Anarchism and Political Modernity

Nathan Jun

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441166869
• eBook ISBN: 9781441162342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Anarchism and Political Modernity looks at the place of 'classical anarchism' in the postmodern political discourse, claiming that anarchism presents a vision of political postmodernity. The book seeks to foster a better understanding of why and how anarchism is growing in the present. To do so, it first looks at its origins and history, offering a different view from the two traditions that characterize modern political theory: socialism and liberalism. Such an examination leads to a better understanding of how anarchism connects with newer political trends and why it is a powerful force in contemporary social and political movements. This new volume in the Contemporary Anarchist Studies series offers a novel philosophical engagement with anarchism and contests a number of positions established in postanarchist theory. Its new approach makes a valuable contribution to an established debate about anarchism and political theory. It offers a new perspective on the emerging area of anarchist studies that will be of interest to students and theorists in political theory and anarchist studies.

1

On Politics

Introduction

Most of Western political thought from the classical period to the present has taken the concept of government as a fundamental presupposition. Indeed, the very word “political” means “having to do with forms of government” (polities), where the word “polities,” in turn, comes from the Greek polis, the ancient Greek city-state and its citizens.¹ Like the axioms of Euclid’s geometry, government has been an implicit starting point, always assumed and never justified— the transcendental condition of possibility for thinking, writing, and talking about human social organization.

The government of which I speak, however, is not a political so much as an ontological force, preceding and constituting the polis and not the other way around. The earliest Greek philosophers believed that the universe as a whole was subject to government by a fundamental organizing principle known as the arche, a term which means “chief,” “authority,” or “head.” The arche brings order from chaos, defining the laws, relations, and hierarchies of nature. Human beings, no less than rocks, plants, and animals, are bound by and subject to its authority, our own authorities being mere expressions or extensions of a more basic natural order. It is this thought— which is archic in the purest and most literal sense of the word— that has been so foundational in Western politics.

Nowhere is this clearer, perhaps, than in Aristotelian political philosophy. For Aristotle politikê (politics) is a shorthand for politikê epistêmê (the science of politics). Like ethics (the things concerning customs of habits), politics belongs to the third of the three main categories of Aristotelian science, which are distinguished according to their respective ends (teloi): Contemplative or theoretical science (theorêtikê epistêmê), which includes physics and metaphysics and is directed toward knowledge for its own sake; productive science (poiêtikê epistêmê), which is directed toward the creation of useful or beautiful objects; and practical science (praktikê epistêmê), which is directed toward good or virtuous action.²

In Nicomachean Ethics I.2 Aristotle famously defines the highest good as that end which all human beings desire for its own sake.³ Were the highest good desired solely as a means to something else, he argues, there could be no end to our search for it, and our desire to attain it would forever remain unfulfilled.⁴ For Aristotle this is an obvious logical problem, as an infinite chain of means-ends relationships (desiring X as a means to Y, which is in turn desired as a means to Z, and so on) is, strictly speaking, impossible. Thus there must be a highest good which is desired for its own sake, and this good, whatever it is, “belongs to the most sovereign and most comprehensive master science.”⁵ The highest good is eudaimonia, usually rendered as “happiness” or “flourishing,”⁶ and its “master science” is politics.⁷

Aristotle assigns politics this role because it legislates all the activity— whether theoretical, productive, or practical— of the polis. To this extent, the various ends of these activities are all subordinate means to the ultimate political end, which for Aristotle is nothing less than the highest human good. This idea is reinforced in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle suggests that politics involves the teaching and implementation of ethics at the level of human social communities.⁸ The treatise known as the Politics is largely devoted to analyzing, explaining, and directing the role of the statesman (politikos) in bringing this about.⁹ There Aristotle compares the statesman in his capacity as lawgiver (nomothetês) to a physician who must diagnose social ills and prescribe treatments (e.g., laws, habits, customs, mores, and institutions) with a mind to achieving the common good.¹⁰ These prescriptions are the constitution (politeia), “a certain ordering of the inhabitants of the polis. ”¹¹ For this reason the statesman is also likened to an artisan (dêmiourgos) who creates the constitution of the city-state from the “raw materials” of individual citizens and natural resources.¹²

