The Mythological State and its Empire
eBook - ePub

The Mythological State and its Empire

David Grant

Share book
  1. 12 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Mythological State and its Empire

David Grant

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

We see the modern State as the most rational form of governing yet devised, and one which properly recognises our inherent individual rights. However, as the histories of colonialism and imprisonment reveal, it is also an intruder into the lives of generally unwilling individuals, constraining rights.

This book looks beneath the contradiction to see an entity willingly sustained by all individuals and for which we forgo our responsibility to and for ourselves. We place ourselves in the hands of those interests that promise to deal with our fears and desires the best.

Probing the work of political thinkers from Hobbes to Rawls, the book discovers a State that is a real, mythological entity, spreading across social and geographic space and concerned first with satisfying our two passions. Understanding this mythology may allow reason to emerge from its service to fear and desire, so that the modern State could become truly modern.

This book will be of interest to scholars in Sociology, Politics, Philosophy, and Law.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on ā€œCancel Subscriptionā€ - itā€™s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youā€™ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoā€™s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youā€™ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weā€™ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is The Mythological State and its Empire an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access The Mythological State and its Empire by David Grant in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Politics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2010
ISBN
9781135858988

Part I
The Nature of Political Mythology

1
Introduction

PREAMBLE

The modern State is not modern. It is a mythological entity created and sustained to satisfy our deepest instincts, fear and the desire for sympathetic conditions of existence. It is not the product of reason but of reason in the service of myth. Emerging from this condition into political modernity would mean understanding the mythological nature of our fundamental political presumptions, including the idea of the State, in their long passage through the political tradition from Hobbes to Hayek and Pettit. This would also mean seeing liberalism and republicanism as mythological strategies, the function of which is to repair and sustain this myth of the State. Yet facing this challenge and modernising our political presumptions might bring an end to the manufacture of the docile and productive individual and establish Enlightened self-responsibility as the dominant personal code.
This work is an exploration of the meaning and implications of the connections between these ideas. Its primary focus is therefore an extensive examination of political mythological thinking and it will undertake this through a consideration of the emergence and persistence of the State as the pre-eminent example of the kind of mythological entity described by Blumenberg. In doing so, this work sets out to explain and test a particular three-part proposition. The first part is that strategic variations in the application of liberal principles have sustained the idea of the mythological State, the foundation of this idea being that forgoing responsibility for oneself to the State will ensure that our fear and desire are dealt with through the creation of freedom, autonomy and responsibility to others. The second part is that, while the variations in the idea have been pursued over time, strategic variations in the application of liberal practices have actually dealt with fear and desire through the manufacture of docility and productivity. The third part is that individuals typically forgo their self-responsibility willingly and submit to such practices due to the seductive power of the mythological idea of the State.
This exploration shall be undertaken by looking at a range of key thinkers within and outside the political tradition, but often against the grain of the usual readings of them. One argument here is that it is the contributors to the modern political tradition from Hobbes to Hayek and Pettit who have, unaware of the mythological presumptions of their respective political philosophies, engaged and perpetuated such thinking in their interleaved accounts of politics and the State. In doing so, the tradition has perpetuated a notion of modernity which is characterised by pre-Enlightenment presumptions. This is not to say that the modern State is not legitimate, but that it is not truly modern. This lack of true modernity, therefore, is due to the persistence of pre-Enlightenment, in fact of mythological, thinking.
The consideration of the work of the chosen thinkers will be undertaken through the prisms of liberalism and republicanism, portrayed here as mythological strategies. These strategies are mythological by virtue of their two component trajectories, the first claiming to establish an idea of freedom that satisfies these instincts, but which disguises the other, which induces or imposes the acceptance of normalising regimes on typically willing individuals. The social ontology of Wittgenstein is used here as the model of normalisation and the nature of such regimes has been revealed by Eliasā€™ account of civilisation and by Foucaultā€™s study of discipline and governmentality. These trajectories have, repeatedly over time, offered not only critiques but also positive proposals by which the long course of the political myth at least from Hobbes has been repeatedly repaired and so sustained. Thus through liberalism and republicanism we examine the political implications of the intersection of the ontological thought of Blumenberg, Wittgenstein, Elias and Foucault.
In this context, this work argues that the honoured notion of individual responsibility is highly problematic and that it reflects a range of deep flaws that inhabit our central political presumptions and arrangements. Despite the apparent similarity between them, but an appearance which hides a vast difference, it will be argued that a new notion of self-responsibility should take its place as a core personal code. In this, it will also be made clear how key principles of the Enlightenment remain of value and that they may be realised by adopting the arrangements and practices upon which self-responsibility is founded. Self-responsibility is principally denied by mythological thinking. Such thinking pervades the foundations of our political thought and makes the highly reassuring but false claim that, by creating widely empowered entities and inducing individual subjection to them, these instincts will be satisfied. It will be shown how such thinking thereby becomes the basis of the honoured notion of individual responsibility.
In effect, we are exploring the causal connection between human instinct and the nature of the arrangements of the modern State, a deep connection which prevents the realisation of Enlightened self-responsibility. This is a synthetic approach towards a new understanding of the modern State, the foundation of which is no longer faith but neither is it reason. It is reason in the service of fear and desire, and of mythology.
To enable a better navigation of this terrain, this chapter will now provide a somewhat wider view of the range of interconnected ideas that comprise this work. Because the Enlightenment has been put forward as a valuable reference point, we shall first explore its significance for the broad argument. This will be followed by an outline of the notion of self-responsibility, a foundational idea within any newly Enlightened approach, based on the acceptance of existential fear and on the optimal self-determination of oneā€™s conditions of existence. We shall then examine the grounds, drawn from the consideration of questions of the legitimacy and modernity of the State, on which political mythology has been established and sustained and how this denies the realisation of self-responsibility. These are grounds adopted and promoted by the political tradition through their construction and reworking of the idea of the mythological State and on which are built their ideas of reason, freedom, autonomy and responsibility but which disguise the manufacture of docility and productivity. The chapter will conclude with a broader outline of the notion of liberalism used here as the mythological tool with which we explore this wide landscape, and then with a statement that makes it clear how, in the end, this work is a consideration of the political implications of the continuing dominance of myth over reason.

