HA Journal: Volume II

2014 The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College

The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

2014

The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College

Foreword

Volume II of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College publishes four essays based on talks given at the 2012 Arendt Center Conference, “Does the President Matter? A Conference on the American Age of Political Disrepair.” As I write in my essay, the conference began with the Arendtian assumptions; first, that public deliberation and self-government are at the core of human collective life, and second, that the 20th century witnessed the decline into irrelevance of participatory government in American politics. The presidency has become the near exclusive focus of American politics. We may bemoan the fact that only half of registered voters vote in presidential elections; however, in off-year elections we are lucky if 15 percent of the registered voters bother. To ask “Does the President Matter?” is to ask: What kind of leader might once again make people care about politics?

Jeffrey Tulis’s keynote lecture addressed the disrepair, arguing that the problem with presidential power today is actually founded upon the “the gross abdication of responsibility by the legislative branch, the Congress of the United States.” What we need, Tulis concludes, is a president who can be the kind of “constitutional leader that gets Congress reoriented towards doing its own job better.”

Great presidents are largely a thing of the past, writes Tracy Strong.

He asks why, and answers: because of the demise of political conventions and political parties. In Strong’s counterintuitive argument, direct primary voting—a core democratic demand—has weakened the participatory exercise of self-government. Replacing local parties that “attached local interests and concerns to national ones” with the mere act of voting has distanced people from politics. What institutions, Strong wonders, might re-invigorate the participatory exercises that conventions once provided?

Anne Norton worries about the “the poverty of public space in our democracy.” Taking cues from Occupy Wall Street, Norton argues that the idea of liberal democracy—the once productive melding of liberalism and democracy—has now become an obstacle to democracy understood as the public participation and engagement in politics. “[L]iberalism may have secured democracy in the past, but now liberalism puts democracy in peril.” Norton challenges us to think of democracy outside of its historical connection with liberal conceptions of free speech, property rights, and procedural legalism.

In addition to essays on the matter of the presidency, we publish as well “The Destiny of Freedom,” a revised version of two lectures given at Bard College by Philippe Nonet. In Part One, Nonet sketches the path of freedom understood as “freedom of the will” in Kant’s political philosophy to its culmination in the Nietzschean “will to power.” What needs to be seen is that free will is the metaphysical origin of technique and all technical understandings of freedom. In Part Two, Nonet argues that “Modern mankind is then faced with the necessity of a decision regarding freedom.”

Either we remain committed to freedom as freedom of the will, and so condemn ourselves “to servitude in the exclusive service of technique as will to will,” or, letting go of the “will to will,” we follow Heidegger and put ourselves “in the service of freedom proper, as guardianship of the unconcealment of being.”

Finally, this issue of HA also includes four “Quotes of the Week” reprinted from The Hannah Arendt Center Blog.

Hannah Arendt is the leading thinker of politics and the humanities in the modern era. No other scholar so enrages and engages citizens and students from all political persuasions, all the while insisting on human dignity, providing a clear voice against totalitarianism, and defending freedom with extraordinary intelligence and courage. An activist and thinker whose work resists simple categorization, Arendt writes with a stunning lucidity that resonates with scholars and the reading public alike. Her writing continues to delight and inspire, even as she asks us to confront the most haunting questions of our time. HA embodies the desire to remain true to Arendt’s irreverent, provocative, and vibrant spirit. While HA will solicit and publish new scholarship on Hannah Arendt, the journal seeks above all to publish essays that provoke, surprise, and enlighten as they speak to and about the common world.

Acknowledgments: The journal would never have made it to print without the invaluable assistance of Bridget Hollenback, Josh Kopin, Matthew Goldstein, and Jennifer Szalai, who generously donated their time to edit these essays. Amy Pedulla and Keziah Weir provided essential editorial support, and Mary Smith shepherded the journal through production. The journal offers a physical work, an increasingly rare thing that persists in the physical world. I hope it returns you to the spirit of provocation and thought characteristic of our Hannah Arendt Center conferences.

Roger Berkowitz

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Does the President Matter?

Does the President Matter?

Thoughts on Miracles in Politics Roger Berkowitz

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Is the Presidency Too Weak?

Jeffrey K. Tulis

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Occupy Wall Street and Liberal Democracy Anne Norton

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Is the Era of Great Presidents in the Past?

Tracy B. Strong

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The Destiny of Freedom Philippe Nonet

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The Danger of Intellectuals Roger Berkowitz

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The False Culture of Utility Jennifer M. Hudson

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Forgiveness Grace Hunt

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When Power Is Lost William Dixon

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Contributors

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Essay

Quotes of the Week

Does the President Matter?

Does the President Matter?

Thoughts on Miracles in Politics

In preparation for the 2012 Hannah Arendt Center Conference “Does the President Matter? A Conference on the American Age of Political Disrepair,” the Arendt Center placed large chalkboard blocks around the Bard campus and invited students to respond to the simplistic yet complicated question: Does the President Matter? The blocks generated quite a few compelling comments. Many mentioned the president’s power to appoint justices to the Supreme Court. Quite a few invoked the previous president, and his legacy of war and torture. Some were specific to Bard College, where undoubtedly the president does and has mattered for nearly three decades. And since we are at Bard, one student answered: “It depends what you mean by matter.”

This last comment struck me as insightful. If what we mean by matter is that the president possesses an increasing and unprecedented power traditionally absent in a democratic leader and largely absent since the time of enlightened monarchy, the president does matter. We live in an age of an imperial presidency. The president can—at least, he does—send our troops into battle without the approval of Congress. The president can, and does, harness the power of TV, the Internet, and Twitter to bypass his critics and reach the masses more directly than ever before. The president can, and does, appoint Supreme Court justices with barely a whimper from the Senate; and the president’s appointments can, and do, swing the balance on a prisoner’s right to habeas corpus, a woman’s right to choose, or a couple’s right to marry.

And yet, we must also ask: What if by matter, we mean something else?

What if we mean having the power to change who we are in meaningful ways? What if by matter we mean the resolve to confront honestly the challenges of the present? What if by matter we mean the virtuosity to make unpredictable and visionary choices, to invite and inspire a better future?

On the really big questions—the thoughtless consumerism that degrades our environment and our souls; the millions of people who have no jobs and increasingly little prospect for productive employment; the threat of terrorism that evacuates our public squares as well as tames our

public discourse; the astronomical national debt, $17 trillion and counting for the U.S. (that is, $140,000 for each taxpayer); and the $3 to $5 trillion deficiency in public pension obligations that will force local and state governments to close public libraries and starve public schools in order to pay for the comfortable retirements of public employees—the president seems powerless. So do Congress and other elected leaders. On the transformative questions that most impact us—consider the $1 trillion of inextinguishable student debt that is creating a lost generation of young people whose lives are stifled by unwise decisions made before they were allowed to buy a beer—it is hard to think of ways in which the president today can or does matter.

The 2012 election should be about a frank acknowledgment of the unsustainability of our economic, social, and environmental practices and expectations. We should be talking together about how to remake our future in ways that are both just and exhilarating. This election should be scary and exciting. But so far, it’s small-minded and ugly.

The smallness of politics is not limited to the United States of America.

Around the world, we witness worldwide distrust and disdain for government. In Greece, there is a clear choice between austerity and devaluation; but Greek leaders have saddled their people with half-hearted austerity that causes pain without prospect for relief. In Italy, the paralysis of political leaders has led to resignation and the appointment of an interim technocratic government. In Germany, the most powerful European leader delays and denies, trusting that others will blink every time they are brought to the mouth of the abyss. From Russia to Japan, and from China to Brazil, world leaders are refusing to face the economic, environmental, and metaphysical crises that are engulfing the world. Denial may be an essential part of politics. But crises usually have the virtue of focusing attention on what is wrong. It is from crises that leaders emerge. And yet politicians today seem uniquely immune to the oft-remarked advantages of crises. There is increasingly a real concern that the crisis may come, and little will change.

No wonder that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in the United States, and the Pirate Parties in Europe, share a common sense that liberal democratic government is broken. Anarchists on the left and small government reactionaries on the right are united on little else except their disdain for democratic self-government. A substantial—and highly educated—portion of the electorate in America and across the globe has

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concluded that government is so inept and so compromised that it needs to be abandoned or radically constrained. Are they wrong?

No president, it seems, is up to the challenge of fixing our broken political system. On the contrary, every president comes to Washington promising reform! And they all fail. According to Jon Rauch, a journalist and Brookings Scholar, failure of political reform is inevitable. He has this to say in his book Government’s End: If the business of America is business, the business of government programs and their clients is to stay in business. And after a while, as the programs and the clients and their political protectors adapt to nourish and protect each other, government and its universe of groups reach a turning point—or, perhaps more accurately, a point from which there is no turning back. That point has arrived.

Government has become what it is and will remain: a large, incoherent, often incomprehensible mass that is solicitous of its clients but impervious to any broad, coherent program of reform. And this evolution cannot be reversed.

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On the really big questions of transforming politics, the president is, Rauch argues, simply powerless. President Obama apparently agrees. On October 8, 2012—just one day before the Arendt Center Conference— the President said, in Florida: “The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.”

A similar sentiment is offered by Laurence Lessig, known to many of you as a founding member of Creative Commons. In his recent book, Republic 2.0, Lessig writes: The great threat today is in plain sight. It is the economy of influence now transparent to all, which has normalized a process that draws our democracy away from the will of the people. A process that distorts our democracy from ends sought by both the Left and the Right: For the single most salient feature of the government that we have evolved is not that it discriminates in favor of one side and against the other. The single most salient feature is that it discriminates against all sides to favor itself. We have created an engine of influence that seeks not some particular strand of political or economic ideology, whether Marx or Hayek. We have created instead an engine of influence that seeks simply to make those most connected rich.

For Rauch and Lessig—and even for President Obama—government is so concerned with its parochial interests and its need to stay in business that we have forfeited control over it. We have, in other words, lost the freedom to govern ourselves.

The system of influence and corruption through PACs, SuperPacs, and lobbyists is so entrenched, Lessig writes, that no reform seems plausible. All that is left is the Hail-Mary pass of a new constitutional convention—an idea that Lessig promotes widely, as with his “Conference On the Constitutional Convention” held in 2011 at Harvard. Only by starting over and creating a new system can we free ourselves from the seemingly insatiable appetite of government for more power. For that reason, Lessig advocates the admittedly risky proposition of calling a constitutional convention, one that could propose amendments to the U.S. Constitution or—more radically—go beyond its constitutional mandate and propose a fully new Constitution.

One question Lessig must answer is who would attend such a new Constitutional Convention. Fifty-five delegates—leading citizens and thinkers of the time—attended the original convention in 1787, appointed by the 13 states. All were white. They were well off, largely educated, and most had government experience. Many had fought in the revolution. All were recognized leaders. Would it be possible to agree on such a group today? How many interest groups would need to be represented? How many races, classes, and genders? To represent American in 2012, how many people would have to attend to guarantee the convention legitimacy? And how could we agree on the leading thinkers of today?

Choosing those representatives empowered to rewrite the Constitution would be infinitely more complicated today than in the 18th century.

Probably, it would be impossible. Which is why Lessig argues they should be chosen by lot. His is a compromise solution that seeks to avoid the crisis in leadership by abjuring leadership. But a Constitution written by average Americans chosen by lot would ensure, in all likelihood, a decidedly average document. This returns us to precisely the problem we face today: an inability to decide upon or choose leaders of vision and courage. Why is it that we have such difficulty electing presidents, members of Congress, and leaders who matter?

The question “Does the President Matter?” is asked, in the context of this conference, from out of Hannah Arendt’s maxim that freedom is the fundamental raison d’etre of politics. In her essay “What is Freedom?”

Arendt rejects the usual association of freedom with the free will and the

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freedom to do what one wants. To praise freedom is not simply to enjoy the right to think—something every human being has. Instead, freedom is the ability to do things, to act with others to bring new ideas and new worlds into existence. So understood, freedom is intimately connected to politics and public life. “Freedom is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison d’être of politics is freedom.” For Arendt, to be free is to act—to act in public with others in ways that matter and have significance. “Men are free as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” Politics is about acting freely.

But what does she mean by a free act?

A free act is spontaneous. It follows no rules and is unpredictable. It is something that, as free, is new. It begins a new chain of events, one that appears sui generis. All human beings have the potential to act in such unpredictable, extraordinary, and free ways. Human freedom means, at least in part, that we can act so as to surprise. This is what makes us human and distinguishes us from animals on the one hand and machines on the other. Animals can be trained to obey; they act in accord with external stimuli. Machines follow programmed algorithms. But humans are, in the end, mysterious and unpredictable. We are surprising.

Surprise is an essential element of free action in another sense as well.

Only an act that is surprising and bold is a political act, because only such an act will strike others, and make them pay attention. An act, if it is to remake the world in some way, must draw attention to itself. It must seduce others to attend to it and, in the end, persuade them to agree. But prior to the question of agreement is the need for attention, which is why action must be new and surprising. Indeed, action must be beautiful, in the sense that it strikes others and draws them to look and to judge. Human freedom is inseparable from the distinctly human capacity to act creatively in ways that demand judgment of the act’s ugliness or of its beauty. It is precisely those surprising and compellingly beautiful acts that gather plural and diverse people around them in agreement that are political. Such acts, from the force of their active power, form a unity from a plurality, without in any way sacrificing the independence of the plurality.

Arendt emphasizes the importance of the surprisingly bold and glorious nature of action in The Human Condition. Political action cannot be judged by moral standards of good or bad, or by utilitarian standards of success or failure. Plenty of great political acts are morally problematic, as for example the decision to drop the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the

assassination of Osama Bin Laden. And many great political acts end in failure, as for example John Brown’s raid. Rather than morality or utility, the only standard for judging political actions is greatness: Unlike human behavior—which the Greeks, like all civilized people, judged according to “moral standards,” taking into account motives and intentions on the one hand and aims and consequences on the other—action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.

