delegation

Tacitus’ arcana and political wisdom. by Gerardo Muñoz

During the flourishing of Renaissance civic humanism, the tradition of Tacitism, as well as the work of Tacitus, was broadly understood as advisory to the problem of tyranny within the cycles of political power’s rise and decline, unmasking imperial rule’s debasement and cruel domination [1]. It is in Edward Gibbon’s erudite project where Tacitus’ political wisdom receives an integral treatment about the institutional dimension of power and its cohesive structure based on both facts and theoretical presuppositions. For Gibbon, the wisdom of Tacitus is not merely anchored in theoretical speculation; rather, the rhetorical construction takes its energy from the convergence between historical facts and the physics of a concrete political order. Tacitus’ wisdom is practical but also flexible, and this entails that political realism is not about the opportunist dimension of power (although this most certainly occurs in every political community), but about the deployment of analytical understanding regarding faults, fissures, and disequilibrium of institutions. Tacitus’ thought is about vision, and this means looking at the cracks, identifying the asymmetrical correspondences, and teasing out the nuances of a particular reality.

This presupposes that Tacitus’ enduring notion of the arcanum imperii, far from posing a ‘mystery of the state’ (its legitimacy, rule, and mystical reserve), allows for a strong narrative about the latent crisis internal to every political community. Tacitism is, insofar as it confronts the crisis and ruin of a political order, draws a negative reflection on the ongoing force of civil war as a historical and existential condition of domination. In other words, no politics can exist without the concrete legibility of the faults of conflict, which ultimately entails that civil war and political power are constantly in proximity. The arcana delimits the problem of civil war as the internal contradiction of every imperfect institutional design that cannot transcendent its own crisis through conceptual reordering.

At the center of Tacitus’ arcana in Rome is the death of Nero as well as the fault lines of civil war: “The was revealed that arcanum of state, the discovery that emperors might be made elsewhere than Rome” [2]. Of course, Rome as the glorious center of power was fundamental and indivisible; but for Tacitus the argument condensed in the arcana is precisely that the corruption of politics takes place when political representatives (power delegated at the provinces) and that of the center ceased being in coordination, losing the grip of institutional mediations. Thus, the ruin of politics is best expressed by the disjointment of formal procedures between authority and delegation, the vesting of the emperor and territorial monopoly, legitimate rule and predatory corruption. When this happens the arcana is transformed into a permanent revolution that dissolves checked political rule into the willful triumph of the uncontained and proliferated fragmentation (this is why Tacitus looked back with nostalgia to the unlived era of Roman republicanism).

For Gibbon to hold on to the Tacitan tradition of the arcana imperii meant, above all, to underscore the esoteric relationship between history and revolution as part of the desire to understand political energy, which he posed as a methodological concern: “In our larger experience of history the imagination is assisted by a perpetual series of causes and effects , to unite the most distant revolutions” [3]. The arcana is political wisdom of a secondary source; that is, it’s not a normatively established political premise or category, but an excess to description of political order. Hence, it is not that the arcana imperii is a monocausal and ultimate foundation of instability – and in this sense he was still faithful to his conception of plurality of causation in defense of the study of literature and the imagination – the emphasis is placed, on the contrary, in the way in which grasping the archeological and heterogeneous field of tension that will reveal, in turn, the historical specificity of the arcana [4].

In other words, the arcana grants access to the fundamental features of the epiphenomenon of civil strife without a recourse to abstraction and the closure of the concept. In this way, it could be said that the arcana (in part in the reading that Gibbon undertakes of Tacitus) is continuously operating in three distinct registers: a) it is a comprehensive analytic of the plurality of causation that impact political conflict and civil war, b) it reports to the center of authority, probing its direct and indirect meditations on the ground; its forms of delegation and adjudication, and its production of legality and dominium and implementation; c) it demands to design a description and a narrative of the political situation in order to properly respond to the paradox of tyranny and corruption within a specific polity.

Having sketched out the operational effect of the arcana, we can say that the notion is far from being reducible to a Renaissance “ragion di stato” scenario assisting in the consolidation of power in the hands of the price; the arcana seeks to elucidate the contours and limits of the intensification of war and its risks; a problem that becomes central to Hobbes notion of the state [5]. To claim that this political wisdom is something that merely emerges technically-placed in the Renaissance “great men”, and systematically blurred in modern liberalism is a thesis that will need further elaboration about the resources of the state and the underpinning of modern legitimacy through civil society and its late-modern mutation into planetary imperial spaces. In a certain sense “Tacitism” opens the possibility of sketching the political crisis of in each distinct epoch. It is perhaps in this sense that Carl Schmitt invites us to think the issue in an entry of his Glossarium:

“The beginning of Tacitus’ Histories has moved me. Is it just rhetoric, like Ortega told me?’ Isn’t it about the identity of the situation, that is, existential participation, participation in one and the same nuclear and ancestral situation of our eon? Every word of that chapter of Tacitus is absolutely current: «Magna ingenia cessere; opus adgredior optimum casibus, atrox proeliis, discors seditionibus, ipsa etiam pace saevum. Of course, “ipsa etiam pace sacvum, bella civilia et exterior plerumque permixta.” The relationship between international war and civil war, that is not rhetoric but the horrible reality recognized and expressed, the non-distinction between war and peace.” [6] 

The arcana never truly coincides with a philosophy of history or a rhetorical veneer of civil existence (social contract). The subversiveness of Tacitus plays out in thinking through the elaboration of a specific governmental organization [7]. And what is the “ancestral situation of the eon” if not the polar relationship between political order and stasis, the duality between civil war and the principle of authority, the nihilism of the will and the limits of a public rule of law, however ordered? Tacitus’ classical wisdom, invested in plotting legible facts with a singular narrative, far from raising itself to a “science of politics” or a set of “fundamental principles of order”, responds to potential fluctuations devoid of a universal grammar. In this way, politics remains closer to a physical experiment: an active self-evolving canvas in which the arcana is irremediably drawing upon the instituting and destituting of interconnected forces at play.

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Notes 

1. Arnaldo Momigliano. “Tacitus and the Tacitist Tradition”, in The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (University of California Press, 1990), 120.

2. J. G. A. Pocock. Barbarism and Religion: The First Decline and Fall, Vol.III (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 25.

3. Ibid., 58. 

4. G.W. Bowersock. “Gibbon on Civil War and Rebellion in the Decline of the Roman Empire”, Daedalus, Summer, 1976.

5. Richard Tuck. “Hobbes and Tacitus”, in Hobbes and History (2000), eds. G. A. J. Rogers and Tom Sorell, 99–111.

6. Carl Schmitt. Glossarium: Anotaciones desde 1947 hasta 1958 (El Paseo, 2019), 7.

7. Ronald Syme. “Who was Tacitus?”, Harvard Library Bulletin XI, Spring 195, 185.

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.