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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

Empire: Hegel, public authority & civil society « Previous | |Next »
May 16, 2004

In section two of chapter I Hardt and Negri now make the turn to Foucault in order to conceptualize the formation of empire. They start from the police. They say:


"The "police" appears as an administration heading the state, together with the judiciary, the army, and the exchequer. True. Yet in fact, it embraces everything else. Turquet says so: "It branches out into all of the people's conditions, everything they do or undertake. Its field comprises the judiciary, finance, and the army." The police includes everything."

The police. That definition of Turguet's is a bit terse and misleading. We need to spell it out to understand what is going on here. This is the purpose of this post.

We are in a better position to understand what Hardt and Negri are getting by turrning to Hegel. The police is a key Hegelian concept in his Philosophy of Right. In para 230ff Hegel defines the police as an external authority between civil society and state; an authority which represents the morality of the community, but does so in the sense of controller and controlled.

In para 236 Hegel initially describes this public authority as a regulatory authority that diminishes the danger of upheavals arising from the clashing of individual interests for the sake of the public good. Hegel says:


"The differing interests of producers and consumers may come into collision with each other; and although a fair balance between them on the whole may be brought about automatically, still their adjustment also requires a control which stands above both and is consciously undertaken. The right to the exercise of such control in a single case (e.g. in the fixing of the prices of the commonest necessaries of life) depends on the fact that, by being publicly exposed for sale, goods in absolutely universal daily demand are offered not so much to an individual as such but rather to a universal purchaser, the public; and thus both the defence of the public’s right not to be defrauded, and also the management of goods inspection, may lie, as a common concern, with a public authority."

However, the public care and direction exercised by public authority is far broader than that a regulator in a self-organizing market. In para 239 Hegel says that public authority is also concerned with education

"In its character as a universal family, civil society has the right and duty of superintending and influencing education, inasmuch as education bears upon the child’s capacity to become a member of society. Society’s right here is paramount over the arbitrary and contingent preferences of parents, particularly in cases where education is to be completed not by the parents but by others. To the same end, society must provide public educational facilities so far as is practicable."

Hegel the broadens the care and concern of public authority to poverty in civil society in para. 241:

"Not only caprice, however, but also contingencies, physical conditions, and factors grounded in external circumstances (see § 200) may reduce men to poverty. The poor still have the needs common to civil society, and yet since society has withdrawn from them the natural means of acquisition (see § 217) and broken the bond of the family — in the wider sense of the clan (see § 181) — their poverty leaves them more or less deprived of all the advantages of society, of the opportunity of acquiring skill or education of any kind, as well as of the administration of justice, the public health services, and often even of the consolations of religion, and so forth. The public authority takes the place of the family where the poor are concerned in respect not only of their immediate want but also of laziness of disposition, malignity, and the other vices which arise out of their plight and their sense of wrong."

The public authority has a very wide brief.

Are there limits to the concerns and power of public authority? Hegel says yes. In para:


"While the public authority must also undertake the higher directive function of providing for the interests which lead beyond the borders of its society [see § 246 where the reference is to overseas markets], its primary purpose is to actualise and maintain the universal contained within the particularity of civil society, and its control takes the form of an external system and organisation for the protection and security of particular ends and interests en masse, inasmuch as these interests subsist only in this universal."

So we can see the attraction of the police as public authority for Hardt and Negri. It is a very useful category as it involves right, governance of material production and the subjectivity of individuals. Hegeel's idea of police as public authority gives us way of looking at the machinery of governance of civil human conduct within society.

Hardt and Negri make this point in their convoluted way. They say:


"From the juridical perspective we have been able to glimpse some of the elements of the ideal genesis of Empire, but from that perspective alone it would be difficult if not impossible to understand how the imperial machine is actually set in motion. Juridical concepts and juridical systems always refer to something other than themselves. Through the evolution and exercise of right, they point toward the material condition that defines their purchase on social reality. Our analysis must now descend to the level of that materiality and investigate there the material transformation of the paradigm of rule. We need to discover the means and forces of the production of social reality along with the subjectivities that animate it. "

So they turn to Foucault's conception of biopower to do this. Biopower is technology of governance exercised by public authority.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:51 PM | | Comments (0)
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