Critical theory and sociological theory

On late modernity and social statehood

Darrow Schecter

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526105868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Democracy in the twenty-first century faces a number of major challenges, populism, neoliberalism and globalisation being three of the most prominent. This book examines such challenges by investigating how the conditions of democratic statehood have been altered at several key historical intervals since 1945. It demonstrates that the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood, such as elections, have always been complemented by civic, cultural, educational, socio-economic and constitutional institutions that mediate between citizens and state authority. Rearticulating critical theory with a contemporary focus, the book shows why a sociological approach is urgently needed to address conceptual deficits and explain how the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood need to be complemented and updated in new ways today.

1

Reconsidering the theoretical preconditions of modern democratic statehood: on mediated unity and overarching legal-political form

This chapter examines two of the central premises underlying most standard explanations of the construction of modern democratic statehood and its preconditions and raises fundamental questions about their continuing relevance. The presuppositions in question must be deconstructed because they offer an inaccurate account of the rights of citizens and the resources of states in the twenty-first century. This preliminary work is necessary in order fully to understand what resources states might realistically rely on today to deal with the internal pressures of conflict and social fragmentation, on the one hand, and the external pressures stemming from globalisation and transnational governance, on the other. The complex relation between internal divisions, external strategic constraints, and collective political resources for coping with tensions is complicated further by the fact that the national and international dimensions of state authority have not been neatly separable for some time now, and certainly not since 1945.¹

The first premise of post-feudal statehood is that there exists a mediated unity binding individual citizens, law, government, and the nation state. This idea is often implicitly or explicitly invoked in tandem with the second, closely related premise according to which democracy functions as an all-inclusive political form capable of reconciling the unified foundation of popular sovereign power with the normative ideal of extensive citizen participation on an equal basis. Some scholars argue that although conceptual constructions of mediated unity, constituent citizen power, popular sovereignty, democratic inclusivity, and the like can be interpreted as celebrating the agency of the people in theory, one should be wary, for functional and political reasons, of literal readings of these ideas when attempting to explain how nominally democratic states really operate in historical practice.² The approach adopted here shares this point of methodological caution. But instead of contrasting theories of the constituent power of the demos with a demonstration of the limitations on the actual exercise of popular power, this book begins by examining how affirmations of mediated unity by some highly influential political philosophers (chapter 1) uneasily coexist with insistence on the functional separation of law, politics, and justice found in the writings of historians of the modern state, constitutional theorists, and sociological theorists (chapter 2). The political and sociological significance of this contradiction will attain greater clarity in chapters 3–5, where the real capacity of political parties substantially to reform functionally differentiated societies is called into question. The investigation in those chapters thus raises a number of fundamental questions about democracy in general and about the future of social democracy in particular.

There is clearly much at stake when defining terms such as ‘mediated’, ‘unity’, ‘binding’, and ‘reconciling’. There is also much at stake when framing arguments about the quality and composition of the synthesis between the individual and authority implied by institutions that unite, bind, and reconcile. These issues, in turn, prompt a further set of questions about the extent to which the institutions in question manage to produce political unity without resorting to force, ideological accounts of national origins, and dubious narratives about the sources of cultural identity. Some of the arguments involved in these debates need to be introduced before taking up the central theme of this chapter. The discussion of mediated unity and overarching political form is therefore preceded by a series of preliminary remarks. Whilst the first of these take up questions about the legal and political dynamics of institutional syntheses and mediation processes, the second examine the defining characteristics of the modern state, in contrast with its feudal predecessor in early modern Europe. Although these observations may seem like digressions, they illustrate the extent to which a great variety of arguments about political legitimacy stem from suppositions about the mediated unity of humanity and nature. These premises are frequently translated into assertions about the political unity of the governors and the governed achieved through parliamentary representation. From the sociological standpoint developed in this book, the suppositions in question are shown to be conjectural and speculative in crucial ways.

