Worldly objects, the welfare state, and 'authentic' politics

According to Hannah Arendt in On Revolution, the degeneration of the French Revolution into the Terror was predictable as soon as the poor entered the political arena as direct actors, i.e., from the onset of the Revolution itself.  The plight of the starving provoked compassion; and -- as George Kateb summarizes Arendt's account -- this "intensely felt compassion" then "transformed itself...into an abstract pity for humanity, and pity...in turn transformed itself into immitigable anger that brooked no opposition and established a despotism that was meant to be radically remedial."[1]  

In this context Arendt contrasted "necessity," the unmet physical needs of 'the people', with "freedom," i.e., the ability/opportunity to participate, through speech and deliberation, in "the public realm."  In chapter 2 ("The Social Question") of On Revolution, she put the point this way:

When [the poor] appeared on the scene of politics, necessity appeared with them, and the result was that the power of the old regime became impotent and the new republic was stillborn; freedom had to be surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process itself.  When Robespierre declared that "everything which is necessary to maintain life must be common good and only the surplus can be recognized as private property," he...was, again in his own words, finally subjecting revolutionary government to "the most sacred of all laws, the welfare of the people, the most irrefragable of all titles, necessity".... It was necessity, the urgent needs of the people, that unleashed the terror and sent the Revolution to its doom.[2]

Passages like this support the view that Arendt drew a sharp distinction between social and economic matters on one hand and properly political concerns on the other; of a piece is her denigration of "compassion," which, in its focus on suffering, "will shun the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics, and lend its voice to the suffering itself, which must claim for swift and direct action, that is, for action with the means of violence."[3]  

However, Steven Klein offers a different reading of Arendt in an article published in the November 2014 issue of the American Political Science Review.  In "'Fit to Enter the World': Hannah Arendt on Politics, Economics, and the Welfare State" (APSR, v.108 n.4, pp.856-869), Klein argues, to quote the article's abstract, that  

[f]or Arendt, the danger is not the invasion of politics by economics, but rather the loss of the worldly, mediating institutions that allow economic matters to appear as objects of public concern.  Reconstructing her account of these mediating institutions, [the article] show[s] that Arendt's analysis opens up novel insights into the relationship between democratic action and welfare institutions, drawing attention to how such institutions transform material necessity into shared objects of attachment, judgment, and action.

Klein's argument, which proceeds through detailed exegesis, is quite dense and so rather than trying to summarize all of it I'll focus on a few key points.  Though Arendt's position on the modern welfare state is "equivocal" (p.857), Klein writes, implicit in her work is a view of the welfare state as containing "mediating institutions that transform [material] necessity into the worldly interests and concerns that are possible, indeed unavoidable, objects of political activity." (p.858)  Thus, according to Klein, "far from stringently upholding the divide between politics and economics," Arendt "elucidates sophisticated accounts of both the possible interrelationships between them and the vital importance of economic matters in political life." (p.857) 

The article's title comes from a passage in The Human Condition in which Arendt writes that 'work' -- one of that book's central categories -- transforms "'the naked greed of desire' and 'the desperate longing of needs' into things that 'are fit to enter the world'" (p.862, quoting The Human Condition), where 'work' "signifies those activities that transform raw materials into lasting tools and objects of the built human world." (p.858)  Bare needs, carrying "the urgency of the life process itself" (to quote the passage that opens this post), have to be changed into 'worldly' things to become proper matters for political action, in Arendt's view.  Klein thus emphasizes Arendt's concern with the public face, or 'worldly' aspect, of economic institutions (see esp. pp.861-63); it is this aspect that 'mediates' between bare needs (or 'necessity') and the public realm.        

For most of Klein's article, the idea of "mediating institutions" remains at a high level of abstraction, but his concluding section gives some contemporary and historical examples tied to the argument about the welfare state.  For instance, a pension can be seen as a 'worldly object' because it not only "satisfies material needs of citizens but...also provides [them] with a stable location in the world and a measure of glory or public esteem...." (p.866)  Bismarck's social insurance funds, contrary to his intentions, assumed a 'worldly' character when they became sites of political action, as socialists demanded "that workers... play an active role in their democratic administration." (p.868)  In this way workers could become, in the words of one activist of the era, "'the most knowledgeable interpreters of their own wishes and demands.'" (p.868) 

Let's return to the period of the French Revolution.  Arendt held that there were, in Klein's words, "some important, albeit limited, mediating and worldly institutional structures" in late 18th-century Europe (p.861), but these were not enough to prevent the 'unmediated' entry of social needs into the public arena.  She viewed the U.S. Constitution as a worldly object, a "tangible worldly entity" (p.861, quoting On Revolution, p.157) that "open[ed] a non-instrumental space of appearance and judgment," but "the relative absence of such worldly, shared objects in Europe" (p.861) sent the French Revolution, in the words of the passage from On Revolution quoted at the outset of this post, "to its doom."  While the notions of 'mediation' and 'worldly objects' may shed light, as Klein suggests, on the modern welfare state and its institutions, the usefulness of these ideas for interpreting the French Revolution seems more doubtful. 

