After Sovereignty

On the Question of Political Beginnings

Charles Barbour, George Pavlich

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134008995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

After Sovereignty addresses the vexed question of sovereignty in contemporary social, political, and legal theory. The emergence, and now apparent implosion, of international capital exceeding the borders of known political entities, the continued expansion of a potentially endless 'War on Terror', the often predicted, but still uncertain, establishment of either a new international American Empire or a new era of International Law, the proliferation of social and political struggles among stateless refugees, migrant workers, and partial citizens, the resurgence of religion as a dominant source of political identification among people all over the globe – these developments and others have thrown into crisis the modern concept of sovereignty, and the notions of statehood and citizenship that rest upon it.

Drawing on classical sources and more contemporary speculations, and developing a range of arguments concerning the possibility of political beginnings in the current moment, the papers collected in After Sovereignty contribute to a renewed interest in the problem of sovereignty in theoretical and political debate. They also provide a multitude of resources for the urgent, if necessarily fractured and diffuse, effort to reconfigure sovereignty today. Whilst it has regularly been suggested that the sovereignty of the nation-state is in crisis, the exact reasons for, and exact implications of, this crisis have rarely been so intensively examined.

Chapter 1

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Leveraging Leviathan

Peter Fitzpatrick

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I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible – for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man's creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death – the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct.

(Conrad 1994: 44)

Beginning I

Consider the whale. And let us take initially the ‘random allusions to whales’ so assiduously collected by Melville's ‘grubworm of a sub-sub-librarian’ (Melville 1994: 10). These allusions include Hobbes's ‘great Leviathan’, an attribution that Hobbes almost certainly would not recognize, but one that is by now common and one that is, for present purposes, convenient (Melville 1994: 12, 16). Almost without relief, the librarian's derivative whale is found to be a creature of dread and untameable power, a solitary ‘King of the boundless sea … where might is right’, as one rousing ‘whale song’ would attest (Melville 1994: 20). ‘For the modern world’, however, ‘the whale is a symbol of innocence in an age of threat’ (Hoare 2008: 33). Science becoming more astonishing than mythos, we now know of the intense sociality of the whale, its relating to others across enormous distances (Hoare 2008: 25–27). Or there is the counter-myth of beginnings so beautifully reproduced by Le Clézio, the great gathering in that natal immensity, that ‘secret place’, ‘where the whales went to birth their young’ (Le Clézio 2001: 1).

Bringing these opposing versions of the whale now to the standard-issue conception of Hobbes's Leviathan, a particularly telling instance can be extracted from Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor in their recent little book, On Kindness (2009). Leviathan for them provides ‘the ur-text’ set against the efficacy of kindness since in it ‘men’ are simply, very simply, ‘savage beasts’ and utterly selfish, having no natural affection for society – the ‘isolated … self’ as against ‘the inherently social’ (Phillips and Taylor 2009: 5, 27–28). These are the sort of ‘men’ completely needful of an all-powerful sovereign Leviathan so as to effect and enforce some degree of enduring sociality. Admittedly, Hobbes would not insist on an animating kindness to facilitate social relation, but his ‘men’ are nonetheless intensely social beings, as we will see.

What I will now derive from Hobbes is a sovereign Leviathan which integrates the common conception of it with its sociality, with its constituent responsiveness to and dependence on its subjects. Following the titled direction, then, and asking what comes ‘after sovereignty’, the answer will be ‘sovereignty’, but an existent sovereignty perceived differently to the norm. And the compositional key to this sovereignty becomes something of an answer to the subtitled ‘question of political beginnings’ – an answer insisting on the imperative of always and intrinsically beginning.

Beginning II

Going for now with the grain of conventional scholarship, and as is excessively well known, Hobbes takes us to a state of nature in which the ‘life of man’ is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes 1991: 89). This is a state where we are in opposition to each other in ‘as is of every man, against every man’ (Hobbes 1991: 88). In this way Hobbes implants the savage within ‘man’, a location where it has attributively endured. So wholly are we pervaded by our bellicose passions that we must perforce transfer ‘all power and strength’ to Leviathan, and so much so that the subject is committed to all actions of a Leviathan that ‘beareth their Person’ – ‘none of his Subject … can be freed from his Subjection’ (Hobbes 1991: 120, 122). Anything less than this total commitment to Leviathan leaves scope for our recusant natural passions and for a reversion to the lawlessness of the savage state, ‘to the confusion of a disunited Multitude’, ‘to the Sword’ (Hobbes 1991: 122–23).