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Does the President Matter?

For Arendt, politics is an art, and “the art of politics,” she writes, “teaches men how to bring forth what is great and radiant—ta megala kai lampra, in the words of Democritus.” Political actions must be great because they must shine and strike others. Only then will others gather around and tell stories, write poems, and erect monuments glorifying the act in beautiful artworks or—when the action is rejected—disdaining it as criminal or an abomination.

When President George Washington stepped down after his second term; when President Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves; when President Theodore Roosevelt took on the corporate trusts that were corrupting the country; when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the New Deal; when President Harry Truman seized the nation’s steel mills; when President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the Arkansas National Guard into federal service in order to integrate schools in Little Rock, these presidents acted in ways that helped refine, redefine, and re-imagine what it means to be an American. Their actions were surprising, bold, and striking. They upended expectations and demanded that the citizens of the United States pay attention, consider the action, and decide how to respond. These actions are remembered and told about today because they transformed the way that the American plurality conceives itself as a unified political body. It is in the president’s ability to act in such ways that the president can matter in ways that matter.

Political action can only matter when it is seen to be great. Our word politics is derived from the Greek polis that is in turn descended from the verb pelein, which was a word used to describe the circular rings of smoke that arise from a pipe—what we today call smoke rings. Politics is the gathering of a circle of plural citizens around a common center, that common

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core that holds a people together amidst its many differences. The politician, according to this understanding, is the person who acts in such a way as to remind—or to show—the people what they share in common. The polis is necessary for politics because it is that space where people can be assured that their actions will be seen, heard, judged, and remembered.

The paradoxical danger of a politics that matters is that all great political action is—in its nature—inherently risky even criminal. This is an insight familiar to readers of Dostoevsky. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov says: Let’s say, the lawgivers and founders of mankind, starting from the most ancient and going on to the Lycurguses, the Solons, the Muhammads, the Napoleons, and so forth, that all of them to a man were criminals, from the fact alone that in giving a new law they thereby violated the old one.

All leaders are, in important ways, related to criminals, in that they must act in new ways that break established conventions. Any action, any original deed, any political act that is new and shows leadership is, of necessity, something out of the ordinary, something that partakes in some measure of greatness. Those who act must risk themselves in the venture into the public world. The actor leaves the security of home and enters the world of the public. Which is why Arendt insists that courage is “the political virtue par excellence.”

Arendt’s favorite examples of such daring actors are Achilles and Socrates, both of whom were killed in or for the doing of great acts. Even in Homer’s sympathetic portrait, Achilles’s rage is presented as excessive and inhuman; his dragging of Hector’s body in mud and his furious disemboweling of those who beg for mercy is accompanied by repeated invocations of his desire to eat human flesh. The hero Achilles is very nearly an outlaw. And yet by accepting his mortal fate and choosing heroism over life, he lends to his actions a patina of humanity that, in Homer’s poem, is transfigured into a thing of beauty.

Similarly, Socrates is known for his physical ugliness, as well as his impiety. His public questioning of Athenian nobles diminishes them while undermining Greek religious traditions. Having written nothing, Socrates could have been reviled as a failed Athenian rebel. But his willingness to die for his belief—his exemplification of the moral fact that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong—so strikes his friend Plato that Socrates’s act is immortalized as the epitome of ethical action for all times.

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If Socrates’s ethical action inspires the fundamental moral maxim of Western civilization, Achilles’s mortal fame illustrates the basic paradox of the human condition, that while we humans can do incredible things and fabricate our world, we are, in the end, subject to forces beyond our control. The acts by Achilles and Socrates are political in Arendt’s sense of the word because the manifest greatness of what they did inspired poets and writers to tell stories about them. These stories and artworks helped to mold moral and humanist ideas that became the common foundation of western civilization.

For all of the courage and bravery in Achilles and Socrates, their acts would have been politically meaningless without poets and citizens to tell stheir stories. Pericles’s funeral oration and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address illustrate the importance of the polis as that place where stories about heroes are told and remembered. In Arendt’s words from The Human Condition, the polis gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how to turn words to praise them; without assistance from others, those who acted will be able to establish together the everlasting remembrance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in the present and in future ages.

A president can matter, then, either as an actor or as a storyteller. Or in both ways, as when a president like Lincoln can memorialize those who answered his summons to fight for “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Meaningful political action must combine both daring doing and the political promise of remembrance.

Shortly after we began to plan this conference, I heard an interview with former attorney general John Ashcroft speaking on the Freakonomics Radio Show. Ashcroft said: Leadership in a moral and cultural sense may be even more important than what a person does in a governmental sense. A leader calls people to their highest and best. . . . No one ever achieves greatness merely by obeying the law. People who do

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above what the law requires become really valuable to a culture.

And a president can set a tone that inspires people to do that.

My first reaction was: this is a surprising thing for the attorney general of the United States to say. My second reaction was: I want Ashcroft to speak at the Hannah Arendt Center conference. Sadly, Mr. Ashcroft refused. But this does not change the fact that, in an important way, Ashcroft is right. In crisis, great leaders will rise above the laws. They will call us to our highest and best.

What Ashcroft doesn’t quite say—and yet Arendt and Dostoevsky make clear—is that there is a thin and yet all-so-important line separating great leaders from criminals. Both act in ways unexpected and novel. In a sense, both break the law. But only the leader’s act shows itself to be right and thus re-makes the law. A great leader shows the earlier law to have been wrong and forges a new moral and also written law through the force and power of moral example. Raskolnikov knew that leaders and criminals were of a kind; he also knew he was not the great man he wanted to be.

In many ways presidential politics in the 21st century takes place in the shadow of George W. Bush’s overreach. At least, at this time, it seems painfully clear that President George W. Bush’s decision to systematize torture stands closer to a criminal act than an act of great legislation. One result of his excesses is that we have reacted against great and daring leadership. In line with the spirit of equality that drives our age, we ruthlessly expose the foibles, missteps, scandals and failures of anyone who rises to prominence. Bold leaders are risk takers. They fail and embarrass themselves. They have unruly skeletons in their closets. They will hesitate to endure the scrutiny of modern politics and they rarely prevail in the public inquisition that the presidential selection process has become.

Those who are inoffensive enough to succeed in politics in 2012 are branded as pragmatists by their consultants and spinners. Our current pragmatists are both products of Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. Governor Mitt Romney loves data. President Barack Obama worships experts. They are both nothing if not faithful to the doctrine of technocratic optimism—that with the right people in charge, we can do anything. The only problem is that they refuse to tell us what it is they want to do. They have forgotten that politics is a matter of thinking and imagination, not a pragmatic exercise in technical efficiency.

And yet, people crave what used to be called a statesman—that political leader who ventures the unexpected and the glorious in the public

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realm. To ask: ‘Does the President Matter?” is to ask: Might a president, might a political leader, be able to transform our nation, to restore the dignity and meaning of politics? It is to ask, in other words, for a miracle.

At the end of her essay “What is Freedom?” Hannah Arendt said this about the importance of miracles in politics.

Hence it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect “miracles” in the political realm. And the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear.

Arendt’s invocation of miracles is to be taken seriously. Political action always appears as if it were a miracle—unexpected, awesome, and extraordinary. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia, it was an act of courage. But no one could have predicted—and certainly no intelligence agencies did predict—that this would set off a string of revolutions known as the Arab Spring. All truly political acts appear as miracles.

That politics trades in miracles does not mean that Arendt invokes divine intervention. On the contrary: “It is men who perform miracles— men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own.” What she means is that human beings can act surprisingly and spontaneously in ways that initiate chains of actions that appear as miracles. We need to remember the miraculous potential of human action, especially when so many are so convinced that our political paralysis cannot be cured.

I don’t know if the current president matters, or if the next one will matter more. But I know that he or she must. Which is why we must believe that miracles are possible. And that means that we, ourselves, must act in freedom to make the miraculous happen.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006).

Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Dostoevesky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993).

Lessig, Lawrence, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (New York: Twelve, 2011).

Rauch, Jonathan, Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working (New York: Public Affairs, 2008).

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Is the Presidency Too Weak?

Jeffrey K. Tulis

I am going to take up the question that was just posed in that kind introduction, “Is the presidency too weak?” I won’t hold you in suspense: the answer is no. The presidency is not too weak.

For a long time in political science, it used to be thought that the presidency was too weak. That was due to the powerful influence of a book by Richard Neustadt titled Presidential Power. Neustadt has a story about Harry Truman that sets up his thesis. In the early summer of 1952, before the heart of the campaign, President Truman contemplated the problems of a general’s becoming president, should Eisenhower win the forthcoming election. Truman said that Eisenhower would sit here, “tapping his desk for emphasis, and he’ll say ‘do this, do that’ and nothing will happen.

Poor Ike, it won’t be a bit like the army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

And so the dominant understanding of the presidency in American politics for the 1950s and ’60s tried to wrestle with the fact that it’s difficult not only for the president to get his will in Congress, but even for the president to control and direct the executive branch. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, well-known public intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. claimed that the opposite was true; that presidents were far too powerful.

The idea of the imperial presidency took hold, which suggested that presidents were actually dominating the American constitutional order. Today, the most influential literature in political science about the presidency emphasizes the enormous ability of presidents to exercise unilateral powers in a variety of ways. For example: across all administrations since FDR, we see the increasing ability of presidents to use executive agreements in place of treaties, to withhold information from Congress, and to use the processes of regulation instead of legislation. President Obama has already signaled that he is prepared to do all sorts of things on his own authority if he doesn’t get cooperation from Congress. Because so many of these executive actions have been used effectively to implement important public policies, in recent years we’ve had a spate of books on the “new imperial presidency.”

I want to suggest something different—that the presidency is very strong, but not imperial. This executive strength may indeed pose problems for democratic governance, but the source of those problems does

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not lie in the presidency. The presidency looks somewhat imperial today because of the failure of the Congress. In other words, the problem of presidential power today is actually not the exercise of presidential power; it’s the gross abdication of responsibility by the legislative branch, the Congress of the United States.

The core pathology of national politics today is congressional abdication. Now, you might wonder, how far back does that go? How old is this problem? Not too old. It goes back basically to the mid 20th century. The 19th- and early 20th-century Congresses were veritable models of constitutional responsibility compared to present practice. This is not to suggest that the 19th century was a utopian era. One can readily point to slavery, racism, gender discrimination, and all sorts of things to argue that time was deeply flawed compared to the modern period. But with respect to institutional politics and the civic education of the citizenry more generally, the 19th century was a really remarkable time. To see this, all you need to do is look at the congressional globe or the congressional record at random. Read the debates. You will find them unbelievably engaged, interesting, informed, often—but not always—principled, and of a high quality, rhetorically and politically. And if you do the same thing with the congressional record today you will find the opposite. American politics is characterized, believe it or not, by the absence of robust constitutional discourse and a dearth of institutional contestation.

I will come back to the obvious rejoinder: “What do you mean? Isn’t there too much conflict in DC today?” And the answer is: “Yes, there is.”

“Isn’t there too much partisan polarization?” Yes, there is. But these perverse forms of conflict that we see today are themselves the fruit, or byproduct, of a kind of institutional amnesia that has led to the absence of the fructifying, helpful sorts of institutional conflict that was built into our original political system and was manifest in the19th-century constitutional order.

Why would our original political system be properly characterized as designed for conflict? It is because the three branches of our government were not crafted to illustrate and embody the separation of powers principle, although this idea is the most familiar to everybody, and can be found in the original language used. Over time, transformation and misinterpretation of the separation of powers discussion have obscured what the Constitution was actually designed to be. I call this new constitutional design a democratic version of the mixed regime, a mixed democracy.

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The classic mixed regime, some of you may know, was the idea that a polity might be better off if it could somehow represent the alternative regime possibilities in one polity so that one branch would be representing a monarchy, another one aristocracy, and another democracy. Taken together, they would insure a kind of continual agonism over who should rule. The polity as a whole would benefit from a continuing, institutionalized argument regarding fundamental political alternatives. The virtues of each alternative could be exploited and the vices of each contested.

America did not adopt the mixed regime, partly because we did not have pre-existing social classes that might represent these regimes, but also because we were committed to becoming some form of a democracy.

The American choice, at least the founding choice, was to represent different desiderata of a democracy itself in different institutions. To represent energy and a need to attend to security in one, to represent a popular will and deliberation in another, to represent rights and judgment in another—and to structure these institutions so that the way they were built, even more than the powers we assigned to them, would incline them to see the very same problems from different angles, different democratic perspectives. And the reason to do that is to make sure over time, even though you didn’t know who would actually inhabit these institutions, you could count on the relevant considerations for democratic deliberation, discourse, and decision being raised. If the institutions inclined their occupants to look at the world in the way the institutions were designed to make them look at it, rights should be attended to in every case—what people wanted should be attended to and the security needs of a country, which is not a peculiarly democratic issue but is an issue for all regimes, would be attended to. The relative weight that should be given to these competing considerations would be a bi-product of the political contestation between these vigorous proponents of different ways of seeing politics.

In order for this new design to work, the institutions have to be engaged to do it. The occupants of the institution need to see—and be motivated to see—the world from the designed point of view of those major branches of government. The Federalists described this as “tying the ambition of office holders to the duties of the place.” It meant that the ordinary ambitions of people, once they inhabit an institution, would be transformed as they looked at the world from that institution, in order to advance their own political ambitions.

