I continue to puzzle about the formation of conservatism that is happening around us today. It was very evident in the Anzac rhetoric, and so I want to connect it up with political philosophy to try and understand the nature of conservatism. This is philosophy apprehending is its own time in thought, if you like; one that makes a judgement that conservative ideas are having considerable repercussions throughout Australia.
The current time is one which appears as if the Left seems theoretically and politically finished, whilst the Right is experiencing an unexpected renaissance. Do these developments signal a major paradigm shift threatening the reconfiguration of post-Cold War politics? If so then how do we understand conservatism?
The core conservative category, and one we find in both Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes, is the obedience/protection category. This holds that sovereignty resides where there is power to provide protection from enemies in return for obedience. A strong state applies the obedience/protection principle correctly. With Hobbes this category leads to the absolute state, whilst for Carl Schmitt it leads to the total state. For both the state is the guarantor of order and it's power ultimately rests on the executioner.
Now I want to suggest that it is Schmitt, not Hobbes, who can give us some insight into the formation of contemporary conservatism. My reason for this is that Hobbes is too individualist: the foundation of Hobbes's protection/obedience category is an over-riding concern for individual survival. The individual owes obedience to the state, as long as his own self-preservation is safeguarded by the state. That is not the way of Australian conservatism. It talks about the Anzacs defending our national way of life.
John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, in his address at the dawn service at Gallipoli said:
"Ninety years ago, the first sons of a young nation assailed these shores. They forged a legend whose grip on us grows tighter with each passing year. Those who fought here changed the way we see our world: they strengthened our democratic temper and our questioning eye towards authority."
Schmitt's focus is the group: the over-riding concern of his protection/obedience category is the preservation of a group's political identity, a set of goals, a way of life. Since the focus is the preservation of the way of life of a group, then the loss of life of a single individual becomes acceptable. Hence we have all the Anzac sacrifice forging 'the nation' and sacrifice talk of recent days.
Schmitt's category of the political is also useful, as enmity is the relationship of a group against another. Politics can never abolish enmity, as the latter is the very essence of politics. The political is any force that brings people together as friends against other people regarded as enemies. The friend/enemy antithesis is the essence of the political, an antithesis that has always existed and is likely to persist in the future. So politics as a struggle of friends against enemies is in our history as well as our destiny.
Thus we have all the conservative talk in the clash of civilizations about the enemy, by which they mean terrorists plus those liberals and anti-American lefties who opposed the war on Iraq. The identity of the group emerges through psychological and physical confrontation with the enemy and, conversely, through the psychological and physical collaboration with friends.
Schmitt highlights the way that conservatism is opposed to, and critiques liberalism. He argues that liberalism fails to see that politics is above all a struggle to establish our identity. Liberalism does not see identity as a problem, but as a starting point, as an assumption. As identity and rights are not questioned, but assumed as given, politics for liberals becomes less important and less fundamental than, for example, economic interaction.
Because liberals do not feel that group identity is at stake, their politics is marked by never-ending discussions, procrastination, indecision, and general gossiping. Liberal politics becomes a discourse on matters of minor concern; tradeoffs and compromise are alwaysconsidered possible because what is discussed in never existential. As a result, liberal politics is never serious.
Only when identity, life and death are at stake, do we have a real concern, a real commitment, a real determination, to find solutions, a real need to take decisions. When identity is at stake, compromise and tradeoffs are inconceivable. The struggle for identity is
real and not a product of philosophical imagination; it is a struggle that takes place all the time, both at a national and international level.
The significance of the Anzacs for Australian conservatives is that it is about national identity: it was a struggle for national identity in which the youmg Australians confronted death.
Schmitt can also help us to the tectonic shift to conservatism and away from liberalism. He argues that a constitutional liberal state with its rule of law can cope with everyday politics, but not with a state of emergency. A liberal democracy, with all its checks and balances, with its divisions of powers and competences, with its complex bureaucracy and decision-making processes, can never cope adequately with the exception.
I have previously argued that today it is terrorism that is the prime exception that disrupts the regularities of everyday politics. What we have find is less the liberal state coping with the war on terrorism without renouncing its liberal and democratic principles, and more the transformation of the liberal state into a total state in the form form of the national security state?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 27, 2005 01:03 PM | TrackBack