Patchen Markell

The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archê , and Democracy

This article presents a novel critical account of a key concept in democratic theory, “rule,” via an unorthodox interpretation of Hannah Arendts work. Many theorists treat democracy as one type of regime; others, stressing the importance of unruliness to democratic politics, challenge the reduction of democracy to a form of rule. Although this debate remains caught within conventional oppositions between order, closure, and continuity; and interruption, openness, and novelty, Arendt shows this whole matrix of oppositions to be an artifact of the dominance of a hierarchical understanding of rule. Her unusual critique of rule and her distinctive account of the meaning of “beginning” draw attention to an important dimension of political activity that lies off these axes of opposition, shedding new light on democratic agency and the forces that obstruct it.

The Insufficiency of Non-Domination

This essay argues that the neo-Roman republican principle of “non-domination,” as developed in the recent work of Philip Pettit, cannot serve as a single over-arching political ideal, because it responds to only one of two important dimensions of concern about human agency. Through critical engagements with several aspects of Pettits work, ranging from his philosophical account of freedom as “discursive control” to his appropriation of the distinction between dominium and imperium, the essay argues that the idea of domination, which responds to concerns about “control,” needs to be supplemented by the idea of usurpation, which responds to questions about “involvement”; and it shows how attention to both domination and usurpation (and to the interaction between them) can shed light on such phenomena as imperialism, slavery, and democracy.

Introduction: Violence, Redemption, and the Liberal Imagination

Violence haunts liberal political thought. The defining image of early modern European social contract theory—and an image that remains potent in contemporary contractarian moral and political theory —l ocates the possibility of civil society in a compact among men who are long accustomed to the use of force in the bloody business of self-assertion and self-preservation. These men, so the story goes, surrender their right to fight one another (and to dominate the defenseless), investing a common, sovereign power with the right to command obedience for the sake of peace, justice, prosperity, and reasonable expectations of security. In turn, their consent legitimates this common power—the state—at least as long as its use of coercion serves the welfare and good future of a voluntarily toothless citizenry.1

Domestic homologies and household politics: A comment on Patricia Owens’s Economy of Force

In July 1967, Hannah Arendt wrote to the editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn, to praise Jonathan Schell’s recently published report on Ben Suc, a village of several thousand people along the Saigon River that the American military had recently encircled, bombed, occupied, searched, evacuated, burned, bulldozed, and bombed again. Most of the surviving villagers had been trucked to a hastily constructed relocation camp. Under a ‘long nylon canopy over the bare earth, without floors or walls’, ringed by barbed wire, ‘each family was assigned a place about ten feet square’ to inhabit, along with their pigs and chickens; a sign under the canopy welcomed them to ‘the reception center for refugees fleeing communism’ (Schell, 1967: 69, 74). ‘Nothing else I read has the same immediacy’, she told Shawn, adding that ‘compared with this nylon-concentration camp’, the French internment camp where she had been imprisoned in 1940 ‘was sheer luxury’.1 In 1967, Arendt was already sharply critical of American conduct in Vietnam – ‘God knows the message must have spread by now’, she commented, ‘that one of the worst fates that can befall a people is to be liberated by us’2 – but when she came to write about the war at length, her concern was with the role of deception, and of the insidious ‘remoteness from reality’ that she referred to as ‘defactualization’, in the making of American foreign policy (Arendt, 1972: 20). Notwithstanding her own preoccupation with the anti-political effects both of violence and of the reduction of public life to ‘collective housekeeping’ (Arendt, 1958: 28–29), Arendt did not comment on the striking combination of physical destruction and social administration – the building of canopies, the digging of latrines, the registration of families, the rationing of food – that Schell had documented in the American-led program of ‘pacification’ in Vietnam. Nor did she relate this war, except in passing, to the sweeping historical accounts she had given in earlier books of the modern development of capitalism and the nation-state system, which were both crucial constituents of the process she referred to as the ‘rise of the social’ (Arendt, 1958: 38; 2004: 160–161). In her marvelous new book Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social, Patricia Owens (2015) does what Arendt did not – and much more. Owens shows that

Books in Review: Philosophy and Real Politics Princeton, by Raymond Geuss. NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. ix + 116 pp.

false and that history has no particular significance. But for the Nietzsche of the Genealogy, European history has the significance of a slowly unfolding catastrophe. And worst of all, the success of the German state, coming at the expense of a missed opportunity for the Napoleonic unification of Europe, keeps nationalism in play as a distraction from cultural tasks. What Nietzsche championed was not so much Napoleon as a moral ideal but a kind of nostalgia for the cultural climate of the Napoleonic era, and this is simply inaccessible to us. What did he oppose? His hostility to German nationalism is that it is too Protestant, to Protestantism that it is too Christian, and to Christianity that it is too . . . Jewish. That is likely where the road that a complete historical contextualizing leads, and it is unsurprising that almost everyone who now values Nietzsche’s many insights is wary of going down it. It is to Emden’s credit that he has begun a far more serious and historically informed investigation of who Nietzsche as a thinker of the historical and the political was and what he wanted. But perhaps sixty-four years is not distance enough for Nietzsche to become history—he is still one of us, and thus too caught up in our concerns, and anxieties, for us to begin to safely recount who he was.

19.95 (cloth)

“Politics,” Bismarck said, is the “art of the possible.” Although the phrase may suggest a pragmatic acquiescence to circumstance, it takes on a more radical cast in the light of these thoughtful, engaging new books. For Wendy Brown and Jane Bennett, “possibility” is less a constraint than a rich field of prospects that opens up before us, if we know where to look. Brown looks for possibility in the vertiginousness of late modernity. She begins with a familiar refrain—our “constitutive narratives” are breaking down (p. 3)—but she neither despairs at nor celebrates this development. Instead, resisting counterproductive retreats into defensive righteousness, she works to convert the experience of “profound political disorientation” into a sober hopefulness about, and exploration of, the “uncharted potential” of the present (pp. 3, 5). Bennett looks for possibility in the inspiring but uncanny experience she calls “enchantment.” Questioning the conventional characterization of modernity as an era devoid of wonders, she argues that enchantment persists whenever we are “struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday” (p. 4), from intransigent parrots to animate khakis. Such moments of enchantment teach us that the world is shot through with surprise, and the energy these moments generate can help motivate ethical engagement with that world and its possibilities. These books have much in common. Brown and Bennett are both concerned with the question of how to orient and motivate action in a world ungoverned by divine providence or its secular successors. Both pursue this