Now, how does all of this bear on American politics today? Well, in fact, the presidency works pretty much the way it was anticipated and

encouraged by the original design. A lot of Obama supporters were surprised that Obama continued some of the policies of the Bush administration, with respect to foreign policy and national security. To some extent they shouldn’t have been surprised because he adopted a moderate stance during the campaign. But there were some ideas or campaign commitments that he did change. His views changed because, as president, he looked at the world from a security perspective. Now sometimes that security perspective can be too narrow of a perspective for the polity to take, but it’s his job to take that perspective, and if you’re concerned about the foreign or defense policy result, you should be concerned about Congress not articulating its contending or competing perspective.

In the 20th century, however, Congress is no longer the agonistic, viable contender in national politics it once was. It gives up, or abdicates, its power to the presidency. For example: in the 19th century, one out of every three Supreme Court justices was turned down—either by resigning after the debate, or actually being voted down. In the 20th century, only a handful have been turned down. And more than one out of three were controversial in the earlier period, including some that weren’t turned down. That’s a huge change. And the still more important change is that we’ve come to the view that it’s a bad thing to have political argument over, for example, ideology, or jurisprudence, or the political views that justices bring to the table. In the 19th century, the full array of considerations that a president might have for nominating somebody—which ranged from crass political concerns regarding geography or representation of some group, to the higher considerations regarding the meaning of the Constitution and methods to interpret it—were ripe for consideration by the legislature as well as the presidency. In the 20th century, those concerns are no longer taken on and debated by the legislature. That is a serious abdication of power.

With respect to budgets, the legislature is the place that’s supposed to do the budgeting. A legislature’s fundamental job is to allocate money, particularly in an advanced, industrial, liberal-democratic society like our own. What else is there to do, legislatively speaking, that’s important? We no longer need a democratic legislature to spend its time arguing about whether we should be a democracy, as in old mixed regimes. The big questions have, in a way, been answered for us. The questions that are grave today actually have a technical dimension to them, such as how to best spend our money in order to make the country as a whole more prosperous, or more just. The modern-day Congress has found itself incapable

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of budgeting and so it is increasingly giving that responsibility to the executive. Initially the executive itself insisted that it was better at doing this because it had the tools—the technical tools—to do budgeting. And in the Nixon administration there was a really good and robust debate about this as President Nixon was impounding money. He was refusing to spend money that had been appropriated for particular things on the grounds that he had custody of the whole and they were thinking too much about the parts. Congress responded to that by cutting back his power to impound, but also by creating the Congressional Budget Office, the legislature’s own technical support institution, which over time has developed a reputation for being better than the executive branch. Even the executive branch now cites the Congressional Budget Office if it wants to make a credible claim about whether their budget means x or y. It’s the Congressional Budget Office numbers that they use, not those of the Office of Management and Budget—the executive’s institution.

Despite those resources, Congress punts on the budget, and they do this in a way that is very interesting. They do this in a way that resembles the story of Ulysses and the Sirens, from Greek mythology, in which Ulysses’s ship sails past beautiful sirens, whose singing causes sailors to jump overboard and swim toward them until they all die. In that myth, Ulysses decides he has to solve this problem, and he says, “Look, cover your ears, so you can’t hear these sirens, and put me up there and tie me on the mast so I can see what’s going on, but I can’t kill myself.” (It struck me as an odd solution. I would have said, “Why don’t we take a different route?” but he said, “No, no, no, I have to hear what is so special about these sirens.”) So that’s a kind of approach that’s actually been thought to be a form of political and ethical responsibility—that you can anticipate your own weakness in advance, and make advance arrangements for it, so that it doesn’t harm you. Now this idea, this notion of pre-commitment, is the one that Congress absorbed and tried to model for itself to deal with the budget. On the surface, it looks like a potentially responsible, not irresponsible, response to this problem.

In the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, for example, and in proposed balanced-budget amendments, and in the recent sequestration that has been a subject of political debate, Congress said, look, “we’re going to devise a process in which if we don’t successfully make a budget ourselves, the budget will still get made.” By the way, a budget is simply a mechanism to figure out what amount of money is being collected, what amount of money is available to spend, and what one is going to spend the money

on. That’s what a budget is. And the problem has been that Congress would just spend money on whatever they wanted, beyond any limit on what money was coming in. In response to this problem, Congress said, “Let’s figure out how much money we can spend, and if we fail to come up with a budget within those limits, we will delegate somebody to actually cut the budget, across the board, by a percentage amount.” It’s like tying yourself to the mast.

The difficulty with that solution, of course, is that in the end nobody, including the delegated executive or whoever the functionary is who executes this policy, has ended up doing the essential activity that legislatures were designed to perform—which is to decide among the priorities how much you want to spend on each. It’s obviously a dumb thing to cut everything by 15 percent, since some things are going to be killed by doing that, and other things are going to be hardly affected at all. The whole point is to make those legislative decisions about what’s more important, and that is not being done.

A final example: war powers. The president, as you know, has enormous authority over war and peace. Enormous authority. That’s where a lot of the credible claims about the imperial presidency come from. Yet, the president should be pushing the envelope regarding national defense.

That is a principal job of the executive—to figure out how to defend our country. It is the Congress, however, that has not been doing its job— either by retrospectively evaluating those actions or, in the case of things like offensive wars, by insisting that they can’t happen unless the legislature authorizes them. I happen to be one who liked, for example, the Obama policy in Libya, but it was simply wrong and clearly unconstitutional for the president of the United States to execute it on his own authority. There is no compelling constitutional case that can justify an executive decision to take the nation from a state of peace to a state of war with another country on his own authority—but Congress did not stand up for itself.

One of the reasons for Congressional abdication of war power goes back to something that was mentioned earlier this morning. During Roger Berkowitz’s introduction to the conference, he listed several moments of leadership greatness: the Emancipation Proclamation, George Washington, Truman and the steel seizure. And I was thinking, wait a minute, how does this sequence work? The steel seizure case is generally thought to be American history’s most dramatic instance of presidential failure and weakness.

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Some of you may know that Truman seized the steel mills in the Korean War to intervene in a labor-management dispute. There were all sorts of mediation efforts. Labor agreed to the mediators’ proposals, but management did not. Due to the intransigence of management, a strike was looming. The president decided the war effort would be hindered if the state did not have ready access to steel, so he seized these steel mills.

The case was quickly taken to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court, in a decision that is the most confining of presidential power in the history of the Republic, hammered the president.

It was a highly unusual moment for the Court to refuse to ratify an assertion of presidential power. From the point of view of the opinion, from the people’s reaction to the opinion at the time, and from the judgment of historians since—the decision was received as a great triumph for American democracy—Truman was wrong in this received understanding; this was a supremely bad exercise of presidential leadership. I actually think Truman was right, and I think the Supreme Court opinion was wrong. The unnoticed piece of this story is that, unlike exercises of presidential power today, when Truman seized the steel mills he sent a letter to the Congress of United States saying, “I know this action is unprecedented; it does require your authorization. But the circumstances of war impel me to seize the steel mills. Here are my reasons but I will follow your guidance, your legislative judgment. You need to either ratify what I do democratically, or you need to suggest something to do instead, or you need to countermand my decision. Whatever you decide, I’ll follow.”

No response from Congress. He sends another letter to the Senate 14 days later: “I don’t know if you got my first letter but . . . ” He repeats basically the same argument. Nothing happened.

The steel companies brought the lawsuit and the Supreme Court decided to arbitrate this dispute, or alleged dispute, between Congress and the President. Truman interpreted Congress’s failure to respond as tacit consent—“It’s your job to deliberate, I’m doing my job to win a war.”

He believed that whatever separation of powers issue was raised by his action was one to be resolved by the two political branches—Congress and the President. But the court decided that they were going to do Congress’s job on its behalf. They said, this is not right, the President should be following the Congress, and the Congress did not authorize this. That extraordinary Supreme Court decision had enormously unfortunate consequences for the conduct of American politics subsequently. It means now that if Congress ever has the wherewithal to care about what a president

does with respect to its own powers, it tends to go to the court to figure out if it can do what it should be doing, rather than stand up and develop its own constitutional conscience, its own constitutional position, and its own articulate view. The Court hastened the legalization, and depoliticization, of formerly robust constitutional contestation between Congress and the president.

So those are examples of congressional abdication. As a result of the demise of constitutional conflict in the United States, we have seen a stunning reversal of the use of Congress. In the 19th century, ideologues and partisans would be transformed into constitutional officers. I sometimes tell my students that hypocrisy is a virtue of constitutional design even though it’s a defect of individual character. You certainly don’t want your friends to be hypocrites. But a lawgiver who figures out how to make politicians intentionally hypocritical—which is to say, induces politicians to say the right thing whether it’s in their hearts or not—that is the supreme triumph of modern liberal democracy. It happened in 19thcentury America.

The irony is that this defining feature of modern constitutional design has been reversed in our century. Rather than ideology and party being co-opted by the institution, we now have the Congress of the United States being hijacked by a political party. I could say “by political parties,” except I happen to think that what’s called polarization is wrong to the extent that you think of it as a symmetrical problem with ideologues on the left and ideologues on the right. It’s not. There are some ideologues on the left, but in general the Democratic Party has been rather moderate ideologically, and prone to compromise with the Republican Party. The entire ideological spectrum has moved toward the right, and the right has become intransigent. The right has increasingly used constitutional institutions for partisan purposes—for examples, filibusters, temporary budget resolutions, and debt ceilings. So we do have too much conflict, too much of what’s called polarization, and too much gridlock in American politics today; but it is due to the perversion of institutions that were originally structured for a different kind of conflict.

Let me end by saying what this account says about presidential leadership and its needs. I think that one possible ill consequence of a conference like this is to focus too intently on presidential leadership as the principal instrument of democracy. The worry that the president is too weak to contend with the demands of modern governance captures this focus and this error. If our meaning of leadership is an ability to do what

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many effective leaders that have come to this conference do—to mobilize groups of like-minded partisans—then at the presidential level, to be effective as that kind of leader and to normalize that idea of a leader is to actually undermine democracy. Democracy requires deliberation—democratic deliberation—and leadership of the sort most familiar to students of the presidency supplants deliberation.

For this reason, the greatest ancient statesman-lawgivers—those great political problem solvers—were not the model for presidential leadership when the American Constitution was designed. George Washington was the model of a presidential leader, and his kind of leadership did not supplant deliberation in the manner of ancient lawgivers. He was not thought to be a Lycurgus or a Solon. He did not want to be a statesman-lawgiver and he did not want to have the power to remake a people—to make a people into a different people. A constitutional leader needs to be, in Washington’s model, representative of a people already made and making itself.

So our constitution envisions leadership as constitutional officership that only occasionally has to step out of that more limited notion of officership in times of war and emergency, where the presidents become something a little bit more like the statesman-lawgiver-leader of the past.

But, in general, constitutional leaders are supposed to make the Congress do its job better. The kind of leader we need now is not necessarily the one who is more effective at getting a particular policy agenda rammed through Congress, or one who accomplished partisan policy goals outside of Congress—although, in present circumstances, an effective partisan president may be the best we can get. The kind of leader we most need now is a constitutional leader that gets Congress reoriented toward doing its own job better. And in order to do that, the citizenry is going to require a high level of civic education that is almost unimaginable—an education that equips us to better monitor the Congress, so that the Congress is responsible to the citizenry. I’m not talking about civic education as participation, such as going to rallies and so forth. (I’m all for going to rallies and I also think movements that have been described in sessions here are profound and important.) The kind of education that is relevant to the pathology I have described is a constitutional education, and it requires a kind of deliberative discourse that is in serious decay today.

Occupy Wall Street and Liberal Democracy

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Occupy Wall Street and Liberal Democracy

Does the President Matter?

Anne Norton

I’m a very obedient person, so I do want to address the question asked by the conveners of the conference: “Is Occupy Wall Street a symptom of an irreparable loss of faith in liberal democracy?” And I want to argue that if it isn’t, it should be, and that we should lose faith in liberal democracy. Or more precisely, if we want to keep faith with democracy, we need to lose faith in liberalism. We need to begin to question insistently, fundamentally, whether liberalism is securing or damaging democracy.

We tend to speak about liberal democracy as if one word slid easily into another, as if there were no space between the protection of individual rights associated with liberalism and the democratic form of government; in other words, that liberalism solves the problem of democracy.

Liberalism was supposed to guarantee rights, establish the rule of law, establish regular transparent procedures; it was a little supplement to democracy that would tame and domesticate it and make it safe—safe for minorities, safe for unpopular opinions. But instead, I think liberalism has acted as a supplement in the Derridean sense: it’s something that adds only to replace. That liberalism may have secured democracy in the past, but now liberalism puts democracy in peril.

Now, I’m not the only person who thinks this. Sheldon Wolin, a friend and colleague of Hannah Arendt, argues that democracy has become distorted—principally by liberal economics, by capitalism; that reliance on the free market to spread wealth and power has concentrated power; that the press, under the conditions of the free market and the concentration of the media, has become a gatekeeper and a censor—not something that gives us access to more information, more opinion, more thought, but something that constrains what acceptable thought is, what can be said, and who can say it. Rather than protecting minority opinions, the liberal press today often mutes or silences them. So the institutions that we were taught to think of as undoing private power have come instead to serve and consolidate private power. The institutions that were represented to us as securing means of the liberation of our people have become the tools of a more effective dominion.

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The subjection of democracy to the liberal rule of law and liberal proceduralism serves in the same way. Consider, first, the freedom of assembly and how thoroughly that has been abridged. I mean, the idea that you must obtain a permit for a demonstration, that you must go to the state and say “May we demonstrate, sir?” is fundamentally counter to what a demonstration is meant to be—that it is meant to demonstrate that the power of the people is beneath, beyond, and above the power of the state.

And that reminder is obscured; instead, demonstrations are tucked away where they can’t be seen, where they become powerless and often invisible.

