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July 19, 2006
Although the core idea of democracy is that people rule liberals tend to think in terms of ' citizens versus the state', rather than citizens being powerful or ruling in their own right as held by the classical republican philosophers. They primarily think this way in order to defend a space for the expression of negative liberty--as freedom to do as one pleases without infringing on the liberty of others. Rule is a key category in this account. What then, is meant by 'to rule' in a political sense?
Patchen Markill, in an article entitled 'The Rule of the People: Arendt, Arche and Democracy' that was published in the February 2006 issue of the American Political Science Review, addresses this issue. He says that 'to rule' is generally understood to mean "to have power or command," or to "exercise supreme authority," and "to exercise control" often over others. Rule is about command and obedience. He says that though there are fierce disagreements about what makes rule democratic, these disagreements presuppose (as a taken-for-granted background) that politics is at bottom a matter of ruling, and that ruling consists in the exercise of authoritative control. Many liberals, for instance, especially those of a classical or libertarian bent, see their freedom as the power to exceed, break, subvert, modify, often in the sense of 'to transform the paternalistic rules and laws of the social democratic state.'
Markill says that in The Human Condition Hannah Arendt argues that "the concept of rule" is at the center of the philosophical tradition's long-standing effort to escape from fraility in the uncertain world of politics into the solidity of quiet and order (p. 222) She adds
...that the greater part of political philosophy since Plato could easily be interpreted as various attempts to find theoretical foundations and practical ways for an escape from politics altogether.The hallmark of all such escapes is the concept of rule...
Markill says that these escapes are typically made by substituting the logic of "making" or poiesis, in which a craftsman applies an already-given set of "rules and standards" to his material, for the unruliness of genuine action. The statesman as craftsman makes his city as a sculptor makes a statute through applying his rules and standards upon the raw material. Implicit in this making is 'control over' others since people are seen as the raw material for the statesman as craftsman to shape.
Markill asks a good question. Can we think of 'rule' differently to one that connotes a hierarchy of power of those who rule and those who are ruled? He says that if a word like "rule" refers to something it also involves an interpretation of the world, an explicit or tacit sense of why some phenomena belong together, what they are like, and why they are significant. The category 'rule', Arendt says in The Human Condition is:
... the notion that men can lawfully and politically live together only when some are entitled to command and the others forced to obey. The commonplace notion already to be found in Plato and Aristotle that every political community consists of those who rule and those who are ruled. (p.222)
Markill argues that Arendt aims her critique at the interpretation of the world that the word "rule" carries with it. She highlights the close association the category 'rule' posits between relationships of subordination on the one hand and such phenomena as stability, regularity, and continuity on the other and argues that the category of rule tends to obscure 'beginning'.
I find this a good interpretation of Arendt a good one as it highlights Arendt's critical stance to the tradition of political philosophy--as an overcoming of the tradition--rather than the standard liberal interpretation that states Arendt is an anti-modernist who has an elitist nostalgia for the politics of ancient Greece, engendering a fatal split between the 'political' and the 'social' in her thinking. She may romanticise the political life of the Greek polis but her depiction of the polis is not an exercise in nostalgia since her theory of action was, and can be, deployed to help us understand both the politics of participatory civic engagement in modernity and the meaning of political action.
Does Arendt help us to think differently to the category of 'rule ' as command and obedience in modernity? This is what needs to be placed on the table if, as Arendt argues, the authority of the political tradition has been broken. What pieces can be retrieved through remembrance and rethinking in a world where instrumentalism has converted everything into a means for some subjectively posited end. ?
Markill argues that Arendt can help us to think of 'rule' differently to one that connotes a hierarchy of power of those who rule and those who are ruled. Arendt, he says, thinks of "rule" and "to rule" as also a "beginning" and "to begin". In The Human Condition Arendt says that:
Moreover, since action is political activity par excellence, natality and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinquished from metaphysical, thought. (p.9)
Markill helps us here with the categorry 'natality', which we have previously encountered here. He says that natality stands for that which perpetually escapes the most reified order of presence. It is a pervasive initiatory power, one of moments and events, of spontaneous resistance and disobedience. Her recovery of beginning is not to celebrate those phenomena that are conventionally taken to be the opposite of rule as authoritative control as mastery--unruliness or disorder, instability, interruptions of regularity, or radical breaks in continuity. It is about natality, and it refers to the capacity of human beings to engage in action---to give birth, as it were, to new beginnings.
Natality is the category for that aspect of the human condition in virtue of which we possess "the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting". (The Human Condition, p.9) It is the unexpected new, happenings not just as states of affairs but also as meaningful events--- the phenomenon of action as beginning, openness and interruption and attunement to events.
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It might be worth adding that Arendt has a quite distinctive notion of "action" and "freedom", beyond just the capacity for initiative and renovation. Her initial preoccupation with totalitarianism set her agenda and for her totalitarianism is based not just in a total eclipse of human freedom in the name of an imposed ruling "necessity", (even as it claims boundless possibility, slipping loose from the limitations of reality), but on the consigning of whole populations to oblivion, superfluity.
It's that oblivion/superfluity and its effects on modern politics that is the main "object" of her criticism, to which she counterposed her conception of the public-political world as a "plurality", in which is encountered and perhaps conserved the perspectives of particular others. A "free" act/judgment then is precisely one that interrupts/resists the web of relations constituting the routinization/reification of a political situation and the oblivion that thus attends it, in opening up the encounter with the particular perspectives of plural others, thereby renewing the political as a common world.
That, in turn, underlies her insistence on the public-political as "a condition of equality rather than an equality of condition" and on the genuinely political stance as being "neither for, nor against others", as disinterestedness or impartiality that has nothing to do with the theoretical. And that goes to answering the complaints of liberals/leftist about her "puristic" conception of the political and her criticism of its "invasion" by "the social", (i.e. the economic-administrative), in modernity, as stripping the political of any real or substantive content and as impervious to concerns of social justice.
Don't the injuries of oblivion form the deepest root of social injustice and doesn't the substition of "solutions" to social "problems" for any actual encounter with others in the perspectival reality of a common world subtlely advance such oblivion? For Arendt the ethical question always concerns thinking or thoughtfulness in the sense of knowing or understanding what one is actually doing.
The notion that the truly "free" act is one of resistance perhaps shares some Heideggerian roots with Foucault's otherwise much different conception/framework.