Critical Theory and Political Modernity

José Maurício Domingues

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030020002
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030020019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book draws together philosophy, jurisprudence, political science, and international relations to study the main categories of political modernity and its development trends. Grounded in critical theory—from Marx to later currents such as the Frankfurt School—Critical Theory and Political Modernity circulates around state power and oligarchy as well as emancipatory possibilities from their foundations to the present, such as radical democracy. Domingues analyzes the main categories of political modernity, including the juridical dimension, to conceptually articulate its long-term processes of development. In so doing, he examines rights, law and citizenship, state and domination abstract and concrete, the political system, state power, freedom and autonomy, scalar configurations, political regimes, oligarchy and democracy.

Part IPart I

© The Author(s) 2019

José Maurício DominguesCritical Theory and Political Modernityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02001-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Dual Individual and Its Rights

José Maurício Domingues¹

(1)

Rio de Janeiro State University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

José Maurício Domingues

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1.1 The Split Nature of the Modern Social Fabric: Citizen and Private Agent

In modernity we face each other as individuals with basic rights, at the core of which is freedom. Or at least we are prone to believe we are—or ought to be—individuals in possession of basic rights, in which our freedom is guaranteed. These regulate—or should do so—our fundamental relations to one another, regardless of who we are. This relationship is objectified in the form of law and appears at once as political and apolitical. Political because it depends on collective decisions, apolitical inasmuch as it is—or should be, at least originally—based on universal reason and, once established, it is—or should be—beyond the squabble between distinct standpoints and the interested intervention of social agents. This process takes place in one particular sphere, which conditions the whole of social life. Beyond it we do as we please, as rights-holding individuals and provided we respect each other as legally free individuals.

Simultaneously underpinning and as a result of this legal construction, the dual individual stands at the centre of the social structuration of modernity. This implies the definition, imaginarily and institutionally, of all its characteristics through the establishment of a split order, of which it is the ostensible foundation. It cannot but exhibit a torn soul, as a divided being, immediately an individual citizen and a private individual. In the former it is defined by its abstract countenance; in the latter, concrete features establish who it is. Social reality as a whole, including its modern political dimension, hinges directly on this rift. This is a dialectical unit of contraries upon which everything else is directly dependent, notwithstanding the impossibility of deducing all the elements of modernity, even in this sole dimension, from it.

Our first task here is to outline this division. Beyond its intrinsic significance, this starting point will allow us to eventually bring out the most important aspects of political modernity, with the constitution of a secluded juridical-political body. This is not a reality extant in all types of social organization. It is a pristine feature of modernity, related to how one of the main aspects of the existential social question of power is solved within its bounds, namely, with the constitution of politico-bureaucratic apparatuses partly separated from the other dimensions of social process. Politics in principle would not have a warranted place in the latter, with social life utterly depoliticized beyond that dimension, in which, furthermore, the relation between politics and law was watered down, especially at the beginning of modernity. This is not to say that power is not present across the particular social formations constitutive of modern civilization. It surely is, especially because they are strongly stratified—in classes, genders, races, ethnic groups. Other civilizations have organized the existential question of power, inevitably present in all of them, in distinct ways. These have rarely been cast as so walled off from the rest of social life and even less so have they received the designation of politics or were considered according to their own and exclusive imperatives. As it seems, this was for the first time, in what regards conceptualization, explicitly and fully suggested by Machiavelli, with naked—political—power showing its face, henceforth becoming an explicit feature of how we think of it.¹ On the other hand, this was exactly what modernity tried to tame and liberalism strived to supersede through neutralized law-making, as we shall see in what follows.

Individuals exist only in and through social interactions, regardless of the ideological force of the notion of the individual such as present in most modern ideologies. Social interactions can be more or less stable, lending shape to social relations which are nothing except interactive processes that unfold according to reiterated patterns, which they also reiterate (no recourse to a reified and metaphysical notion of ‘structure’ being necessary in this regard). This has been one of the essential teachings of almost all sociological schools—and of those currents of thought, such as Marxism, that were not born as part of the discipline and were eventually understood as laying the ground for its development (even though some authors reified ‘structures’ or social ‘facts’—and, more rarely, individuals). Yet most people in modern social formations, what is usually called ‘society’, do not see things this way. Collective belongings are unavoidable aspects of the awareness people have of social life, but the imaginary construction of individualism, the object of countless studies, weighs heavily on the cognitive frames people deploy when they look at themselves and at the social world.

