economy – Infrapolitical Reflections

The central contribution of American republican political thought is arguably the way it found a solution to the problem of factions, a legendary difficulty that not only has not disappeared but rather intensified in our present. For the enlightened republicans of the eighteenth century, well versed in the classical tradition and the histories of Florentine medieval strife, factionalism was the cardinal difficulty of social order; how to best deal with conflicting loyalties and the perpetuation of violence for virtuous and at times times even springing from “idleness and courage of the youth”, as told by Carol Lansing’s scholarship [1]. The existence of differences and cleavages in the society ultimately meant the brewing of an ephemeral coalitions and private masters, which, in turn, often resulted in the thorough expulsion of the enemies from the polis. These unregulated clashes of authorities and private actors was called by the fourteenth century jurist Bartolus of Saxoferrato a seventh form of government mixture: a “monstrous government”. The problem of faction will emerge for the moderns as the condition that prompts the articulation of a governmental rationality capable of constructing the homogeneity of social living. In other words, the modern classical homogeneity of the civil society is the creation of the domestication of factions as social grouping units to be obtained and arranged as an indirect power from within to transform ‘barbarism’ to civilization. David Hume’s political writings – and in particular his “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” (1752), which was highly influential to the Federalists, understood that the threat is of “factions” required a new framework: politics had to be reduced to a science [2]. What could politics as science entail? We are not yet in the administrative rationality and professional political vocation of Max Weber’s sociology. The scientific reduction meant a paradigmatic transformation of classical politics properly understood (virtuous, moral, and just) into an economic determination in which interests took the center stage over the combustion of the passions. The new science of politics implied a retooling of the problem of factions by decompressing the clustered interests of unaccounted and disloyal factional expansion under governmental action. For Hume the passage from passions to interests entailed a descaling of factionalism on one hand, while an expansion of a robust form of government over a large territory on the other.

However, if for Hume factions are still an impolitical unit of association that must be minimized, it is James Madison in “Federalist 10” who achieves the complete “scientific” aspiration of political construction over factions as inseparable from the Social ahead of the industrial modern economic division of labor. In fact, as Douglass Adair reminds us, this particular essay of the Federalist Papers only became important towards the end of the nineteenth century in the wake of industrialization and economic power groups; that is, at a moment when indirect economic powers began to exert their influence into the institutional and regulatory composition of the state [3]. One could say that it is only at the outset of the triumph of economic “Americanism” that the Madisonian framework on factions is situated in its proper tripartite structure: factions are conditioned by positive liberty and make up the totality of the economic interests that make up civil society. Indeed, for Madison factions as expressions of the nature of man, and their existence detail degrees of activities in civil society [4]. In a way there is no civil society without factions, and there are only factions because there is civic Liberty.

Madison even constructs a naturalist analogy: what unrestrained Liberty is to faction, air is to a propagating fire. The activity and energy of factionalism is exclusively understood as one of economic interests which, insofar as it is conditioned by positive, differentiated, and unregulated liberty that expresses the unequal distribution of property that characterizes the essence of the social. The new science of government in this framework becomes clear: the end of government is neither properly about political enmity in relation to the state nor about suppressing and limiting factions, but rather about the optimization of the effects of factions. Madison writes in the groundbreaking moment of “Federalist 10”: “The interference to which we are brought is that the causes of faction cannot be removed from that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects” [5]. The optimized logistics of factionalism displaces the modern hobbesian picture of the sovereign state to a minimalist and compensatory nature to attenuate public order against “local and particular state legislatures” [6]. The optimization of factions now appears as the dominant aspect of a fundamental cybernetics that seeks to isolate, fragment, and juxtapose the conflagration of factions without losing the barring of state energetic durability. The faction difficulty lays bare the arcanum at the center of the res publica politics: the administration and reproduction of civil conflict.

The consolidation of the cybernetic solution to the faction difficulty emerges as an upgraded version of state auctoritas whose aim is to establish a balance between public opinion as distrust over “dispute”: “communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary” [7]. If communication becomes a strict science of regulating the means of expression (itself a medium), political authority is superseded over a constant war over words and force of exchange. This means that rather than putting an end to the stasiological tension through a political mediation of the state, the problem of faction reveals that stasis becomes an instrument to manage effects, produce legislative, and translate interests in the struggle of social differences. It goes without saying that perhaps the modernist differentiation between state and civil society in light of the problem of faction loses its predominance, as an entirely new framework emerges: a monstrous socialization that takes the form of a productive stasiology given that if “men were angels no government would be necessary” [8]. The irony is that the auxiliary precautions of factions is a secularized form (or at least one could trace it to) of the ministry of the angels. This reality demands a new ethic of the passions against both the vigorous indirect struggle of factionalism (and its modern rendition in the party form) and the axiological arrangement of interests that made the foundation of the social community possible.