Understandably enough, to have such complete and continuing sway, this ‘great Leviathan’ would have to be conceived of as a ‘Mortall God’ (Hobbes 1991: 120). Like any competent monotheistic deity, this god would have marvellously to combine being determinate with an illimitable efficacy. Unlike the ‘Immortal God’, however, the sovereign Leviathan has to do this without recourse to a transcendent reference fusing these contrary dimensions of its being (Hobbes 1991: 120). Admittedly, a way of fusing these dimensions could be derived from Hobbes decreeing that, cling as we must to this mortal god, we remain ‘under the Immortal God’ (Hobbes 1991: 120). As we will see shortly, in Leviathan Hobbes sets the domain of this mortal god distinctly and self-sufficiently apart from the religious, with the ostensible exception of the laws of nature which we will also come to shortly. Even where, in another work, Hobbes would recognize some explicit effect of the religious, this would hardly challenge the pervasive hold and the surpassing determinacy of the mortal god, since being under the sway of the immortal God would only enable the subject to disobey a sovereign denial of the Christian faith or of the lordship of Christ; otherwise and unreservedly God ‘speaketh by his vice-gods or lieutenants here on earth’, by those who hold sovereign power (Hobbes nd a 101, 114–15).

Hobbes offers no resolvable way in which the being-in-the-world of this mortal God could be comprehended, and much of this present chapter will revolve around law as such a way, but persisting for now with the standard scenario, we find that in it ‘law’ is constituently contained as the ‘Command’ of the sovereign Leviathan ‘addressed to one formerly [that is, already] obliged to obey him’, the sovereign being ‘the Force and Power of the Law’, the ‘common Power’ necessary for there to be law (Hobbes 1991: 90, 183, 471). And it is the sovereign ‘not only by whose authority the Lawes were first made, but [also] by whose authority they now continue to be Lawes’ (Hobbes 1991: 185–86). Hobbes decrees furthermore ‘that none can make Lawes but the Common-wealth; because our Subjection is to the Common-wealth only’, and since the sovereign is the representative of the Commonwealth ‘the Sovereign is the sole Legislator’ (Hobbes 1991: 184).

Beginning III

With a work that should transform the study of Hobbes, James Martel, in his Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat, reveals a very different Leviathan, one in which a people can be-together and generate authority in ‘horizontal’ relations as opposed to the vertical or descending subjugation to the sovereign (Martel 2007: 135). This comes about in two linked ways. With one, it is in our creative ability of reading that Hobbes finds a generative capacity transposed to political formation (Martel 2007: Chapter 2). With the other, Martel ‘takes seriously’ Hobbes's engagement with religion and scriptural interpretation and in so doing he finds that for the Hobbes of Leviathan we exist in an ‘in-between time’, a time between what was once and will again be ruled by God, but a time in which and for now we as a people are left to our own devices even as we are prompted towards the realization of our being-together by the ‘pure and empty hypostatization’ that is the Holy Spirit (Martel 2007: 102, 184). To repeat somewhat, Martel sets the standard sovereignty derived from Hobbes against the radical democracy enabled by the horizontal relations of our being-together, relations that would subvert and even displace Leviathan as sovereign subjugation. My endeavour here will accord with Martel's in affirming the constituent force of our being- together, but it will do so in a way that derives from the operatively secular and modern quality with which Hobbes endows our in-between time. In this perspective, our being-together, whilst still subverting the standard reception of Leviathan, nonetheless goes to create sovereign affect. All of which will, in the result, accord also with Martel's own endeavour ‘to establish how for Hobbes the sovereign is by his own argument an idolatrous figure (or what he also calls a “separated essence”), something that purports to stand in for but actually supplants what it represents' (Martel 2007: 16; and see also 132).

In empathy with Martel's own nuanced reading, then, one can find in Hobbes forces formative of a people that connect generatively to, and qualify, the power of the sovereign Leviathan. In the beginning, as it were, the sovereign is the creation of people covenanting with each other. That entails something of a threshold, and classic, problem in that for Hobbes ‘when there is no Civill Power erected over the parties promising … such promises are no Covenants', for ‘the Validity of Covenants begins not but with the constitution of a Civill Power, sufficient to compell men to keep them’ (Hobbes 1991: 101, 102). Clearly an exception has to be found and Hobbes also affirms that ‘Covenants entered into by fear, in the condition of meer Nature are obligatory’ (Hobbes 1991: 97; and see Hobbes nd b: 25). Despite the compelling element of fear, and despite the dismal condition of the state of nature, Hobbes does recognize that some sociability and normative cohesion exists in the state of nature, such as some ability to covenant within that state and not simply to escape it, and the existence there of ‘the Lawes of Honour’ (Hobbes 1991: 99, 118 and cf. 89). As well, the primary quality of the state of nature would seem to be radically qualified by Hobbes declaring: ‘I believe it was never generally so, over all the world’ (Hobbes 1991: 89).