A number of openly authoritarian thinkers are happy to endorse the idea that the concrete unity of the people and state in a truly democratic community can be effectuated as a synthesis in which preoccupations with the proper relation between theory and practice, as well as careful thinking about constitutional mechanisms capable of limiting the exercise of political power, can be considered superfluous because of spontaneous solidarity and communal bonds. In the Genesis and Structure of Society (1943), Giovanni Gentile argues that just as one cannot really separate theory and practice, one cannot distinguish between citizens and the state because society exists inside the individual as language, law, politics, and history.³ Carl Schmitt recognises the functional separation of law and politics as a distinctive constitutional feature of modern democracies.⁴ He nonetheless insists that the irreconcilable antagonisms proper to politics do not disappear with the consolidation of the state of law (Rechtsstaat), even if, in times of domestic peace, law seems to limit the exercise of power and neutralise political enmity through juridical formalism. He suggests that what enables the law to function in times of relative stability is the political foundation to which the law is irrevocably tied. According to Schmitt, the unification of the people and political authority is achieved when a state of exception makes the suspension of the law a requirement, thus enabling politics to re-assert its primacy over legal reasoning and strategic corporatist compromise. In this moment of clarity and transparence, sovereign unity is manifested in the rightful authority of the state to resolve a friend–enemy conflict with extra-legal means when the law cannot perform its usual adjudicating functions. This idea runs throughout Schmitt’s writings prior to 1945, and is especially prominent in Political Theology (1922) and The Concept of the Political (1932).⁵

The idea that the relation between citizens and states can be thought of as a synthesis at all may seem inherently authoritarian and abhorrent to many. Yet Hegel enlists powerful arguments to show that unless one thinks of the relation as a synthesis capable of stipulating reciprocally binding and mutual long-term obligations between citizens and nation states, one is likely to have to accept that it is a private and contractual relation that citizens can ignore or cancel at any time, if they so choose. In Hegel’s estimation this would set up a permanent war between private, particular interests and collective, public interests. Such conflict might yield illusory unity and dubious legitimacy at times. But it is a war that he presciently thinks will eventually result in either the reversion of law to neo-feudal status and privilege or in the reversion of state unity into loose aggregates of private power, that is, the end of the state. Moreover, as the first thinker to distinguish systematically between civil society and the state, he points out that the kind of unity and agreement required to generate a valid contract presupposes a valid state of some kind. Stated simply, contractual agreement needs and presupposes an extra-contractual agreement that is more elastic and genuinely consensual than the contractual mode of bargained compromise.⁶ It can therefore be argued, he intimates, that when analysing the interaction between citizens and states, the question is not whether or not the relation can or cannot be understood as a synthesis. The question is really concerned with the composition and quality of the synthesis, and the mediations that produce synthetic unity. With specific reference to the central thesis developed in the Philosophy of Right, the composition and quality of the synthetic mediations performed by the family, civil society, and the state indicate if one is observing harmoniously mediated unity between citizens and authority, as the mature Hegel seems to think, or if one is really observing a series of relations that can be more accurately described as antagonistically mediated disunity, as the young Marx will subsequently say. Despite their manifest differences, these two thinkers are agreed on the methodological and political importance of ascertaining the modalities of mediation at work in any political community.⁷ But can society in the second decade of the twenty-first century be meaningfully conceived as a political community in which there are institutional forces capable of binding and reconciling the individual citizen and political authority? This strand of the overall argument will be taken up in chapters 4–5.

In anticipation of that debate, the discussion to follow in this chapter will comment on the similarities and differences between Hegel and Marx in relation to the two central premises of modern statehood mentioned at the outset. Hegel is of central importance in this context for several reasons. His thinking has a profound impact on Marx and first-generation critical theory and he initiates a dialectical method of socio-historical investigation discernible in the work of contemporary theorists such as Žižek and many others.⁸ Most important, however, is that one can clearly discern Hegelian motifs related to mediated unity in the political theory of what are usually considered liberal, democratic, Marxist, and generally non-Hegelian approaches to the central questions of law and the state. These affinities will become evident in the second section below on weak dialectical and strong dialectical models of political cohesion and agreement. In that discussion it will be shown that whether implicitly or explicitly, theories of dialectics and mediation underpin virtually all explanations of the modalities of modern political representation that underscore the close links between legitimacy and the workings of reason in modern institutions. This is particularly striking in arguments for secular political obligation that regard reason as the only consistently viable alternative to religion, tradition, or command.⁹ Hence a key question taken up at a later stage concerns the possibility of developing methodologies of critical theory that manage to retain a modified version of dialectics without relying on the foundational dialectics of mediated unity that underpin virtually all theories of the modern state, and which are so clearly at work in the Philosophy of Right. It has already been seen that for Hegel one is grappling with a synthesis. This means that one is also struggling to define the precise nature of the mediations structuring the dialectic at work in the construction of the specific synthesis under consideration. A very brief preliminary word on the function of synthesis in his philosophy in broader terms is therefore useful.

