is materialized. This is the case in the constitution of the so-called “homo sacer”. Homo sacer is the abbreviated formulation for a much-discussed and variously interpreted sentence from archaic Roman law. In the law of Twelve Tables (8, 21), he who as patron deceives his clients is declared to be sacer, outlawed, without peace. Agamben bases his interpretation of homo sacer on Pompeius Festus’ lexicon, according to which homo sacer is a man who is condemned for a crime and killed but may not be sacrificed. The homo sacer is, in a sense, free game. Agamben equates him with the condemned and interprets him as the representative, the embodiment, of “bare life”, of the bare life released in the sovereign act of constituting the law. This historical phase begins with archaic Roman law and lasts until institution of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679. This act allowed anyone under arrest to bring his case before the court within three days. The goal was to limit arbitrary arrests. Literally, it means that everyone who holds someone under arrest is required personally to bring the arrested party before the court within three days. For Agamben, with this legal formulation, which is focused on physical presence, the body becomes a political subject. The role of representing bare life is transferred to this body, and with this, according to Agamben, begins the last phase of Western history. Acta Poetica 361, 2015, pp. 49-69 61 Once again, this passage clearly shows how the thinking of the state of exception functions and where it leads. The orientation around the extreme promises the highest concreteness but leads to empty abstraction, as the sweeping generalization that we are all potentially homines sacri makes clear. As such, it is not only an affront to the concrete sufferings of the victims and their relatives. It does not only level out the differences between victims and perpetrators, between witnesses and those born afterwards. It also effaces existing and —through the implementation of globalization— increasing class differences between rich and poor, north and south, between those who fulfill and those who deviate from the norm. It is as if Agamben were playing into Foucault’s hands, for Foucault criticises the concentration on the theory of sovereignty precisely on the grounds that through an ideology of a fictive unity of power, it renders invisible actual relations of domination and difference, as well as the perpetual struggles for power. Both the category of the state of exception as well as the concentration on the camp as the “taking of land of the exception” refer back to the origin of Agamben’s theory in Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of sovereignty and his concept of the nomos. Finally, he is Schmittian in his interpretation of the collapse of inner and outer as the irruption of a catastrophe, a catastrophe Schmitt compares to the coming of the Antichrist. Thus, according to Agamben, the catastrophe of modernity is the consequence of the dissolution of the distinction between political existence (bios) and bare life (zoe), in so far as bare life, rather than being differentiated from the political, becomes the foundation of the political in the camp. While, for Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy represents a necessary category for the construction of the political, Agamben replaces these categories —in explicit analogy to Schmitt— with the distinction between “bare life” and “political existence” (8). Of course, Agamben aims to expose the violence characteristic of, and essential to, the Western politico-juridical model of power from its beginnings. He traps himself, however, in a circle of violence, culminating in the story of decline presented here, by ontologizing and thereby dehistoricizing it. The Critique of Michel Foucault By focussing on Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, Agamben claims to re-introduce questions of legal theory into the discussion of biopolitics. Precisely this legal theoretical aspect is supposedly neglected by Foucault in his concentration on a dynamical model of power. Does, however, Agamben’s reconnection of biopolitics to sovereign authority in fact represent a correction to Foucault’s limitation of sovereignty and biopower? I would like to close by pursuing this question. Agamben first reproaches Foucault for having failed to find a link between his investigations of the “techniques of the self” and the political strategies of biopower (5f). Then he reproaches him for neglecting to provide an analysis of modern totalitarianism and the concentration camp (119). Agamben seeks to address both points with his reformulation of biopolitics. However, he reduces the complex and far-reaching first question of how the intermingling of the techniques of the self may be thought along with the processes of the totalization of power, to the sole aspect controlling his own epistemological interest: how the biopolitical model of power interferes with the juridico-institutional model of power. Thus power is no longer thought of as a complex relation of forces, as in Foucault, but appears as the formation of two blocks. This has as a consequence, first, that the whole complex of struggles, and with it the question of oppositional movements, remains unthought. Second, Agamben omits precisely the interest in epistemology which had guided Foucault in his research on the techniques of the self: the question of how, in view of the disciplining and subjugation of the subject, to explain the development of an art of critique. His answer to the question of how the biopolitical model of power interferes with the juridico-institutional one is simple: there is no difference between sovereign authority and biopower, for the biopolitical body is nothing other than the production and therefore