Chapter Seven
Contesting “Power”
Lest the reader lose track of where I am going in the midst of the many details following, let me explain that before further discussing what Foucault does with the word “power,” I am going to discuss several contexts, several language games, in which “power” is prominent. I want to create a broad although inevitably incomplete sense of what is at stake when one chooses to speak less (or more) of “power.” I also want to say more about philosophy and the process of making metaphysical choices, and more about kinds of talk I recommend doing more of while we do less power-talk
I have been saying that philosophy is about choices, about choices of conceptual frameworks. It is about deciding how to talk and implicitly also about deciding how to see. When these choices are about highly general propositions I call them metaphysical, especially when they purport to be anti-metaphysical, as the choice to talk about “power” frequently purports to be. Following Foucault, I regard saying and seeing as closely connected; but while he was (during the part of his life considered in the preceding chapters) ostensibly more interested in what it is possible to say and see in a given culture during a given age, I am more interested in choices. With regard to “power,” my question is, “What shall we do with this word?” My answer on the whole is that we should use it less often.
It is true as Charles Taylor and others have pointed out that the word “power” is used to refer to many different things, which are incommensurable with one another. (Taylor 1986, p. 89) “Power” is also a term with multiple and hotly contested meanings. (Lukes, 1974) Foucault’s tendency from roughly 1970 to roughly 1981 to make “power” a central theme thus necessarily lends itself to confusion, and the many other writers who also make “power” a central theme also invite confusion, and indeed any term that becomes a central theme in the human sciences invites confusion, just because a single umbrella term tends to obscure the variety that exists among its meanings and referents. I run a similar risk of inviting confusion by losing sight of differences when I frequently use the terms “rule” and “norm.” But I want to say more here. I want to say that “power” lends itself not just to confusion but also to degradation. It is a word that tends to filter out culture. It tends to filter out two of Hart’s three aspects of rules: the conscious deliberation that is part of rule following, and the mutual criticism by and through which people appraise and guide each other’s conduct. In general, my case for doing less power-talk is a case for doing more rule-talk.
It is true that there are many varieties of power-talk, and some lend themselves to degradation more than others. Foucault credits his Nietzschean power-talk with being better than Marxist power-talk, because Nietzscheans make power productive while Marxists associate it with domination and repression. But this does not meet my point: productive or repressive, historically important strands of power-talk still tend to model humans on machines more than on personalities in stories endowed with wills and with social roles to play. Thus Foucault is led to see institutions as machines: the school-machine, the hospital machine, the jail-machine etc. (Foucault 1976, p. 237) On the other hand, when Bertrand Russell defines power in terms of the production of intended effects, or when Walter Wink reads the New Testament as a series of stories about “powers”, or when Hannah Arendt defines power in terms of the ability to act in concert, or when any number of writers advocate empowerment and propose to say “power with” instead of “power over”; all these writers tend to bring in the cultural and characteristically human elements that mechanical versions of power-talk tend to leave out. I do not want to quibble about a word when we agree in substance. But I do want to discuss the substantive issues at stake.
The ways of seeing and talking I am endorsing consider that an ethical perspective and a realistic perspective are the same. To disregard or underestimate ethics as cause and guide of human conduct is not realistic. Ethics is rooted in the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens as a cultural animal who has been for several hundred thousand years now a functioning part of a biosphere located in an airy envelope with moderate temperatures located in the four or so kilometers between the surface of the earth and cold outer space. The human brain is a cultural organ; as are the mouth, the larynx, the female breast, the gonads, and indeed almost every physical feature of this animal that evolved talking and living in families and tribes. (Tanner, Leakey) Humans are biologically coded to be culturally coded. The heart of culture consists of ethics. It is norms in Durkheimian terminology; customs in the language of Margaret Mead; the conventional morality of the normal adult in the terminology of the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg; Sitten in Kant´s German; Verhältnisse (relationships) in Marx´s German, morals and manners in senses coming down to us from the Latin mores (French moeurs); ethics in English drawing on Greek roots; rules expressed in a way that helpfully connects norms in general with legal norms. (All these terms, on whose common accord I am now relying, are, of course, usefully distinguished to be employed as names for different things, in many contexts where people use them for purposes that are not at present my purposes.) Agreeing with John Dewey and disagreeing with the unavoidable Immanuel Kant, I see ethics as part of a world of geological and biological processes. Ethics is the practical side of a culture’s belief system, which generally includes, as inseparable from ethics, beliefs about the relationship of the divine to the human; in Durkheim´s terms the relationship of the sacred to the profane. (I do not think [and Foucault does not think] that the human relationship to the divine ended with modernity; on the contrary, l´homme, the human person, that being deserving unconditional respect, that being who must always be treated as an end and never as means only, is precisely the divine.) (Richards 1995, chapter 10)
The terms “ethics” and “ethical” are both descriptive and prescriptive. On the one hand, they can be used (especially when remembering their Greek etymologies) simply to state that a certain group has certain customs or standards, without commenting on whether it would be better or worse if they were different than they are. For example, one can cite an ethical rule of the State Bar of California simply by citing chapter and verse of its Rules for Professional Conduct without saying anything to praise or blame the chapter and verse cited. On the other hand, “ethics” and “ethical” are usually honorific. “Unethical” is usually pejorative. As R.M. Hare and others have shown ethical talk follows a logic that is more imperative than declarative. As Charles Stephenson and others have observed, it expresses emotions: warm emotions (ethical) and angry emotions (unethical). “Ethics” is usually about what should be, not just about what is.
I view these two aspects, descriptive and prescriptive, as a desirable and natural meshing of functions. When one describes a norm (not of course “norm” in the special sense Foucault gives it, connected with “normalization,” but as a convenient synonym for “rule” in the commonly accepted more or less Durkheimian senses of “norm”), for example a norm of exogamous marriage, one does not just describe an observed regularity in behavior. The description itself includes the fact that the norm is normative (i.e. prescriptive) for the people observed. One is describing the behavior of a self-monitoring animal who is also an other-monitoring animal. Accepted rules are used by the actors themselves to guide action, or in some cases to acknowledge that what they are doing is not really what they should be doing; those who violate the accepted rules are likely to be criticized for acting wrongly. For example, the rules of accounting, known as G.A.A.P. (Generally Accepted Counting Principles), are used by accountants to draw up balance sheets, and to calculate profits, losses, and taxes due, among other things. Accountants do not follow their rules as a set of regular strokes on the keyboards of their computers analogous to the regular orbits of the planets. Unlike the planets, they deliberately apply rules; when they are in doubt they look up rules in books and on the Internet. Accountants who violate the rules can lose their licenses and cease to be accountants. There is already a prescriptive element in the description of an ethic in the respect that the people for whom it is an ethic regard it as authority telling them what to do. A great deal of ordinary talk revolves around ethics in the respect that it consists of praising and blaming people. A great deal of ordinary emotion is about rights and wrongs, and not only among humans, for moral indignation has also been observed among monkeys living in captivity in zoos. ( )
Seeing the inherently prescriptive character of rules (even when one only intends to describe them) leads naturally by a few easy steps to seeing some rules as better than others. “We follow rules here,” leads naturally to “Our rules are good rules,” from which it is but a small further step to “It is possible to improve a rule.” In Kohlberg’s findings, but not only in his, some portion of a human population will grow beyond adhering to the conventional morality of the group, and will adopt a critical stance, philosophizing about how the group’s norms could be improved. Habermas finds that the very acts of speaking and listening, the very acts that constitute entering into communication with another human being, presuppose commitment to certain norms. (Habermas ) One can also say that the very existence of rules presupposes that there is some point and purpose to having the rules. The point and purpose is problem-solving. Given that they have some point and purpose, rules can be better or worse according as they are more or less successfully performing their social functions.
