[Odyssey] For the Return of “the Political”

About 2,500 years ago, the Athenian democratic alliance of Greece won its war against the great army of despotic Persia. Historians have not hesitated to describe this monumental event as “democracy defeating despotism.” But Athens’s Delian League was later crushed by the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Sparta was a quintessential totalitarian military state, comparable to modern-day communism. Athens, the polis that symbolized ancient democracy, fell into the status of a Spartan colony and, sinking into the mire of vote-buying welfare promises and populism that surfaced at every election, declined again and again. Did democracy truly defeat totalitarianism?

The German Weimar Republic, established in 1919, emerged the year before, in 1918, as a parliamentary democratic republic after the Kaiser was deposed through a democratic civic revolution. Grounded in liberalism, the Weimar Constitution guaranteed the basic rights of the German people and, at the same time, was an exemplary constitution in that it also recognized the president’s emergency powers to dissolve parliament when the legislative branch violated the constitutional order. Yet in the process by which Hitler built a Nazi dictatorship through the unconstitutional Enabling Act, by which the legislative branch handed over power to the executive, President Hindenburg did not exercise the emergency powers granted to him to stop it. Liberalism yielded to fascism.

In the summer of 1989, the communist regime in Warsaw, Poland, collapsed, and two years later, in 1991, on Christmas Day, the former Soviet Union was dissolved. The liberal political economist Fukuyama declared this “the end of history.” Fukuyama’s proclamation—that capitalism’s victory over communism had realized Hegel’s dialectical world spirit, and that as a result the history of ideological struggle had ended and world peace would arrive—sounded to the liberal camp like welcome news, like the Marathon messenger’s report of victory brought by the Athenian soldier who had defeated Persia.

But the victory did not last long. The September 11 attacks in 2001 signaled that America’s enemy had shifted from Soviet communism to Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. After Afghanistan, the United States sank into the quagmire of the Iraq War, and the number of U.S. military dead surpassed the 2,973 people killed in the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, astronomical fiscal spending took place. Zero real interest rates, massive liquidity provision, and increased regulation led to the U.S. subprime financial crisis of 2007, which in turn became the occasion for another ambitious authoritarian power—China—to emerge as America’s adversary. History was not ending; it was leading us into an unknown world.

The State: Another Invisible Hand

Liberalism, which seemed to have historical victory spread out before its eyes, has nevertheless been marked by a history of hardship that, at decisive moments, turned into political defeat. Whether left-liberal or right-liberal, those who uncork the champagne of history too early were mocked by Carl Schmitt as engaging in the “daily routine of the office of eschatology,” forgetting the essence of the political—namely, the “order of friend and enemy.” The point is that the end of history cannot come so long as politics exists. For that reason, politics easily becomes an object of distrust for liberals. This is especially so for right-liberals who advocate “small government” and the “market economy.”1

Modern economics presupposes that natural laws exist within society. Accordingly, just as questions of value and belief are independent of nature, value and morality are excluded from analysis within economic laws as well. Put simply, economic liberals presuppose politics as something already “resolved.” Hence they accept the belief that the market, where private supply and demand meet without government intervention, takes precedence over society or the state.

For this reason, for liberals—or more precisely, for market-superiority liberals—democracy or republicanism becomes a cumbersome issue for freedom or one that lies outside its essence. As Hayek said, if liberty concerns the content of law, democracy concerns the making of law. Yet liberals still have not found an answer to the question of how legitimacy can be grounded in this democratic order. Perhaps the reason is that just as the market is formed through spontaneous order, the state too emerges through such spontaneous order, and whether it takes the form of democracy, monarchy, or republic is determined evolutionarily by the cultural paths of the peoples of that society.2

The person who sharply pointed out this problem was the German constitutional philosopher Carl Schmitt. Drawing on the various forms of rule among the poleis observed by Aristotle in Politics, he argued that a state’s political system, whatever its form, is chosen as the system “best suited to defending against external enemies.” For the Greek poleis, whether democracy, aristocracy, or monarchy, the purpose was the same.