I need not go into extensive detail about the Politics here, though I will have occasion to return to it from time to time below. For present purposes, it is sufficient to note three general characteristics of Aristotelian politics, which is my point of departure in analyzing the history of Western politics as such. First, politics is “politicocentric”; it is always concerned with, and to a certain degree presupposes, the state under some description or other. Second, politics is always and already a normative discourse. It does more than merely describe the various forms human social relations can and do take;¹³ rather, it is concerned with how human social relations ought to be organized in order to achieve the highest good. Third, politics generally presupposes the concept of political force or power or else renders it secondary in the order of explanation. Political concepts are not defined in terms of a specifically political type of force or power, and political power as such is generally not subject to any sort of independent analysis. Let us explore these three characteristics in greater detail.

Political naturalism in Aristotle

In describing Aristotelian political theory as “politicocentric” I do not mean that it completely ignores other forms of interpersonal relationships and social organization. On the contrary, Aristotle provides a very extensive analysis of the forms of rule by which individuals or groups exert power over other individuals and groups— for example, despotic rule (slavery),¹⁴

marital rule,¹⁵ and paternal rule.¹⁶ In general, however, Aristotle regards marriage, the family, the institution of slavery, the village, and all other such relations as simple and primitive arrangements that come about for specific reasons but eventually and naturally evolve into the city-state.¹⁷ As I noted above, Aristotle views such relations as “raw material,” the components or parts of a community (koinônia) that are molded into a polis by the lawmaker through the implementation of the constitution.¹⁸ The entire process is directed toward the achievement of the good, which is its single telos and final cause.¹⁹

To a limited extent, this outlook prefigures later thinkers like Hobbes for whom social relations may be seen as “solutions” to various sorts of problems and conflicts that arise among individuals in a state of nature. The crucial difference, of course, is that for Aristotle human beings are always and already social and political by nature.²⁰ As Todd May helpfully notes:

In ancient philosophy, the question was: How should one live?… the question of how one should live is asked within a context that assumes the existence of a cosmological order to which a good life must conform. A human life does not exist divorced from the cosmological whole within which it is embedded. It has a role to play that ought to converge with or at least complement the movement of the rest of the universe. For Plato, that role consists in seeking the Good; for Aristotle it is a matter of living out a specifically human teleology. Neither doubts … that the universe has an order to it, a stability and a general form that ought to be mirrored and conformed to by the lives of human beings.²¹

The city-state is prior to individuals and is contained, if only as a potentiality, within their nature as social creatures.²² Because the city-state is the natural end of all human association, the concrete actualization of the city-state by the lawgiver isn’t an arbitrary exertion of power but a necessary consequence of human nature.²³ Furthermore, insofar as human beings have a nature or natural function (ergon) that is directed toward the natural end of eudaimonia,²⁴ and insofar as the city-state is the fullest expression of this nature and its corresponding end, it follows necessarily that the existence of the city-state is, ceteris paribus, naturally good and just.²⁵

As to the second characteristic noted above, my point is merely that politics is not what one would call an empirical science but rather a kind of social ethics. Insofar as ethics proper is concerned with the good of the individual, politics may be seen as pertaining to the good of the community as a whole. For this reason, it is no surprise that Aristotelian politics tends to focus on “statesmanship”— namely, on questions concerning the proper governance of extant political communities, where “proper” refers not to expedience but to virtue. In other words, the purpose of political science is to offer a kind of moral compass to “the good lawgiver and the true politician.”²⁶ Again, this is not to say that Aristotelian political theory is purely nondescriptive. As we have already seen, Aristotle provides a very extensive analysis of different forms of political and nonpolitical rule. The ultimate goal of his analysis, however, is to discover which of these forms are most conducive to the practice of virtue²⁷ and, by extension, to the achievement of the good life.²⁸ Put simply, the most important question for Aristotle is not what states are or how they come into existence, but rather how they ought to operate once they do, in fact, exist.