Thus although any rule people think they should follow, which they think it is right to follow and wrong to violate, is an ethical rule; one that functions better in facilitating getting the work of the world done and in getting everybody’s needs met, is a better ethical rule. It is ethical in a narrower but stronger sense of the word that meshes with its broader but weaker sense.
This Deweyan view of how ethics and culture work implies democratic practices. It implies working with common sense, rather than bypassing it or undermining it. It implies working for social change through education.
I will soon comment on some objections to my views coming from people who are more inclined than I am to think in terms of “power” when explaining social phenomena. Against those who dismiss as naive equating an ethical perspective with a realistic perspective, I will express the opinion that they are the ones who are naive. They think they are closer to reality when they are actually farther from it.
I have chosen the overuse of “power” as a target for several reasons and with several misgivings. I will discuss first the misgivings and second the reasons. Misgivings: “Power” is a useful word. Rom Harré´s phrase “causal powers” is one of my favorite useful phrases. Sometimes in politics one should say precisely what according to me some people say too much: one should say that what ethically should be done is one thing, while what can be done given who has most of the power is quite a different thing. I myself want to say –and here I am in danger of doing power-talk in a manner so similar to the way my opponents do it that our disagreements might appear to be quibbles— that whether social and economic democracy is real is defined by who has power. It is not defined by whether industry is nationalized or land ownership collectivized; or by whether shares in the stock market are widely held by millions of people through mutual funds; or by whether land is divided into small acreages run as family farms; or by whether firms are municipalized or provincialized or run as para-statal autonomous public authorities like the Port Authority of New York or many city bus companies; or whether the economy is dominated by nonprofits, or by corporations whose stock is owned by charities and schools; or by whether industries are owned in trusts where the trustees have stated duties; or by whether the dominant economic form is a people’s economy where most people are self-employed, or are full members of cooperatives that own the enterprises; or by whether firms are worker-run or owned by employee pension funds; or by what the role and reward of the entrepreneur is; or by whether the government provides many facilities helping people to start new businesses; or by whether taxes are high or low; or by whether business is highly regulated or hardly regulated at all; or by how the educational system articulates with the economy; or by what health and pension and housing benefits are provided as citizen rights independent of anybody’s economic role, or. ... etc. Whether there is social and economic democracy is not defined by what mix of institutional forms is chosen. It is defined by who chooses them. It is defined by whether the people are able to choose --and I want to recognize degrees of quality in choice, some choices being better informed, freer of constraints, more rational, and more ethical than others— a mix of institutional forms that works for them and makes their lives better. (Shonfield ) It is defined by whether the people can change their minds over time, in the light of historical experience and ongoing conversations, so that the mix of institutions the citizens choose at one time is not the same as what they choose at another time. If the people have power, they will devise institutions that they believe work for them, and that will be real social and economic democracy. If they do not, then they will be exploited whatever the nominal name of the system may be.
Having expressed such strong misgivings about attacking the overuse of “power,” by speaking so strongly in favor of a particular kind of power-talk (perhaps better called empowerment-talk) I need to explain why this chapter will be nevertheless mainly be a complaint about overuse of the word “power”. My reservations about “power,” my perception that in the behavior of this useful servant of culture there is more than one vicious streak, are connected with my reservations about modern institutions; which are connected with my general views concerning how history happened, leading to the outcome that our social institutions are what they are today.
Modern science and modern social institutions arose together at the same time and at the same place. The time was the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. The place was Western Europe. Western Europe is mostly a large peninsula of Asia, which used to be distinguished from the rest of Asia, before it came to be called “Europe,” by calling it “Christendom.” Because modernity grew out of the culture that used to be that of Christendom, it has a special relationship to it, as well as to the European late middle ages that were modernity’s immediate predecessors. For Descartes, Locke, and other early modern philosophers, “the teachings of the schools,” or “scholasticism,” was what the new philosophy was not. Theology was what the new philosophy was not. Scholastic theology was its other, the background against which it defined and differentiated itself; and against which later social science --starting with the sociologie of Auguste Comte specifically proposed by Comte as a source of rational authority to replace the authorities of church and king that had been deauthorized by the French Revolution—would also define and differentiate itself.
Modern science and modern social institutions arose in interaction with each other, and in mutual support of each other. It should not escape notice, for example, that one of Voltaire´s lovers translated Newton’s Principia into French. That is a clue –there are abundant other clues—that mathematics and physics were drafted to serve as combatants against the then prevailing common sense; and in favor of Voltaire´s pleas for toleration, for freedom, for curtailing the secular power of the clergy, and –this is key— for a secular civil law modeled on the jus gentium of ancient Rome, so that, as Voltaire enthusiastically reported from London in his Lettres sur Angleterre, the Quaker, the protestant, the Jew, and the Catholic, might spend the day peacefully trading on the Stock Exchange, guided in their mutual interaction by the norms of civil jurisprudence, and then at the end of the day return each to his own hearth, to pray to God each in his own way.
In the emerging modern worldview “power” shared the legitimacy of other terms that, like “power,” are employed in physics, in mathematics, and in inferential statistics, such as: force, energy, work, impressed upon (Newton), impression (Hume), impact, factor, dependent and independent variable, acceleration, differential, vector, and others. Earlier the work of people like Galileo and Copernicus and later that of people like Newton became paradigmatic not only in advancing human understanding and control of natural phenomena, but also in shaping general pervasive habits of mind. They shaped the minds of Europe, including the inverse shaping they performed on the minds of the romantics who reacted against them, in all spheres, as Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl showed in Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenchaften (a book which Foucault regarded as a genealogy and as a predecessor of his own genealogies). As nature was reconceived in mathematical terms, human self-definition in relationship to nature changed. (Merchant) Still later, at the time of the French Revolution, the advocates of liberty, equality, and fraternity counted on Galilean-Copernican-Newtonian science to undermine the ideology and therefore the authority of their opponents in the church and in the nobility. Unlike Mohammed, and like the ancient Roman jurists, the modernizers offered as an alternative to a religious set of norms not another religion, but a secular set of norms. Protestantism was an intermediate case: it was a series of religious movements more compatible with the norms of the emerging commercial civilization. (Hill)
Science in modern times was born with an anti-religious and therefore anti-cultural bias, due to the role it played in social conflicts in Europe at the time of its birth. The same undermining of mythical worldviews in the name of knowledge that operated in Europe to facilitate the passing of the ancien régime operated worldwide to justify colonialism. Asians and Africans had cultures, but they did not have civilization because they did not have science. Science was new and universal. Its bearers, the Europeans, brought new universal norms to people whose cultures were old and local. As non-European cultures were more and more caught up in the nets of global commerce, as their local communities were disorganized, as their traditional norms were weakened, science-as-ideology contributed to defining what was happening as progress.
