administrative state

The camp is still with us. by Gerardo Muñoz

Immediately after the end of the Second World War, the historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring published a thin book in Havana with the title Weyler en Cuba: un precursor de la barbarie fascista (Páginas, 1947), which made a direct connection between twentieth century political movement fascism and the lurking shadow of the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler, who commanded the intense colonial pacification against pro-independence insurrection at the end of the nineteenth century in Cuba. It is to Roig’s credit how he managed, toward the end of the book, to capture the actuality of what he called “weylerism” of full-fledged totalitarian and imperial wars against populations that did not come to an end in spite of international law and the several peace agreements of the Second War victors. For Roig the structural positionality of politics even in the years 1945-1947 was still maximalist, all encompassing the total conditions of living of populations, and thus a direct instrument of capitalist rent through war making. What he termed “weylerism” or the new fascist barbarism was a new qualitative leap in terms of conducting war, which now realized itself in terms of population control and the veneer of “order”: “Todo lo que Weyler representó y practicó está vigente en la posguerra” [1]. 

The idea of “peace” (the United Nations was settled in the fall of 1945 with the active participation of Cuba, something that Roig would not have ignored) could only signal the continuation of an extreme form of extermination and the dispensation of cruelty. In fact, the Weyler model (weylerism), was very much an administrative form of pacification of population through encampment and survival. In his memoirs, Weyler himself justifies “reconcentraciones” of the population as a martial solution to answer insurrectional arson activity, in the form of an exclusionary space within the territory even if this meant mass starvation [2]. As Roig does not cease repeating in his postwar essay, the actuality of Weylerian command is not an image of the past, but something that is already an essential part of the world of today and surely of tomorrow. 

Today we are living Roig’s historical future, and we can say that his Weyler en Cuba: un precursor de la barbarie fascista (Páginas, 1947) has become as current as ever before. Just a few days ago we heard the Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States claim that Immigration Detenter Center in Florida’s Everglades could become a model for detention centers across the nation thanks to its spatial efficiency near airport runways that facilitate deportation flights and extraditions without due process. As observed by Stephen Bonsal as early as 1897, the Spanish reconcentraciones in the island of Cuba enacted by Weyler’s military command were all deployed near key military strategic sites of the colonial army [3]. 

It comes to no surprise that in the current public discussion about Immigration Detention camps in the United States, the discussion always pivots towards health and sanitary management of the centers, and not in the “dislocating localizations” of these evolving zones d’attentes that now are propping up near airports, shipping ports, and hinterlands of American metropolises [4]. If the camp, or reconcentraciones, is the sharp image of ongoing domestication of human beings, as a great twentieth century writer observed, it might very well be that the current metamorphosis of Weylerinism has become victorious because it has been rendered acceptable by an increasingly indolent and dormant Society.

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Notes 

1. Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring. Weyler en Cuba: un precursor de la barbarie fascista (Páginas, 1947), 216.

2. Valeriano Weyler. Memorias de un general (Ediciones Destino, 2004), 257.

3. Stephen Bonsal. The real condition of Cuba today (Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1897), 112.

4. Giorgio Agamben. Homo sacer (Stanford University Press, 1995). 175.

Movements at dusk. A note to a conversation. by Gerardo Muñoz

A recent roundtable entitled “American Constitutional Collapse”, organized at Red May, and now archived here, with Aziz Rana, Camila Vergara, and Michael Hardt should confront us with the limit of political form today. All the interventions were able to shed light on distinct angles of the current collapse of the American constitutional order, which has only intensified since the beginning of the new current administration, although its sedimentation, as it is well known, has deep historical legal-political itineraries. However, here I just want to register the question that I posed to the panel, which is one not alien to some of the chapters of La fisura posthegemónica (2025), and that concerns the exhaustion of constituent power. There are many ways of posing this question, but in the tradition of American republicanism, the most clearcut of the problem is to take seriously the end of historical social majorities as vehicles for enacting a ‘constitutional moment’ of democratic reformation.

Some of us remember that towards the end of the third volume of We The People: The Civil Rights Revolution (2014), Bruce Ackerman claims that in our epoch we might very well be entering into the dusk of social movements. Ackerman’s book is from 2014, that is, a couple of years before the landmark victory of Donald J. Trump’s first electoral victory of 2016, and written in the wake of the decision of Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which abolished substantive parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The sequence of the last decade has only validated Ackerman’s intuition about the effective collapse of movements as the driving force of American ius reformandi within the constitutional order (in other countries is no different, take Chile for instance, which we discussed two years ago at Red May, and that is also the story of the the ills of transformative constitutionalism).

However, to anyone that has paid any attention to the political turmoil in the United States in the last decade, it is completely clear that the paralysis of the constitutional system is far from being a state rigidity or stability, but rather it has shown itself to measure every social pressure through an equal force of legal force, testing the durability, probing the reach, and outsourcing the validity of implicit norms and guardrails within the tripartite structure of powers through an enacted process that some American legal theorists have called “liquidation”; that is, the adjudication of fixing and enforcing textural legal provisions in historical time. This means that what animates the internal process of American law is no longer that axiological conditions of political republicanism – representation and minimalist judicial review, separation of powers and state authority, congressional representation and autonomy of the legislation – but rather a stasis, that is both paralysis with respect to the the formal aspiration of classical social representation; and, at the same time, total legal mobilization, in which social majorities are oriented under the nexus of the administrative presidency that can take (it has taken) priority over institutional mediation and process – if anything should be learned in the last decade is precisely the effects of Moore v. Harper (2023) on the doctrine of the independent state legislature (in spite of its ruling at the Supreme Court); and, most recently, the legal showdown regarding process (or lack thereof) and the suspension of habeas corpus for migrants residents and illegal aliens, which according to an American Federal Judge, could prefigure as a potential invasion.

We have good reasons to assume that mobilization and social movements from below can no longer stand as the source of constitutional change. They must be taken at face value in order to avoid rhetorical platitudes: mainly, that any movement today is a vector in the ongoing stasis and decomposition, that ultimately animates (even if against its own intentions, as the progressives seems to ignore) the verisimilitude of state form in the age of stagnation. But this is not very different from the inchoate promises of the new right-wing populism that projects new historical heights of economic growth in epochal decline (and now the progressive programmatic calls for technocratic abundance coextensive to the administrative state).

It is perhaps in demobilization and a de-socialization derives where other horizons might soon emerge. If the modern epochality was defined by the energetic transfer of total social movements, our epoch of collapse will be shaped by that of non-movements outside political hegemony. There is no doubt that it brings paralysis and distress to the political thinker looking for historical reiterations. But then again, the anxiety for mimesis before a breakthrough is always dreadfully sharp.