the original activity of sovereign power itself. Thus he arrives at the statement that biopolitics has always been an integral aspect of sovereign authority and therefore just as ancient as the sovereign state of exception itself. The modern state consequently represents nothing new, but in making Acta Poetica 361, 2015, pp. 49-69 63 biological life the center of its calculations, it merely brings to light the secret tie that always already binds power to bare life (6). Thus, the modern state is tied to the immemorial of the “arcana imperii” according to Agamben’s law of a “tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic, which one encounters in the most diverse spheres” (6). In fact, Agamben’s reformulation of the concepts of sovereign authority and biopolitics results not only in a monolithic, static model of power but also in a similar move that blocks any view of the historically efficacious forces of resistance. By bowing down before the sovereign authority to which he attributes, as the “supreme power”, the “capacity to constitute oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed” (101), Agamben reinstalls the ominously remaining sovereign as the solitary actor and motor of history. Unlike Agamben, Foucault conceives of power as a relation of forces and thinks of it from the bottom up. For Foucault, it is a matter of encouraging the sort of knowledge he calls buried or subjugated (2003a: 8). Accordingly, he grants the highest importance to the requirement not to read into history what one already knew beforehand. The buried historical knowledge he sought to unearth concerned the historical knowledge of struggles, precisely the knowledge a monolithic model of power relegates to the darkness of forgetting. It obstructs a view of the actual and possible historical forms of resistance. Starting with the Enlightenment conceived of as a relation of forces, Foucault develops in his late work the possibility of an ethics in the form of an “aesthetic of existence”. He links this with the answer he gave in a 1977 lecture to the self-posed question “what is critique?” Critique is, as he formulated it in 1977, an attitude and, as such, a virtue; according to the now famous general characterization, critique is: “the art of not being governed” (2003a: 265). Foucault locates the “core” of this art of critique, which he equates with the art of self-legislation, in three places: First, the Bible: emerging out of the question of how to interpret the Holy Text, and whether in general the Bible corresponds to the truth. Second, the juridical: arising from the impulse to no longer accept existing laws because one senses that they are unjust. Agamben as Master Thinker Third, the epistemological: the development of the sciences led to the renunciation of obedience to an authority that determined what was true and what was untrue. From this tripartite origin of critique, Foucault describes the “core of critique” as the “the bundle of relationships that are tied to one another, or one to the two others, power, truth and the subject”. Critique therefore questions the “truth on its effects of power and questions power on its discourses of truth” and now allows itself to be specified as “the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability” (266). It is no accident that Foucault approaches the question of resistance via the language of law. The art of “self-legislation” is another word for autonomy —giving law to oneself—. Now, for Foucault, the investigation of the techniques of the self is connected to the question of the conditions that would give the most space to the art of critique. Techniques of the self are therefore not only techniques of subjugation but mean every form of creating a relation of the self to itself. Also belonging to this is the form that Foucault, in one of his last lectures from 1983-1984, calls the parrhesiastic relationship of the subject with himself (Foucault 2001: 13). Parrhesia may be translated as “speaking freely” but also as “speaking truly”. It designates a relation of the subject that speaks with itself. And it does this in such a way that the subject binds itself both to the enunciation and to the enunciating itself. In this “parrhesiastic enunciation”, Foucault discovers a technique of the self which can be regarded as the condition of possibility of critique. Through the double relation contained in the parrhesiastic utterance, the subject enters into a binding relation with himself and, as such, practices the art of critique: In parrhesia the speaker emphasizes the fact that he is both the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciandum – that he himself is the subject of the opinion to which he refers. The specific ‘speech activity’, of the parrhesiastic enunciation thus takes the form: ‘I am the one who thinks this and that’ ... the commitment involved in parrhesia is linked ...to the fact that the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk (13). Acta Poetica 361, 2015, pp. 49-69 65 Through this double relationship, the subject enters into a binding relation to that which he has enunciated as truth. This relation enables him to be released from the authority of the accepted form of justice and to contradict an authority felt to be untrue and thus unjust. The parrhesiastic utterance, which Foucault explicitly distinguishes from the performative utterance, is taken as a point of departure for the art of self-legislation. The risks indicated, which the subject takes upon himself, extend to the penalty of death. In the passage cited, Foucault introduces as an example, the subject who “rises up against the tyrant and speaks the truth under the eyes of the whole courtly state”. Hannah Arendt poses the question underlying Foucault’s investigations concerning the techniques of the self, though in another terminology, in her essay Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship (cf. Arendt). In this essay, Arendt refers to the question of the (absent) resistance to National Socialism. Arendt objects that one should not question why so many cooperated but rather why some did not cooperate, thereby incurring the risk of all sorts of consequences. The discovery and determination of these traces of an “art of not being governed” presupposes a form of thought which neither understands history as mono-causal nor power as monolithic. It is a form of thought that understands itself rather as a historical, philosophical praxis and as such “a practice of the self ”, and in this sense as a “technique of the self” (Foucault 1985: 13).