In a few centuries the modernity that arose in Europe and became worldwide has made great material gains. People are living longer worldwide, even in those regions classified as extremely poor. The planet is now supporting a population several times larger than Malthus thought possible. This fact, the fact of modernity’s material gains has everything to do with the rhetoric of “power.”
On the one hand it is alleged that material prosperity, better known since the late 1940s as “development” (Escobar 1995), historically has been achieved, and politically only can be achieved, when modernizing elites have “power.” It is they who do the saving and investing; it is they whose ideology accepts science and rejects superstition. Democracy and social security, although virtuous in theory, in practice must come later, after a highly skewed distribution of “power” has brought modernity and therefore prosperity, to the late-comers on history’s stage. My opinion expressed above, that empowerment at the grassroots level, and at every level, leads to people designing institutions that will work for them, is rejected by people who hold a nearly opposite opinion: An excess of citizen participation and empowerment can only lead to populism, and then to demands on the state that the state cannot possibly fulfill, and then to chaos, and in the end to dictatorship. It would have been better, on such a view, to have had a limited democracy, in which for the sake of social cohesion some concessions were made to the masses, but in which for the sake of development “power” remained in the hands of technocrats who understood economics and entrepreneurs who had money to invest. If the limited democracy breaks down (if it fails to establish and maintain a regime of accumulation, in the vocabulary I am endorsing) then, unfortunately, it is desirable as well as inevitable, on this view, that there be an authoritarian regime as long as it may be required to establish a country’s credibility in international financial markets.
On the other hand others, rejecting the trickle-down theory just sketched, allege that the poor stay poor because they lack “power.” If the hungry masses lack land on which to grow their own food, if in general they lack access to resources, these material lacks are but a consequence of the lack of something more basic, namely “power.” (Lappe and Collins 1974) If governments allow people to starve, it is not because there is not enough food; it is because there is not enough democracy. (Sen 1987) It is inequality that holds progress back, and equality that generates it. (Wilkinson 1995, Sen ) It is pointed out that the Scandinavian social democracies did not first get rich and then get democratic; on the contrary they started from poverty and built their material prosperity as social democracies.
It has everything to do with “power” to answer the question whether the material gains that have been achieved during the last few centuries are mainly due to modern science or mainly due to modern social institutions, or mainly due to a combination of both without which neither could have done it alone. This question is connected with another one: whether modernity is a package, so that if you take part of it you have to take all of it; whether to get science you have to take capitalism; whether to get modern material prosperity you have to take modern forms of thought, those forms of thought which Gandhi in Hind Swaraj condemned as adharma, without dharma; or whether modernity is composed of separable elements. In thinking about these questions I have been helped by Solow´s studies which show that productivity gains are associated more with changes in technology than with capital accumulation. (Solow ) I also find Joseph Schumpeter’s approach helpful insofar as he shows that the great contributions of entrepreneurs have been more due to a sort of madness that drives their dreams (of which the religious fervor of Max Weber’s Calvinist capitalists might be regarded as a subset) than to the cold logic of profit maximizing. I find Saint-Simon’s allegedly utopian socialism to be more scientific than the so-called scientific socialisms, because Saint-Simon classified the entrepreneurs as members of the productive classes, and proposed to build social justice with them rather than against them. (Saint-Simon) Ditto for Leon Walras proposals for combining liberalism and socialism. (Walras) From Piero Sraffa I take the idea that to get the work of the world done it is necessary to apply certain physical inputs to get certain physical outputs; in principle an infinite number of cultural forms could organize and motivate the choice of outputs and the effort required to get them –even if in fact the cultural form we have now is one where (as Anthony Giddens says) most people are organized and motivated by fear of losing their jobs. With the help of Solow, Schumpeter, Weber, Sraffa, Giddens, and of course Adam Smith´s principle of division of labor, and of course others, I have come to agree with Fredric Jameson that we should declare a moratorium on the use of the word “power” for ten years, and then reconsider how we want to use it. During the ten year moratorium we should focus on science and on its technological applications; on building cultures that encourage creativity, innovation, risk-taking, and hard work; on sustainability; on cultural diversity and on recovering those cultural resources that help people feel a mystical communion with nature and their fellows (reversing Max Weber’s Entzauberung).
My reading of history is that insofar as the masses have shared in the material gains of modernity, it has been due to cultures of solidarity; to Keynesian macroeconomic policies; to moderately populist industrial policies and generally Fordist solutions to the problem of creating conditions under which capitalism works (relatively) well; and to social movements that have modified capitalism; and not due to the unmodified dynamics of capital accumulation, which tend rather to polarize the population into haves and have-nots. History’s unfinished business is to raise consciousness to the point where cultures can be deliberately designed to achieve social and environmental purposes.
It also seems to me (and one is quite likely to be wrong in expressing opinions on such large topics) that although science as a set of institutions started out with a physics-as-model-for-all-science anti-cultural bias, science today is in a position to contribute to completing history’s unfinished business. Its anti-cultural bias has to a large extent been corrected over time, as scientific research by its very nature, correcting findings and revising theories as new facts come to light, has come to appreciate the many roles diverse cultures play in human life. Gone are the days when Sir James Frazer could get away with writing that African peoples make up myths because they lack science and therefore need pseudo-science to explain the world around them. The human sciences have become better integrated with the natural sciences, not as bogus copies of physics, but as cultural studies.
Nevertheless, shades of science’s checkered past remain, and the scientistic abuse of the concept of “power” is one of them, or several of them. In the following pages I will suggest that the historical association of a scientific worldview with a Newtonian worldview, which I take to be at the root of much of the prestige of “power” discourse, is still operating. An initial example: if an historian or political scientist explains President Harry Truman´s decision to drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima along the lines of saying that after giving much thought to the matter Truman decided it was the right thing to do, such an explanation still today does not sound scientific. I think it is the true explanation (Kelly ) (although I think Truman made a tragically wrong decision), and I think it should therefore be the scientific explanation. On the other hand, if the scholar can contrive to cast an explanation in terms of power, making Truman´s decision follow from an analysis of America’s strategic options, then the “power” explanation would (still today) sound more scientific than one that sees humans as animals who deliberate concerning their actions in the light of prevailing cultural norms.
In the field of terms that gain legitimacy from being identified with science seen as a mathematizing tradition whose great pioneers were people like Galileo and Copernicus, the word “power” stands out because it elides violence and calculation. The capacity to bend others to one’s will by killing some of them is associated with numbers quantifying how much work a machine will do with how much energy in how much time. Both name “power.”