What is most significant here, however, is that the natural state is freighted with numerous laws of nature, and these continue into the formation of civil society, binding not only the subjects of the formed sovereign but also Leviathan itself. And, to borrow Runciman's apt observation ‘[t]hroughout his long writing career, Thomas Hobbes … displayed a striking consistency on his central political concerns: the scope and content of the laws of nature (which boil down to “the Fundamentall Law of Nature, which is to seek Peace, and follow it”)’ (Runciman 2008: 16; Hobbes 1991: 92). Furthermore, Hobbes segues the ‘Laws of Nature’, those ‘Articles of Peace’ which ‘Reason suggesteth’, immediately after his account of the dire element of the state of nature, and he does so by way of ‘mans … possibility to come out of it consisting partly in the Passions, partly in his Reason’ (Hobbes 1991: 90). And, so, whilst Hobbes affirms repeatedly, in some such terms, that ‘the Law of Nature … is undoubtedly Gods law’, this law is ‘found out by Reason’ (Hobbes 1991: 91, 198).

In a more engaged mode, and with ‘the Lawes of Nature, dictating Peace, for a means of the conservation of men in multitudes’, what then becomes pertinent is the ‘fifth Law of Nature, [which] is COMPLEASANCE; that is to say, That every man strive to accommodate himself to the rest’, an imperative founded in ‘mens aptnesse to Society’ (Hobbes 1991: 106, 109). What ensues from this and from the like laws of nature, and drawing on Samantha Frost's wonderful analysis, is a civil society constituted by way of the interaction of singular beings, beings who are themselves constituted by way of that very interaction (Frost 2008: especially Chapter 4). The singularity remains insistent. It entails the rough equality of ‘men’ in the state of nature which calls for a surpassing force to quell their bellicose tendencies. Some such equality persists ‘because men that think themselves equall, will not enter into conditions of Peace, but upon Equall terms’ (Hobbes 1991: 107). With this modernist equality, there can be no transcendent a priori – no god, strange or otherwise, before us. What is more, this primal equality is necessary for that fullness of interaction between singular beings which goes to constitute civil society since, if there were any determinative a priori, to its effective extent there would not be such interaction.

Even as ‘Acts of Sovereign Power’ can create an ‘Inequality of Subjects’ for the time being, the sovereign is bound by the laws of nature (Hobbes 1991: 237, 238; and generally Hobbes 1991: Chapters 29–30). Or, in Frost's concentrated perception, ‘the laws of nature are a condition of politics and therefore of the constitution of the sovereign’ (Frost 2008: 118). The pivotal issue now becomes: in what way or ways is the sovereign bound? On the answer depends the quality of politics, and of the constitution of the sovereign, most pointedly for present purposes the constituent connection between sovereign and subject. Hobbes often equates natural law with ‘Morall Lawes’ and ‘Morall Virtues’ (e.g. Hobbes 1991: 197). And there can be no doubt Hobbes intends to endow the laws of nature with a deontological charge, and endow them even with the formidable sanction of ‘the pain of eternal death’ should there be ‘breaches of the law of nature’ by the sovereign (Hobbes nd a: 122). Yet, in a crucial passage, Hobbes finds ‘the true and onely Moral Philosophy’ to be the ‘science of … the Lawes of Nature’ (Hobbes 1991: 110). That science would instrumentally endow the laws of nature with content, assessing their efficacy as ‘the meanes of peaceable, sociable, and comfortable living’, and seeing them not so much as ‘Lawes’ but as ‘Conclusions, or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of … men’ (Hobbes 1991: 111). So, with the eleventh law of nature, ‘if a man be trusted to judge between man and man, it is a precept of the Law of Nature that he deale Equally between them. For without that, the Controversies of men cannot be determined but by Warre’ (Hobbes 1991: 108). Or, to take one more instance, ‘A sixth Law of Nature, is this, That upon caution of the Future time, a man ought to pardon the offenses past of them that repenting desire it’; not to do so ‘is signe of an aversion to Peace; and therefore contrary to the Law of Nature’ (Hobbes 1991: 106). This is a little bare. It can be supplemented by Arendt's more incisive account of forgiveness as imperative for continuate sociality (Arendt 1958: 237, 240).

Given sovereign dependence on subjects and on conditions maintained by them, these subjects would have to be more effective than is the supine variety of subject normally derived from Hobbes – effective as autonomous and as constituently contributing to Leviathan. And such proves to be the case. The same law of nature impelling ‘men’ to enter into the primal covenant by which they created Leviathan does not ‘command any divesting of other rights, than those only which cannot be retained without the loss of peace’; and indeed ‘many rights are retained, when we enter into peace one with anothe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Leveraging Leviathan
• 2 On the subject of sovereigns
• 3 Sovereignty after sovereignty
• 4 Sovereignty without sovereignty: Derrida's Declarations of Independence
• 5 Freedom after the law: Arendt and Nancy's concept of ‘The Political’
• 6 Exception and event: Schmitt, Arendt, and Badiou
• 7 Rival jurisdictions: the promise and loss of sovereignty
• 8 After sovereignty: spectres of colonialism
• 9 What comes after sovereignty?
• 10 Polymorphous sovereignty
• 11 Giorgio Agamben: thought between two revolutions
• 12 Walter Benjamin, sovereignty and the eschatology of power
• Index