The last characteristic, which is closely related to the first two, is that Aristotelian politics is generally not concerned with questions of power. In fact, one could argue that Aristotle simply takes the existence of political power for granted. This follows directly from a rudimentary feature of Aristotelian science— namely, the method of explaining how things come to exist and why they behave as they do in terms of natural functions, causes, and ends.²⁹ For Aristotle, individual human beings are naturally directed toward the good by internal causal principles such as appetite. Political power, in turn, is simply the internal causal principle which directs human communities toward their natural end. Thus it makes no sense to inquire whether and to what extent political power as such is “justified” or “legitimate.” For Aristotle this would be tantamount to asking whether human appetites, animal behavior, or the motion of the spheres are “justified” or “legitimate.” Such questions are specious precisely because whatever is natural is, ceteris paribus, good. Again, the principal goal of politics is not to justify political power nor even to explain its operation, but rather to show how political power ought to be implemented by the statesman (whose possession of, and claim to, political power is always and already presupposed).

Furthermore, there is a sense in which Aristotle regards political power (variously referred to as kratos, dynamis, exousia, etc.) as one more natural relation of force among many such forces— for example, motion.³⁰ In Book III of the Physics, he defines motion as “the fulfillment of what is potentially, as such.”³¹ Taken by itself, this definition is highly ambiguous and readily open to misinterpretation. As Joseph Sachs has pointed out, “[it] is constructed at the limits of thought and speech, and inadequate translation makes it crumble away to nothing. It did not travel well in Latin, and in the form in which it came into English from Latin it is scarcely intelligible.”³² Particularly problematic is the word entelecheia, translated above as “fulfillment,” which Aristotle uses on three separate occasions at the beginning, middle, and end of his account. The standard English translation of this word as it appears throughout the Aristotelian corpus is “actuality.” This seems, for the most part, to be a sound exegetical strategy. When Aristotle uses entelecheia in Book IX of the Metaphysics, for example, he specifically identifies it with the related word energeia,³³ which refers to the actuality of a potency or, to use Joseph Sachs’s clever expression, “the being-at-work-staying-itself of a potency, as material.”³⁴ Thus the actuality of a potency is not a definition of motion here, but rather a definition of being a thing — namely, “thinghood.”³⁵

If we translate entelecheia as “actuality” in the unique context of Physics III, then motion is defined as the actuality of what is potentially as such. This seems to imply that motion is somehow the end result or final product of a potentiality having become actual— in other words, that the motion of building a house (that is, the actuality of bricks and stones qua potentially a house) just is the house itself.³⁶ But this seems absurd; surely the product of building is ontologically distinct from the process by which it is built. In order to circumvent this spurious conclusion, W.D. Ross argues, we must interpret entelecheia in the sense of motion not as actuality, but rather as the actualization of that which potentially is as such— namely, “if something is actually x and potentially y, motion is the making actual of its y -ness.”³⁷ According to this view, motion is the process by which the potential y -ness in x is actualized— not the actuality of the potential y -ness in x.

Speaking very generally, power or force (dynamis) is understood as the capacity to be or become something. To use a simple example, a seed has the power to become a tree but not a dog. Motion itself, however, may also be seen as a form of dynamis. It is, in fact, the most basic and fundamental form of dynamis insofar as it underlies all particular instances of motion (i.e., the process by which a potential x becomes an actual x). From this it follows that political power (kratos) is the dynamis by which a collection of individuals becomes a city-state, and this in at least two senses: first, all human groups have the natural power to become a state through the formal causation of the constitution, the efficient causation of the statesman, and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Policy Context: Educational ‘Standards’ and Human Capital
• 2 Conceptualizing Gender and Achievement
• 3 Facilitating High Achievement and the Issue of ‘Balance’
• 4 ‘Boffins and Geeks’: The Social Consequences for Young People Constructed as ‘Too Hardworking’
• 5 High Achieving and Popular: The Ideal Neoliberal Subject
• 6 High Achieving and Popular: How Do They Do It?
• Notes
• References
• Index