The background of my reservations about “power” is, as I have been saying, its ideological role in the rise and continued prominence of modernity, with all its virtues and vices. A supplementary reason for choosing that particular word as a theme, rather than some other that has also frequently cloaked pseudo-science, is that there is already a great literature on power. (De Juvenal, Russell, Hartsock, French, Arendt, Wink……) Whatever success I may have in provoking people to think about the word will be multiplied if those provoked go to the library to read up on the subject.
In terms of mainstream International Relations theory, my rule-oriented problem-solving philosophy lines up generally with the research tradition known as institutionalism, although more specifically with more radical tendencies in international relations theory I will refer to generically as critical. Institutionalists believe peace can be achieved through peacebuilding, peacemaking, and peacekeeping institutions. Institutions are made of rules. The United Nations is an institutionalist project, and, I believe, a valid one. Peace really could be achieved through the UN if the UN could achieve the social and economic goals set for it by its founders. The core dispute between institutionalists and “realists” according to John Mearsheimer, who declares himself to be an anti-institutionalist and a “realist” (i.e. “realist” in terms of the standard nomenclature of International Relations Theory, a nomenclature derived from the earlier Cold War “Christian Realism” of Reinhold Niebuhr) is: “..can institutions push states away from war by getting them to eschew balance-of-power logic, and to refrain from calculating each important move according to how it affects their relative power position?” (Mearsheimer 1995 p. 82) Institutionalists answer yes. “Realists” answer no. The question dividing “realists” from the more radical, more communitarian, critical tendencies in international relations theory is, “Is world politics socially constructed?” Critical theorists answer yes. “Realists” admit that there are social constructions, but with respect to crucial material facts, such as which nations have what weapons and how many, their relevant answer is no. The physical facts about weapons, not any social construction, are what make international anarchy a Hobbesian war of all against all. (Mearsheimer 1995 pp. 90-91)
“Realists” tend to view institutionalists as idealists and wishful thinkers. They call on them “...to tone down their claims about the peace-causing effects of institutions until they have solid evidence to support their position.” (Mearsheimer 1995 p. 93) But institutionalists have plenty of solid evidence. Their books are full of it. (See Keohane 1986) What makes their evidence not solid enough from a realist point of view is that there is nothing in it logically incompatible with the realist claim that nation-states act to maximize power.
One of the solid sources of evidence supporting a broadly institutionalist perspective is a 1957 study by Karl Deutsch and seven other authors. (Deutsch 1957) Its purpose was to find out how a community of states can form what came to be called a “security community,” or, in other words, can achieve “political integration,” so that war does not break out among themselves. The authors examined 10 historical cases: the states of the USA; the union of England and Scotland; the United Kingdom prior to 1921; the unification of Germany; the unification of Italy; the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Norway and Sweden; the Swiss confederation; the union of England and Wales; the formation of England in the Middle Ages. Based on their case studies they find a set of nine rather onerous and difficult-to-achieve conditions to be necessary for success in replacing military confrontation with the institutional rule of law. They are: mutual compatibility of major values, similarity in conditions of life, hope of an improvement in the level of life, hope of an increase in the political power of the states participating in the community, hope for an increase in the economic strength of those states, solid ties between the social classes in the interior of those states, widening of the political elite, freedom of movement of people among the different states, increase in the intercourse and commercial transactions among the different states.
I would submit that Deutsch et al´s summary of historical prerequisites to political integration is approximately a summary of what the United Nations is trying to accomplish on a global scale. Among other bits of solid evidence that institutional progress is although difficult not impossible are the reports that UN programs have actually achieved considerable success in recent years in reducing warfare in Africa. (SIPRI) Many other studies make many of the same points: acknowledging that the physical facts are as the realists say they are, i.e. that states physically have weapons they might use, and therefore every nation-state is in principle insecure in a Hobbesian sense because it can never be certain it will not be attacked, the social construction of politics is such that an actual attack, e.g. by one Scandinavian country against another Scandinavian country, is so unlikely that its physical possibility can be disregarded. Norway attacking Sweden is physically possible but socially impossible
(Many writers have pointed out that these debates often do not focus on the world as it is today because they are often cast in terms of an alleged international anarchy which leaves each nation-state in a Hobbesian state of nature vis-à-vis the others; while in the world as it is today some 90% of wars are not between nation-states at all, but rather civil wars (SIPRI); and, further, the status of the wholly non-natural institution called the nation-state in today’s global economy is, to say the least, in flux. The fogging of vision caused by such discrepancies between the terms of the debate and the world the debate is about, matters less than it otherwise would matter because the institutional conditions for political integration, such as those outlined by Deutsch et al, tend to be the same at all levels, from local to global.)
So how can one explain the fact that “realism” continues to overshadow institutionalism and its variants, constructivism, and other minority schools of thought, when a building-up-the-rule-of-law perspective is so reasonable ? I suggest that the abuse of “power” helps to answer this question in two ways.
First, the links between “realism” and “power” are part of what Foucault would call the historical a priori of modern culture. Feminists, but not only feminists, would add that those links go back beyond the early modern Europe briefly discussed above, to even older and deeper layers of patriarchy. The “realist” is licensed by our culture as it has historically come to be to say, whenever the institutionalist says that rules are causing peace, that the institutionalist is deluded; what is really happening is what the historical a priori tells us must be happening; it is that power is using rules to achieve its ends. The proposition “politics is about power,” like “behavior that is positively reinforced will tend to occur more frequently in the future,” and “consumer welfare is maximized when consumers acquire as much of possible of the goods and services they prefer,” is not an empirical finding. It is a point of view, a choice of conceptual frameworks. It is not, at least not initially, a personal choice; rather it is in Gramsci´s terminology sediment; it is composed of frammenti from the past dumped into our minds by history. Before we can dig ourselves out from under it and consciously choose a worldview we have to take an inventory of what history has put in our minds. (Gramsci 1949) “Power” still has, among the sediments in our minds, features driving from the ideological role it played in the social struggles that led to the social reality we live in. It remains at the core of what is commonly taken (for reasons not entirely scientific) to be legitimate science, even though yesterday’s social struggles have been superseded by today’s.
My view is that when realists refuse to accept the evidence of the institutionalists -- alleging that there is nothing in it logically incompatible with the realist claim that nation-states act to maximize power-- their refusal is more a metaphysical prejudice than it is an open-minded assessment of the facts. I do not believe that the extensive work attempting to test empirically the claims of institutionalism and realism (e.g. Russett and Oneal 2001) makes my view irrelevant. I believe that “realism” enjoys an advantage, whatever the evidence may be, because of its congruence with deep cultural structures.
The second abuse of “power” giving an edge to “realism” derives from the practical failures of institution-building projects like the UN. Realists could (if they wanted to) concede that institutions cause peace sometimes, but remain for the most part unmoved and unconvinced because so much effort devoted to institution-building has produced so little peace. At this point I agree in a sense with the “realists.” There is not much peace even if peace is defined as absence of war; there is even less if following Johan Galtung we associate peace with absence of direct, structural, and cultural violence. Since if the institutionalists were right there would be more peace than there is, it follows that they must be wrong.