Arendt's views on the relation between economics and politics evidently can be read in more than one way.  I take Klein's reading as, among other things, an effort to broaden the sense of what counts as 'authentic politics' in Arendt's sense.  Klein argues that such politics can be found not only in, to use Kateb's words, the "eruptive" and "creative" moments of founding a new polity[4], but also in settings that are less dramatic but no less important.

And why is 'authentic' politics so significant anyway?  As Kateb explains, Arendt's answer is that humans are most distinctively human and also freest when engaged in it.  To "affirm existence against...causes for despair or resignation" and to "affirm the human stature," she seeks "evidence of freedom in activities that 'traditionally, as well as according to current opinion, are within the range of every human being'" (quoting The Human Condition).[5]   To engage in authentic politics is to bring within reach "the sheer exhilaration of action and, relatedly, the experience of being free."[6]  To broaden the conception of authentic politics is thus to expand the idea of freedom.  

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Notes
1. George Kateb, "Political Action: Its Nature and Advantages," in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge U.P., 2000), p.140.

2. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Viking Press, 1963), pp.54-55 (internal quotation from Robespierre, Oeuvres (1840 edition), vol.3, p.514).

3. On Revolution (Penguin ed. 1990), pp.86-87.

4. Kateb, "Political Action," pp.134-135.

5. Ibid., pp.147-148. 

6. Ibid., p.145.

Noted

Buzan and Lawson open a symposium at The Disorder of Things on their book The Global Transformation.

Added later: The previous symposium at the same blog, on Anievas's Capital, the State, and War, should also be noted. (I've just been glancing at it and those interested in Marxian approaches to IR will find it worth a look, if not always especially easy going.)

Book review: The First Total War

David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 420 pp. (including notes, bibliography, and index).


Historians and social scientists do not agree, and likely never will, about when (or how) certain key features of the modern world originated.  One such feature or phenomenon that eludes universally accepted definition and a universally accepted date of origin is "total war."  International-relations scholars these days refer to "major war" or "hegemonic war" but don't use the phrase "total war" much, although Hans Morgenthau had used it, indeed had devoted a chapter to it, in Politics Among Nations.  At any rate, for most people the phrase "total war" brings to mind the world wars of the twentieth century; however, a good case can be made that the kind of war that engulfs whole societies was invented in the era of the French Revolution.  Although various writers have made this point before, in The First Total War David Bell explores it in detail, deftly combining cultural, intellectual, political, and military history.  

The intensification of warfare during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period reflected, Bell maintains, a change in the prevailing "culture of war," from one that assumed war was an unexceptional, normal phenomenon to one that viewed war in apocalyptic terms:  "A vision of war as utterly exceptional -- as a final, cleansing paroxysm of violence -- did not simply precede the total war of 1792-1815.  It helped, decisively, to bring it about" (p.316).  He argues that a mindset that demonizes enemies and presents conflicts in stark good-vs.-evil terms continues to affect the way Western societies prosecute wars.  Clearly this argument is influenced, perhaps overly influenced, by the rhetoric of the G.W. Bush administration, during which The First Total War was written.  Bell refers to Carl Schmitt a few times, and those who see the 'war on terror' as a 'Schmittian moment' will find support for their position here.  The book's value, however, lies perhaps not so much in its main thesis as in the wide range that it covers, from works of philosophy to poems and paintings to rhetoric to battles and strategy, and in its effort to draw connections among these.  Most of the book's detail cannot be covered in this post, unfortunately.      

***

The opening chapter describes the aristocratic and relatively restrained character of eighteenth-century warfare (the key word being relatively).  The nobles who dominated European officer corps before the French Revolution viewed their behavior on the battlefield as a kind of elaborate performance, similar in that respect to their behavior on the dueling field, on the dance floor, and (in certain cases) in the bedroom.

According to Bell, this aristocratic ethos took war to be a normal, ordinary part of existence.  During the Enlightenment that assumption came under a dual intellectual assault: on one hand, from various philosophers who saw war as irrational, primitive, and likely to disappear as commerce, civilization, and morality progressed; on the other hand, from writers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, who called war "one of the healthiest phenomena for the cultivation of the human race" (p.82).  The eighteenth-century nobility generally saw war as neither primitive (in d'Holbach's or Condorcet's sense) nor healthy (in Humboldt's sense), but as something one regularly did between May and October (see p.25).  The two-pronged critique of that view of war gave rise to what Bell calls "a new culture of war in embryo, one grounded precisely in the assumption of war's exceptionality" (p.82).  Add the idealization of the classical (Spartan and/or Roman) ideal of the citizen-soldier, as extolled by Rousseau and Mably and then by various orators in the Revolutionary assemblies, and the ground was prepared for a new style of warfare.  

Revolutionary and Napoleonic France led the way in the adoption of this new unrestrained and often brutal style of war, while the other European powers lagged behind.  And in the case of the counterrevolution in the Vendée and its violent suppression, described vividly in chapter 5, the French turned the brutality on each other.      

