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January 14, 2008
Perry Anderson's article Jottings on the Conjuncture in a recent issue of New Left Review explores the longer-term logics of the world-historical changes we are living through. He says that:
At least four alternative readings of the times—there may be more—offer diagnoses of the directions in which the world is moving that are substantially more optimistic. Three of these date back to the early-to-mid nineties, but have been further developed since 9/11. The best known is, of course, the vision to be found in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, to which the other three all refer, at once positively and critically. Tom Nairn’s Faces of Nationalism and forthcoming Global Nations set out a second perspective. Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing constitute a third. Malcolm Bull’s recent essays, culminating in ‘States of Failure’, propose a fourth. Any reflection on the current period needs to take seriously what might superficially appear to be counter-intuitive readings of it.
These are a kind of contemporary philosophy of history. All four versions take as their points of departure thinkers prior to the emergence of modern socialism: Spinoza for Negri, Smith for Arrighi, Hegel for Bull, Marx before Marx (the young Rhineland democrat, prior to the Manifesto) for Nairn. The one that interested me, as I was unfamiliar with it, was that given by Malcolm Bull who returns to Hegel.
Anderson says that Bull’s story begins in the 17th century, with the first intimations of an involuntary collective intelligence, as distinct from conscious collective will, in the political thought of Spinoza.
Descending through Mandeville at once to Smith, as the invisible hand of the market, and to Stewart, as the natural origin of government, this tradition eventually issued into Hayek’s general theory of spontaneous order—perhaps the most powerful of all legitimations of capitalism. Today it has resurfaced in the ‘swarm intelligence’ of Hardt and Negri’s multitude, counterposed to the state that supposedly embodies popular sovereignty, descending from Rousseau....The dichotomy to which Hardt and Negri revert, however, is effectively an expression of the impasse of contemporary agency, which has become a stalemate between the pressures of the globalizing market and defensive populist reactions to it.
Populist reactions have so far indeed been the principal response to the expansion of the globalizing market, even in Australia.
What I find interesting is Bulls' suggestion that in his time Hegel offered a resolution of the antinomy. For The Philosophy of Right\ constructs a passage from the spontaneous intelligence of civil society—the market as theorized by Scottish political economy—to the orderly will of a liberal state. This was then dismantled in the early 20th century by adversaries from Right to Left. Anderson says that Bull argues that this is the legacy of which a metamorphosis is needed:
For what has happened in the interim is the disintegration of the global state whose overlapping incarnations have been the European, Soviet and American empires: first decolonization, then de-communization and now, visibly, the decline of US hegemony. Does this mean, then, the unstoppable release of a global market society: collective intelligence stripped of any collective will? Not necessarily. The entropy of the global state could release, instead, dissipative structures inverting the Hegelian formula: not subsuming civil society into the state, but—in the opposite direction—reconstituting civil society, on a potentially non-market basis, out of the withering away of the state, as once imagined by Marx and Gramsci.
Bull sees an impasse between the globalizing market and populist reactions to it and this implies that they are of equivalent weight, neither advancing at the expense of the other.
However, instead of the withering away of the state, as once imagined by Marx and Gramsci, we have the decay of the liberal state as it transforms into a more authoritarian one. However by the state Bull does mean the nation state of Hegel: --he means a global one in the form of US hegemony, and so its dissolution gives rise to a global civil society.?
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Gary,
good post of a very timely issue.
The globalization construct has sadly been hijacked by neo-liberal commodity fetishists to the point where it is simply code for making it easier multinational corporations to exploit markets globally for profit. any questions that this may be harmful to the 'globe' environmetally or suggestions that it may be detrimental to a great many members of the global family are drowned out. However, it does not have to be that way. with some political will and courage it is possible to reframe globalization to include notions of sustainablity, reciprocity and the building of non-finacial capital all over the world. The crucial acknowledgement, both tacit and explicit, that we are all part of the global village has been missing until now (except in pecuniary) but I sense that the tide is turning. This is pivotal and I agree that the demise of US hegemony and ideological influence will contribute greatly (paradoxically, the Iraq debacle is probably assisting in this decline in influence). we live in hope
regards
Luke