"How, then, does Foucault describe the relation of biopower and sovereign authority, and which consequences does he draw for a possible explanation of National Socialism? In contrast to Agamben, Foucault understands biopower decisively as an historical phenomenon. Its emergence is tied to the development of the modern sciences. If one divorces the concept of biopolitics or biopower from the development of statistics, modern medicine, biology, evolutionary theory, and the interpenetration of the apparatuses of knowledge with the institutions of the state, it then becomes an empty concept. As opposed to Agamben, who seeks to ground politics philosophically, Foucault conceives of politics as the relationship between power, truth, and the subject. Thus he does not understand truth as a transhistorical phenomenon but as the effect of concrete historical techniques linked to the history of the sciences. Unlike Agamben, Foucault does not reason from philosophy but from epistemology. From this perspective, one of Agamben’s central claims appears to be pure speculation. That is the claim that the modern state is nothing new, but the fact that it places biopolitical life at the center of its calculations only reveals the secret bind which has always already linked power and “bare life”. For “life itself ”, just as much as biopower, does not exist before the politics of the population. Biopolitics is based on the “societal body” developed in the 19th century, which is itself an effect of the apparatus of knowledge that developed alongside the modern sciences. Thus, as early as The Order of Things, which appeared in 1966, Foucault emphasizes that the concept of life in itself, or bare life, is the product of a science which has only existed for the past 150 years: Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then (...). And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history (Foucault 1973: 129f). In his analysis of totalitarianism presented at the close of his lectures at the Collège de France in 1975/6,5 Foucault starts from the question of how it is possible that a political authority can exercise the function of death if it is true that disciplinary and regulatory bio-power always seeks more power for itself. In other words, how is it to be explained that under the dominance of a biopower whose function consists in the optimization of life, not only millions of people but whole peoples were murdered? 5 This concerns the lecture delivered on March 17, 1976 (Foucault 2003b: 239-264). Acta Poetica 361, 2015, pp. 49-69 67 The link between sovereign authority and biopower is, as Foucault convincingly shows, not the sovereign but state racism. “In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable” (Foucault 2003b: 256). Out of this results the analysis of totalitarianism: first, that it is only explicable under the condition that biopower and the power of sovereignty are understood as distinctive forms of power. That, second, biopower is conceived of as a recent historical form of power linked to the development of the modern scientific apparatus. That, third, this power has as its aim the optimization of life, where life is related in this context to the “social body” or race. And that, fourth, the power of sovereignty did not abdicate, but rather, in the course of these modifications, changed itself by bringing forth state racism in order to continue to exercise its function. Thus, totalitarianism can only be understood with recourse to racism. Summarizing, Foucault describes the National Socialist State as follows: The Nazi State makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people. There was, in Nazism, a coincidence between a generalized biopower and a dictatorship that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the entire social body by this fantastic extension of the right to kill and of exposure to death. We have an absolutely racist State, an absolutely murderous State, and an absolutely suicidal State. A racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State. The three were necessarily superimposed, and the result was of course both the “final solution” (or the attempt to eliminate, by eliminating the Jews, all the other races of which the Jews were both the symbol and the manifestation) of the years 1942-1943, and then Telegram 71, in which, in April 1945, Hitler gave the order to destroy the German people’s own living conditions (260). The self-obligation to differentiate belongs to the task of a critique of violence; for the task of the critique of violence, as Benjamin establishes in the first sentence of his essay, can only be defined as “that of expounding its relation to law and justice”, since a “cause, however effective”, only becomes violent “only when it enters into moral relations” (Benjamin: 236). Agamben’s elevation of the camp to the matrix of modernity, his globalizing explanation of the state of exception to the rule, removes itself from history. In this very abstraction, an abstraction that carries with it a further abstraction from “ethical relations”, he carries out the violence which he purports to criticize''.