The ascent of the Shadow Docket. by Gerardo Muñoz

In recent years there has been a steady but increasing practice in the American legal system that has passed unnoticed outside the corridors of law professors and practitioners of litigation, including the federal state that has summoned to its practical use: the emergency relief, or ‘shadow docket’ that puts the burden on the Supreme Court to decide on concrete questions without a formal hearing, fact finding, or without proper argumentative opinions of visible authorship (the judge who pens the opinion tends to deface his authorship). Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Supreme Court of the United States has increasingly expanded its so-called ‘shadow-docket’ in parallel with the merits docket to such an extent that, as some legal theorists have noted, the blurring of the borders between the first and the second have become so tenuous and intertwined that it would seem that the merits docket depends on the prior selection mustered in the shadow docket. As constitutional scholar Stephen Vladeck has registered in his The Shadow Docket (2023), a practice that historically was strictly tied to emergency relief for capital punishment executions, it has now become a normal vehicle to decide on the emergency contingencies, while at the same time exercise discretionary judgement regarding the merits, or actual dispute, of case pending future review that might never be considered at all [1]. 

It must be said that the selective practice of cases by the court through the notion of “certiorari” on merits cases was in itself a decision on the exclusivity of relief based on the criteria of major legal questions of interest to the court. But precisely the differentiation between certiorari and the shadow dockets grants sharp focus on their differences. On the one hand, the shadow docket fails to decide on “legal questions” – in fact, it avoids tailoring the boundaries between the other branches of government and itself, as some have noted – and, by the same token, its non-decision produces a precedent lacuna that further entrenches the ascension of the shadow docket, inviting an evermore practice of emergency relief to increase chances of ‘cert’. Contrary to expert opinion, this is a juridical situation that does not create the conditions for the normalization of the “state of exception”, since there is really no authoritative decision to stabilize a concrete order, which was the purpose of Carl Schmitt’s well known formulation about sovereign arcana in political theology. In a certain sense, we have already crossed this threshold. Rather, the shadow-docket as a juridical practice in the American legal order is an institutional symptom in which decision has been evacuated or rendered inoperative, so that emergent social needs enforce any specific arrangements and political vectors through an enacted order. 

Furthermore, the shadow-docket as a regularized legal practice at the highest court confirms the historical shift within American legal system from the empire of the courts to administrative departmentalized commands, which ultimately means that the formal tendency towards “delegation” should not be solely circumscribed in allocated powers of the different branches’ oversight and control, but rather is a product of a holistic tendency towards the emergence of a new form of social indeterminacy in which authority resides in the shadows. As Supreme Court Jackson writes in the “Per Curiam” dissent in Trump v. JGG  (April 7, 2025): “With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: we are just as wrong now has we have been in the past, with similar devastating consequences”. It is an astonishing statement from the Judge not only because of what it states, but also what it silences; mainly, that by leaving no trace at all of their argumentative reasons there is no precedent, and for that matter no process and thus no case. And what is a rule of law devoid of a case and precedent? The historical schism with respect to the tradition of Common Law that gives birth to its formal constrains should be utterly obvious. Ultimately, this evidences the uttermost decline of the legal positivist horizon of the modern law rooted in legitimate authority (authoritas, non veritas, facit legem), in which arbitrary decisionism, legal motorization, and appeals to external values align themselves in order to render absolute determinacy between social life and legal execution without any preclusion in the form of a social trial without end. In this sense, it would be foolish to assume that the crisis of authority with the dissolution of auctoritas in the social spheres compartmentalized in functions of the “political community”; on the contrary, in the shadow docket scenario, authority “becomes more and more abstract, more and more inhuman and inexorable; more and more demanding” [2]. The orientation of executive commands is met with proportional digression of adjudicated moral pondering, and each time the force of legalization is vigorously expanded.

The decline of the juridical decision, one would be tempted to say, paves the way for the infinite demands at the expense of the arbitrary values formation of social gigantism. In the opinion about college admissions and racial discrimination of the 2023 merits docket cycle (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College), Justice Roberts wrote that “What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The constitution deals with substance, not shadows”. An ironic statement, indeed, given the preeminence of the shadow-docket in the adjudicative practice of the Supreme Court itself. While the administration of justice becomes a practice in the shadows, one cannot but be reminded of Plato’s protofigure of the Guardian of Constitution, the Nocturnal Council, as elaborated in the last pages of The Laws. And for Plato “if a state lacks such constituent [a Nocturnal Council], no one will be surprise to see it staggering from one irrational and senseless expedient to another in its affairs…that body must posses virtue in all of its completeness which amens that it will not take erratic aim at one target after another but keep its eye on single target and shoot all its arrow at that” [3]. On the tail opposite end of the platonic Nocturnal Council, the United States’ highest court’s gliding abdication seems to erratically aim at repeated targets that emerge blasting flickering lights from within the ever present shadow docket – indeed, a momentary luminosity, full of ‘technical terms’ and deferrals, that aim to showcase that the rule of law still endures in the House of Justice.

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Notes

1. Stephen Vladeck. The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court uses stealth rulings to amass power and undermine the republic (Basic Books, 2023), 19.

2. Theodor W. Adorno. “On the Problem of the Family” (1955), Endnotes, 2022: https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/theodor-adorno-on-the-problem-of-the-family-1955 

3. Plato. The Laws (Penguin Books, 1975), 520.

On American despair. by Gerardo Muñoz

The rhetoric of “decadence” now prevalent in United States has reached such heights that, regardless of political orientation, it is clear that it has become a pretext for a desired take off and accession from the objective  stagnation and paralysis. Paradoxically, the assumption that there is “decadence” is revered as a moment of forthcoming light and rejuvenation; and, thus, as a “crisis” that can be identified and managed through the end. As it is well-known, for some critics of decadence the Golden age of American life was the landing on the moon and the population boom of the 1950s; technology and family. The elements are self-serving: to accelerate the reproduction of the human species, and to lead technological gigantism against new geopolitical competitors (AI, chip wars, Green economy, etc).

In the early twentieth century Americanism was a benefactor of private Fordism (everyone could enjoy his or her car, that is, their increasing isolation), but in principle things have not changed much a century later in terms of the outlook and the techno-administrative power. But the one thing that has changed is that the age of increasing productivity and formal production is no longer the objective coordinates of social relations; rather, depopulation and stagnation are the new variables that public powers that must be governed through its effective processes. Ultimately, this also implies that the waning of the high-modern state is no longer effective, and so the established discussion about “race to the bottom” fails to understand that there is no bottom. Hence, the only race is toward planetary destruction.   

And what is curious to note is that even those that have identified the epochal crisis of Liberalism can only exacerbate and contribute to the acceleration of the ongoing destruction with cultural and rhetorical veneers notwithstanding. The ‘postliberal’ commitment to the fantasy of a “new policy of re-industrialization” cunningly allows the autonomy of state-sovereign capacity as the main orientation within the growing desert of administrative functions. In fact, this is a fort da moment in which policy makers can be in favor of empowering the nexus between executive power and the federal bureaucracy; while, at the same time, the mouthpieces of these policies can promise a dismantling of the administrative state in a post-Chevron era. This schizophrenic position is not a symptom of mere anachronistic derailments of a political movements, it is also an expression of the desperate attempts of American failed (and to a large extent non-existent) political elites to find a formal mediation between state, administrative coordination, and constituent power, precisely because this nexus is broken and in shackles. 