Marx’s The Jewish Question drove the point home very early on. Citizens (the citoyen, as he stated it, using the original French expression), as holders of political rights, and concrete individuals, who belonged to distinct classes (with a stress on the bourgeois of the then restricted electoral franchise) and religious groups (Catholics and Jews in the case at hand), furnished the twofold categories of his discussion. Capitalism had split human nature at its most intimate, creating a peculiar reality, although Marx had no inkling as to why such was the case beyond a vaguer view of it as a part of capitalist-bourgeois social structuration.² It is worth noting that Hegel had, before Marx, tried to theoretically reconcile both dimensions, an attempt that was similarly bound to fail since it rested on an artificial, abstract process, articulated merely in thought, not in actual social life.³ In a sense, Marx turned into an analytical and critical perspective what was a normative request in liberal thought.

Curiously, Marx never dealt with this issue again. He was very much attentive to how abstractions pervaded the social fabric, in tension with concreteness, above all in his analysis of the ‘commodity form’ as a ‘unit of contraries’, composed of (concrete) ‘use-value’ and (abstract) ‘exchange-value’. Regrettably, Marx never resumed this problematic at a political level. Dialoguing with him, Simmel noted that law, like money (and the modern intellect), is characterized by ‘indifference’ (Gleichgültichkeit) towards ‘individual properties’, abstracting from the ‘totality of life’s movement’. Then Lukács directly started off from Marx and the commodity as the basic element of the economic infrastructure, surely also bearing in mind Simmel’s insight, and worked out this idea as the fundament for all the split-up nature of social life in modernity, with its endless dualisms. Strangely, in political theory nobody picked this idea, even though Pasukanis suggested some possible lines of development in this direction in legal theory, and Poulantzas at some point threw up some not very systematic remarks on the topic.⁴ A risk remained, with deleterious consequences in Marxism, where perception of the issue was more acute, stemming from a sort of economism—that is, the lurking possibility that, once again, what was not directly economic would be causally reduced to it. The commodity was hence deemed responsible for abstractness, due to its double nature—use-value and exchange-value—and the fact that the latter had, under capitalist relations of production, the upper hand, its abstract character spilling over onto other dimensions. It is not unreasonable to ask whether this sort of response has not in a way reinforced the fetishism denounced by Marx himself, the ‘bourgeois’ stress on economic life and interests impacting even its main critical opponents.

Let us take a step back. As citizens, individuals connect and influence one another as in principle beings whose specific features do not matter and should be overlooked. As private individuals, their specific interests come to the fore. Abstract and concrete individuals therefore fabricate social reality, in their twofold existence, on each side of the divide, as a contradictory but complementary unit of contraries. This is as much an imaginary as an institutional reality (and Marx’s Capital was really, in a sense above anything else, a critical study of the capitalist imaginary, with its entwined institutional moorings). As a social form, dual individuality organizes personal and collective experience in modernity, furnishing people the lenses through which they see themselves and frame their environment. They thereby shape and further split social processes in this sort of civilization, both in imaginary constructions and in the development of institutions, mediated by practice (or Praxis). Dual individuality organizes our experience (or Erlebnis, or vivencia, with the deeper resonances of these words in German and Spanish—as well as Portuguese), mediating between our active relation to the world and its empirical reality. Citizenship—as citizenship-form—lies at its basis, with cognitive, normative and expressive aspects, which to a large extent define our identity, at first expelling whatever was not abstract to the other side of the modern divide. It is, in turn, premised on the rights-form, which is directly linked to the dual individual and is essential to its constitution. To be sure, much escapes the spell of these forms; experience, cognition, normativity and expressiveness span a much wider spectre, in which the societal side of social life is decisively important. Yet the abstract juridical-political side of these forms has in a sense priority over all else, to the extent that what lies beyond it has as a pre-condition the basic imaginary and institutional features furnished by rights and citizenship.

We surely must not take the analogy between the economy and the other dimensions of modernity too far, but in terms of an epistemological strategy and a basic con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Part I
• Part II. Part II
• Part III. Part III
• Correction to: Global Ramifications: Sovereignty and Autonomy
• Back Matter