Hegel intimates that knowledge is achieved through the construction of concepts that give form and unity to contradictory impulses and ideas such as intuitions, thoughts, sentiments, and experience more generally. Concepts aim at syntheses capable of reconciling duty and inclination, thought and emotion, power and authority, sense of reality and imaginative vision, and so on. It is the task of conceptual philosophy to break down the barriers separating the speculative and concrete/immediate aspects of reality and experience, though without fusing them in some kind of implausible union. He thinks that one can attempt to bypass the task of creating conceptual syntheses by asserting the priority of already unified essences, noting that the latter often pose as concrete, immediate, and therefore irrefutable truths about humanity and nature. Hegel points out that the resulting affirmation will usually have to appeal to a philosophically suspect notion of an unconditioned, self-sufficient being or an originary, self-moving mover. By contrast, good philosophy effectively shows that if one attempts to deduce something about nature by resorting to hunches about the nature of nature, or if one tries to identify a fundamental property of humanity by invoking one anecdotal version of human nature whilst dismissing countless others that are equally plausible, one has probably come up with a tautology or mere opinion rather than a convincing account of the phenomenology of worldly forms structuring human life in society. If it is true that nature cannot know nature, that is, if a fully natural entity has no other perspective apart from a natural one that is unreliable because it is dependent on its own, necessarily biased account of itself, the question arises as to how humanity can be known, if human self-knowledge does not suffice to comply with the epistemological demands of objectivity. In this case, the analogy with nature holds: a fully natural account of nature is as unsatisfactory as a fully human account of humanity. In other words, every unmediated account of reality is unconvincing, since it can offer no other perspective than the necessarily biased account of itself that it can produce (leaving aside the question, in this specific case, whether nature is even capable of interrogating the premises of its own existence). Hegel therefore suggests that in order to have politically relevant knowledge, one must transform the question about the essence of humanity into a question about the forms and functioning of human institutions as they evolve over the course of history. The way one frames and answers this question about the possibility of knowledge of society has quite obvious implications for the way one understands reason, law, and the attempt by the modern state to use power to limit the use of power.¹⁰

It is not speculative to think that humanity can know nature because although it is part of nature, humanity is not identical or reducible to it. One might say that humanity is neither separated from nor unified with nature. There is enough proximity in the relation for knowledge to be possible, and also enough metaphorical distance so that knowledge is not superfluous. More will be said in what follows in order to explain why this point about the dynamics between identity-separation and proximity-distance is very relevant to understanding what are still prevalent approaches to the relation between reason, representation, foundational dialectics, and notions of political community. Kant and others adduce good arguments in support of the claim that the question as to whether knowledge is to be sought in the human mind (internal) or in nature (external) is falsely posed, and that the far more pertinent question is the following: under what conditions is knowledge possible, given that humanity is neither fused with nature nor separate from it? As is well known, Kant concludes that the fundamental condition of knowledge is a human subject that experiences the phenomena of the world and events in time and space, with the help of the twelve categories of the understanding. Explanatory problems multiply when one extrapolates from what humanity might know about nature, presupposing the foundation of an individual epistemological subject, to the possible knowledge of the forms and functioning of institutions, presupposing the foundation of a collective epistemological subject such as the people or the proletariat. The question about the phenomena experienced by a natural, a-historically conceived individual cannot simply be re-phrased as a sociological question about institutions and social forms experienced by a collective in a specific historical context. The only way to do so is by positing an overarching political form capable of harmonising the discrepant realities constantly negotiated by overlapping and conflicting partial social forms and systems. If such harmony actually existed, legitimate representation would be a straightforward matter of channelling horizontal patterns of interpersonal interaction into vertical structures of collective authority. This dilemma illustrates the connections between epistemological and sociological matters. Simmel comments on the problems involved in transferring the Kantian approach to human knowledge of nature to the study of human interaction in society. The problem is compounded, Simmel notes, by the fact that although no direct transfer is possible, in one important respect there is a qualified symmetry in approach between Kantian and sociological methodologies. Kant shows that our knowledge of nature is mediated by the anthropological forms (time and space together with...