Introduction
The primacy of the political

Based on public opinion surveys, voter apathy, and the patriotic relief with
which a confused and anxious citizenry embraces seemingly perpetual war
(against ‘terrorism’ and against states), the not surprising conclusion has been drawn that the American public is tired not only of politics, but also of
‘democracy’. Weary of political debate, of having to confront more than one
political issue at any one time, and of being asked to help determine solutions to problems they do not fully understand, a majority of the American people willingly and eagerly wish to leave decision making up to ‘experts’ or ‘business leaders’, and therefore wish to take such power to decide not only out of their own hands, but out of the hands of their purported political representatives.

Whether what holds for the United States is an aberration or only an
exaggeration of what holds for Europe and elsewhere in the world is open to
interpretation. Certainly extra-parliamentary politics are alive and well in the
streets of various European capitals, and elections seem still to arouse passions, but whether that indicates in kind or only in degree a fundamental difference of popular participation in political life is also an open question. What does seem clear is that, despite the casual and occasional arousal of the collected populace, what in 1941 James Burnham called the ‘managerial revolution’ has by and large been accepted not only as reality, but as desired utopia by the citizens of a modernity that has seemingly become too complex for any meaningful notion of participatory democracy.

Burnham’s observation of the managerial society was, of course, but a
variant of a host of similar, if philosophically more sophisticated, diagnoses
from diverse political perspectives, including: (a) Weber’s analyses of modern rationalization, bureaucratization, and disenchantment, that fueled (b) Carl Schmitt’s critiques of liberalism’s neutralization of politics and (c) Lukács’ Marxist elaborations of commodity fetishism in the direction of the reification of human relations as a form of social and psychological self-alienation, until finally, (d) Adorno proselytized a near-total asceticism as a response to a modernity in which even culture becomes an industry. When linked with Heidegger’s similarly sweeping negation of an expansive and all-consuming modernity, it is this last gesture, Adorno’s asceticism, that leaves the greatest impression and creates the most alluring temptation. If, for the purist, in the dark night of modernity all cows are black – fascist and communist ‘totalitarianism’ as well as the capitalist ‘society of the spectacle’ – then there is no need for the political because the political, no matter how conceived, offers us no escape.. Indeed, to engage with the corrupted world politically is to increase the corrosion and to implicate oneself more fully in the original sin that is modernity. Best, therefore, to hibernate and wait, if not with Heidegger for the return of the gods, then with Deleuze for the philosophers to found the new ontology.

2 Sovereignty and its discontents

Ironically, if inevitably, such a retreat leaves the field clear for the managers.
As we take our occasional summer respite from hibernation and gaze down
upon the valley below, we can see that what was once called the state is now identified with the law and thus threatens to become fully absorbed by civil society (by ‘culture’, Leo Strauss and his conservative followers would say) and transformed into just one bureaucratized association among many. In this way liberal rule of law and humanist pluralism minimize the importance of the state, but by no means do they thereby abolish hated state sovereignty. Rather, ‘decision’, that existential bugaboo of liberal theory, is taken out of the hands of the sovereign (which includes ‘the people’ every bit as much as the arbitrary will of the monarch) and is dispersed, distributed among the various bureaucracies, exercised by ‘experts’ and ‘advisors’, and thus rendered invisible. And this invisibilization is the cause of exhaustion and ennui. The ‘managerial’ society is the ‘administered’ society whose efficient performativity reduces the political to the routine activity of policing.

What experts in the domestic sphere see as administration has its
correspondence in international relations as pacification, cooperation,
legalization, and the implementation of ‘human rights’.1 Just as liberal society marginalizes politics and conditions us to be suspicious of it, the modern international order, dominated by the United States and theatricalized by worldwide media outlets, outlaws war and makes opposition to its rule something immoral. Legitimate violence is the violence that is conducted under the auspices of the United States and its vassals; illegitimate – ie terrorist – is everything else. The virtue of the American response to the events of September 2001 is to have removed, at least partially and at least at times, the rhetorical camouflage from this fundamental attitude and made it visible for all to see, even the most naive and willing believers. We no longer play with formulas like ‘police actions’ and ‘peace keeping’, but talk quite simply and directly of war, economic booty, and the installation of compliant regimes. ‘Consultation’ with the Allies is a gleefully open and public form of threat, extortion, bribery,
and, when these do not work, punishment. And support for the United States is displayed with all the calculating opportunism of a masochistic, tail-wagging and hand-licking lapdog. But there is one element of duplicity that remains, that will always remain. Our wars are always wars of liberation, never wars of conquest. Thus the discourse that dictates the tone of both political arenas, the domestic and the foreign, is moral. Once the Good is pitted against an Evil Axis of criminal regimes, opposition, domestic and foreign, can only be illegitimate, conducted by the morally perverse and therefore the politically discredited.