As for how and why the Revolutionary wars were launched in the first place, Bell emphasizes the belligerence of the faction known as the Girondins, and especially Jacques-Pierre Brissot.  They thought war would "regenerate" the Revolution.  While some scholars have seen France more as a victim of Austria and Prussia in 1792 than as an aggressor, Bell writes (pp.110-111): "The apparent weakness and chaos within [France] certainly tempted Austria and Prussia to behave more aggressively...but.... [w]hat proved decisive was that an influential group of French radicals [i.e. the Girondins] began to push for aggressive international action, in apparent contradiction of the declaration of peace [by the National Assembly in 1790]."   

After almost 200 pages, Bell turns to Napoleon, discussing Napoleon's character and the cult of personality that he fostered, as well as Napoleon's campaigns.  Even as French forces' often brutal suppression of insurrections in various parts of Europe (notably Spain) blurred or eliminated the civilian/combatant distinction, within France there was "a growing cleavage between military and civilian spheres" (p.217).  The legitimacy of civilian authority was eroded by crises, factionalism, and incompetence, while the citizen army's main loyalty increasingly went to its generals and to Napoleon in particular.  And although Napoleon as emperor was not exactly a military dictator, maintaining a civilian administrative apparatus and keeping or institutionalizing certain features of the Revolution, the influence of militarism on society and culture increased (p.243).  The casualty figures on all sides in the Napoleonic wars (not only from battle but, significantly, from disease) still have the capacity to shock, lending some credence to Metternich's claim in his memoirs that Napoleon told him: "I grew up on the battlefield.  A man like me does not give a shit about the lives of a million men" (p.251; see end-note on p.351).  Yet, as Bell remarks in the epilogue, Napoleon's legend has survived the gore for which Napoleon was responsible: "Julien Sorel [the protagonist of Stendhal's novel The Red and the Black] stands for millions of real men and women who have breathed in [the legend's] intoxicating fumes" (p.307). 

***

Not all historians are inclined to emphasize the discontinuities between the pre-1789 and post-1789 worlds as strongly as Bell does, nor will everyone be fully persuaded by his attempt to connect the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to the early twenty-first century.  Some will be irked by his dismissal of "trend analysis" as applied to armed conflict (p.315).  Bell's stress on the causal role of ideas, rhetoric, and ideology will be congenial or not, depending at least partly on the reader's prior commitments.  But whether one cottons to the main arguments or not, this book is well worth reading for its engaging narrative backed by solid research.  Students of international relations will find much of interest in The First Total War, and they may find it worth comparing to the approaches of political scientists who have dealt with the same period, such as Stephen Walt (in Revolution and War) or Mlada Bukovansky (in Legitimacy and Power Politics).    

Quote of the day

From Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire (1991), pp.97-99 (footnotes omitted):

The most powerful explanation for German expansionism...focuses on the domestic political consequences of Germany's late industrialization.... It was characterized by the comparatively abrupt development of large-scale heavy industry, centrally financed by bank capital and organized into cartels.... Its social concomitants were the divergence of agricultural and commercial interests, the organizational concentration of economic power, the immobility of investments and consequently of interests, and the emergence of mass political movements without the prior completion of a bourgeois-liberal political transformation.

This pattern had decisive consequences for the power and interests of the key actors.... Junker landowners... had an overwhelming incentive to use [their] political power to inflate the price of grain...through protective tariffs.... The military used its high degree of operational autonomy...to pursue...apolitical, offensive strategies for decisive victory.... Cartelized heavy industry used its market power, high-level political access, and political subsidies to mass groups to promote industrial protectionism and the building of a fleet while blocking a liberal political alliance between labor and export industry.

These group interests promoted policies that led to Germany's diplomatic encirclement: Junkers got grain tariffs that antagonized Russia; the navy and heavy industry got a fleet that antagonized Britain; and the army got an offensive war plan that ensured that virtually all of Europe would be ranged among Germany's enemies. Thus three key elite groups had the motive and the opportunity to advance policies that embroiled Germany simultaneously with all of Europe's major powers.

Abstract of the day

Peter Haldèn, "Republican Continuities in the Vienna Order and the German Confederation (1815-66)," Eur. Journal of Intl. Relations, June 2013:

This article argues that the German Confederation — deutscher Bund — (1815–66) was a form of rule built on early modern republican political theory. It was a ‘Compound Republic’ form of rule constructed to prevent the emergence of a system of sovereign German states as well as a single sovereign German state. Its purpose was maintaining peace and stability in Europe and safeguarding the autonomy of its member polities. Contemporary statesmen, intellectuals and scholars saw these purposes as complementary. A non-sovereign, polycentric and republican organization of the German lands was regarded as a natural and necessary component in a stable Europe free from war and revolutions. This article analyses the origins, institutions and policies of the German Confederation, with particular regard to how the means of organized violence were organized. It thereby demonstrates the implementation of republican ideas and purposes in the Bund. The article situates the Bund in 19th-century thinking about European stability and sovereignty, further demonstrating the prevalence of republican ideas on international order. Republican political theories and institutions differed sharply from modern theories and models of international relations. Consequently, the history of international politics, the European system of states and state-formation must be re-conceptualized more in line with historical realities.