What strikes me most about this subjection of democracy to liberal proceduralism is that it reminds me of the poverty of public space in our democracy. Think about how difficult it is to find a public space. I mean, if you’re looking for a public space in which to assemble, you readily find out that most of them are privately owned, and so it’s actually quite difficult; the places where people naturally assemble, like shopping malls, are obviously privately owned places. They’re highly regulated places, we might say non-places. And they’re very policed, so there is a poverty of public space.

I’ve been teaching the Twelve Articles of the Swabian peasantry written during the German Peasants’ War of 1525. There are many interesting things about these Twelve Articles, one of which is that the Swabian peasants insist on the return of their commons. In the very poignant Article Seven, the peasants demand that they will not be oppressed anymore. But the pressure to create a commons, I do believe, has changed. I continue to believe in the importance of physical assembly, but I am struck by the way that it works with technology—by the way in which people can now call to one another to organize, assemble and advocate virtually. As physical spaces for assembly become overregulated and insufficient, the virtual realm can play a powerful role in bringing voices together and projecting them publicly. So, I think it is enormously important to create a virtual commons, in addition to a physical commons.

I should say that I’m one of those people who regard the term scholaractivist as not a nice name, and so I rarely speak as an activist; I speak as a scholar. But one’s mind does sometimes go to questions of strategy, and that raises the importance of time. One of the interesting things about virtual assemblies that are called up by the social media we have now is that they can come and go. They can appear and disappear. The possibilities of the flash mob are very interesting, but they also remind us that assembly is a matter of time as well as space. You can’t go camp out in Occupy Wall

Street if you’ve got a kid to feed, or you have yourself to feed, and so we have to take time into account. And so that is, I think, part of rethinking assembly—raising the questions of how you call people together for a moment and what can you do in that moment.

Even as the right to assembly has been compromised by the loss of the commons, so too has free speech, the greatest contribution of liberalism, been turned against democracy. It has even been turned against individual rights. Globally, freedom of speech is used to secure majority power over minorities and to affirm imperial hierarchies. When people tell you that the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in the Jyllands-Posten in Denmark is about freedom of speech, or that the French antireligious satirical journal Charlie Hebdo is about individual rights, think again. These claims of free speech serve to protect the powerful against the powerless.

That is not freedom of speech, properly used, to advance democratic government and to challenge authority; that is freedom of speech used to secure authority, to secure hierarchies, to limit freedom, to limit what people can say. Now, if the Danes had decided to defend the wearing of the burqa, that would have been a courageous act in support of the freedom of the powerless. If Hebdo had decided to argue for the public chanting of the call to prayer in the streets of Paris, I would speak out in support of its courage. But what it is doing is not courageous and not what we should mean by freedom of speech because it does not secure democracy.

I should say too, to clarify things, that I am a free speech absolutist. I do think people should be able to say anything, and in that respect I am very American, although I think I would like America to be more American; I think free speech should extend from the boardroom to the shop floor and I’d like to see more of it aired. But, what troubles me about these great spectacles of free speech that dominate the press is that they’re profoundly fictional. For example, in the case of the Mohammed cartoons, at issue were commissioned cartoons. It wasn’t the case that one couldn’t find a picture of Mohammed in Denmark. The publication of the cartoons was a piece of theater.

I emphasize, the newspaper had every right to do it; it was contemptible to publish these cartoons, but it was their right. And further, the publication was a nonevent in Denmark. What happened in Denmark? Nothing. No Danish Muslims were upset. Other people were upset, there were some demonstrations, but no one was hurt, no one was killed. Nothing happened.

In fact, in the entirety of Europe, and the United States, and Canada, and Australia, the entirety of the west, nothing happened. There was one death

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associated with the Mohammed cartoons—it was the death of a Muslim in police custody. No death, no injuries, nothing. That’s what happens in free countries when you have free speech that you don’t like. We should be really proud of that. We should say, “That’s what free speech looks like among free people.”

We also have to understand the reactions to such spectacles of free speech in non-free countries. When people who live under censorship see something like the Mohammed cartoons, the logical assumption they make is that the offensive speech has the sanction of the state. They live in a world in which news and the distribution of ideas are censored and regulated. Their presumption is that such speech must have the sanction of the state, and this is a rational presumption based on the standards that pertain in most of the world. In most of the world there are things that are forbidden, such as hate speech and Holocaust denial, so the presumption is that the state is giving its seal of approval. That presumption is an error, it’s a most unfortunate error, and it testifies to the need for more speech. But it is not a question of a given culture, a given civilization being hostile to the freedom of speech. On the contrary, it’s an objection to the state, it’s an objection to certain persistent hierarchies.

The real core of free speech in a democratic society is the right to oppose, and for minority viewpoints to be heard, so that all people in a democracy have to listen to people who are alien to them. It’s important to listen to people who you think are your enemies, who are your enemies, and whom you hate. That’s enormously important, and it’s also surprising.

It is surprising because some of the people we disagree with most tend to be closer than we think. They are people we choose to listen to, rather than balk from, because we assume they share our fundamental views. Too often in gatherings like this one people say, as someone said earlier, “We’re all liberals, we all agree.” That is absolutely not true, and let me give you a really serious fault line that runs through any liberal community. I mean the question of big government. I’m a small government democrat. I’m very suspicious of big government. I live with a woman who is a big believer in big government. We vote for the same people most of the time, but we have very different views about specific political issues and about how it should go, and in many respects that becomes a big dividing line.

When the Iraq war broke out, I found my first and most vigorous allies among old-school conservatives because they were really angry. They were angry about the USA PATRIOT Act—they were more angry about the PATRIOT Act than my fellow liberals—and it’s important to keep your

eye out for those chances to make an alliance. An alliance doesn’t have to last forever, it can be a really short alliance, but I would happily join up with the most hardened, old-school conservative in resisting the PATRIOT Act. Not only would I never think twice about it, I would be doubly grateful, because, as you say, it breaches that partisan wall, breaches the bubble.

You learn certain things, and also, all of a sudden your alleged opponents are obliged to think of you as human.

Moving beyond both freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, we come to the great problem of liberalism and liberal economics; namely, the problem of property. And this is in some respects a strangely scholarly problem. For John Locke, property meant something quite different.

Property meant first of all that which was most one’s own: the body, your body, the rights it sheltered, the claims that it made, the needs that it had.

The body was the center of the rights, and only secondarily did it refer to things, things you held in your hand, things you had mixed your labor with. Yet, for liberalism now, property means something different.

Property means wealth, goods—or a cipher for wealth and goods, a little entry in a bank that says “You have more power than that person has.”

How does the sacred right to property sound, when it means the sacred right to money? Or, the sacred right to my stuff? That, I think, is not a right that can claim any sanctity, and yet, that is the right we have.

What would happen if we understood the sacred right of property to be concerned with what Locke thought it was concerned with? What if it was concerned with what is properly one’s own? With your body? With your mind? With your rights? With your thoughts? What if it conferred the rights the body requires: the right to food, the right to shelter, the right to health care? What if it conferred the rights that the mind requires: the right to have rights, the right to exercise those rights, the right to education, the right to access power? Some of the changes that would force would be quite benign changes—policies more sympathetic to universal health care, a little economic redistribution. But some things would be terrifying. We would have to consider what we can actually claim, justly, to be our own. That’s the old question of equality—equality of needs— and it’s an old question, it’s an old struggle. Why is it so hard? I think it’s hard because property has a perverse logic: those who have are served better by it than those who have not, but those who have the least have the most to lose. If you lose a million dollars, and you’re a billionaire, it’s an inconvenience, it’s a fluke of the stock market, it’s nothing to trouble you. But if you’re poor, and you lose a dollar, that’s the loss of a meal, or

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what passes for one. If you lose a house, it’s not a burden if you have six or seven, like John McCain. You might not even remember where that other house was. But if you lose your house and it’s your only house, you can lose a world. So it is the person who has the least who has the most to lose, in losing that sacred right of property. And so those with plenty have an army of those with little to defend their claims. They profit, as those with plenty have always done, from the labor, and the needs, and the desperation of those who have not. It is this perverse logic concerning property that I think continues to guarantee that the needs of the neediest citizens will not be met. It is what makes it so very hard to move forward at the question of equality.

I honor Occupy Wall Street because it has brought attention to that problem of inequality. If Occupy Wall Street seems to have withered away, the language of the 1 percent and the 99 percent—that has lingered. It is deployed in the presidential election, where it now includes something about the 47 percent. But I think it’s possible, too, that Occupy Wall Street has not withered. Dispersed, maybe, but perhaps it isn’t itself yet. It’s important for me to remember that Occupy Wall Street has still not occupied Wall Street; it has occupied Zuccotti Park, not the floor of the stock exchange. There are occupy movements and tents and encampments on universities, but they aren’t in the banks. They’re not in the headquarters of CitiBank, and they’re not in your local branch. That would be different.

That would take thought, it would take risk, it would take courage.

And then, thinking of that, I want to say a word about courage, and remind us of one of the places that Occupy Wall Street came from. I mean, there are many practices and movements that fed into Occupy Wall Street, but Occupy Wall Street was conceived in part as an emulation of what happened in Tahrir Square. It was called up by people who were inspired by Tahrir Square, and that’s quite interesting. It reverses the direction of imperial influence; it puts the west—it puts Americans—in the position of students. It is important that we remember this; that we learn from others, that we have learned from others, that we have seen courage greater than our own. Because, frankly, it took a hell of a lot more courage to occupy Tahrir Square knowing what was going to happen; knowing that people were going to be beaten, that people, women, men too, probably, were going to be raped—that they were really facing death. And when you see that, when people pushed back the tanks on Qasr al-Nil bridge; that’s courage, and that is democracy in action.

I have enormous respect for Occupy Wall Street, but you have to know that nobody was likely to die in New York City. We are learning from what other people do who had more to risk. It should change our sense of ourselves from teachers of the world to students of the world, and it should make us refuse the claim, forever, that Islam is alien to democracy.

What happened in Tahrir Square was and remains a democratic demand.

And, moreover, Tahrir teaches us certain fundamental democratic lessons. First, that individual rights are not opposed to collective action, but that they issue in collective action. Second, that democracy rests on something which is profoundly difficult—democracy requires daring.

Democracy is not the work of domesticated people who vote in elections, and obey the law. Those are parts of democracy. Democracy is also the people who dare, the people who will put their bodies on the line.

Which is why it is deeply important that political theorists write about the world, and not just about other theorists. It is so much easier to write about the world, and so much more pleasurable. And it helps you think better, because the particularities of the world are constantly throwing up things that you don’t anticipate, that no one has taught you about, and that you can’t easily come to grips with. That need to deal with particularities— historical particularities, local particularities—is, I think, both demanding and enormously rewarding.

With regard to the question, “Does the president matter?” I want to put on the table the symbolic character of the presidency. I think there’s a tendency to regard that as trivial, and I don’t think it’s trivial. I think it’s enormously important. There is a particular dimension of the Obama presidency that I have personally benefitted from in my daily life. And that is, I live in Philadelphia—Philadelphia is a majority black city, and I live in an integrated neighborhood—and when I walk on the streets now, I have a different set of interactions than I did before Obama’s election. African American people are more likely to greet me, to talk to me. This became especially visible to me after the shooting of Trayvon Martin because there I am, walking my dogs—I have corgis, like the Queen of England—and I’m walking the dogs, and there are two young black men about the same age as Trayvon Martin kind of circling around me. And they have their hoodies on, and I know what they want. They want to pet my dogs.

But that used to be a really different situation. Young black men wouldn’t approach a white woman, my age. Why would they? They wouldn’t know if I could be trusted. They would have good reason not to

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Occupy Wall Street and Liberal Democracy

Does the President Matter?

Anne Norton

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trust me. And on my side, I want to prove “that I’m a nice human being,” but how do I do that? So we do this little dance on the street, but the dance doesn’t take as long as it used to. There’s a possibility for me—and there’s a possibility for them as well—that did not exist before Obama won the election. That is not a small deal. That’s a change that has transformed American racial relations, even if just at the edges. America is still a nation of white supremacy. But it’s a nation of white supremacy with a black president, and that changes daily life.

It also means that during the election, we got a phone call from a friend who’s an Algerian communist, and she is not a friend to the United States of America. Alya calls us up and she says, “You have shown the world that you are a great nation.” You couldn’t wring that out of Alya before the Obama presidency. His election makes a difference. It makes a difference locally on my street, on my sidewalk, in my neighborhood. And it makes a difference globally. We may squander the opportunity for change, but the possibility is there.

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HA

Does the President Matter?

Is the Era of Great Presidents in the Past?

Tracy B. Strong

Government includes the art of formulating a policy as will receive general support; persuading, leading, sacrificing, teaching always, because the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate.

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Papers 1:755-756

What makes a president great? The following seems important. A great president must bring about change and leave a legacy—arrangements that define an era. A great president is a democratic president in the sense that there is an interdependence of leader and led. The president is accountable to his followers and he enables them to follow him (her?). He does not make the public more passive but more civic minded. As Felix Frankfurter said about Roosevelt, “He takes the public to school.”

In the United States, the changes that a great president brings about need to be reconciled with the American constitutional tradition. He is a revolutionary and a conservator. Thucydides in his description of Pericles notes that the Athenian both respected the liberty of his people and held them in check; when they were over-confident he could bring them back to a sense of danger; when they were discouraged, he would restore their confidence.1 Arguably the last possibly great president was Lyndon Johnson—this despite massive flaws and a willingness to go along with Kennedy’s advisers on foreign policy. No one else at that time except Johnson could have passed the Civil Rights bills that he did—and that is not all. One might remember also: health insurance for the elderly and the poor; federal aid to elementary, secondary, and higher education; repeal of the 1924 National Origins Act giving favored treatment to Western European immigrants; environmental protections promising cleaner air and water; urban renewal under a Department of Housing and Urban Development; more effective and integrated means of national movement under a Department of Transportation; National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities; National Public Television and Radio; Head Start; and the War on Poverty.