Notes

1. Carol Lansing. “Violence and Faction”, in The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Princeton U Press, 2014), 181.

2. David Hume. “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”, in Political Writings (Hackett Publishing, 1994), 240-252.

3. Douglass Adair. “The Tenth Federalist Revisited”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1951, 48-67.

4. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, & John Jay. “Federalist 10”, in The Federalist Papers (Mentor, 1961). 79.

5. Ibid., 80.

6. Ibid., 83.

7. Ibid., 83.

8. “Federalist 51”, in The Federalist Papers (Mentor, 1961), 322.

If the modern state presupposes the concept of the political, then the notion of the political presupposes the concept of the enemy. And if in Political Theology (1922) Schmitt claimed that the modern ethos was predicated as a struggle against the political, a decade later The concept of the political makes the case as to why the political could have only emerged in the wake of the crisis of the modern liberal state aggravated by the rise of the total state and the politization of the economy. All things considered, what Schmitt claims about “politics as destiny” (quoting Walter Rathenau, although the original is handed to us by Hegel quoting the Napoleon- Goethe conversation) has been misunderstood: “It could be more exact to say that politics continues to remain the destiny, but what has occurred is that economics has become political and thereby destiny” [1]. The total politization of economic relations – social contract as structured in value transaction and production – does not imply that Schmitt thinks that politics is destiny. If the ‘concept of the political’ is suppressed and subsumed by economics and techno-administration, then this implies that every sphere of human activity becomes political including one’s destiny. But no destiny can be fully administered or it ceases to be one.

The suppression- expansion of the political allows for the destruction of the enemy, who turns a mere protuberance in a pacified world order. In other words, for Schmitt (unlike what is usually said on his behalf) proposes a concept of the political to achieve a separation from politics that doesn’t amount to ‘critique of politics’ (allegedly what Liberal epoch offers), in the same way that the figure of the enemy is not to be understood normatively as the telos of political activity, but rather an operation that indicates degrees of association and dissociation given that the modern theory of the state is inseparable from plural conflict. In fact, as Schmitt states, the concept of the political as operatively defined by the enemy does not turn its back to pluralism, but rather wants to produce (“yield other consequences” is the language used) pluralism without suppressing the political unit itself [2]. And to yield “space of recognition” for friend-enemy divide does not entail war is neither the end nor the continuation of politics, as it has been understood, but rather an optimal effect whenever there is the existence of political units [3]. In this sense, the notion of enemy as presupposed in the concept of the political is not a substantive and personalist notion, but a particular operation that tries to contain domination while providing breathing space for a non-suppressive practice of politics (a counterpoint to fleeing from catastrophic techno-politics, suggested by Erich Unger’s Politics and Metaphysics during the same time).

One could outline at least four operative determinations of the enemy, which support the thesis of Schmitt’s effort to amend the conditions of the liberal state not negating them: a) the enemy is always a public enemy (hostis) and not a private one (enemicus). Here Schmitt retains the modern juristic conception of positive law. As Schmitt recalls in Ex captitvate salus, for the theologians the enemy is something to destroy, but he thinks as a jurist and not a theologian [4]. b) the hostis is not reducible to a person, but rather to a political unit, although the political could amount to an existential condition. If the “enemy is one’s own question as figure (Gestalt)”, as Schmitt quotes from Däubler, this also means that enemy is a principle of differentiation and mediation rather than a substantive essence, ideological or otherwise [5]. This is why it could be a mistake to confuse the gestalt formation with the unity and relative homogeneity of society required for the modern state.

c) If any political thinking is a thinking oriented towards optimization of the extreme case (this presupposes a negative anthropology), then it follows that the enemy is also the “enemy” in a concrete conflict. And it is clear why Schmitt taught that the suppression of war in the wake of the Kellogg Pact 1928 meant, as least tendentially, that enemies cease to be taken as a unit of differentiation transforming politics into a world police as the dominant practice of managing partners that eradicate the hostis. d) Finally, the notion of the enemy allows the state to recognize concrete threats and dispose of capabilities to respond to a crisis (here the polarity between decision and discussion comes to light), but also without discarding the basic principles of the rule of law such as nulla poena sine lege. In this final determination, the concept of the political is directed at displacing the separation of state and civil society, which according to Schmitt was incapable to offering a concrete response to the rise of neutralization posed by totalization of the “society” superseding the authority of the state (this is a variant of the economic primacy). The notion of the enemy is thus understood best as an optimal operativity that seeks to relieve politics from this polarity (totalization and repression) laying bare at the origin of the modern state.

Notes

1. Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 78.

2. Ibid., 45

3. Ibid., 34.

4. Carl Schmitt. Ex Captivate Salus (Polity, 2017), 135.

5. Ibid., 136.

6. Carl Schmitt. “Premessa all’edizione italiana”, Le categorie del politico (Il Mulino, 1972), 39.