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May 2, 2004
The category of right is what Hardt and Negri are talking about in Empire. Their approach to this juridical concept for international relations or world order sits quite comfortably with in the tradition of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.
Here is Hegel on international law in para 330 of the Philosophy of Right:
"International law springs from the relations between autonomous states. It is for this reason that what is absolute in it retains the form of an ought-to-be, since its actuality depends on different wills each of which is sovereign."
Then we have the addition where Hegel spells out, and develops, the cryptic remark. He says that:
"States are not private persons but completely autonomous totalities in themselves, and so the relation between them differs from a moral relation and a relation involving private rights. Attempts have often been made to regard the state as a person with the rights of persons and as a moral entity. But the position with private persons is that they are under the jurisdiction of a court which gives effect to what is right in principle. Now a relation between states ought also to be right in principle, but in mundane affairs a principle ought also to have power. Now since there is no power in existence which decides in face of the state what is right in principle and actualises this decision, it follows that so far as international relations are concerned we can never get beyond an 'ought'. The relation between states is a relation between autonomous entities which make mutual stipulations but which at the same time are superior to these stipulations. "
So we live in the world of ought because in the 1930s there is no international power that decides what is right for nation-states and is able to actualize this decision. The situation is the same in 2004, despite the existence of various international bodies. We live in ought.
Does this apply to the IMF or the WTO?
If we come back to Hardt and Negri, they say that the point of departure for their study of Empire is a:
"...new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts."
Good. They are going to develop some new categories to deal with a new situation. How will they do this? They go on to say that they:
"...accord special attention to the juridical figures of the constitution of Empire....because they provide a good index of the processes of imperial constitution. New juridical figures reveal a first view of the tendency toward the centralized and unitary regulation of both the world market and global power relations, with all the difficulties presented by such a project."
They make a Hegelian-Marxist move by connecting the juridical catgories to the process of global power and order, They say that:
"Juridical transformations effectively point toward changes in the material constitution of world power and order. The transition we are witnessing today from traditional international law, which was defined by contracts and treaties, to the definition and constitution of a new sovereign, supranational world power (and thus to an imperial notion of right), however incomplete, gives us a framework in which to read the totalizing social processes of Empire. In effect, the juridical transformation functions as a symptom of the modifications of the material biopolitical constitution of our societies. These changes regard not only international law and international relations but also the internal power relations of each country."
They then give this approach to the juridical concept of Empire a twist by looking at the genealogy of the concept to give us some preliminary terms for our investigation.
This genealogy gives us a:
"...juridical concept involves two fundamental tendencies: first, the notion of a right that is affirmed in the construction of a new order that envelops the entire space of what it considers civilization, a boundless, universal space; and second, a notion of right that encompasses all time within its ethical foundation. Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons the past and future within its own ethical order. "
They then trace these two tendencies and argue that in early modernity both separated and develop independently. There emerged in modern European political thought a conception of international right; the developed utopias of "perpetual peace." Their account states:
"In the ...case [ie., the conception of international right] the order that the Roman Empire had promised was sought, long after its fall, through a treaty mechanism that would construct an international order among sovereign states by operating analogously to the contractual mechanisms that guaranteed order within the nation-state and its civil society. Thinkers from Grotius to Puffendorf theorized this process in formal terms."
And in the second case, the idea of perpetual peace:
"...continually reappeared throughout modern Europe, from Bernadin de Saint Pierre to Immanuel Kant. This idea was presented as an ideal of reason, a "light" that had to criticize and also unite right and ethicality, a presupposed transcendental of the juridical system and ideal schema of reason and ethics."
They conclude their genealogy of the juridical concept of world order with the following:
"The fundamental alternative between these two notions ran throughout all of European modernity, including the two great ideologies that defined its mature phase: the liberal ideology that rests on the peaceful concert of juridical forces and its supersession in the market; and the socialist ideology that focuses on international unity through the organization of struggles and the supersession of right."
The socialist one barely exists anymore. Marxism has been consigned to the historical trash can. So what we have left is the idea of perpetual peace produced by the global market. That was the tacit assumption of the 1980s and 1990s.
Hardt and Negri conclude their genealogy by saying that the two different developments of the notion of right, which persisted side by side through modernity, are tending towards being united and presented as a single category. Their argument is that in postmodernity the notion of right should be understood again in terms of the concept of Empire.
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