And truth be told, no piecemeal or nudge-driven re-industrial protectionism is “enough” to cure the social angst and despair of contemporary American subjectivity at all levels of human experience. It has been two honest economists, Anne Case & Angus Deaton in the book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2021), who taken noted that what they call “deaths of despair” is the central social affection of contemporary America, which fuels the slow but steady self-annihilation of the life that no longer truly lives (and paralyzes the economic framework as well). And, in turn, what outlives the hegemony of social domination is the regulation of pain and despair as the last dispensation of this unliving.

The necessary oblivion of the social production of the deaths of despair is what remains necessary so that a pseudo-theological framework of imperial “decadence” can retain its competitive narratives in the abyss. The end of real forces of autonomous production have led the way into the production of pain, which as Gianni Carchia clearly saw in his reading of Michelstaedter (Retorica del sublime, 1990), is a form of active ethical communication between souls. For all the alleged talk about spiritualism, theology, and instrumentalized Christianity in times of “decadence”, the high point of Americanism remains a techno-administrative apparatus that can only produce and conceal the prolongation of social pain. Precisely, “the parabola of the impossible so that any notion of the ‘good’ fails to be affirmed in this world”. 

On the Highest Office. by Gerardo Muñoz

The Supreme Court of Colorado has recently upheld the constitutional argument developed by two constitutional scholars, William Baude & Michael Paulsen, that disqualifies former President Trump from a presidential nomination under section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. According to this legal argument by one of the nation’s renowned legal originalists, any former public official who has taken an “oath” to the Constitution and engages in a rebellion or insurrection is disqualified from returning to public office as expressed in the letter of the Reconstruction Amendment. What is more, section three is ‘self-executing’, which means that it applies through adjudication by the courts without having to pass by legislative majority from Congress. Regardless of the future outcome of the contentious case, what is remarkable is how the development of American democracy – centered on the republicanist innovation of electoral power and voting, if we are to believe Sanford Levinson’s hypothesis – bends towards an executive constitutionalism that sits way above the political representation mediated by constituent power (Congressional authority) [1].

And insofar as to the normative nuances of the case are concerned, the application of section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment does not express a constitutional crisis as much as it reveals the system of the constitution‘s arcana of power: “the officer” and the ‘highest office’. In fact, as many legal scholars have already noted, the center of the applicability of section 3 will be waged on whether the Presidential office qualifies as an “officer of the United States” or not [2]. Implicitly it should not be noted that this is the constitutional standard through which the case already presents itself. In other words, what is at stake in section is not only the betrayal of an oath, democratic legitimation, constitutional public meaning, or a violation of separations of power; what is at issue is the enduring force of an office and the command of the officer in a concrete institutional reality. 

And not just any office, but according to the opinion of the Colorado Supreme Court, it pertains to the “highest office” of the land, which is not lex scripta in Constitution but implicitly derived: “President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land. Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3″ [3]. As in the allegorical ‘Commandant’ in Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, the highest office follows the unwritten Executive office tradition in order to bar a former president (involved to some degree in an insurrection) for its own endurance: the being of command that must self-execute itself in order to be what it is, that is, the highest office [4]. The paradox, then, it is not just at the level of interpretative enterprises of a specific legal culture – in other words, what legal theory will allow judges to accept Trump as officer or non-officer of the executive branch, as Vermeule suggests – but rather, the fact that in order to preserve the veneer of democratic legitimation between the different conflicting public powers and its potential rise to “authoritarianism”, the highest office must rank at the center of the executive force of either general economy of deference and public legitimation [5]. This also speaks to the ‘royal’ tailoring of American republicanism (the monarchical force in the executive) in which the unbound dimension of the “highest office” also entails a constrained, impersonal, and thus anti-constituent dimension that shows its relief upsetting the modernist liberal forms of the separation of powers [6].

 From this picture it follows that the so-called post-liberal and virtuous calls for a neoclassical regime change perhaps have failed to grasp that this regime has always been beneath their own noses: the ‘highest office’ dispenses the soulcraft that subsumes civil society to the functions of the administrative state bypassing practical spheres of separation. If the arguments and debates about section 3 matter, it is precisely because it reveals the esoteric arcana (the highest office) of American structure of government runs parallel to its exoteric liturgical arcana (voting rights) – and, precisely, it it comes to no surprise that executive immunity under section 3 comes into full tension with voting rights in an unprecedented theater of active operations in which both levels of the arcanni convergence and collapse. In a way, this validates Carl Schmitt’s assumption that decision over exception is constitutive of every legal system, and that every legal system (insofar as it does not want to crumble under the abstraction of a general norm) arms itself with a sovereign decision. The highest office in the American constitutional system is the institution for the self-executing force of sovereign immunity. 

In this legal landscape, a recently published book, Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (2023), by classicist Melissa Lane aptly analyzes the binding notion of political rule with the public office in Plato’s Republic. In another epoch, the publication of such book would have been taken as a theoretical touchstone for either side of the constitutional crisis, since Lane’s intricate argument illuminates the original tension between political rule and office in a democratic polis; a highpoint of intensity that fractures office-holding (anarchos) as in the account of the “democratic man”  in the parabola of the young lotus-eater goes: “intolerance good breeding, anarchy freedom, extravagance magnificence, and shamelessness courage”  [7]. Thus, as Lane observes, the attitude of the anarchos is not merely achieving the erasure of power or government, but more specifically the destruction of the proper constitution of the office. It is also telling that the energy of the anarchos is not against the state or a “leader” (archontes), but oriented towards the civil magistrates and bureaucratic power; or, to put it in the language of modern American public law, against the administrative state. At the end of the day, the elemental unit of administrative law is the autonomy of the command of an agency / office of regulatory power dispensed from the Executive branch. And is not in the modern opposition of movement – institution the very friction between office and anarchos? If politics is reduced to this polarity, then there is no longer any paradoteon, a complex term that Plato in his late work associated with restraint and prudence when regulating music for the fulfillment of the kallipolis through the generations [8]. The highest office constitutes, in this way, an ur-officium, the arcana that binds the political system when all there is a system of commands.  

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Notes 

1. Sanford Levinson. An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century (Yale University Press, 2015). 

2. “Prof. Michael McConnell, Responding About the Fourteenth Amendment, “Insurrection,” and Trump”, The Volokh Conspiracy, August 2023: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/08/12/prof-michael-mcconnell-responding-about-the-fourteenth-amendment-insurrection-and-trump/ 

3. Supreme Court Case of Colorado, No.23S A300, 2023, page 84: https://www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file/Court_Probation/Supreme_Court/Opinions/2023/23SA300.pdf 

4. Giorgio Agamben. Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty (Stanford University Press, 2013), 84.

5. Adrian Vermeule. “The Non-Originalist Decision That May Save Trump”, The New Digest, December 2023: https://thenewdigest.substack.com/p/the-non-originalist-decision-that 

6. Adrian Vermeule & Eric Posner. The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic (Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.

