Jessica Whyte

‘Man Produces Universally’: Praxis and Production in Agamben and Marx

In The Kingdom of the Glory, in the midst of outlining what he sees as a specifically Christian account of governing as constant praxis, Giorgio Agamben turns his attention to a text that has preoccupied him for several decades: The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of Karl Marx. Beginning with his first book, The Man without Content, Agamben has repeatedly ignored Louis Althusser’s suggestion that ‘Marx’s early works do not have to be taken into account’ (Althusser, 1971, p. 35) and turned to the Paris Manuscripts in the course of formulating his own accounts of praxis and of history.1 Indeed, references to Marx in Agamben’s texts can be found as early as his first published essay, ‘On the Limits of Violence’, in which he defends Marx from the charge that his radical transformation (or Aufhebung) of man and nature relies on a form of historical Darwinism ‘which configures History as a linear progression of necessary laws, similar to the laws governing the natural world’ (Agamben, 2009, p. 106).2 These themes — non-linear history and ‘human nature’ — are ones to which Agamben returns repeatedly in subsequent decades. And again and again, he is drawn to the 1844 Manuscripts, in which he finds an account of praxis as that which ‘founds the unity of man with nature, of man as natural being and man as human natural being’ (Agamben, 1999a, p. 83).

The Fortunes of Natural Man: Robinson Crusoe, Political Economy, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Reflecting on the drafting of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Lebanese UN delegate Charles Malik noted that what was at stake was “the determination of the nature of man.” Perhaps surprisingly, this debate revolved around the figure who epitomizes the myth of “natural man”: Robinson Crusoe. This article situates this debate in the context of Karl Marx’s critique of those political economists who had previously used Robinson Crusoe to naturalize new, historically specific, capitalist social and economic relations. In opposition to this naturalizing move, I suggest that close attention to the debates that preceded the UDHR allow us to resist the utilization of the language of human rights to make the possessive individualism of contemporary neoliberal capitalism appear eternal.

Hayek’s Submissive Subjects: Reply to Kyong-Min Son, “The Making of the Neoliberal Subject: Response to Whyte”

Friedrich Hayek repeatedly stressed the centrality of submission to his own account of spontaneous order. In what he depicted as the rationalist refusal to submit to anything beyond human comprehen...

The Invisible Hand of Friedrich Hayek: Submission and Spontaneous Order

Friedrich Hayek’s account of “spontaneous order” has generated increasing interest in recent decades. His argument for the superiority of the market in distributing knowledge without the need for central oversight has appealed to progressive democratic theorists, who are wary of the hubris of state planning and attracted to possibilities for self-organization, and to Foucaultians, who have long counseled political theory to cut off the King’s head. A spontaneous social order, organized by an invisible hand, would appear to dispense with arbitrary power and foster creativity and individual liberty. This article challenges this view by highlighting the centrality of submission to Hayek’s account of spontaneous order. It shows that Hayek struggles to obscure the providentialism underpinning the account of social order he derives from Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment. Nonetheless, his own account of spontaneous order relies on faith in the workings of the market, and submission to unintelligible m...

Legitimacy and the shadows of universalism: a response to Meine’s ‘Debating legitimacy transnationally’

This is a reply to:Meine, Anna. 2016. “Debating legitimacy transnationally.” Global Discourse 6 (3): 330–346. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2016.1175084.