ENLIGHTENMENT

The Aspirations of the Enlightenment
Since the Enlightenment has been presented as an aspirational reference point for this work, it is important first to say a few things about the sense in which that term is understood here and the extent to which this is drawn from the Enlightenment as a wide current in the cultural and intellectual history of Europe, as an historical reality. As the bulk of this work will show, there is no adoption here of the range of universalist, rationalist arguments and inferences from that historical reality. Nor, certainly, is there any general endorsement of the political philosophies produced by Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau or Kant as they might be argued to be Enlightenment figures.1 In fact, the arguments presented here are substantially a rejection of key political arguments of those thinkers and their successors within the tradition.
However, neither is there any simple acceptance of the external criticisms that have been made of the Enlightenment, whether by conservative reactionaries, Romantics or by radical political and social reformers.2 Rather, it is argued here that there is a way to look at the Enlightenment which draws out a sustainable intellectual theme and by which, at the same time, the presumptions that are displayed in the political theories of those key thinkers from Locke to Kant can be seen afresh.
This way of looking at the Enlightenment is to see it in its aspiration to be a liberating force. This is to say that provisional, rational incremental progress can be made in human affairs, one effect of which would be the gradual realisation of Enlightened political individuality. This sense of progress would result from the promotion of respectful self-responsibility rather than from continuing to address political questions inherited from medieval Christian ways of thinking and which are based on myth not reason.3 Although there is no endorsement here of the political theory that he developed from it, this is the sense given to Enlightenment by Kant: ā€˜Enlightenment is the human beingā€™s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of oneā€™s own understanding without direction from anotherā€¦. Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.ā€™ He continues: ā€˜For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the least harmful of anything that could even be called freedom: namely, freedom to make public use of oneā€™s reason in all mattersā€¦. The public use of oneā€™s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among human beings.ā€™4
Conservative Criticism of the Enlightenment
Seeing Enlightenment in this way helps to address certain criticisms levelled at it, especially by conservatives and Romantics. Nisbet gives some insight into the way that conservatives, generally against the arguments of radicals and liberals, responded to what they saw as the inevitably destructive implications of the Enlightenment and the modernity which it heralded. What Nisbet saw is that, whereas nineteenth century liberals sustained the faith of the Enlightenment by promoting the emancipation of manā€™s mind from religious and traditional bonds5 and radicals saw in it the dismantling of the institutional structures of oppression, conservative thought regarded the Reformation and the Industrial and French Revolutions that consequentially followed as having largely socially destructive effects.
These effects included the equalitarianism that ended traditional hierarchy and authority, the excesses of centralised popular power, the substitution of passion for the restraints of tradition, the replacement of sacred values with impersonal norms of contract, the decline of religious and political authority in favour of power, the loss of liberty not as freedom but as principled right, the debasement of culture through mass dissemination and the sense of progress that saw the past as bad and the future as best.6 In saying so, conservatives rejected the Enlightenment claim that individuality, progress, contract, nature and reason were means by which the oppressions of traditional arrangements, which they saw as good, could be