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May 3, 2004
I will try and read two texts together: Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Hardt and Negri's Empire.
Why? As I mentioned in yesterday's post I think that Empire works within the broad philosophical tradition of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.
Here is Hegel. The quote is para. 333 and it is on international law:
"The fundamental proposition of international law (i.e. the universal law which ought to be absolutely valid between states, as distinguished from the particular content of positive treaties) is that treaties, as the ground of obligations between states, ought to be kept. But since the sovereignty of a state is the principle of its relations to others, states are to that extent in a state of nature in relation to each other. Their rights are actualised only in their particular wills and not in a universal will with constitutional powers over them. This universal proviso of international law therefore does not go beyond an ought-to-be, and what really happens is that international relations in accordance with treaty alternate with the severance of these relations."
We then have the additional remark to this paragraph which introduces Kant's idea for perpetual peace and League of Nations into the discussion.
"There is no Praetor to judge between states; at best there may be an arbitrator or a mediator, and even he exercises his functions contingently only, i.e. in dependence on the particular wills of the disputants. Kant had an idea for securing 'perpetual peace' by a League of Nations to adjust every dispute. It was to be a power recognised by each individual state, and was to arbitrate in all cases of dissension in order to make it impossible for disputants to resort to war in order to settle them. This idea presupposes an accord between states; this would rest on moral or religious or other grounds and considerations, but in any case would always depend ultimately on a particular sovereign will and for that reason would remain infected with contingency."
That is how the United Nations is seen by the US and Israel for instance: a particular sovereign will infected with contingency. So how are conflicts of interest between nation-states resolved? Hegel draws the realist conclusion. By war (para 334):
"It follows that if states disagree and their particular wills cannot be harmonised, the matter can only be settled by war."
Can the particular wills of nation-states be harmionized in any other way? Hegel says that the substantial welfare of the state is its welfare as a particular state in its specific interest and situation Consequently,
"....its aim in relation to other states and its principle for justifying wars and treaties is not a universal thought (the thought of philanthropy) but only its actually injured or threatened welfare as something specific and peculiar to itself."
Hegel then introduces the category of recognition into the mix:
"The fact that states reciprocally recognise each other as states remains, even in war — the state of affairs when rights disappear and force and chance hold sway — a bond wherein each counts to the rest as something absolute. Hence in war, war itself is characterised as something which ought to pass away. It implies therefore the proviso of, the jus gentium — that the possibility of peace be retained (and so, for example, that envoys must be respected), and, in general, that war be not waged against domestic institutions, against the peace of family and private life, or against persons in their private capacity."
He then introduces another category, that of custom:
"...the relations between states (e.g. in war-time, reciprocal agreements about taking prisoners; in peace-time, concessions of rights to subjects of other states for the purpose of private trade and intercourse, &c.) depend principally upon the customs of nations, custom being the inner universality of behaviour maintained in all circumstances."
Hegel then begins to make his shift to world spirit or culture.
What appears to have dropped away is the category of right. Nation-states do not appear to relate to one another on the basis of right. It is self-interest, recognition and custom. The category of right, which figured so strongly within the nation-state, does little work in the international areana.
It is this lack that Hardt and Negri address. The juridical concept of Empire, they say, needs to be developed because of the shift in postmodernity. Towards the end of chapter 1.1 they describe this shift. They say that today:
"...the enemy, just like the war itself, comes to be at once banalized (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (as the Enemy, an absolute threat to the ethical order). The Gulf War [1991] gave us perhaps the first fully articulated example of this new epistemology of the concept."
So we need to move into thinking of this category of Empire in positive and not negative terms.
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