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
"In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls asserts that justice is the first virtue of social institutions (1999: 3). Institutions must be improved or else abolished if they are unjust. Here we can interpret him as using the word ‘just’ to mean that they distribute rights, duties and the benefits of social cooperation in a fair way''.
The philistine, for Arendt, is almost by definition an individual without culture, but he is at the same time positively defined as the man of society (positively not in a question of value, but as a positive characteristic). When Arendt speaks of society, she means something more specific than what we might associate with this word, like a community living together. While she does not give a clear definition of what she means by “society,” she does tell us where she sees its origins: in the courts of Louis XIV, and his effort to depoliticise his nobility so as to establish absolute rule (cf. CC 196). The “intrigues and cabals” that replaced the political activity of nobility is what Arendt sees as the origin of “society”: questions of status and one’s position in the hierarchical order (the nobility were fighting for the favour of the king instead of dealing with actual politics), one’s own private interests concerning wealth and importance, and, above all, competition. But it was only with the rise of the bourgeoisie that a dominant class started to define itself primarily by such ‘societal’ considerations, and it is in that sense that Arendt situates the origins of the philistine, at least in his modern form, in the capitalist society. The reason for this is that while nobility legitimised its power by birth, the bourgeoisie’s power was purely based on economic terms, it lied in its material wealth and ownership. It therefore had to draw the legitimacy of its rule from elsewhere, which led, according to Arendt, to a long process of the appropriation of culture by the ruling class. In “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt describes a whole development in the relation of the philistine to culture, from pure disinterest, where the philistine, not having a flair for culture, sees it as purely superfluous, to an active interest in it, so that the lack of legitimacy of rule outside of mere violence is compensated by what has come to be called cultural capital.3
placeholder ‘Culture’ thus becomes something one acquires, something one can have more or less of, and more importantly something that is tied to one’s “value,” so that it can be used to legitimise rule over those who, purportedly, don’t have it. In that sense, it becomes a mark of social status, and social status, just like material wealth, is something an individual acquires for itself, something that it ‘owns’ just like it owns its factories and company stocks. The man of society is in that sense the representative of the modern age for Arendt, because as traditional forms of legitimising power faded away, the world of culture has become an extension of the market, marked by the quest for dominance and a functionalist way of seeing. This ‘ideal type’, as we’ll see, can be opposed to another one, namely the man of culture, who, as we can already guess, will untie culture from questions of power and distinctions of worth between individuals. Let it be already said that, if we are to distinguish, following Arendt, two ideal types when it comes to fundamental outlooks on life, it is a distinction that, as often within her thought, is mainly heuristic, because it intends to render something visible that remains unnoticed in our daily life;4placeholder it intends to interrupt our normal order of looking at things, in which sense Arendt is very much indebted to a modernist tradition. In that sense, there is on the one hand the man of society, and on the other hand, the man of culture. These two ideal types distinguish themselves one from another by their fundamentally different way of looking at things, and at the world they inhabit; one might even call them two existential modes of being.