I part company with the institutionalists here, noting, along with their radical critics, that the kinds of institutions they advocate –like NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations itself…-- to some considerable extent exist. Regarded as promises of peace they have mainly proved to be false promises. At this point a Deweyan emphasis on building institutions to solve problems accords with the contributions of critical international relations theorists who favor deeper institutional changes: the neo-Marxists, the feminists, the communitarians, and to some extent the constructivists. The error of institutionalists is not that they are mistaken in thinking that institutions in general can cause peace; it is that they are mistaken in thinking that the particular institutions that are now dominant can take us much farther toward peace. The institutionalists do not really deserve their name; they take the most fundamental institutions of the modern world for granted, treating institutional facts such as money, markets, patriarchy, and property rights as if they were (in John Searle´s terms) brute facts. They are halfhearted pragmatists, unwilling to pursue the question “What works?” into conceptual spaces where answering it would require moving socially constructed parameters they do not regard as variable.
If limitations of “realism” are those of Hobbes´ account of “power,” the limitations of institutionalism are those of Kant´s account of “duty.”
For Kant, unlike Hobbes, humans are different from nature. (That is why Foucault called Kant´s vernunftige Wesen, i.e. l´homme, a “transcendental being,” and, since the existence of humans is also an empirical fact, a “transcendental/empirical doublet.” The difference between humans and nature, according to Kant, is that humans can act from duty, from the conception of law. That is ethics. How did acting just like a machine, but, unlike a machine, conscious of what one is doing, deliberately choosing to act from duty instead of from inclination, come to be identified with doing one’s duty in a social moral order? Here Kant weaves together two strands: an ultra-Lutheran concept of duty, and a Newtonian concept of law.
The only thing that is purely good in the world, Kant tells us, is a good will, and having a purely good will consists precisely in acting from duty (aus Pflicht) and not from any other motive.
Acting from “any other motive,” the sum total and full range of possibilities of all other possible motives, consists of acting aus Neigung, i.e. from natural inclination. In other words, it consists of joining and participating in the forces that causally determine everything, yes everything, in the natural world. The question whose answer requires l´homme to be a transcendental being is the question, “How can a human being act aus Pflicht and thus be an ethical being?” The answer can only be autonomy. Independence. Autonomy must be and is for Kant the supreme principle of all ethics. From it flow the concept of human dignity, the concept of infinite worth beyond price, the concept of treating a rational being always as an end and never as a means only.
Since ethics is transcendental, being a series of consequences drawn from a concept, that of autonomy (without which l´homme could not act aus Pflicht), ethics is eternal. It never changes. The laws of nature, those of Newton, never change either. As is well known, as Kant himself suggests in passing, and as others made explicit, the laws of economics are also laws of nature. John Stuart Mill, for example, in his Principles of Political Economy, begins with a long description of natural processes, from which he passes insensibly and by unnoticeable degrees to descriptions of markets, insinuating without any subtlety that markets are also natural.
I will discuss all these matters further in a chapter on Kant. Suffice it to say for now that in a Kantian liberal world power operates in nature according to the laws of mathematical physics, and in society duty operates according to the laws of mathematical economics. For John Dewey, to be ethical is to be a social reformer. Institutions are experiments. Experience continually gives us new information with which to evaluate and revise our ethics. For the Kantian liberal to be ethical is to obey the categorical imperatives implicit in the concept of a rational (and therefore autonomous) being. Liberal Kantian institutionalists are like Deweyan ethical social reformers up to a point. The construction of better social institutions can and should bring historical reality closer to the ethical standard. But the standard itself does not change. As Kant says in his plan for peace, over the time the moral power of the categorical imperative can and should become equivalent to the physical power of natural laws. Kantian “duty” is over a broad range no less mechanical and anti-cultural than Hobbesian “power.”
I want to claim, in alliance with many past and present movements in social science, that ethical construction is superior both at a societal and at a global level to more conventional approaches to social science that make freer use of the word “power.” It is superior both for understanding what is happening and for guiding efforts to make better things happen. I will soon elaborate my suggestion by discussing three episodes in which ethics and power have interacted in the domestic politics of Chile, but before doing that I will make three general theoretical objections to the idea of “economic power.”
I want to object to statements like: “According to the United Nations, to bring to all of the population of the earth access to basic necessities (sustenance, drinkable water, education, health) it would be sufficient to discount less than 4% of the accumulated wealth of the world’s 225 largest accumulated fortunes.” (Fazio 2001, p. 5) Consequently, it is in principle feasible to meet all basic needs. However, it is not easy because attempting to do so, “will encounter the active resistance of those who have economic power.” (Ibid.)
It seems to me that such statements depict “economic power” as the cause of continuing inequality and failure to meet basic needs. It also seems to me that there are at least three reasons why it is a poor philosophical choice to talk this way. ( I do not mean to criticize the author quoted, or any other author who makes similar statements, because it is quite likely that where I criticize a particular way of seeing and saying as a poor choice standing alone, the author knows perfectly well that a shorthand expression like “economic power” is inadequate, and quite likely adopts other perspectives elsewhere.) My three objections are:
1. It is a way of talking conducive to pessimism since it borders on recommending that the powerless take power from the powerful, which by definition is impossible. “Power” implies that those who have it will keep it, since “power” includes the “power” to keep “power.”
2. Simplifying, but not without a grain of truth, the dynamic of capital accumulation implies that for production to start the rich must make profits. For the rich to maximize profits, labor costs must be minimized, which means that a minimum number of people must be employed at minimal wages. These are consequences of the rules of the system. We do not see these as consequences of rules if instead of choosing to talk about rules we talk about a general and abstract “power” supposedly held by a few people. We are consequently less likely to see the need to change the norms that organize the dynamics of the system. It is a system which is constructed in such a manner that one regime of accumulation of accumulation or another is “necessary.” (Necessary in the world as it is but not necessary in the other world that is possible.)
3. What “economic power” resists, on the view criticized, is the redistribution of part of the 225 greatest fortunes for the purpose of ending hard-core poverty. It suggests an image of a few people holding on to their wealth and fending off the demands of a much larger number of propertyless people. But humanity has more than one problem: the destruction of the biosphere and ethnic violence began a list of fourteen main problems at the beginning of Chapter One. Choices of conceptual frameworks that lend themselves to furthering the ethical construction of social cohesion, on the other hand, have the advantage of contributing to seeing and talking in terms of a mythical “we” whose collective interest is to solve all “our” problems.
Now I will discuss the interaction of ethics-talk and power-talk during three episodes of the recent history of Chile. Hopefully this discussion will shed some light on what is at stake in choosing a vocabulary for social science.