Is the Era of Great Presidents in the Past?

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Until the Community Action Projects of the Great Society were killed by a combination of war expenses and senatorial interests, they were serious attempts at bypassing deadening and corrupt state interests in order to bring money and resources directly to the grass roots. By April 1964, Johnson’s approval rating was 77 percent and only 9 percent of the American public disapproved of the job he was doing. I do not need to go to what happened in the following years.

There are those who might nominate Ronald Reagan. The Reagan case is interesting: in this space I would say rather that Reagan was the perfect imitation—the perfect acting—of a president. One might even remember—these coincidences are surely scripted—that at the end of Kings Row—arguably his best movie—he plays Drake McHugh, a well-todo young man forced to work on the railroad after his trust fund has been stolen, who has his legs run over by a boxcar and has both legs amputated.

On awakening from the operation he asks: “Where is the rest of me?” The resonance to FDR was strong.

But this is not the issue. The question is why it is that present presidents are not great—or rather what is it that made presidents great. One answer is too easy, and it is to refer to character, smarts, political cunning, and related matters. This is the Machiavellian version of politics and many of those who presently lament Obama’s failures blame it on his inability to manipulate necessities—to “jump from wheel to wheel” as Machiavelli put it in his Tercets on Fortune.

There is some truth to this view, but it is limited. It sees politics without paying attention to institutions, as a manner of individual skill—Richard Neustadt is to some degree responsible for pushing this understanding.2 What, however, are the political institutions that make possible enduring presidential greatness? And here the answer must come from an understanding of the profound changes in the American political system over the last 60 years.

The danger with the Machiavelli/Neustadt view is that it thinks that one makes possible great presidencies by enhancing the power of the president. Such thought continues. A bipartisan group of advisers to former presidents and would-be presidents calling itself No Labels3 has put forth a plan for radically expanding the powers of the presidency (coupled, it should be said, with a few British-type nods to accountability). Carl Schmitt would have been happy.

Here one should look rather at the transformation of the American system of political parties. And while I will not quite make the case for

smoke-filled rooms, I will come close. Parties were not an original part of the conception of American government. Indeed, Madison’s railing against “faction” would also apply to parties. We owe the sense of the importance of parties to Jefferson and to the response to the 1824 election in which the House selected John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson, despite the latter having more popular and electoral votes. As a result, through the efforts of Martin van Buren and Jackson, partisan political parties that were militantly decentralized became part of what was called the “living constitution.”

Parties were local, but they legitimated the presidency by providing a broad base of popular support during periods of realignment. They attached local interests and concerns to national ones. (I am not saying that the substance was always one of which all might approve; what is important is the connection.) As Jefferson and Jackson conceived of them, parties were localized political associations that provided a link especially between the executive and the people.

This began to change, in particular, with the advent of what some of have called the “modern presidency.” FDR had established an administrative state that preserved individual rights (both civic and social) and operated an interventionist foreign policy, nominally dedicated to liberal democratic principles—it was so in fact, particularly with the Henry Wallace wing of the party, far more so than have any recent presidents been. Loosely, what happened post-World War II, was that the party increasingly dropped out.

Bluntly speaking, the demise of the centrality of parties is consolidated as a consequence to 1968. Hubert Humphrey’s nomination flew so strongly in the face of the orientation of large segments of the Democratic Party—for the first and last time in my life I did not vote the Democratic nominee—that over the next few years, the Party reorganized the Presidential selection process along contested primary lines. The primary system, as Stephen Skowronek says, tends “to vent the most passionate interests in the electorate and to turn politicians . . . into masters of their own political machines.”4 Now, primaries have been around since the Progressive era, but it was generally the case until the 1960s that nominations came from a mixed process. Stevenson was drafted at the 1952 convention, and even in 1968 Humphrey was nominated without having seriously contested any primary. But the extraordinary chaos of the Chicago convention put in motion a set of reforms that have changed things.

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Is the Era of Great Presidents in the Past?

Does the President Matter?

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Note that during the convention-centered process it was not the case that we did not get people of quality. Wilson Carey McWilliams has estimated that of the 36 party nominations between 1900 and 1968, only nine were by any accounting second-raters (Coolidge, Cox, Davis, Goldwater, Harding, Landon, McKinley, Nixon, Parker).5 Today, conventions no longer mean anything except for media time.

The danger of the primary process has to do with what it does to the meaning of voting. Voting is a final act. However, if there are more than two candidates, as there always are in the primaries, it is not clear what I am voting against. If there are only two, my vote for one is known by me to be a vote against the other. But if I were Republican, was my vote for McCain a vote against Gingrich, or against Romney? Not only do others not know, I do not know—and I don’t have to know. This in turn leads to the paradox that, in primaries, we vote too early, as it were. Once I have voted, I have in some important sense shut down deliberation—that process that keeps alternatives open, postpones decisions, multiplies alternatives, and strives for consensus. In 1980, a majority of Democrats would have preferred someone other than Carter or Kennedy; a majority of Republicans would have preferred Ford to Reagan. Ford delayed too long to stop Reagan and the die was cast by the time of the convention.

When political parties break down the president has trouble. After 1976, Carter, who had by and large simply ignored the party, was in trouble—in great part because the election had swept into office a large number of neophyte Congresspersons who owed little to the party and who had generally run ahead of the president in getting elected. The same happened in 2010 with the Tea Party. The consequences are important: a breakdown of consensus in all aspects of policy; a weakening of the institutional ties that bound elites together; proliferation of political entrepreneurs with secure positions of their own; transformation of the media into a scandal-mongering and confrontational mode; concentration of interests and financial resources in professional organization.6 How does this affect the president? A fractured Congress, where the party is multiply beholden to a disparate set of first choices, as it were, cannot do anything well other than not do anything. We complain about the do-nothing Republicans but one has only to read Robert Caro’s volumes on Johnson to see that the “do-nothing” Congress is not a recent development, even if at present it is do-nothing in spades. It was no accident that Carl Schmitt designated the legislature as a clasa discutidora, a petty

body that discusses much and does little. Party makes for links between government and the citizen—links that are essential if a President is to educate and reshape a country. Party is essential if politics is to offer an education to reshaping the people, reshaping being a good operating definition of greatness. The effect of the primary system is the decline of the party’s ability to filter candidates; hence the nominating process is defined more and more by the media and by money—now doubly true after the Supreme Court decided Citizens United. What counts now is the cultivation of elites rather than the development of relationships with and between ordinary Americans—a brief moment of hope that this might be reversed with Obama now appears increasingly less the case. Nor can social media fill this gap. James Fowler has recently shown that voter turn-out is positively affected by person-to-person contact (knowing that someone you know voted) and not by media.7 American politics has become capital intensive rather than labor intensive.

With the disaffection of the populace, politics is all the more open to volatile appeals—to anything that claims to cut through the mess. Max Weber had already warned of this in his 1921 “Politics as a Vocation” address, in which he reminded us that politics was a strong and slow boring of hard boards—not a magical solution. Nor is it the case that technology will change matters. Technology brings resources but not democracy. It may unsettle old elites, but only to create new ones, and it produces techniques that are beyond the capacities of the mass public.

Being a party member increasingly means contributing money, almost never deliberation about policy or vote for office. And technology also changes the nature of representation. I am constantly solicited to contribute money for campaigns in states and localities that are not my own.

The effect is to diminish the already tenuous relationship I might have to “my” congress-person, “my” senator.

In the face of this, except to some degree in foreign policy, the president has little recourse but to succumb. Without localized parties, there will be no democratically great presidents. It is no accident that theorists like Benjamin Barber have recently begun to look to mayors as the last surviving centers of political power that have direct contact with their constituencies.8 What to do? Perhaps I should close with this letter that de Tocqueville wrote to his friend Arthur de Gobineau in 1853: “After having believed ourselves capable of transforming ourselves, we now believe ourselves

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Is the Era of Great Presidents in the Past?

Does the President Matter?

Tracy B. Strong

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incapable of improving ourselves; after having had an excessive pride, we have fallen into a humility that is just as excessive; we thought that we could do everything, and now we think we can do nothing . . . This, to put it simply, is the great malaise of our age.”9 The thought is dismal— but it is not clear which institutions might help us shake off this malaise.

Notes 1. I here owe a debt to Bruce Miroff, Icons of Democracy: American Leaders as Heroes, Aristocrats, Dissenters, and Democrats (St. Lawerence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

2. See here his classic Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960) and later Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1991).

3. www.nolabels.org: “No Labels is a citizens’ movement of Democrats, Republicans and independents dedicated to a new politics of problem solving.”

4. Stephen Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraised (2nd edition) (St. Lawerence: University Press of Kansas, 2011).

5. Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Democratic Soul: A Wilson Carey McWilliams Reader, eds P. Deneen and S. McWilliams (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). And some would now argue about Nixon.

6. Skowronek, op cit.

7. James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives with Nicholas A. Christakis (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009) 8. Benjamin R. Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (New Haven, CT.: Yale Univesity Press, 2013).

9. Alexis de Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau (New York: Doubleday, 1959).

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HA

Does the President Matter?

Essay

The Destiny of Freedom

opening of a more original possibility of freedom, detached from the will.

It focuses on the teaching of Heidegger.

Philippe Nonet1

I. “Free Will” as the Metaphysical Origin of Technique. Ἀρχὰ μεγάλας ἀρετᾶς ῎ωνασσ’ Ἀλάθεια, μὴ πταίσῃς ἐμάν σύνθεσιν τραχεῖ ποτὶ ψεύδει Pindar, fragment 205 Origin of what fits [man] for greatness, queen Alètheia, may you never make my understanding stumble upon harsh deceit

The following remarks may seem to present a sketch of the history of freedom in modern times, namely from Kant to Heidegger. They do not intend to do so. They do not concern history as such—that is, as the succession of events in the passing of calculable time. They concern the past only insofar as it opens a destiny for modern man. Hence their title: “The Destiny of Freedom.”

The past indeed puts modern man before the necessity of a decision regarding the future of freedom, a necessity that he can evade, but only at the greatest danger. To anticipate, the following argument in brief is this: Until today, freedom has been thought as an attribute of the will, indeed as the will’s highest possibility. However, “freedom of the will” attains its most extreme power in the rise of modern technique. Technique in turns threatens to extinguish human freedom.

“Freedom of the will” thus turns into an illusion that conceals a radical form of servility, such as mankind has never known before.

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A striking ambiguity pervades Kant’s ethics. On the one hand, Kant grounds ethics in “pure” duty, free from all utilitarian calculation. On the other hand, pure duty is thought to rest upon the will to will, which, as the cornerstone of modern metaphysic, culminates in the sway of technique, and the reduction of all good to the “value” of means, i.e. the radical opposite of pure duty. Thus Kant’s law of duty ends up being destroyed by the very ground it lays for itself.

For present purposes, it suffices to read one sentence, perhaps the most widely misunderstood of all his ethics, namely the first sentence of the first chapter of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten : Es ist überall nichts in der Welt, ja überhaupt auch ausser derselben zu denken möglich, was ohne Einschränkung für gut könnte gehalten werden, als ein guter Wille.

When this illusion and concealment become apparent to modern man, there opens the possibility of a new birth of freedom, now grounded in what Heidegger called “the truth of being,” “die Wahrheit des Seins;” “truth” here employed in the Greek sense of ἀλήθεια, namely “un-concealment.” So grounded, freedom itself is freed from the will’s imprisonment in technique.

The remarks are accordingly divided in two parts. The first concerns “free will” as the metaphysical origin of technique, and ranges from Kant to our times. The second concerns the present sway of technique as the

Roughly translated, the German words say: “It is impossible to think of anything in the world, or indeed outside of the world, that could be held as good without limitation, other than a good will.” In brief: No good can be thought unlimited, other than a good will.

What is a “will”? To Kant, the will is a power of the understanding to propose to itself an aim, and to move itself to actualize this aim; that is, to bring the aim into actuality, to cause the effectuation of the proposed end.

What then is a “good” will? The power to will is good, in Greek ἀγαθόν, insofar as it is indeed fit to will, and thus itself desirable as an aim of willing.

Only such a good will can be good “without limitation,” i.e. unconditionally, absolutely, infinitely good. A good is absolute if it must always be willed along with the willing of every other contingent good a will may propose to itself. Then every willing, however contingent, harbors in itself an absolute will to will, by virtue of which the will actualizes itself as will, causes itself actually to be a good will. The Kantian concept of a will to will follows from the Cartesian cogito, cogito me cogitare, in accordance with which every thought rests upon a fulfillment of the self as a being who thinks.

This absolutely good will to will is the causa prima, the first cause, of all possible willing of the good. As cause prima, it must be causa sui, the sole cause of its own actualization. Causa prima and causa sui are long established names of the god of metaphysic.

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Such a good will is “pure,” that is, unaffected by causes alien to its own power. It is entirely determined by laws it gives itself in accordance with its own essence. Thus it is absolutely “free.” Freedom, so conceived, is the power of a will to actualize itself in accordance with its own essence.

As the summum bonum, the highest good, such a free will is the being, das Seiende, that most is, the summum ens, in German, das Seiendste, in Platonic Greek, τὸ ὄντως ὄν. This highest “being,” in the substantive sense of das Seiende, fulfills in itself the essence of “being,” in the verbal sense of das Sein. Accordingly, the essence of being is willing.

Here are, in a nutshell, the fundamental principles of modern metaphysic since Kant. They remain unchanged all the way through our times, however oblivious modern man may be of the way they still govern his mind. They aim to show a presence of god in man in the form of an unconditional will—and an unconditional obligation—to will freely.