7. Melissa Lane. Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (Princeton University Press, 2023), 304-305.

8. Plato. The Laws (Penguin Books, 1970), 291, 802d.

The ascent of the administrator. by Gerardo Muñoz

Today the political surface only seems to obfuscate the analyses of the real forces that move at different pace underneath the crust. When recently Emmanuel Macron referred to the popular unrest protest as “la foule…pas de légitimité face au peuple qui s’exprime souverain a traversé ses élus”, he was not only speaking as the sovereign, but as something more specific; that is, as an administrator. If the old sovereign stood metonymically for the totality of the whole constituent body, Macron’s political rhetoric cleverly distinguishes between the “groups” or “masses” (this is also the same term that Sigmund Freud deployed in his contestation to Le Bon’s theory of the multitudes in 1921), and the institutional mediation of the “People”. What is interesting, in any case, is the cleavage between the two figures becoming well delimited: one being on the side of political legitimacy, the other on its inverse pole of apolitical illegitimacy. The logistics of administration (or what I have called in recent research the administrative nexus) serves to conjoint this specific separation. By the same token, we should not let pass the occasion to recall that if Macron is a hyperbolic political commander of the West, it is precisely because he stands as the executive force at the helm of the administrative legitimacy (as a political elite, he was shaped at the École nationale d’administration).

What do we mean by administrator in this specific historical conjuncture? It goes without saying that modern French public law has a long and important history of droit administratif, which in France is structured around a dual jurisdictional system enshrined by an extensive legal case law and its juridical principles. The French system of droit administratif, however, is not to be understood as an amalgamation a posteriori of classical separation of powers, but rather a concrete institutional design within public powers. This was an institutionalist design that profoundly impacted Schmitt’s thought on the concrete order in the first decades of the twentieth century. The bureaucratic institutionalization was an integral organizational mechanism of legislative congressional practice. The rise of the administrative state differs from droit administratif insofar as it represents liquidation, as well as a thorough transformation of the modern system from within. In this sense, the rise of the administrative state is an excedent to bureaucratic legitimation – and Schmitt was right to characterize as the ‘motorization of law’, a force that he saw unleashing already in the overall tendency of European public law of the 1930s, although only taken to its fulfillment in the United States (something that Schmitt did not foresee) [1]. And if we were to sketch out a minimal phenomenological reduction of administrative law today we could state that it consists of the overflow of executive power through the exercise of the principle of delegation and the extension of intra-agency policy-police enforcement. What early on administrative law professors termed the revolution of an ‘administrative process’ has now come to full extension by subsuming the tripartite structure of the separation of powers to the administrative oversight of the space of social reproduction.

That Macron can only frame his political analysis in terms of “la foule” entails that he is already occupying (at least tendentially; and I can not speak myself for the concrete institutional transformation of the executive office in the French political system) and envisioning role of executive branch as a presidential administration. In an academic legal article that will exert an enduring influence in American public law, “Presidential Administration” (Harvard Law Review, 2001), Judge Elena Kagan stated that the era of executive administration had arrived; which rather than the supremacy of an institutional branch over others, it aspired to defend the orderly equilibrium to the total functioning administration of the whole system [2]. It is important to note that today’s ascent of the administrative state across the Western Anglo-Saxon public law is not rooted in maximization of bureaucratic rationalization nor in the authority of the charismatic office of a Reichspräsident as in the Weimar Republic (I have previously shown its difference), but rather in the production of delegation and deference of political authority that flows from executive power, while remaining bounded within a logistics of balancing and equity (in fact, the notion of equity has become the administrative unity of enforcing a positive production of exceptionality, but this is a discussion for another occasion). In other words – and as paradoxically as this may sound – the Macronite experiment with executive action based on Article 49 of the French Constitution, bypassing Congress, is a thoroughly habitual and normalized practice in the American legal system, which have led some jurists to claim a last farewell to the legislative body of the State – the same branch that Woodrow Wilson would describe as the ‘body of the nation’ in his seminal Congressional Government (1885).

All things considered, whenever Macron’s technocratic politics are described there is an amnesia to the concrete fact that Americanism is not just economic planning or the drive towards indexes of productivity and financial credit standards; it is also a specific governmental stylization. And this stylization is the administrative government, whose stronghold on public law should not be taken for granted. This means at face value that the empire of judges and congressmen (the “elected representatives” upheld by the Macron internal doctrine) is ultimately marginalized in the new center stage government occupied by an elite cadre of administrators and regulators in charge of grand policydesigns in virtues of expertise, rationality, adjudication, and compartmentalized decision-making process – that Kagan recommended should orient “a coherent policy with distance from politics and public opinion” [3].

Contrary to Macron’s republicanist rhetoric, the true and concrete ethos of the administrator is no longer at the level of classical modern political representation (elections, legislative body, judicial restraintment), but rather on the production of statute rulemaking balancing (equity) that unifies the aggregation of private preferences and calculations to the specific determinations of broad and discretionary public interests. At the level of the analytics of ideal types, this transformation sediments the passage from the political elite to the executive administrator of new normative indirect powers. The ‘americanization’ of Macron’s policymaking universe is centered on the exclusion of political governance or judgement in favor of abstract administrative principles (the so-called ecological transition tied to metropolitan or specific territorial energy hubs, to cite one example) and optimal regulatory determinations. What emerges at the threshold of modern republican politics is, then, the rise of a fragmented ‘la foule’ and the activation of police-powers (legality) through the procedures of statute enactment oriented at the unruly state of contemporary civil society.

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Notes 

1. Carl Schmitt. “The Plight of European Jurisprudence”, Telos, March, 1990, 35-70.

2. Elegan Kagan. “Presidential Administration”, Harvard Law Review, 114:2245, 2001, 2385.

3. Ibid., 2262.

Von Balthasar and the eclipse of humor. by Gerardo Muñoz


Some will surely remember the figure of the painter Tirtorelli in Kafka’s The Trial who executes portraits of monotone and serious judges and magistrates on demand. The aura of these portraits is of absolute austereness and seriousness, as if Kafka wanted to capture the lackluster liturgy of the empire of judges and their repetitive exercise of legal adjudication. This seriousness, however, must be contrasted to the comic dimension of bureaucracy, that is known to anyone who might have glimpsed at the administrative processes that control even the tiniest details of daily life (the literary and cultural objects are too many to even reference them). The comic and the serious are also visual tones in the exhibition of modern public powers. If the empire of judges is gray and inexpressive, the bureaucratic agencies have been rendered as playful even if they repeatedly yield tragic effects on anyone entrapped in the legal construction of the “case”.