1. In 1961 Ricardo Lagos (who later became president of Chile for the term 2000-2005) completed a doctoral dissertation in economics at the University of North Carolina writing about the concentration of economic power in Chile. He showed that Chile´s large industries were controlled by a few interconnected groups, and that their behavior was monopolistic. (Lagos 1961) Lagos thesis contributed to one of the strands of the program of the Popular Unity coalition led by Salvador Allende, who was President from late 1970 until September 11, 1973. (Martner) It influenced that part of the program which called for nationalizing the largest firms to form a Social Area of the economy. Since Allende got a higher percentage of the vote in the 1970 election than any other candidate (36.4%, versus 34.9% for the runner-up) he became President, under a Constitution that did not provide for a runoff if nobody got an absolute majority, but rather provided that Congress would determine the outcome, and under a customary rule that provided that the Congress would elect the candidate who had received the largest number of popular votes. With the support of allies in Congress, the Popular Unity government carried out important parts of its program, including the nationalization of Chile´s largest industry, its copper mines, and the completion of the land reform begun under earlier administrations. (In his 1973 presidential address, President Allende was able to say that latifundia no longer existed in Chile.) The Congress balked when it came to approving legislation to transfer the country´s largest industries into a Social Area.
At this point the Allende presidency had a choice. It could choose to acknowledge that it could not legally carry out a central part of its program. In that case it might still have carried out part or all of it, either by watering it down to get legislation passed, or by winning a congressional majority in the upcoming 1973 elections. Popular Unity had indeed raised its percentage to 51.1% of the vote in the April, 1971, local elections of municipal officials, a number which proved to be its electoral high water mark. Or it could choose to go forward with its program without congressional approval. It chose the latter course.
Important sectors, including the nitrate industry and several banks, were nationalized by having CORFO, the national development agency, buy up their shares, which was a dubious way to bypass congress, but not blatantly illegal. More seriously, a large number of firms de facto joined the Social Area without either the executive branch or the legislative branch taking the initiative. The workers seized them, including many firms the government did not intend to nationalize. (In October of 1971 Allende stated that he only intended nationalization of a list of 91 firms.) Whether the government had originally intended to nationalize the firm or not, worker occupation of the plant generally was followed by a decree “intervening” the firm and naming an “intervener” to run it, pursuant to old legislation that authorized the President to “intervene” firms in certain unusual circumstances. Legally, the “intervened” firms, in the end some 350 of them, were left in limbo, since “intervening” did not formally transfer title from the owners to the government. De facto the owners lost possession. The owners did not believe that either the government or the workers would ever voluntarily give them their property back. The Chilean Controller-General, an official charged with reviewing and publishing laws and executive decrees with the force of law, considered that the old legislation was not intended for the uses to which it was being put. He regularly ruled that the firms had not legally been taken, starting with rejecting the purported “intervening” of three fishing companies on August 2, 1971; followed by declaring the illegality of the “intervening” of the United Brewing Company on September 3, 1971; the Cachantun Mineral Water Company on September 6, 1971; the Calaf Candy Company on December 10, 1971; and others. The orders of the Controller-General had no effect; the firms stayed occupied and the interveners continued to run them in the name of the government. Controversy was especially intense in the textile industry, where the Yarur textile mill turned out to be a test case. Yarur was one of many cases where owners asked the courts to order law enforcement officers to return their property to them, in which the usual pattern was for the court to give the order but for the police then not to enforce it. In the Yarur case because of a technicality the owners did not get the order they wanted, and they consequently appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court then ruled in the owners´ favor.
Once again, the Allende government had a choice. Although sympathetic jurists had tried to come up with legal theories justifying nationalizing industries without congressional approval (CEREN ), it became clear beyond a reasonable doubt that under established Chilean law, as interpreted by those authorized to interpret it, much of the Social Area was de facto and not de jure. Following the logic of existing Chilean jurisprudence, the government should have returned the factories.
But following a different logic, a logic of power, it made no sense to return the factories. Marxist/Leninist theory has often held that control of the means of production carries with it social power in general, everything else being superstructure. Lagos and others had shown who had control of the main means of production. Now they no longer had control. With the benefit of hindsight, three of Allende’s supporters wrote fifteeen years later, “..the Left overestimated the effects of transformations of the structure of property ownership. Mistakenly it believed that they would produce almost immediate and decisive consequences in the functioning of the economy and in power relationships.” (Bitar et al 1988 p. 16). Without the benefit of hindsight, looking at Chile in early 1973, it appeared that even where industry was not, or not yet, in the Social Area, the workers now had control “The property of the big entrepreneurs lacked real power. Their legal title did not guarantee it …and even if it was recognized by the judicial branch, the Government would not authorize the use of public force to restore to the owner the peaceful possession of his property. The only large or medium sized properties that were safe were those where the owner enjoyed the support of the workers who worked there. The property of large and medium sized enterprises, whether they were agricultural, mining, industrial, or commercial, had no protection at all whenever the workers decided to defy the owner and take possession of the firm.” (Arriagada 1974, p. 205)
If one´s theory of history is such that power makes rules, so that the only reason why bourgeois law now gives legal title to owners is that the bourgeoisie had the power and therefore made the laws; then in the natural course of events when the proletariat has power it will make proletarian laws. On this logic, to give back the industries because of the letter of historically outdated laws now that the proletariat de facto controls the main means of production, and therefore the source from which law historically springs, makes no sense at all.
Further, if, as is likely, probable, or inevitable, class struggle in Chile will lead to a violent confrontation, not because the proletariat chooses it but because the bourgeoisie will not accept loss of power without a fight, then the workers who have seized the factories are the very ones most likely to fight on the government´s side. They are also the most loyal voters. There was no way to maintain the power of the Popular Unity coalition without them. Again, a logic of power rules out enforcing the legal orders issued by the courts.
In terms of Lewis Coser´s theory of conflicts, Chile in 1971-73 appeared to be in a state of “absolute conflict.” There appeared to be no dialogue possible because there was no wider frame of reference embracing common premises held by the opposing parties, by appealing to which they could reason with one another. The logic of power excluded the logic of jurisprudence. The logic of jurisprudence excluded the logic of power. (Foucault at one point makes a somewhat parallel analysis, construing some similar facts with a different set of concepts. He distinguishes between socialisms which focus on transforming economic processes, and those which define themselves as a struggle against some class of people. The latter, he says, inevitably embrace racism. (Foucault 1997, pp. 232-34))
In spite of the incommensurability of the two logics, talks continued, with Salvador Allende himself trying to bridge the two logics as best he could; on the one hand he spoke in his second and third presidential addresses of “juridical norms of traditional spirit” that needed to be replaced by others consistent with “the socio-economic realities that are being born,” which made it sound as though he thought the logic of history, the logic of power, justified disregarding the logic of legal rules, which to a large extent was what his government was doing in practice. On the other hand, he continued to insist that he was upholding the oath he had taken as President to uphold the Constitution and the laws. One way out was a plebiscite, which the Chilean Constitution provided for in cases of irreconcilable conflict between the legislative and executive branches of government. In terms of the logic of majority votes, holding a plebiscite would have been redundant, since the Chilean voters had recently, in March of 1973, give his coalition just 43% of the votes, and if the voters had wanted to change their minds and give him a majority they could have done so at the next scheduled congressional election instead of at a specially called plebiscite. In terms of the theory that control of the means of production gives social power, it would have been a mistake for Allende to agree to a plebiscite, since in it the proletariat could only lose power it already had. Nonetheless, Allende reluctantly finally agreed to resolve the issues between him and congress as the Constitution provided, by plebiscite. Just a few days later, a military coup prevented the plebiscite from being held.
