"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Empire: theory + world power
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April 26, 2004
We ended the last post with a question: What then, is the juridical concept of Empire? In the text under consideration Hardt and Negri say that:
"The theoretical responses to this constitutionalization of a supranational world power, however, have been entirely inadequate. Instead of recognizing what was really new about these supranational processes, the vast majority of juridical theorists merely tried to resurrect anachronistic models to apply to the new problems. To a large extent, in fact, the models that had presided over the birth of the nation-state were simply dusted off and reproposed as interpretive schema for reading the construction of a supranational power. The "domestic analogy" thus became the fundamental methodological tool in the analysis of international and supranational forms of order."
They go on to say:
"Two lines of thought have been particularly active during this transition, and as a kind of shorthand we can conceive of them as resurrections of the Hobbesian and the Lockean ideologies that in another era dominated the European conceptions of the sovereign state. "
The reference is back to the social contract tradition in which there is a transfer of power from the individual nation-states to the supranational entity. So what is the diference between the two currents within the social contract tradition? Hardt and Negri deal with the Hobbesian traditionfirst. They say:
"The Hobbesian variant focuses primarily on the transfer of the title of sovereignty and conceives the constitution of the supranational sovereign entity as a contractual agreement grounded on the convergence of preexisting state subjects. A new transcendent power, "tertium super partes," primarily concentrated in the hands of the military (the one that rules over life and death, the Hobbesian "God on earth"), is, according to this school, the only means capable of constituting a secure international system and thus of overcoming the anarchy that sovereign states necessarily produce"
And the Lockean? Presumably it would be more constitutionally orientated. Hardt and Negri say:
"By contrast, according to the Lockean variant, the same process is projected in more decentralized, pluralistic terms. In this framework, just when the transfer toward a supranational center is accomplished, networks of local and constitutionally effective counterpowers rise up to contest and/or support the new figure of power. Rather than global security, then, what is proposed here is a global constitutionalism, or really this amounts to a project of overcoming state imperatives by constituting a global civil society."
Hardt and Negri say that these theories of the supra-national were formulated (during the cold war, when the United Nations only limped forward in the best of times). Their judgement is that these theories cannot account for the real novelty of the historical processes we are witnessing today.They do not recognize the accelerated rhythm, the violence, and the necessity with which the new imperial paradigm operates.
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