I recall this, because if today we are in the rise of an administrative state, this fundamentally entails a collapse of the bureaucratic comedy and the judge’s seriousness. The joining of the two spheres implies not only a transformation of the legal culture in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but also a confusion regarding both the comic and serious that now form an integral techno-political unit. As humor eclipses, comedy becomes controlled, assessed, and weighted against what must be free-standing seriousness each and every time. This integralist institutional imagination, at first sight, could be taken as a return of theology of sorts; but, according to Hans Urs Von Balthasar, it is quite the contrary: the integralist suture is so alien to Catholic theology and the mystery that it only deserves to be taken as a distance from the divine. As Von Balthasar writes in Il Complesso antiromano (1974):

“For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the “progressives” nor the “integralists” seem to possess it—the latter even less than the former. Both of these tend to be faultfinders, malicious satirists, grumblers, carping critics, full of bitter scorn, know-it-alls who think they have the monopoly of infallible judgment; they are self-legitimizing prophets—in short, fanatics.” [1] 

And Von Balthsar reminds us that fanatic is a word that comes from fanum – “holy place” – which alludes to the site that the guardian must guard to keep the divinity at bay. In the same way today, the fanatic is the nexus that organizes the administrative process that covers all spheres of human activity and purpose. If this is the case, then one could say that our current society is “fanatical” not because of the new religious factions or outnumbering of social cults, but rather because new legal administrators exert their control in the guise of priests that speak the rhetoric of a social intelligible common good. This is, indeed, the ultimate comic aspiration of a very seriousness legal process (it impacts literally every living species) in which the precondition to safeguards the “good” must be exerted as to keep everyone away from the irreducibility of what is good, beautiful, and just.

The seriousness of the administrative agents is transformed into a perpetual laughter that secures a social bond where no transgression and sensation is possible. Against this backdrop, we see how Gianni Carchia was correct when suggesting that the passage from comedy to enjoyment (divertimento) renders impossible the laughter of redemption in a life that ceases to be eventful [2]. In this way, comedy mutates into a mere socialization of laughter. And the impossibility of entering in contact with the comic initiates the commencement of the social parody.

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Notes 

1. Hars Von Balthasar. Il Complesso antiromano. Come integrare il papato nella chiesa universale (Queriniana, 1974), 304.

2. Gianni Carchia. “Lo cómico absoluto y lo sublime invertido”, en Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1990), 153.

Two comments on Pedro Caminos’ essay on Vermeule normative framework. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a forthcoming dossier on “common good constitutionalism” at the journal of the Universidad del Salvador (Buenos Aires), edited by the good offices of Guillermo Jensen, there is a featuring essay, “El concepto de marco normative en la obra de Adrian Vermeule”, by Pedro A. Caminos that makes an original attempt to read Vermeule’s legal theory from strong jurisprudential position, and it does so by suggesting that the ‘marginalization’ of the judiciary and the transformation of the administrative state (the Chevron paradigm) implies a normative framework, analogous to Martin Loughlin’s superlegality or Fernando Atria’s common norms (I would be tempted to also add to this list Scott Shapiro’s conception of law as planning). Although I agree with the normative framework in both scope and design of the constitutional theory, there are two underlying elements that I would slightly challenge for further discussion. The first element concerns the notion of tyranny, and the second one to the allocation of “politics” in administrative framework

First, towards the end of the essay, Caminos cites Robert Alexy’s rendition of the Radbruch formula in which no positive law can be tyrannical (or unjust) or it ceases to be legitimate law from an external perspective. For Alexy the conditions of intelligibility must answer not only to internal rules of recognition as positivism would have it, but, more fundamentally, to the challenge of the participant perspective, which is external to the rule of recognition. The problem with the Alexian antipositivist stance in Vermeule’s normative framework is that it would seem to come to a halt if the institutional design is constructed as “second best” safeguards for administrative decision-making. Indeed, the second-best optimizing rule is the same thesis defended in The Exeuctive Unbound (2010), which suggested that ultimate concerns for tyranny (trypanophobia) could ultimately serve the master that it seeks to prevent. To some extent the administrative state – if read from the internal point of view of executive power – is best understood as the optimizing and taming of presidential power through the normative framework. Now, it is true that in “common good constitutionalism” the emphasis against tyranny is counterposed by an objective morality proper to the ragion di stato, which explains why the “second best” optimizing rule is silently replaced by the determinatio that defines the construction zone of the praetorian decision making. The nuances here are important: whereas second-best optimizing rule has no moral purposiveness; the determinatio is by nature a moral discriminatory principle (ius). Whereas the Bartolist jurisprudence aims to tame the privately infused tyrannical forces for good government; the unbounded executive does not fear tyranny as long as it controls the immanent force of administration [1].

Secondly, Caminos derives from the normative framework the construction of a common legal space in which disagreements could flourish. And Caminos sees this as consistent with Schmitt’s concept of the political as the distinction between friend and enemy. But so far as the notion of enmity in The Concept of the Political moves through different determinations, it is an open question as to which determination are allocated or relevant to the normative framework. However, if what defines the “reasonable arbitrariness” of administrative adjudication is predominantly informed by cost & benefit analysis, it would seem that it is value rather than the political distinction the distinctive feature of its logic. This makes sense given the jurisdictional supremacy of the administrative state, which subsumed the legislation into the normative framework. As Carl Schmitt predicted it in his Tyranny of Values, in this context function of the legislator becomes that of a tailor of suturing and producing new mediations for value stratification [2]. But could one conceive the concept of the political within the values of administrative rationality? At the end of his essay, Caminos himself seems to think otherwise, and suggests that normative framework allows for a new conception of political friendship. Of course, in the regime of value administration friendship is defined first and foremost by those are “valued” or “devalued”. Ultimately, this would be strange conception of “friendship”, since, as De Maistre showed, the friend is always outside the margin of utility, and thus constituted outside value [3]. Hence the difficulty for an alleged new politics of friendship: either the concrete friendship is diluted into a “fellow man” (blurring the specificity of friendship) or embracing as friends only those that share common values that can be imposed to non-friends, but who are not recognized as formal “enemies”. This second variant is most definitely the common good ideal type. In either case, friendship and politics become two poles in the procedural organization of values: a hellish reality notwithstanding appearing as a ‘friendly’ paradise of values.

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Notes

1. Adrian Vermeule. Common Good Constitutionalism (Polity, 2022), 27-28.

2.Carl Schmitt. La tiranía de los valores (Hydra Editorial, 2012), 147.

3. Joseph De Maistre writes: “¿Qué es un amigo? Lo más inútil del mundo para la fortuna. Para empezar, nunca se tiene más de uno y siempre es el mismo; lo mismo valdría para un matrimonio. No hay nada que sea verdaderamente más útil que los conocidos, porque se pueden tener muchos y, cuantos más se tengan, más se multiplican las posibilidades en cuanto a su utilidad.”, in El mayor enemigo de Europa y otros textos escogidos (El Paseo, 2020), 212.

A Constitutional Absolutism? On Philip Hamburger’s The Administrative Threat. By Gerardo Muñoz.

AdministrativeThreatPhilip Hamburger’s most recent book, The Administrative Threat (Encounter Books, 2017), is a legal pamphlet as well as constitutional call to arms of sorts. Deliberately written for the general public with the intention of popularizing the central tenets of his otherwise more technical work Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (U Chicago Press, 2015), Hamburger fuses a warning with a call to question the increasing danger posed by the expansion of the administrative state in American public law. In his view, no other force and legal development is undermining the core and purpose of civil liberties as much as administrative law, which today extends to all spheres of social life. This bureaucratic power is not only an existential threat to personal freedoms, but also a betrayal to the original intent of the Constitution.