We must, for want of time, pass over the thought of Hegel and Schelling, who, on present matters, do not differ from Kant. We now turn briefly to the last of the great thinkers in the history of metaphysic, Nietzsche, whose work precedes the extinction of metaphysical inquiry under the sway of technique. (For an overview and basic references, see the table at the end of this section.) As the following hints indicate, Nietzsche’s thought is, at bottom, an extreme form of Kantianism, albeit inverted.

With him, the Kantian will to will takes the form of “will to power.”

“Will” here is the power of a being to command itself, i.e. (as Kant would say) to give itself laws. “Power” is the will’s mastery of the conditions of its causal effectiveness. The will to power commands itself to command the fulfillment of its “values,” namely of the ends it posits for itself as means to the preservation and enhancement of its power.

Among the highest values of the will is “truth,” the illusory “knowledge” by which the will seeks to secure the power it has gained. (Compare with Kant’s account of the transcendental constitution of objects of experience.)

But higher still is the value of “art,” which stimulates the will to enhance its power, and thus to attain ever higher levels of “life” (i.e. will).

(Compare with Kant’s account of beauty and the teleology of nature).

The will to power is thus, ultimately, a will to surpass itself. Man himself is nothing but a “bridge” for passing over to the “overman.”

Accordingly, this will to power deifies itself as the god of the highest life, Dionysos, the being (das Seiende) who “lives,” and therefore “is,” the most (das Seiendste), the summum ens.

All this follows from the principle that the essence of “life,” namely the essence of “being” in the sense of das Sein, is will to power. The law that governs its fulfillment is “the eternal recurrence of the same,” the formal structure of which is identical with Kant’s “categorical imperative”: “always act in such a way that you may will your deed eternally to recur.”

In our times, when the age of technique comes into full sway, Western mankind (with the rare exception of a few descendants of Nietzsche, notably R. M. Rilke and E. Jünger) ceases to ask metaphysical questions, with the consequence that the will to will becomes unchallenged, and transforms itself in unexamined ways. All matters concerning humanity are now referred to the “sciences of man” (biology, history, psychology, sociology), all of which are constitutionally incapable of even posing any question regarding the essence of man.

In accordance with the teachings of Nietzsche, the concept of “value” comes to exclude all other possible forms of the good, and guarantees in principle that all human ends are possible objects of calculation, radically commensurable and thus interchangeable. In lawyers’ parlance, all goods become res fungibiles.

At the same time, the will loses all character of self-command and selfsurpassment. Its freedom, now conceived of as the power to dispose of all forces of nature, becomes a never-ending task at which man is to devote his labor. The homo animal rationale turns into the homo animal laborans: labor takes the place of reason as the destiny of man.

Thus the freedom of the will gives birth to universal servitude, an astonishing phenomenon long ago pointed out by Nietzsche (Also sprach Zarathustra, Vorrede, par. 5, and Dritter Teil, “Von der verkleinernden Tugend”: “Ich diene, du dienst, wir dienen.”) and later again by Max Weber, who coined the phrase “die herrenlose Sklaverei,” slavery without master (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 709), and last but not least by E. Jünger (Der Arbeiter, passim). [See Appendix 1] Now the question arises: What is it to which this servility gives obedience? One answer to it, and so far the only answer known to mankind, is to be found in the thinking of Heidegger.

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The Destiny of Freedom

Essay

II. Das Gestell and the Service of Being (das Sein).

Heidegger’s answer says: the domination (die Herrschaft) to which modern man has fallen into servitude is that of a “law,” but a law of a distinct kind, for which we have no name in English. Heidegger calls it “das Gestell.” The

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word is untranslatable. Like Gesetz, the common German name for “positive law,” Gestell is formed from the passive participle of a verb: “stellen.”

Stellen conveys above all the extraordinarily imperious character of Gestell. It does not only guide man, it compels him. This law is indeed a “higher” law, to which all other law must conform. Characteristically, it compels all legal thought to recast itself in the form of policy calculation.

Most generally, it compels man to think technically: Gestell summons all mankind to summon all nature (including mankind) to release energy for accumulation at man’s disposal (bestellen). Thus it threatens to transform man himself into a disposable “resource.”

At the same time as Gestell reduces man to servitude, it misrepresents (verstellen) technical thought as an instrument in the hands of man, a tool by means of which man enlarges the power of his will, and elevates himself to “lordship over the earth.” The law induces the metaphysical illusion that technique is a promise of “freedom” and “progress” through science.

Imperious and deceptive as it may be, this law, by virtue of which technique rules over modern man, does not issue from will at all, be it the will of God or the will of man, be it by command, or enactment, or contract.

Gestell is no positive law at all. It does not issue from any “posing.”

From where then, or from whom, or from what does “Gestell” proceed? Answer: From nowhere, from no one, and from nothing. “Gestell” can be traced to no being, “kein Seiendes,” that could function as its “ground.” It is a groundless explosion of groundless grounding, an irrationality of rationality.

But this “no-thing” is not nothing at all. “Das Nichts,” as Heidigger says, “ist der Schleier des Seins,” the no-thing is the veil of being (Was ist Metaphysik? Nachwort, p.52). What shows itself in “das Gestell,” in its imperiousness as well as in its deceptiveness, is being in the sense of “Das Sein,” which “is” “nicht selbst ein Seiendes” (Sein und Zeit, p. 6), not itself a being in the sense of das Seiende. Heidegger’s thinking owes its depth to this insight, which sets it apart from all attempts at causal explanations of modernity.

The insight is rooted in Heidegger’s profound experience of die Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden, the abandonment of das Seiende by das Sein.

Under the spell of “das Gestell,” all beings are turned into disposable and fungible quantities of energy. In Kant and Nietzsche, and already in Descartes, things were reduced to the standing of objects (Gegenstand) capable of representation (Vorstellen) for the purpose of scientific-technical inquiry. With technique, even objects dissolve: They become measured amounts of “value” capable of being expended: der bestellbare Bestand des

Bestellens. Things are thus robbed of their being (Sein): They are uprooted from their formerly essential relations to man and God, to sky and earth, to past and future. That is to say, they become worldless, insofar as world signifies the opening of the openness of those essential differences.

In proportion as things cease to be, man experiences a corresponding impoverishment of his own existence, namely the loss of all capacity to marvel, to wonder, to revere, and the corresponding debasement of language. This impoverishment shows itself in the massive boredom from which modern man suffers to no end, as he needs always to be somewhere other than where he is, craving forever “new” distraction and excitement.

But the abandonment of being, die Seinsverlassenheit, is nothing to bemoan as mere privation. The devastation of beings (die Verwüstung des Seienden) shows the power of evil in being (das Sein). This showing, however, entails the first emergence of being (das Sein) out of centuries of oblivion in Western history. (On this point, a key text of Heidegger is discussed in the table attached at the end of this section.) At bottom, “das Gestell” is the first revelation, albeit in disguise, of the law, das Gesetz, of the mutual belonging of being (das Sein) and man. Heidegger calls this law “das Ereignis,” that by virtue of which being and man are destined to be each other’s “own.” “Das Gestell,” says Heidegger, “ist der Schleier des Ereignisses erstes Erblitzen,” the veil of first lightning of das Ereignis (Vorträge und Aufsätze, marginal note f, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 7, p. 20).

The imperiousness of “das Gestell” shows how being (das Sein) lays a claim upon the service of man. It demands that man attend to the unconcealment of beings (das Seiende) in the openness of truth as ἀλήθεια, die Lichtung des Seins, i.e. “the clearing of being.” Technique itself is in the end only one mode of such unconcealment.

The deceptiveness of “das Gestell” reveals how being (das Sein) denies itself unconcealment in its own truth. It conceals itself, and so sends man on the pursuit of misleading metaphysical representations of being (das Sein), thus furthering distortions of man’s own essence as the being (das Seiende) who understands being (das Sein). The truth of being, die Wahrheit des Seins, therefore requires an unconcealment of the concealment of being (das Sein): the saying of the mystery of being, das Geheimnis.

Being’s abandonment of beings, die Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden, reveals how man’s own flourishing is bound to the richness of the world he inhabits, and thus to the care with which he serves the truth of being, die Wahrheit des Seins. This service of truth is no servitude. “Das Gestell” brings servitude only insofar as its exclusive pursuit of expendable energy

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Essay

Philippe Nonet

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rules out a wealth of other ways of unconcealment, and so impedes the flowering of the essence of man. Far from bringing servitude, the service of truth is nothing other than the service of freedom.

The essence of freedom lies indeed in the essence of truth. “Freiheit ist die Zugehörigkeit in das Eigentum des Seyns. Das Eigentum des Seyns is die wesende Wahrheit als Lichtung des Verbergung.” Freedom is belonging into the property of being. The property of being is essential truth as the clearing of concealment (Die Geschichte des Seyns, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 69, par. 174).

Kant already knew the identity of freedom and truth (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, p. 448). Indeed, he thought of thinking (in the service of truth) as a kind of willing (in the service of freedom). Accordingly, just as he conceives truth as an attribute of thought (namely the adaequatio intellectus ad rem, the accordance of thought with thing), he also regards freedom as a property of the will. In this, he follows a longstanding tradition that originates in Ancient Greece.

Heidegger points out that an accordance of thought and thing must rest upon a prior disclosure of beings (das Seiende) in the openness of the unconcealment of being (das Sein). In this openness lies the ground of both truth and freedom. To free a being (ein Seiendes) is to save it, that is, to let it stand in truth in accordance with its own way to be (Sein). The essence of freedom is the capacity to free, i.e. to let be: “Im Seinlassenkönnen, nicht im Anordnen und Beherrschen beruht die Freiheit,” freedom rests in the ability to let-be, not in ordaining and mastering (Feldweggespräche, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 77, p. 230). Of all beings, man alone is granted the capacity to let beings (himself and others) be themselves, which capacity always rests upon the simultaneous gift of the being of beings (das Sein des Seienden).

Over that gift, he has no power other than to refuse it. Man alone is thus charged with the guardianship of truth, i.e. freedom.

Modern mankind is then faced with the necessity of a decision regarding freedom. Either it remains committed to freedom in the Kantian sense of freedom of the will, and so condemns itself to servitude in the exclusive service of technique as will to will, or it sees the essence of “das Gestell,” and surrenders all thought of the absolute self-determination of the will, be it that of the individual or that of a people (autonomy, democracy, sovereignty). Having let go of the will to will, man would have freed himself to place himself in the service of freedom proper, as guardianship of the unconcealment of being. [See Appendix 2]

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Appendix 1 Notes on Free Will Kant: “Es ist überall nichts in der Welt, ja überhaupt auch außer derselben zu denken möglich, was ohne Einschränkung für gut könnte gehalten werden, als allein ein guter Wille.”

Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in Werke, IV, p. 393 (1785).

Der Wille ist eine Art von Causalität lebender Wesen, so fern sie vernünftig sind, und Freiheit würde diejenige Eigenschaft dieser Causalität sein, da sie unabhängig von fremden sie bestimmenden Ursachen wirkend sein kann.

Ibid., p 446.

Schelling: “Es gibt in der letzten und höchsten Instanz gar kein andres Sein als Wollen. Wollen ist Ursein.”

Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit, in Sämmtlishe Werke, Erste Abteilung, 7. Band, p. 350 (1809).

Hegel: “Der Boden des Rechts ist überhaupt das Geistige und seine nähere Stelle und Ausgangspunkt der Wille, welche frei ist, so das die Freiheit seine Substanz und Bestimmung ausmacht und das Rechtssystem das Reich der verwirklichten Freiheit, die Welt des Geistes aus ihm selbst hervorgebracht, als eine zweite Natur, ist.”

Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, § 4 (1820).

Nietzsche: “Unser Intellekt, unser Wille, ebenso unsere Empfindungen sind abhängig von unseren Wertschätzungen: diese entsprechen unseren Trieben und deren Existenzbedingungen.

Unsere Triebe sind reduzirbar auf den Willen zur Macht.

Der Wille zur Macht ist das letzte Factum, zu dem wir hinunterkommen.”

Kritische Studienausgabe, Bd. 11, p. 661; Grossoktav Ausgabe, Bd. XVI, p. 415 (1885).

“Man liebt zuletzt seine Begierde, und nicht das Begehrte.”

Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 175 (1886).

“Lieber will noch der Mensch das Nichts wollen, als nicht wollen ...”

Zur Genealogie der Moral, III, § 28 (see also § 1) (1887).

The Destiny of Freedom

Philippe Nonet

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Appendix 2 Note on “Die Kehre.”

A key statement occurs in Die Technik und die Kehre, Opuscula edition, p. 40 (Gesamtausgabe Bd. 11, p. 118): “Das Wesen des Gestells ist die Gefahr. Als die Gefahr kehrt sich das Sein in die Vergessenheit seines Wesens von diesem Wesen weg und kehrt sich so zugleich gegen die Wahrheit seines Wesens. In der Gefahr waltet dieses noch nicht bedachte Sichkehren. Im Wesen der Gefahr verbirgt sich darum die Möglichkeit einer Kehre, in der die Vergessenheit des Wesens des Seins sich so wendet, daß mit dieser Kehre die Wahrheit des Wesens des Seins in das Seiende eigens einkehrt.”

“Das Gestell” is the summoning claim that das Sein lays upon the essence of man.

“Die Gefahr” is das Verstellen des Gestells, by virtue of which it (das Gestell) presents technique as a means in the hands of man. That deception is the instrumental and anthropological determination of the essence of technique. That is: the metaphysical account of technique as a means of the will to power, i.e. the will to will.

As this Verstellen, das Sein “turns itself ” into the forgottenness of its Wesen, and thus away from this Wesen, and against the truth of its Wesen, namely the clearing of das Sein. This turn is the movement by which, while letting das Seiende appear in the clearing of das Sein, das Sein itself withdraws from the clearing and lets itself fall into oblivion. This turn is nothing other than an extreme form of the Unterschied or Zwiefalt of Sein and Seiendes in the fulfillment of nihilism, i.e. in metaphysic.