Now, if the triumph of a particular species of liberal pluralism denotes the
de-politicization of society, one would think that theoretical opposition to this trend would seek to rehabilitate the political. But rather than asserting the value of the political as an essential structure of social life, the post-Marxist left seems intent on hammering the final nails into the coffin. In the most celebrated works of recent years, Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), the political (denoted by the notion of sovereignty) is irretrievably identified with nihilism and marked for extinction.

In both instances, the political is the cause of the loss of ‘natural innocence’
(Agamben, 1998, p 28), that flowering of human productivity that the Western metaphysical tradition has suppressed; and the logical paradox of sovereignty is to be overcome by the instantiation of a new ontology. In this way, violence, which is not thought of as part of the state of nature but is introduced into the human condition by flawed or morally perverse social institutions, is to be averted. That is, the faulty supposition of ineluctable violence that guides political theory from Hobbes to Weber is to be replaced by a Heideggerian, Deleuzean, Spinozan or Christian ontology of original harmony. In the words of John Milbank, a Christian social theorist who currently enjoys a modest following among political thinkers on the Left, there is no ‘original violence’, but rather an originary ‘harmonic peace’ which is the ‘sociality of harmonious difference’. Thus violence ‘is always a secondary willed intrusion upon this possible infinite order’ (Milbank, 1990, p 5). This, then, is the great supposition that links the ascetic pessimism of an Adorno with the cheery Christian optimism of Milbank: the world as it is is as it is because of the moral perversity of (some) human agents who willfully construct flawed social institutions. To seek to remedy the perversity of the world as it is from within the flawed social and political structures as they are only increases the perversity of the world.

One must, therefore, totally disengage from the world as it is before one can
become truly engaged. Only a thorough, cataclysmic cleansing of the world will allow our activities to be both ‘innocent’ and ‘productive’. Clear, though only partially acknowledged, is the fact that this cleansing, which aims at ridding the world of intrusive violence, is itself an act of fierce and ultimate violence – ultimate in its purported finality, but also, certainly, in its extreme ferocity.

What remains equally clear, though not acknowledged, is that whoever has the power to determine the nature of this harmonious sociality is the one who can determine which acts of violence are to be judged as intrusions into the placid domain and which acts of violence are to be condoned as the necessary means of re-establishing the promise of perpetual peace. Determining the nature of this desired, nay, required originary peace is itself a sovereign act, not the abolition of such sovereignty. What our ultimate sovereign of harmonious peace will do with the willfully violent intruders can only be guessed, but it is certain that they will not be looked upon as legitimate political dissenters, and the unconditional violence that will be used to eliminate their presence will be justified by invoking the ‘harmonic peace’ or ‘natural innocence’ they have so deliberately and maliciously disturbed.

In opposition to the near universal pressure to abolish the pesky complexity
of the political, the aim of this volume is to reject every resurrection of
eschatological desire, and to affirm conflict as the necessary and salutary basis of political life. To this end, the work of Carl Schmitt can be of considerable help. One must be clear, however, that the term most often associated with his thought – namely political theology – is not a term that can be sensibly used to describe his own best work. When, in 1922, Schmitt writes that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ (Schmitt, 1985b, p 36), he makes an analogous claim about the modern political state to the one Max Weber had already made nearly two decades earlier about the modern money economy.2 Just as wealth, industriously achieved, serves as
a sign of grace for the Puritans in early modern Europe (and the Massachusetts Bay Colony), so too the sovereign, as a mortal God, mimics divinity. But God and grace soon become mere power and market value, and Schmitt’s and Weber’s emphases center on the necessities of this secularization, on the profane, not the sacred, on the political and the economic, not the theological.