The idea harboring this perception is that decision-making is only possible on purely market or commercial grounds, which administration continuously obstructs under the guise of regulation. The book cuts sharply through a martial tone: “For better understanding of the administrative threat one must turn to law…for although much administrative state power is economically inefficient, all of it is unconstitutional” (Hamburger 2). But how did the development of legality and American public law reached such a boiling point? This a question that Hamburger must sidestep, and at times reduce to a barely credible narrative regarding a handful of American scholars that studied German administrative law at the turn of the last century. Hamburger accurately notes that in the last century (roughly from 1917 to 2017), there has only been ‘rise and rise’ of administrative delegation. This is undeniable. James M. Landis records in The Administrative Process (1938) about 12-14 federal agencies in 1933. Today there are between 240-456 federal agencies, including sub-agencies, quasi-agencies, and departments. And as if more alarm is needed, each landmark opinion through the century by the Supreme Court has incrementally extended agency statutory powers for execution and judicial interpretation.

In what follows, I want to critically comment the three premises that support Hamburger’s attack on the legitimacy of administrative state: 1. a historical comparison with the King James monarchy in order to make the case that we are returning to a regime of legal absolutism; 2. that we are witnessing the corruption of the separation of powers, which has expounded extralegal boundaries; 3. and the libertarian assumption that civil liberties are prey to the tyrannical might of the administrative state. Hence, as Hamburger says verbatim, the administrative state is fundamentally disloyal to at least two tiers of governmental authority: on the one hand, to an arcana, and on the other, the more real ground of civil liberties and negative freedom (Hamburger 23). While the first lies in that of the level of principle, the second forms that of integrity. It is important to note that, as Hamburger does at the outset of the book, his critique is at the level of legitimacy. Hence, he is not necessarily interested in putting forth a critique of political economy or regulatory reform, which would entail an acceptance of the administrative state one way or another.

Let us take the first premise, which assumes that the administrative state brings about a new absolutism. Hamburger establishes a comparison with King James’s absolute monarchy, which represented a model of constant prerogatives and forms of adjudication to agency discretion, in permanent conflict with legislative decision-making, and interpretative authority of judges. For Hamburger this all takes place in the present, but the situation is much worse, since the administrative state seems to have achieved King James’ absolutist intention. For instance, Hamburger writes: “the lawmaking interpretation that James desired for his prerogative bodies has become a reality for American administrative agencies. Federal judges’ show varying degrees of deference to agency interpretations, and the agencies therefore can use their interpretation to create law” (Hamburger 9). Ultimately, this means that administrative agencies have come to inhabit a sort of juridical monad that can interpret, execute, and legislate its statutory norms and facts in clear violation of the principle of the separation of powers.

Hamburger observes the watershed 1984 decision Chevron vs. National Resources Defense Council, in which Burger Court decided that every time there are statutory ambiguities, judges must defer to agency for clear interpretations, with horror. This does not mean that an agency will rule every time on the agency’s behalf, but it has come to establish what is known as the principle of ‘deference’ in a two-step model. Mainly, that if Congress does not express direct intent on the statute, the agency can uphold the interpretative prerogative for clarification of any ambiguous component. The deference principle to agencies not only violates the principle against subdelegation (the common law axiom delegata potestas non potest delegari), but more importantly for Hamburger it confuses the spheres of interpretation and execution in the hands administrative quasi-judges. The prefix hints at the fact that experts and technicians of different epistemological spheres now have entirely displaced the imperial pretensions of the independent judicial branch. At the same time, we know that there are no judges freed from inter-dependence, and that the very legal process is always politically binding [1]. This transformation does entail that the judiciary is noww marginalized to a thin discretionary position to arbiter reasonable goals.

Furthermore, it is not the case that the way deference is understood in American administrative law hinges on a principle of sub-delegated power. Adrian Vermeule has convincingly argued how the specification of statutes is conceived within the executive branch [2]. Hamburger insists, however, in that “administrative power resembles old absolutism” (Hamburger 14). Absolutism is defined as extra-legality, and as a fundamental and consistent evasion of law (sic). Curiously, Hamburger fails to explain in which way the expansion of the administrative state legality has moved the boundaries unto an extra-legal domain over time. The administrative state cannot amount to a new monarchism for the simple reason that there is no monarch who is deemed as the sovereign mediator capable of dispensing his potentia absoluta without retrains.

The administrative state is a process of self-rationalization towards judicial abdication to experts, abandoning the empire of courts towards reasonable decision-making. It is an enterprise to limit incongruousness and contingency. As we know, this is one of the trademarks of the modern legitimacy. In other words, the administrative state follows integrity, and not the arcanum of political theory. This is something Landis already had in mind in the 1930s [3]. If absolutism is grounded in a principle of contingency and theological nominalism, modern rationality and administration bends towards rationalization of law’s integrity [4]. In doing so, the administrative state is a highly sophisticated machine to regulate all possible risks. Here the question of a constitutionalism of risk within the expansion of the administrative delegation becomes relevant.

Hamburger, in a sense, seeks to revive the specter of Elizabethan judge Edward Coke, while ignoring that the becoming of the administrative state has pluralist aims, at odds with vertical decision protocols vested in the absolute sovereign [5]. The administrative state is a modern legal development, and any comparison to the English monarchy is a serious bend. From a historiographical standpoint, Hamburger’s premise is also ambiguous when he writes: “Early Americans, however, were familiar with English constitutional history, and they therefore were well aware of the danger from the absolute power and its extralegal paths” (Hamburger 19). It is not the case that there is a firm consensus about the patriot political beliefs about presidentialism or the British Monarchy. Eric Nelson in his landmark The Royalist Revolution (2014) has studied how republican patriots were comfortable with ideas of strong centralized executive power in fear of the British parliamentary form regarding commerce and taxation. And here one should ask to what extent the imperial presidency could also be justified on “originalist” grounds. But this is beside the point, since the legal development of administrative law is one thing, and the Atlantic political theory is another.