In the Wesen of this Verstellen, conceals itself the possibility of a reversing of this turn.

In this reversing, the forgottenness of being “turns itself ” in such a way that the truth of the Wesen of das Sein turns-in eigens in das Seiende: namely in die Verwahrlosung des Dinges (p. 44), that is, die Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden. This too is nothing other than the Unterschied or Zwiefalt in its most extreme form, the hidden Gunst in die Gefahr, das Rettende.

The opposite of die Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden is τὸ κάλλος. Hence the unique suitability of ποίησις and its τέχνη as counters to the nihilism of Gestell. It is “the unconcealing that bringsforth truth in the splendor of the shining,” and is thus “fromm, πρόμος, fügsam dem Walten und Verwahren der Wahrheit” (p. 34). Perhaps then das Dichterische, ποίησις proper, can bring das Rettende to shine in die Gefahr.

Note 1. Emeritus Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley. This article was first read as a series of two lectures at the Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College, in October 2012, and at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University, in January 2013. The author is grateful for the support of these institutions, and above all for the abiding friendship of Professors Roger Berkowitz and Shai Lavi, who took greatest care of all preparations.

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The Danger of Intellectuals

Hannah Arendt’s warning about the power of educated elites in government is one of the most counter-intuitive claims made by an irreverently paradoxical thinker. It is also, given her writing about the thoughtlessness of Adolf Eichmann, jarring to see Arendt call Ivy League graduates with Ph.D.s both dangerous and thoughtless. And yet Arendt is clear that one of the great dangers facing our time is the prestige and power accorded to intellectuals in matters of government.

Arendt issues her warning in the introduction to her essay “On Violence.” It comes amidst her discussion of the truth of Lenin’s prediction that the 20th century would be a “century of wars” and a “century of violence.”

And it follows her claim that even though the technical development of weapons have made war unjustifiable, war nevertheless continues for the “simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.” It is “under these circumstances” of extraordinary violence, Arendt writes, that the entry of social scientists and intellectuals into government is so profoundly frightening.

Whereas most political thinkers believe that in violent times we should welcome educated and rational “scientifically minded brain trusters” in government, Arendt is skeptical. Her reasoning is that these social scientists calculate, they do not think. She explains what she means, writing that, “Instead of indulging in such old-fashioned, uncomputerizable activity, [scientifically minded brain trusters] reckon with the consequences of certain hypothetically assumed constellations without, however, being able to test their hypotheses against actual occurrences.”

She has in mind those consultants, talking heads, and commentators in and out of government who create logically convincing hypothetical constructions of future events. This could be the claim, heard so often today, that if Iran gets a nuclear bomb they will use it, or that Al Qaeda and terrorism threaten the existence or freedoms of the United States.

For Arendt, such claims always begin the same way, with a hypothesis.

They state a possible outcome of a series of events. They then discuss and dismiss alternative possibilities. Finally, this hypothesis turns “immediately, usually after a few paragraphs, into a ‘fact,’ which then gives birth to a whole string of similar non-facts, with the result that the purely speculative character of the whole enterprise is forgotten.” In other words, we move from the speculative possibility that Iran would use nuclear weapons, or that terrorism is a meaningful threat to the United States, to the conclusion that these outcomes are facts. The danger of intellectuals in politics is that they have a unique facility with ideas and arguments that are quite capable of so enrapturing their own minds with the power of their arguments that they lose sight of reality.

When Arendt speaks about the danger of intellectuals in government, she has in mind the example of the Vietnam War. In her essay “Lying and Politics”—a response to the Pentagon Papers—she hammers at the same theme of the danger that intellectuals pose to politics. The Pentagon Papers were written by and about “professional ‘problem solvers,’” who were “drawn into government from the universities and the various think tanks, some of them equipped with game theories and systems analyses, thus prepared, as they thought, to solve all the ‘problems’ of foreign policy.” The John F. Kennedy administration is famous, very much as is the presidency of Barack Obama, for luring the “best and the brightest” into government service. We need to understand Arendt’s claim that such problem solvers are dangerous.

These “problem solvers,” she argues, were men of “self-confidence, who ‘seem rarely to doubt their ability to prevail.’” They were “not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being ‘rational,’ and they were indeed to a rather frightening degree above ‘sentimentality’ and in love with ‘theory,’ the world of sheer mental effort.” They were men so familiar with theories and the manipulation of facts to fit logical argumentation, that they could massage facts to fit their theories. “They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them.” They sought to transform the contingency of facts into the

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The Danger of Intellectuals

Roger Berkowitz

[T]here are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades.

The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to “think the unthinkable,” but that they do not think.

—Hannah Arendt, “On Violence”

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logical coherence of a lawful and pseudo-scientific narrative. But since the political world is not like the natural world of science, the temptation to fit facts to reality meant that they became practiced in self-deception. That is why the “hard and stubborn facts, which so many intelligence analysts were paid so much to collect, were ignored.”

For Arendt, the “best-guarded secret of the Pentagon papers” is the “relation, or, rather, nonrelation, between facts and decision” which was prepared by the intellectual “defactualization” enabled by the problem solvers. “No reality and no common sense,” Arendt writes, “could penetrate the minds of the problem-solvers.”

Arendt’s suspicion of intellectuals in politics long predates her concern about the Vietnam War, and began with her personal experience of German intellectuals in the 1930s. She was shocked by how many of her friends, and how many educated and brilliant German professors, lawyers, and bureaucrats—including but not limited to her mentor and lover Martin Heidegger—were able to justify and rationalize their complicity in the administration of the Third Reich, often by the argument that their participation was a lesser evil.

Similarly, she was struck by the reaction to her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which intellectuals constructed elaborate critiques of her book and her argument that had nothing at all to do with the facts of what she had written. In both instances, Arendt became aware of the intellectual facility for massaging facts to fit theories, and thus the remoteness from reality that can infect those who live too easily in the life of the mind.

The Iraq War under George W. Bush, and the war on terrorism waged under Bush and President Barack Obama are, today, clear examples of situations in which now two U.S. administrations have convinced themselves of the need for military action and unparalleled surveillance of citizens under indisputably false pretenses. Iraq, contrary to assertions that were made by a policy of elite of brain-trusters, had no connection with the 9/11 attacks and had no nuclear weapons.

Similarly, terrorism today does not pose a threat to the existence or the freedom of the United States. What terrorism threatens is the continued existence of the United States as the world superpower. What we are fighting for is not our survival, but our continued predominance and power. Some might argue that the fight for continued world dominance is worth the costs of our privacy and liberty; others may disagree. But we should at the very least be honest about what we are fighting for and what the costs of that fight are.

We see a similar flight from fact to theory in the Trayvon Martin case.

Shameless commentators on the right continue to insist that race played no role in the altercation, ignoring the fact of racism and the clear racial profiling in this case. But similarly hysterical leftist commentators insist that Zimmerman killed Martin primarily because of his race. Let’s stipulate that George Zimmerman followed Martin in some part because of his race. But let’s also recognize that he killed Martin—at least according to the weight of the testimony—from below after a struggle. We do not know who started the struggle, but there was a struggle and it is quite likely that the smaller and armed Zimmerman feared for his safety. Yes, race was involved. Yes, racism persists. Yes, we should be angry about these sad facts and should work to change the simply unethical environment in which many impoverished youths are raised and educated. But it is not true that Martin was killed primarily because of his race. It is also likely that the only reason Zimmerman was put on trial for murder was to satisfy the clamor of those advancing their theory, the facts be damned.

If Arendt is justifiably wary of intellectuals in politics, she recognizes their importance as well. The Pentagon Papers, which describe the follies of problem solvers, were written by the very same problem solvers in an unprecedented act of self-criticism. “We should not forget that we owe it to the problem-solvers’ efforts at impartial self-examination, rare among such people, that the actors’ attempts at hiding their role behind a screen of self-protective secrecy were frustrated.” At their best, intellectuals and problem solvers are also possessed of a “basic integrity” that compels them to admit when their theoretical fantasies have failed. Such admissions frequently come too late, long after the violence and damage has been done.

And yet, the fidelity to the facts that fires the best of intellectual and scientific inquiry is, in the end, the only protection we have against the selfsame intellectual propensity to self-deception.

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The Danger of Intellectuals

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Roger Berkowitz

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The False Culture of Utility Jennifer M. Hudson

“Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they are there only to fulfill some need, and for this functionalization it is almost irrelevant whether the needs in question are of a high or a low order.”

—Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture”

Hannah Arendt defines the cultural as that which gives testimony to the past and, in preserving the past, helps constitute our common world. A cultural object embodies the human goal of achieving “immortality,” which, as Arendt explains in The Human Condition, is not the same as eternal life or the biological propagation of the species. Immortality concerns the life of a people and is ultimately political. It refers to the particular type of transcendence afforded by political action. In “The Crisis of Culture,” Arendt demonstrates that culture has a political role insofar as it creates durable and lasting objects that contribute to the immortality of a people.

The danger Arendt confronts in “The Crisis in Culture” is that mass culture makes art disposable and thus threatens the ability of cultural life to produce lasting and immortal objects. The source of her worry is not an invasion of culture by the low and the base, but a sort of cannibalization of culture by itself. The problem is that mass culture swallows culture and subsumes it under the rubric of need. The immortal is degraded to a biological necessity, to be endlessly consumed and reproduced. Durable cultural objects that constitute a meaningful political world are thereby consumed, eroding the common world that is the place of politics.

Arendt’s point is first that mass culture—like all culture under the sway of society—is too often confused with status, self-fulfillment, or entertainment. In the name of status or entertainment, cultural achievements are stripped down and repackaged as something to be consumed in the life process. She would argue that this happens, for example, every time Hamlet is made into a movie or The Iliad is condensed into a children’s edition. By making culture accessible for those who would use it to improve themselves, the mass-culture industry makes it less and less likely that we

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will ever confront the great works of our past in their most challenging form. Eventually, the watering down of once immortal works can make it difficult or impossible to perceive the importance of culture and cultural education for humanity and our common world.

However, Arendt does not offer simply a banal critique of reality television as fast food. We might recognize a more insidious form of the risks she describes in the new intellectualism that marks the politics, or antipolitics, of the tech milieu. What has been termed Silicon Valley’s antiintellectualism should instead be understood as a forced colonization of the space potentially inhabited by the public intellectual.

The prophets of the tech world see themselves as fulfilling a social and political duty through enterprise. They unselfconsciously describe their creations as sources of liberation, democracy, and revolution. And yet they eschew politics. Their abnegation of overt political activity is comprehensible in that, for them, “politics” is always already contained in the project of saving the world through technological progress.

We see such exemplars of technological cultural salvation all around us. Scholars and cultural figures are invited to lecture at the “campuses” of Apple and Google, and their ideas get digested into the business model or spit back out in the form of TED talks. Even Burning Man, originally a “counter-cultural” annual desert festival with utopian pretensions, has been sucked into the vortex, such that Stanford professor Fred Turner could give a PowerPoint lecture titled “Burning Man at Google: A cultural infrastructure for new media production.” The abstract for his article in New Media & Society is even more suggestive: […]this article explores the ways in which Burning Man’s bohemian ethos supports new forms of production emerging in Silicon Valley and especially at Google. It shows how elements of the Burning Man world—including the building of a sociotechnical commons, participation in project-based artistic labor and the fusion of social and professional interaction—help to shape and legitimate the collaborative manufacturing processes driving the growth of Google and other firms.

Turner’s conclusion virtually replicates Arendt’s differentiation between 19th-century philistinism and the omniphagic nature of mass culture: In the 19th century, at the height of the industrial era, the celebration of art provided an occasion for the display of wealth. In

The False Culture of Utility

Jennifer M. Hudson

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the 21st century, under conditions of commons-based peer production, it has become an occasion for its [i.e. wealth] creation.

The instrumentalization of culture within polite society has given way to the digestion and reconstitution of culture in the form of gadgets meant to increase convenience. Would-be cultural objects become rungs on the hamster wheel of life’s progress. At the same time, progress as the ultimate goal of technological innovation declaring itself as culture is a vague concept because it is taken for granted. This is due to the self-contained and self-enclosed nature of the industry. Where progress is defined, it is simply demonstrated through examples, such as the implementation of the smart parking meter or the use of cloud networking in order to better administer services to San Francisco’s homeless population.

In a recent New Yorker article on the tech revolutionaries, George Packer writes, “A favorite word in tech circles is ‘frictionless.’ It captures the pleasures of an app so beautifully designed that using it is intuitive, and it evokes a fantasy in which all inefficiencies, annoyances, and grievances have been smoothed out of existence—that is, an apolitical world.”

Progress here is the increasingly efficient administration of life.

When tech does leave its insular environment and direct its energies outward, its engagements reflect both its solipsism and focus on utility, which for Arendt go together. The Gates Foundation’s substantial investments in higher education impose the quantitatively verifiable standard of degree completion as the sole or main objective, which seems odd in itself, given Gates’s notoriety as a Harvard drop-out. The efforts of the Foundation aim less at placing Shakespeare in the hands of every fast-food worker, and more toward redirecting all of cultural education toward the development of a cheap version of utilitarian aptitude. Such tech intellectualism will ask, “What is the point of slaving over the so-called classics?”

The claim is that the liberal arts vision of university education is inseparable from elitist designs, based on an exclusive definition of what ‘culture’ should be.

“What is the use?” is the wrong question, though, and it is tinged by the solipsistic mentality of a tech elite that dares not speak its name. The tech intellectual presents the culture of Silicon Valley as inherently egalitarian, despite the fact that capital gains in the sector bear a large burden of the blame for this country’s soaring rate of inequality. This false sense of equality fosters a naïve view of political and social issues. It also fuels tech’s hubristic desire to remake the world in its own image: life is about

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frictionless success and efficient progress, and these can be realized via the technological fix. “It worked for us, what’s the matter with you?”