relieved. They preferred the traditionalism of the Middle Ages to the analytical reason of the Enlightenment, as they did its communalism and kinship to later individualism. The main reasons were that the claimed progress only brought, to their eyes, the tyranny of popular sovereignty, the poverty and degradation of the working class, the instability that came from the conversion of landed property into capital, the alienation that came with industrial cities and the growth of technology.7 They also saw the instability that came with the abolition of the guilds and corporations, the undermining of the patriarchialism of the family and the loss of moral influence that came with the subjugation of the Catholic Church to the State, which took control of education and welfare, one manifestation of which was the slide into Jacobin terror.8
It might well be said in response that to visit on the idea of Enlightenment the sins of those who took improper advantage of its loosening of the oppressive bonds of tradition is misjudged, even unfair. It might also be said that the proper response to such sin, where there was sin, was not to revert to oppressive tradition, or ā€˜mythā€™ in terms that will be explored here, but to seek a new way, a radicalisation of the originating sentiments of Enlightenment, of those sentiments expressed by Kant.
Criticism of the Enlightenment from Romanticism
A different attack on Enlightenment comes in the name of Romanticism. Berlinā€™s argument is that this tradition dealt a blow to the Enlightenment from which it could not, and did not, recover. This is an argument with which this work disagrees, so long as one takes the Kantian aspiration of the free public use of oneā€™s own understanding to be the touchstone of the Enlightenment. Berlin refers to the impact of the arguments of Herder and, interestingly, of Kant, whom he sees as a father of Romanticism. From Herder he gathers three criticisms: first, the fundamental importance to being human that individuals express themselves; second, the notion of belonging, what it means to belong to a group; and third the notion that ideals are both often incompatible with one another and are irreconcilable.9 Berlinā€™s claim is that the importance of each of these is denied by Enlightenment thinking. In response, it may be said that, to the extent that Enlightenment thinkers denied the importance of these arguments, they were themselves wrong. However, Herderā€™s attack makes no mark on the primary Enlightened Kantian notion of the free public use of oneā€™s own understanding.
Regarding Kant, Berlin attempts to co-opt him in his criticism of the Enlightenment by portraying him as the father of Romanticism. He acknowledged that Kant was someone who ā€˜hated romanticism. He detested every form of extravagance, fantasy, what he called Schwarmerie, any form of exaggeration, mysticism, vagueness, confusion. Nevertheless, he is justly regarded as one of the fathers of romanticism.ā€™10 Berlinā€™s argument comes from his claim that ā€˜Kant was virtually intoxicated by the idea of human freedomā€™ and ā€˜In the case of Kant it became an obsessive central principle.11 For Berlin, ā€˜This was, of course, to assert the primacy of the will. In a certain sense Kant was still a child of eighteenth century enlightenment, because he thought that all men, if their hearts were pure, and when they asked themselves what it was right to do, would in similar circumstances arrive at identical conclusions, because to all questions reason in all men gives the selfsame answer.ā€™12 However, Berlin is saying that, despite his enlightenment rationalism, Kantā€™s emphasis on the independence of the will makes him a ā€˜restrainedā€™ Romantic.
The problem for this argument of Berlin is that the Kantian will is not the Romantic will, say of Schiller. He as much as admits this himself. Schillerā€™s theory of tragedy, Berlin claims, ā€˜is founded upon this notion of (spiritual) freedom ā€¦ and this is the way in which, perhaps more than through direct reading of Kant, it had such a powerful effect upon romantic art.ā€™13 Berlin also identifies the contrast between natur...

Table of contents