This takes us the second point regarding the separation of powers. The main problem with Hamburger’s account is that it fails to engage with Adrian Vermeule’s sound critique in Law’s abnegation (2016) of a certain political attachment to an idolatrous understanding of the separation of powers. Vermeule terms ‘idolatry of the separation of powers, in reference to a mechanic execution of the three branches (legislative, executive, and judicial). In this framework, anything that is excess to it is part of a narrative of betrayal. But it should not be so. This is what Landis called rather humorously the “attachment to the number three”:

“To condemn the administrative process simply because it is a fourth branch of government is not to consider what a branch implies. Four, five, and six branches of government may, of course, coexist without violating Montesquieu’s maxim, for the ultimate source and the ultimate division of power remains the same. It is the relations of the administrative state’s three departments of government that are important”  [6]

Needless to say, a mechanistic fixation to the tripartite separation of powers fails to account for the ways in which the administrative state is already an expression of specifically allocated knowledge, decisions, and state-national-agency conflicts over a long period of time.  The question that should be asked is not in which way the administrative state profanes a sacrosanct Madisonian separation of powers structure, but rather whether there are powers in separation that are legitimate within the classic design of contemporary government, which is what Vermeule brings to bear in his important book [7]. The fact that Hamburger is silent about the different arguments made on behalf of the administrative state’s legitimacy (Landis, Kagan, or Mashaw ), speaks about his originalist obliviousness to historical and legal evolutionary nature of the separation of powers. As a process of self-rationalization, the legitimacy of the administrative state is rooted in its immanent force against any transcendental arcanum. Hence, the way to test the status of legitimacy is not by probing on the grounds of the separated powers in 1789 or the seventeenth century, or in terms of what Madison or Montesquieu thought of them, but rather on how well those powers today can withhold actions within a frame of reasonable judgment regarding the material need of the res publica. The administrative state does not stand for a vicarious being, since its delegated powers are not ideal immovable concepts, but rational conditions for risk management of human action.

This leads me to the third and final premise of The Administrative Threat. Hamburger does have something to say about the current condition of citizenship, and it comes by way of the libertarian defense of civil rights. The idea here is that the administrative state trumps individual rights in the name of “public” rights, which Hamburger calls a “disgraceful assault on the Bill of Rights and the due process” (Hamburger 35). This argument is supplanted with a meditation on the historical valance between voting rights and the administrative state. Going as far as to the Wilson presidency, Hamburger shows that throughout the twentieth century, bureaucracies were at odds with the voting rights of disfranchised minorities. Of course, the implicit assertion here befalls on a defense of the courts, primarily the judicial activism of the Warren Court, which Bruce Ackerman, on the opposite side of the political spectrum has called the last legal revolution in American constitutional development [8]. This is even truer today in light of the Shelby County decision, and the rise of Kris Kobach or Jeff Sessions to national public office, both intellectually committed to voting suppression [9]. One could say that both Hamburger and Ackerman, albeit in very different ways, lament the dawn of the traditional judicial authority. But even if there were a one-direction movement between the expansion of rights and the rise of the administrative state, it seems illogical to defend a return of a court-centric model on the basis of past historical experiences.

If we are, indeed, at the end of the court-centric legal revolution model, are we to assume that the dismantling of the administrative state will restore its capacities? I am doubtful of the eschatological weight of such a proposal. And if voting rights is a concern for Philip Hamburger, why isn’t electoral reform an optimal option for democratic expansion? Of course, this would necessary entail something like a Federal Voting Commission, which would in turn require more of the administrative state. But we are in no position to think that if we were to imagine the end of the administrative state (even as a thought experiment), a new type of liberty would be distributed across the board.

Since today we are facing the end of the state form, any historical analogies with the past tremble on very weak grounds. Furthermore, we know that beyond the moment of casting a vote a ballot, a civil equality protection really amounts, as Anatole France used to say, to whether we chose to sleep in a park bench or under bridges. While might be true is that the administrative state is a neutralizer of political dynamics, to use the language of Carl Schmitt; it is in no way reasonable seek its destruction in the name of a libertarian ideal of freedom within an unequal social space. It is defeatist to turn to political theory in exchange for the integrity of administrative legality, as Hamburger seems to do here.

It is rather strange for a libertarian to end a book on a legitimacy crisis quoting Lenin. But there is another implicit paradox here on Hamburger’s part; mainly, that while Lenin offered a theory of state, we cannot say the same for Hamburger. The modern state was able to implement and model itself with commerce, but much harder is to image a state emerging from contemporary anarchic markets. Hamburger writes in a section sarcastically subtitled what is to be done?: “Lenin asked his fellow Russians, “What is to be done?”. Fortunately for Americans, the answer is not revolution but a traditional American defense of civil liberties. To this end, Americans will have to work through all three branches of government. Of course, none of the branches have thus far revealed much capacity to limit administrative power” (Hamburger 61). This is a self-defeating argument, since as Vermeule has argued quite convincingly, even if one could ‘magically’ undue the administrative state and return to the original institutional design of 1789, it will evolve into the administrative state. This is an argument centered on the integrity of the American legal development that Hamburger needs to ignore in order to render somewhat possible the return to the  idolatrous originalism of the separation of powers and principled judicial review. The other part of the ‘what is to be done’ plan resonates with a populist overtone: “Ultimately the defeat of administrative power will have to come from the people. Only their spirit of liberty moves Congress, inspires the president, and braces the judges…” (Hamburger 64).

But who are the People? Is We The People the progressive mobilizing force within a constitutional regime? Is the People here a spirit or idea for the return to the courts? It is difficult to say, mainly, because Hamburger himself has no idea either. I take this to be the impasse of libertarian and liberal thought facing the irreversibility of the administrative state. This explains why libertarians, at times, equate deregulation with lessening the administrative power. This impasse is, in effect, the same currently stamping Trump’s strange brand of populism, which has, on one end, the mission to ‘destroy the administrative state’, and on the other, the nationalist protectionist banner to cushion transnational market forces. For better or worse, neither of these two goals seems plausible together. At best, they represent a double-bind of the liberal impasse. Only in this sense, the administrative state is a temporary katechon [10].

The trumpist complexio oppositorum in the form of a schizophrenic symptom is showing, paradoxically, that the administrative state will only be reinforced through new checks and balances emerging from executive administrative inefficiency. We are now in conditions to reach a somewhat different conclusion from that of Hamburger’s: we are far from an absolutist monarchic regime, since the human cannot endure the absolutism of reality devoid of a sense of anticipation [11]. The principles of delegation and anticipation seem to be two components of the administrative state that have their legitimacy in modern self-rationalization. In the end, it might be Hamburger who, in validating an ostensible and yet dissolute world beyond administration, promises the humanity an archaic absolutism of an unbearable nature. However, no man can live in the absolute. But even if we are to image an alleged triumph of an original law under the supervision of a New Coke, this would require in the form of an eternal recurrence, the invention of the administrative state.