For Arendt, culture is not meant to be useful for employment or even the lofty purpose of self-cultivation; our relationship to culture nurtures our ability to make judgments. Kant’s discussion of taste and “common sense” informs her notion of the faculty of judgment in art and politics.

In matters of taste, judging rests on the human ability to enlarge one’s mind and think with reference to an “anticipated communication with others” and “potential agreement.” Common sense, as she uses it, “discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world.”

Culture and politics are linked in that both can only exist in a world that is shared. She writes: Culture and politics, then, belong together because it is not knowledge or truth which is at stake, but rather judgment and decision, the judicious exchange of opinion about the sphere of public life and the common world, and the decision what manner of action is to be taken, as well as to how it is to look henceforth, what kind of things are to appear in it.

That culture and politics are about enacting judgments, rather than truth or technique for the advancement of biological life, is a point that is clearly missed by the tech intellectuals. The establishment of utility as the sole goal of higher education represents only one section of a general lens through which the world appears only as a series of practical problems to be figured out. In this paradoxical utopia of mass accessibility, insulation, and narrowmindedness, applied knowledge threatens to occupy and pervert culture at the expense of political action and care for our common world.

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Forgiveness

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt relates Augustine’s Christian concept of forgiveness to human action and agency. Forgiveness solves an important problem inherent to the activity of action. Since “men never have been and never will be able to undo or even control reliably any of the processes they start through action,” human beings are met with the disabling reality of processes whose outcomes are both unpredictable and irreversible. Knowing that our actions may lead to evil or unhappiness, why would anyone take the risk of action at all? Remarkably, Arendt finds the remedy to this predicament within the faculty of action itself. The antidote for irreversibility is forgiveness, which “serves to undo the deeds of the past” by releasing actors from the consequences of their actions.

The beauty of forgiveness is that it interrupts otherwise automatic processes. For example, forgiveness enables actors to become freed from vengeance, “which encloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.” Within the space created by the interruption, forgiveness creates a new relationship that is radically different from what existed before.

As something startlingly new, forgiveness is not conditioned by the wrong that provokes it and it can therefore never be predicted. Arendt admits as much. She explains, “forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly.”

Released from vengeful reactions, I can act in ways that are not predetermined or compelled by another’s trespasses against me. In this sense, for-

giveness is an unanticipated, uncaused and undetermined act; it is truly spontaneous. Arendtian forgiveness seems to take on a metaphysical stature; it appears to be able to change the nature of reality, undoing the irreversible. It acts against necessity, undoing what was done by releasing the doer from the deed.

In the last 60 years—notably in tribunals and reconciliation commissions characteristic of transitional justice—forgiveness has become a political and legal ideal in cases where massive moral injury threatens to extinguish human plurality and dignity. Seen as a willingness to continually participate in an imperfect world with civility, those willing to forgive demonstrate the ability to begin again, not only despite the social facts of moral injury and misrecognition, but also, as Arendt teaches, despite ontological facts of irreversibility, contingency, and unpredictability. Forgiving victims who are able to respond creatively rather than vindictively are said to escape the vicious cycle of violence and exemplify their moral agency.

What does forgiveness really do as a political tool? Arendt’s forgiveness responds creatively to the fact of injury. What I’d like to suggest is that Arendt understands forgiveness as a cure for the irreversibility of action, not of violence. Unlike many contemporary (theological and secular) political views that see forgiveness as an act of compassion in response to atrocity, Arendt insists that forgiveness is an activity of politics.

Understood politically, forgiveness is about surviving these effects of irreversibility. Because linear time shapes human experience, irreversibility is unavoidable. Taking aim at what cannot be undone, forgiveness releases actors from what would otherwise become a mechanistic or routinized cycle of retaliation.

Arendt describes forgiveness as the act of constantly releasing the wrongdoer. Quoting Luke 17:3-4, she says “And if he trespass against thee . . . and . . . turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt release him.” If the wrongdoer shows signs of contrition or transformation, he should be released from the trespass.

In Roger Berkowitz’s essay “The Power of Non-Reconciliation” on HannahArendt.net about Arendt’s judgment of Eichmann, he argues that Arendt adopts the language of release or dismissal (which I find very similar to Nietzsche’s understanding of forgetting) in order to characterize the action of forgiveness, a move that greatly limits the scope or reach of forgiveness. Berkowitz explains, Arendt critically limits the province of forgiveness to minor trespasses . . . As she notes, the Greek word in the Gospels tradition-

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Forgiveness

Grace Hunt

Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing in order to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.

—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

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ally translated as “forgiveness” is aphienai, which Arendt suggests means to “dismiss” and “release” rather than “forgive.” As a release, Arendt’s defense of forgiveness does not reach the forgiving of crimes and sins. Instead, forgiveness is limited to the “constant mutual release” that allows men to continue to act in the world.

People can release each other, but the capacity as denoted by the original Greek amounts to dismissal rather than pardon or exoneration.

Whereas forgiveness releases, its opposite, vengeance, binds people to the past crime and to the process of reaction. Vengeance, unlike forgiveness, is not creative of new possibilities for action. Instead, it “acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process.” But note that it is the deterministic character that threatens the sphere of action and which morphs a trespass into an unforgiveable crime. The magnitude of the crime is a necessary—but not sufficient—condition for crimes against plurality.

Unlike the common imperialist tactic of legalized discrimination, Arendt explains in Eichmann in Jerusalem that war crimes committed by totalitarianism gave rise to the unprecedented: It was when the Nazi regime declared that the German people not only were unwilling to have any Jews in Germany but wished to make the entire Jewish people disappear from the face of the earth that the new crime, the crime against humanity—in the sense of a crime “against human status,” or against the very nature of mankind—appeared.

This is our first clue that the offenses to which forgiveness responds are within the reach of dismissal, whereas crimes against the human status are not. Moreover, forgiveness releases those who “unknowingly” transgressed. The predicament of action is that people cannot know the consequences of their actions (action is unpredictable). When the act is intended to harm, the law calls for punishment. It would be a mistake, therefore, to think that Arendtian forgiveness is intended to cure anything outside the realm of action.

It is a striking absence that Arendt did not refer to the concept of forgiveness as it is developed in The Human Condition in her decision in Eichmann in Jerusalem. And yet Arendt wasn’t attempting to create a complete system of concepts across her work. As her views changed, her concepts also shifted. But having in mind the limits of Arendt’s forgiveness can nonetheless, I think, help us understand her judgment against Eichmann. Because Eichmann’s decisions and rule-following annihilated spontaneity and plurality, he cannot be released from his deeds.

She continues, Expulsion and genocide must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the ‘human status’ without which the very worlds ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ would be devoid of meaning.

Arendt described such actions as those which “transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their appearance.” Eichmann’s actions destroyed human potentiality. Arendt cannot forgive such crimes.

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Forgiveness

Grace Hunt

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When Power Is Lost

Arendt’s conception of power is one of the most subtle and elusive features of her political theory. Here Arendt poses the problem of power in terms of power’s loss, of powerlessness, which is also what she calls “the death of political communities.” What is powerlessness? What, exactly, is lost when power is lost?

There are many ways to become powerless in the world of 21st century politics. In the United States we often imagine that citizens would be powerless without their constitutional rights—the vote, free speech, due process. In and around the world’s many war zones, the loss of military protection seems to produce a very different kind of powerlessness, one that is linked to both our physical vulnerability to violence as human beings and the persistence of violence between sovereign states (and within them.) There is also the powerlessness that seems to follow from the dislocations or migrations of peoples, a condition that Arendt calls mass homelessness, which may come from the movement of peoples across borders, or the redrawing of borders across peoples. Poverty appears to be another form of powerlessness altogether, one that disrupts our capacity to appropriate nonhuman nature through labor and work and thereby sustain our lives. Arendt argues that mass destitution, alongside mass homelessness, is a form of powerlessness that is peculiar to the political condition of the modern age.

Many other kinds of powerlessness can be added to this list. The list is disturbing not only for its variety and length, but also because the felt urgency of each danger invites us to elevate one or two above the others, so that we risk settling for powerlessness of several kinds in order to secure power in one or two “emergency” domains. We choose between the power

of kill lists and drone strikes and the power of due process for Americans accused of terrorism. We weigh our powerlessness in the face of global warming against the powerlessness caused by the Great Recession, where the hoped-for “recovery” will be defined by consumption-led “growth,” rendered tangible by lower gas prices and more crowded shopping malls. Or, we may think that U.S. power in the globalizing world of free trade and faster capital flows is dependent upon “securing our national borders,” achieved through the quasi-militarization of immigration enforcement. Hard choices are the stuff of politics—they are supposed to be what power is all about—but the dilemmas of modern powerlessness are peculiarly wrenching, in large part because they are not readily negotiable by political action, by those practices of public creativity and initiative that are uniquely capable of redefining what is possible in the common world. Rather, these “choices” and others like them seem more like deadends, tired old traps that mark the growing powerlessness of politics itself.

The death of the body politic, which can only occur by way of the powerlessness of politics itself, is Arendt’s main concern in the above quote. In contrast to Hobbes, Rousseau, Weber, and Habermas, among others, Arendt distinguishes power from domination, strength, rationality, propaganda, and violence. Located within the open and common world of human speech and action, power reveals its ethical and political limits when it is overcome by deception, empty words, destruction, and “brutality.” Rooted in the human conditions of natality and plurality, and constituted by the gathered actions of many in a public space of appearance, power exists only in its actualization through speech and deed. Like action, power depends upon the public self-disclosure of actors in historical time. Actors acting together with other actors generate power. Yet because we do not know “who” we disclose ourselves to be in the course of collective action, or what the effects of our actions will turn out to mean in the web of human stories, power itself is always “boundless and unpredictable,” which in part explains its peculiar force. Given its boundlessness and unpredictability, power cannot be stored up for emergencies, like weapons or food and water, nor kept in place through fixed territories, as with national sovereignty. Power therefore co-exists only uneasily with machpolitik. Power can overcome violence and strength through the gathered voices and acts of the many; it can also be destroyed (but not replaced) through the dispersal of the many and the dissolution of the space of appearance. In between gathering and dispersal, power is preserved through what Arendt calls “organization,” the laws, traditions,

HA

When Power Is Lost

William Dixon

Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and where deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.

—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

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habits, and institutions that sustain the space of appearance during those interims when actors disperse temporarily and withdraw back into the private realm, only to reappear later.

For Arendt, the loss of power is the loss of our capacity to act with others in a way that generates, sustains, and discloses a common world.

Powerlessness is marked by the receding of public spaces. This may occur, for example, through the gentle decline of a formally constituted public realm into the technocratic shadows of the social, or through the brutal sovereign repression of spontaneously emergent spaces of appearance. In both cases, our ethical and political incapacities to act together, and the philosophical inability to recognize power when we see it, are at the root of modern political powerlessness. Power-seekers, in Arendt’s view, would be well advised to cultivate a deeper political appreciation for both the immaterial force and fragility of human natality, plurality, and public space, which will be lost when power is mistaken for its rivals, like reason, strength, violence, or sovereignty.

Contributors

Roger Berkowitz is academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition and coeditor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics and The Intellectual Origins of the Financial Crisis. He is editor of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.

William Dixon, a former doctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, teaches in the Bard Prison Initiative. He is a political theorist and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Johns Hopkins University.

Grace Hunt is assistant professor of philosophy at Western Kentucky University. She completed her Ph.D. in philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York in 2012. She is a former postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center.

Jennifer M. Hudson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center and teaches in the Bard Prison Initiative. She holds a Ph.D. in political science (political theory) from Columbia University.

Philippe Nonet is professor of law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author (with Philip Selznick) of Law and Society in Transition, among many other volumes.

Anne Norton is professor of politics at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire and 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method.

Tracy B. Strong is professor of political theory and philosophy at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Politics Without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century, among numerous other books. From 1990 to 2000 he was editor of Political Theory.

Jeffrey K. Tulis is associate professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of The Presidency in the Constitutional Order and The Rhetorical Presidency, among other books.

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About Bard College

Founded in 1860, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is an independent, nonsectarian, residential, coeducational college offering a four-year B.A. program in the liberal arts and sciences and a five-year B.A./B.S. degree in economics and finance. The Bard College Conservatory of Music offers a five-year program in which students pursue a dual degree—a B.Music and a B.A. in a field other than music—and offers an M.Music in vocal arts and in conducting. Bard also bestows an M.Music degree at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bard and its affiliated institutions also grant the following degrees: A.A. at Bard High School Early College, a public school with campuses in New York City (Manhattan and Queens) and Newark, New Jersey; A.A. and B.A. at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and through the Bard Prison Initiative at six correctional institutions in New York State; M.A. in curatorial studies, M.S. in economic theory and policy, and M.S. in environmental policy and in climate science and policy at the Annandale campus; M.F.A. and M.A.T. at multiple campuses; M.B.A. in sustainability in New York City; and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Internationally, Bard confers dual B.A. degrees at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, Russia (Smolny College); American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan; and Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University; as well as dual B.A. and M.A.T. degrees at Al-Quds University in the West Bank.

Editor Associate Editor Associate Editor Assistant Editor

Roger Berkowitz Wyatt Mason Jennifer Szalai Bridget Hollenback

Editorial Intern

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Bard offers nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions. Total enrollment for Bard College and its affiliates is approximately 5,000 students.

The undergraduate College has an enrollment of more than 1,900 and a student-to-faculty ratio of 10:1. For more information about Bard College, visit www.bard.edu.

ISSN 2168-6572 Cover: Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust Published by The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College Printed by Quality Printing, Pittsfield, Massachusetts ©2014 Bard College. All rights reserved.

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