Schmitt’s reflection suggests an analogy with Adam Smith’s description of the self-regulating function of prices in the market as an “invisible hand.” If the invisible hand operating in the market that emerged as a spontaneous order is “the right hand of God,” and if the political order called the state, like language, also emerged spontaneously, then might politics not be the invisible “left hand of God”? Of course, this God can be understood as a principle immanent in a world too complex to be fully grasped by our limited reason, and in some respects more complex than our own degree of evolution allows us to comprehend.

The Liberal Theory of Politics: Will or Opinion?

If nature and artifice are not distinct, then what difference could one claim exists between an anthill and a human state? Under such conditions, the view that the best state for liberals is a “minimal state” naturally gains support. Unfortunately, however, this “minimal state” or “small government” is nothing more than an extremely absurd notion. A state may be forced by circumstance to operate as a small government, but a developing state can never aim for small government.

Just as the market, as a spontaneous order, expands its own sphere of exchange whenever it can do so without the interference of government, the spontaneous state too seeks to expand the sphere in which its sovereignty is enforced. In history, we have called such states “empires,” and every state possesses the nature of striving to rise into an empire. This imperial nature of the state remains alive today, which is why we witness rivalry and conflict among great powers across the world. The difference, as Joseph S. Nye Jr. observed, is that whereas the past was an order of hard power mobilizing military force, today economic middle power and cultural soft power are combined, transforming the order of competition into one of hybrid war without fronts or borders. As a result, modern states are waging a world war without gunfire, and domestic politics draws its momentum from this world war. Yet amid this political whirlpool, liberals are still confronting familiar enemies not with “will” but with “opinion.”

Within the political state, individuals each possess free will and unite in solidarity to protect their lives, liberty, and property. The will manifested through such solidarity is no longer individual free will, but is summed up into what Rousseau called the general will.3 It is this general will of the people that gives authority and legitimacy to the revision and amendment of constitutions and laws. Rousseau’s phrase “forcing men to be free” has often been criticized by liberals as a contradiction in terms, but it referred to the laws of the state to which all must submit. In other words, the purpose of legislative and executive acts of rule is always to make the people free.

Yet for many liberals, Rousseau’s general will is still misunderstood as the background of totalitarianism or socialism, and is therefore viewed with suspicion and contempt. Does Rousseau’s paradox-laden general will—the general will of the people that grants legitimacy to rule and law, yet is not merely the sum of individuals’ free wills as measured by majority vote—really exist? If it does, how can it be known? The process by which liberals seek this answer is like the Odyssey, the arduous journey of Ulysses returning home to Attica after victory in the Trojan War 2,000 years ago. Let us now raise the sails for that adventure.

1 Political scientist Bihwan Kim classifies the liberal spectrum, centered on the relationship between market and state, into market-superiority liberalism, balanced liberalism, and democracy-superiority liberalism.

2 Unlike the concept of the people (people), which has real existence, the concept of the nation is a singular, agenda-constructed person signifying the bearer of sovereignty in the modern state—in other words, a fictional concept with no real existence.

3 Rousseau’s concept of the people’s general will, together with individual free will, is central to understanding the political. The people’s general will is not the total will as the arithmetic sum of heterogeneous individual free wills, but can be explained as the sum of differences among homogeneous parts—that is, as a concept of mensuration by parts. This will be discussed in detail later.

References

Bihwan Kim / The Spectrum of Modern Liberalism and Conservatism and Progressivism in Korean Society / Philosophical Studies / 2005.11.

Heewon Kang / Popular Sovereignty as Fiction—Reflections on the Constitutional Principle of “Popular Sovereignty” / Journal of Legal Philosophy / 2020.08.

Jiyoung Park · Seonkyung Kim / The Threat of Hybrid Warfare and Responses / The Asan Institute for Policy Studies / 2019

Jean-Jacques Rousseau / The Social Contract / Seoul National University Press / 2016.10.

Carl Schmitt / Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty / Greenbee / 2010.10.

Hayek / Law, Legislation and Liberty / Center for Free Enterprise (CFE) / 2018.11.

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Original title: [오디세이] ‘정치적인 것’의 귀환을 위하여

Author: Jeong-seok Han

Date: 2020-12-02

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=5&idx=23281