 

 

 

 

Notes

  1. See Braden, George D., “The Search for Objectivity in Constitutional Law”, Faculty Scholarship Series. 4031, 1948. However, for a contending non-political moral stand of the judicial process, see Alexander Bickel. “Constitutionalism and the Political Process”, in The Morality of Consent. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.
  2. See Vermeule’s argument on the lawfulness of administrative law on the principle of delegation through executive power in Law’s Abnegation (2016), 50-54 pp.
  3. Landis will write in The Administrative Process (1938): “A similar development with reference to the administrative seems more a matter of time than of political theory, of demonstration by the administrative that intervention of this character is futile and tends more to prejudice than to further a client’s cause”. 102-103 pp.
  4. Hans Blumenberg. Legitimacy of the Modern Age. MIT, 1985. 125-205 pp.
  5. Sunstein, Cass & Vermeule, Adrian. “The New Coke: On the Plural Aims of Administrative Law”. The Supreme Court Review, Number 1, Volume 2015.
  6. Landis, James M. The Administrative Process (1938). 88 pp.
  7. Vermeule Adrian, Law’s Abnegation: from law’s empire to the administrative state (Harvard U Press, 2016). 56-87 pp.
  8. Ackerman, Bruce. We The People III: The Civil Rights Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.
  9. Berman, Ari. “The Man Behind Trump’s Voter-Fraud Obsession”. New York Times, June 13, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/magazine/the-man-behind-trumps-voter-fraud-obsession.html
  10. On the administrative state as a counter-schmittian katechon, see my “The administrative state as a second Leviathan: a response to Giacommo Marramao”. Although I do not mean by any means that the administrative state is a universal katechon in the way that the Church and the early modern state were, but this I will try to develop somewhere. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2017/05/25/the-administrative-state-as-second-leviathan-a-response-to-giacomo-marramao-by-gerardo-munoz/
  11. On the absolutism of reality and the anthropogenesis of anticipation as an intrinsic separation of powers, see Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth (MIT, 1985). 2-40 pp.

The administrative state as second Leviathan. A response to Giacomo Marramao. By Gerardo Muñoz.

The two day conference “All’ombra del Leviatano: tra biopolitica e postegemonia” in Rome Tre University, was extremely productive and rich for continuing thinking the effectivity of posthegemony as a category for contemporary political reflection. Giacomo Marramao made this very clear in his generous introduction, as well as Mario Tronti, who took up the term several times in light of the crisis of depolitization and neutralization in democratic societies on both sides of the Atlantic. Sadly, at times conferences do not allow more time to reshuffle ingrained beliefs and hardened convictions. Thus, I just want to return to a question that was thrown by Giacomo Marramao regarding my paper on posthegemony, constitutionalism, and the administrative state [1]. 

I do not have a recording of Giacomo’s commentary, but from my notes, I recall he asked me a question that had two separate parts: a. whether the administrative state was synonymous with the securitarian state, b. why did I refer to the administrative state as a “second order Leviathan”, which I do explicitly in my text without much elaboration. This a central question, which I would like to elaborate in writing a little bit more, as to get me started thinking about a further relation between posthegemony and legality.

So, I will start with the first question: is the administrative state the same as the security state? My gut reaction in the exchange with Marramao was to say no. However, perhaps today the security state is a compartmentalization within the administrative state. In the United States, there is a clear and substantial difference between the rise of the administrative state and the security state in two separate tracks. In the historical development of American legality, we tend to associate the administrative state with the robust state building social policies of the New Deal, that is, with the classic welfare state. In fact, Moreiras argued a few years back that Keynesianism is one of the last figures of modern katechon [2]. Of course, Keynesian economics is somewhat different from the administrative legal development, but I do think that they complement each other. On the other hand, the so called securitarian state, is usually understood in the wake of the the emergency executive power, the torture memos, Guantanamo, and the expansion of other federal agencies to biometrically further deter terrorism after 9/11. At first sight, it seems to me that in Europe the securitarian state has now normalized and conquered the legal paradigm. In the United States, paradoxically, there seems to be a minimal difference between the security and administrative state.

A good example, in fact, is the case of Kris Kobach, a constitutionalist who favors legal securitization against illegal immigration, but not so much in the name of the administrative state. On the contrary, Kobach wants, very much in line with Steve Bannon, to ‘deconstruct the administrative state’. So, my intuition is that whereas in Europe legal developments have led naturally to the securitarian state, in the US the natural development has been towards deference and the delegation principle of administrative law [3]. We have yet to witness a securitarian state as fully hegemonic within the American legal development.

Now, the second question: why do I (should we?) call the administrative state a second order Leviathan? It is true that I should have made clearer that I was implicitly trying to turn around Schmitt’s argument in The Leviathan in The State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. Everyone remembers that in this book, Schmitt revises the state form in the wake of modern political theology, as already a ‘big machine, a machina machinarum’ within the age of technology [4]. To put it in Gareth Williams’ terms, the katechon was already post-katechontic, unable to fully give form to disorder, and incapable of providing long-lasting authority. In this sense, I agree with Marramao’s paradigmatic thesis that power today lacks authority, and authority lacks power. This seems to me a variation that fully applies to the administrative state. Of course, Schmitt thought administration dispensed anomy. But I think it is quite the opposite. The administrative state has become a great neutralizer of the political as defined by the friend-enemy distinction in the second half of the twentieth century. This is the second katechon.

This administrative katechon withholds the anomy of the full-fleshed market force, as well as the potential force of total politization. This is why both Schmitt from the political sphere, and Hamburger, from the market’s sphere, despise the administrative state. They both seek its destruction, which is an assault against the rule of law. But again, these positions grossly misunderstand the internal development of law’s abnegation, to put it Vermeule’s terms (2016). This katechon has internal legitimacy, but it lacks ex-terior democratic legitimacy of participation and dissent. But the argument of absence of dissent from administration has also been contested (Rodriguez 2014, Williamson 2017). Can one probe the administrative katechon today?

Interestingly, Mario Tronti wrote an essay on the Leviathan to challenge this question. As a Marxist, he called for a will to resist it. Let me briefly quote Tronti: “Men confront the archaic symbols of evil, and against them, they struggle. When men think that, through some of sort divine grace, they do not longer need to struggle, is when they become even more defeated. If time dispenses the tragic, we end up with just a positive acceptance of the world” [5]. This is what Tronti calls the “red heart of conflict”. I have doubts that a principle of subjective will to power can do the work to deactivate the katechon as it stands for the administrative state. In fact, I wonder whether any ‘willing’ against the katechon is even desirable. At the same time, doing so will not differ much from the libertarian position that in the name of an abstract freedom, forgets the infrahuman base of any social existence.

But I also wonder whether Tronti himself still believes in resistance today, since in the conference he called for a reformist political praxis and revolutionary intellectual ideas. I tend to agree more with this scheme, since the administrative state also stands for a process of rationalization. No subjective practice can emerge as an exception to this new katechon without automatically appearing as a bate for this monstrous apparatus. Perhaps another way of thinking about Marramao’s dual question is whether the security state can dethrone the administrative state. Could it happen? If that happens, I will be willing to accept that it will be the end of the second historical katechon as we know it.

 

Notes

  1. My essay written for the Roma Tre Conference on posthegemony can be read here: https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2017/05/23/posthegemony-and-the-crisis-of-constitutionalism-in-the-united-states-paper-presented-at-allombra-del-leviatano-tra-biopolitica-e-posegemonia-universita-roma-tre-may-2017-by-gerardo/
  2. Alberto Moreiras. “Keynes y el Katechon”. Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofia, Vol.30, N.1, 2013. 157-168.
  3. This is the central argument in Adrian Vermeule’s important book Law’s abnegation: from law’s empire to the administrative state (Harvard U Press, 2016).
  4. Carl Schmitt. The Leviathan in The State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 44 pp.
  5. Mario Tronti. “Leviathan In Interiore Homine”. La Política Contra la Historia. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueño, 2016.