I believe that the Popular Unity coalition was misled, or misled itself, by mistaken ways of thinking about power. As Norbert Lechner, one of its intellectuals, reflected with the benefit of hindsight in 1986, their theories prevented them from realizing how much anger they were generating. (Lechner 1986) Thinking more in terms of rules would have helped, because the very concept of rule implies that violating one tends to make people angry. It is part of the very concept of anger that becoming angry is more than becoming emotionally upset. Anger is a combination arousal and indignation. An angry person claims to be right and to have been wronged.
2. Odd as it may sound at first, General Augusto Pinochet, of all people, said that he and his military dictatorship were on the side of morality and against immorality. He said the armed forces were the “moral reserve” of a Chile where many civilians had lost all respect for ethical principles. He said these things not just once, but over and over again, in speech after speech, and in his published writings. (Pinochet ) Pinochet´s mission in life was to destroy Communism, if not in all the world, at least in Chile, the nation he loved above all things. (Ibid.) He knew about Communism because he had read Marxist books. From the Marxists themselves he had learned that they were against morality. Marxism is about power, not about principle. It advocates class struggle leading to a dictatorship of the proletariat. (Ibid.)
Obviously, General Pinochet had not been reading the speeches and writings of the president he overthrew, Salvador Allende, since Allende was specifically in favor of morality and democracy, and was never a partisan of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Pinochet might have been reading the works of Foucault’s professor Louis Althusser, or if not Althusser himself Marta Harnecker´s summaries of Althusser´s philosophy, which were widely circulated in Chile. Althusser indeed explicitly rejected humanism (unlike Allende who explicitly endorsed it); Althusser indeed disparaged scholars like Pierre Bigo and Jean-Yves Calvez who found ethical principles in Marx´s writings; he indeed rejected the moral ideas found in Marx´s early writings. He regarded Marx’s early writings as pre-Marxist, written before Karl Marx himself had discovered Marxism; he indeed advocated class struggle leading to a dictatorship of the proletariat. In the context of Paris, Althusser´s polemics against marxismes mous (soft Marxisms) raised the academic prestige of Marxism by identifying it with hard science. In the context of Chile the same ideas along with those of other Leninists contributed to the drowning of ethics-talk in power-talk. They lent credibility to the worldview of Augusto Pinochet and to the prejudices of the many who thought like him and still do.
In a white paper written to justify its policies and advertise its achievements, the military dictatorship explained its philosophy of morality in the following terms, summarizing the Declaration of Principles of the Chilean Government issued on March 11, 1974: “…the government respects Christian thought on man and society and understands him as a man endowed with spirituality from which emanates human dignity. We can conclude from this that Man has material rights above and beyond those of the State. The latter must recognize them, and though the State does not grant them it cannot deny them. The state therefore must serve the person and not the reverse; its end must be the general common good, understood as `the set of social conditions enabling each Chilean to attain his personal ambitions.´ This definition of the common good differs both from that of liberal individualism and that of totalitarian collectivism. This declaration is perfectly clear in explaining that the common weal requires that the principles of responsibility must be respected, saying that ´the state must assume directly only those tasks that intermediate societies cannot fulfill adequately,´adding that ´to respect the principle of responsibility represents the key to a society authentically free.´” (Government of Chile 1983)
Decoded, the statement quoted does not mean that the State will refrain from intervening in economic life. It means it will intervene on the side of property rights; for example by sending helicopter gunships to fire on the workers who had (on their own, with no help from the state) taken control of a jam factory near the house where I lived at the time. It means that the State will conduct a capitalist revolution intervening in every social institution to bring it into line with its version of morality.
The significance of the summary of the junta´s Declaration of Principles quoted from the government white paper is that the principles of morality -- most notably the constitutive rules of capitalism which establish property rights and a market economy-- are decreed by God, not chosen by humans. God resolves an ambiguity in the concept of democracy. Whether the Chilean people by majority vote and proper legal process could authorize the transfer of Chile´s core industries to the Social Area was a question that never arose during the Allende years, because Allende never had an electoral or congressional majority and the legal process was not proper. But conservative Chilean intellectuals were very aware that it might have arisen, and indeed in an extended sense it had arisen because if the votes of the moderate parties that agreed with parts of Allende´s program were counted, then there was indeed an electoral majority in Chile that wanted in one way or another to socialize the major means of production. The military dictatorship gave the conservative intellectuals an opportunity to utilize certain versions of Catholic theology to answer the unasked question with a resounding NO. As General Pinochet frequently said, democracy was attractive in theory but in practice it was unable to resist Communism. Therefore, there would not be any democracy in Chile soon. There would not be any democracy until the military had completed the process of remaking Chilean culture and society so that the threats to property that had emerged in the past could never emerge again. When democracy did come it would be a limited democracy. It would operate within God´s rules. The armed forces, acting as the moral reserve of the nation, would retain the right and the duty to intervene again if morality were again threatened by an elected government, even if that government had majority support.
The military dictatorship made it clear from the start that its project was not to support the Supreme Court and the Controller-General in their disputes with the President, and thus to restore the rule of law under the Constitution. On the contrary, it wrote a new Constitution. Its project was to reverse what chilean scholars call the “estado de compromiso,” the series of social compromises that had developed historically in Chile since the decline of the 19th and early 20th century hegemony of the landed oligarchy. Milton Friedman and Friedrich van Hayek were invited to Chile, where they had the pleasure of seeing their economic theories zealously implemented with the backing of unlimited military force.
But WAITAMINUTE. Milton Friedman calls himself a positive economist; his case for monetarism is entirely empirical; it does not rest on religion or on ethical philosophy; while van Hayek is an ethical philosopher; and not just any ethical philosopher, but precisely the kind of liberal individualist that the members of the junta in their Declaration of Principles said they were not.
Faced with such a mish mash of empirical theories that are not confirmed by the empirical evidence; faced with theologies that bear no resemblance to what the sacred texts of the world´s religions actually say; faced with declarations that juridical principles are eternal when the slightest acquaintance with history shows they are not, and universal when the slightest acquaintance with anthropology shows they are not; faced with mystifications of material reality accomplished by arcane mathematical performances by rightwing economists; faced with economists who could care less about the coherence of their intellectual positions while they continue to occupy official positions, collect their paychecks, and look forward to their pensions; faced with the typical incoherence of fascism, as it was exemplified by Benito Mussolini, who invented the word “fascist,” and whose philosophy consisted of advocating whatever at the moment seemed likely to advance his career, including at one point in time feminism, at another point in time the progressive philosophy of John Dewey, and at another point in time the doctrine that Latins are racially superior to Aryans, and so on; one is tempted to conclude that Nietzsche was right after all. Human nature is will-to-power. The mouth is an extension of the fist. All talk is power-talk. This extreme philosophical conclusion is not far from standard historiography. Many books on social, economic, and political history tell stories about power in which talk serves interests.