Considering the origins that Arendt traces society to, we can see how for her it becomes almost congruent with ‘economy’, so that the opposition society-culture in many ways mirrors her famous opposition economy-politics. The fundamental way of looking at things that characterises the man of society is one that expresses his primary representative’s – the bourgeois philistine’s – way of thinking. To put it as succinctly as possible, the man of society submits everything around him to the calculus of instrumental rationality, so that everything is defined by its use value. Arendt does not follow Marx’s valorisation of use value against exchange value; to her, the concept of “value” implies exchangeability, and in that sense the negation of the given object’s inherent uniqueness.5placeholder Thus, for Arendt, modernity is not as much characterised by the universal loss of values, as nostalgic critiques of modernity present it, but rather by the emergence of the concept of value itself that arises with modernity. “Values” imply right from the start their exchangeability on a marketplace, where they indicate a certain social status, so that it is no surprise that it leads to the “bargain sale of values,” as Nietzsche, whom she references here, formulated it (cf. CC 201). The ‘social’ is the area of values because it is from there that the capitalist class draws the legitimacy of its rule beyond mere material power and violence, but as values basically act the same as merchandise, the ‘social’ is just the continuation of the economical by other means. Whereas material wealth is acquired with the help of instrumental reason on a competitive market, social status is acquired with the help of, well, exactly the same thing in the same way, merely on seemingly ‘cultural’ grounds: education and use of upper-class vocabulary and intonation, connections and personal acquaintance with important cultural figures, private art collections, and so on, all to prove that the capitalist class is worthy of ruling. As what counts here is exchange, the man of society fails to perceive the unique, the individual, the “event”: as a thing is perceived in accordance with its value, it is immediately viewed as something that can be replaced with something else of equal or higher value.
But the use value also assigns a fixed temporal limit to an object; once it’s ‘used up’, it can be replaced with another object that will fulfil the same function. Such a functional view is devoid of care, quite the opposite, it subsumes the individual objects to their imposed function, which rather pushes towards their consumption (towards their being used-up6placeholder), as the production of use values is itself of an economic interest; indeed, the economy is nothing but the production of use and exchange values. That our current economic system is based on the universal replaceability of people and things alike (‘human resources’) is, for Arendt, connected to a fundamental way of looking at the world; one that only sees use values, that judges everything it encounters according to its utility and functionality. Instrumental rationality is a fundamental way of thinking, and it characterises, according to Arendt, modernity as such, which is a world that more and more defines itself entirely by the cycle of production, going from production to distribution to consumption and back to production, as described by Marx in the introduction to the Grundrisse.7placeholder The economy is a cyclical affair, because it needs to uphold a continuously functioning order, which, to function, needs to ‘use up’ as many resources as possible, because its productivity, the totality of its productive forces, is defined by the mere (re)production of use values that uphold the normal functioning of the order of things. The more use values a society produces, the ‘wealthier’ it is, but to produce more use values, it needs to consume more use values, in that sense: use up all its resources as quickly as possible. The acceleratory character of capitalism lies in this dynamic, where consumption and production stimulate each other mutually. At its limit, the creation of use values is indistinguishable from the process of using-up; as Marx says it himself, once you take a closer look, you can’t really say if it’s production or consumption that comes first. It is such processuality, where things don’t really have a specific beginning nor a specific end, and which engulfs living and non-living ‘resources’ alike, that is the most fundamental characteristic of modernity for Hannah Arendt.
Social ownership is a type of property where an asset is recognized to be in the possession of society as a whole rather than individual members or groups within it.[1] Social ownership of the means of production is the defining characteristic of a socialist economy,[2] and can take the form of community ownership,[3] state ownership, common ownership, employee ownership, cooperative ownership, and citizen ownership of equity.[4]
Wiki
"In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination. People who suffer from depression, bipolar disorder, or burnout syndrome develop the symptoms displayed by the Muselmänner in concentration camps. Muselmänner are emaciated prisoners lacking all vigor who, like people with acute depression, have become entirely apathetic and can no longer even recognize physical cold or the orders given by guards''.
Han