To show that an ethical construction approach has something to add to standard historiography, it is convenient to mention a fact about the Allende years that has not been mentioned so far. The economy ceased to function. There were shortages of everything. People had to stand in long lines to buy bread. I will not here give details, nor will I analyze why, nor will I say whose fault (or faults) it was. (For details and analysis see de Vylberg 1974, Lagos 1976, Valenzuela, Bitar 1979 , Guardia 1990, Martner 1988…) Suffice it to say that the regime of accumulation dissolved. The military dictatorship had to make the economy function again, which it did, however inadequately, and with whatever levels of injustice (for example, it encouraged the accumulation of profits by freezing wages, forbidding strikes, and offering investors guarantees). Looking at recent Chilean history in the light of the need of any society to establish conditions that make it possible for the vital processes of life to function (that is to say, among other things, looking at history from a characteristically feminine point of view), provides a superior way to understand what happened and a superior way to guide efforts to make better things happen. In terms of understanding what happened: yes in 1973 to be sure there were many conservative Chileans who desired to destroy not only the worker control of industry established in 1971-72, but also the gradual deepening of democracy established in 1933-1970. But if the economy had not ceased to function, they would not have had the golden opportunity that they zealously seized to carry out the destruction they desired. Questions helpful for guiding efforts to make better things happen and to avoid future tragedies are: How can a regime of accumulation be designed to make production compatible with liberty and equality? And: How can humanity be liberated -- partially or completely-- from the necessity of establishing some regime of accumulation or other? These are not just questions about power, because even when there is a broad consensus that such goals should be achieved (as in fact there is), finding ways to achieve such goals remains a difficult task, given that the constitutive rules of the system are what they are.
3. If we regard philosophy as about choices, about choices of conceptual frameworks, we will regard it as capable of collaborating helpfully with the social sciences. With regard to “power,” if we ask the question, “What shall we do with this word?”; then the apparently absolute conflict discussed above, the conflict between a logic of power and the logic of established Chilean jurisprudence, is not absolute. It is a matter of taking a step backward, a leap into abstraction in the terminology of Gaston Bachelard, in order to evaluate and revise both logics in a wider context.
The wider context is the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens as a cultural animal who has been for several hundred thousand years now a functioning part of a biosphere located in an airy envelope with moderate temperatures located in the four or so kilometers between the surface of the earth and cold outer space. The human brain is a cultural organ; as is the mouth, the larynx, the female breast, the gonads, and indeed almost every physical feature of this animal that evolved talking and living in families and tribes. (Tanner, Leakey) Humans are biologically coded to be culturally coded. The language of physics; the constitutive rules of modernity; the principles of Roman Law; power-talk; and the particular forms ethics-talk has taken in modern times, at any given time, and in any given religious tradition are all subsets of the broader category “cultural coding.” Ethics is part of the world of geological and biological processes. Ethics is the practical side of a culture’s belief system.
What is particularly insidious about power, and not just “power” as a word but about power as label for a field of deeply rooted metaphors typical of economics as a quasi-science; even when it is expressed not in words but in graphs and tables which purport to show the impact of independent variables on dependent variables; even when the key word “power,” or the more generic word “force,” is not used; is that it de-personalizes the world. It de-ethics the world. Actions of persons are reframed as values of variables. Institutions made of rules are reframed as brute facts. Ethics returns –for humanity can never live without ethics—as the moralistic rhetoric of a naturalized status quo; for example as a demand to face the numbers honestly, to demonstrate the nation´s credibility by complying faithfully with the requirements of the brute institutions; to resist seduction by populism; to make the hard choices needed to make Chile (for example) competitive in global markets.
The superficial return of ethics in such forms as moralistic neoliberalism hopefully will lead by easy steps to deeper ethics. The terms “ethics” and “ethical” are both descriptive and prescriptive. They are used to describe the normative requirements of existing institutions. On the other hand, “ethics” and “ethical” are usually honorific. They are used to appraise institutions. Their use implies that at any given place, at any given time in history, the prevailing institutions could be better than they are. Adapting Lawrence Kohlberg´s terminology, there is a conventional ethics, which has been internalized by a majority of normal adults; and a post-conventional ethics, the ethics of the cultural creatives. The latter, it is important to note, does not deny and reject the former; it accepts it, not unthinkingly, not without acknowledging its defects; but critically, practically, taking it to be the necessary platform and point of departure for social transformation. Unlike Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations, a Deweyan pragmatism does not see any given culture as complete unto itself, self-justifying in its own terms, self-positing its own supreme principles from which there is no appeal to any authority higher than itself. Nature judges culture; and partly because nature is never fully known, the evaluation of institutions is never finished.
Multi-millenial unending conversations about religion, about politics, about philosophy, about art, about science, define humanity as homo sapiens sapiens. When the biologists chose that name for our species, they wisely chose a term, sapiens, that already had a distinguished history in Latin and its Greek antecedents; the biologists wisely, even though perhaps unintentionally, defined us as philosophical animals, as animals who live in, but also create, conceptual frameworks; as I hope a discussion of my last example from Chile, the privatization of the Essbio water company in Region 8 in the year 2000, will serve to illustrate.
Since Chile returned to civilian rule in 1990 all of the presidential elections have been won by a center-left coalition called the concertación. Its candidate, Ricardo Lagos, won the 2000 election by a razor-thin margin, making Lagos the third concertación president (the first two were Christian Democrats) and also Chile’s third socialist president. (The second was Salvador Allende; the first was Marmaduque Grove, an air force colonel who staged a short-lived coup and sat in the president’s chair for a few days in 1932: the fourth is Michelle Bachelet, who is Chile’s president now.) One of the important choices Lagos faced in his first year in office was whether to privatize Essbio, a public water company located in that portion of the rainy south of Chile that the military dictatorship, reversing the older practice of naming the parts of Chile with words, and beginning a new practice of naming the parts of Chile with numbers, had designated as Region 8. The preceding concertación government had promised investors that it would privatize Essbio.
The people who drank Essbio’s water, bathed in it, and cooked with it, did not want their water supply privatized. Town meetings were held throughout the region, at which nearly all the speakers spoke in favor of keeping their water company public. They organized a “plebiscite” in which over 130,000 people voted. More than 99% voted against privatization. (Fazio 2000, pp. 54-55)
As a lawyer and as a student of conflict resolution, I cannot help but observe that Lagos had multiple options. He could, for example, have kept Essbio in the public sector as its principal stakeholders desired; and then negotiated with investors to pay them damages for breach of contract. Since the reason why the investors were interested in Region 8 was that they expected to make money there, they would have been happy to walk away from the table with cash in their pockets, without having to go through the intermediate step of running a water company.
Lagos chose to use the occasion to make a dramatic gesture. Defying the wishes of almost all the voters of Region 8, he ordered Essbio privatized, because, as he put it, the credibility of Chile was at stake. As a move in the game of economic power he had studied forty years earlier as a graduate student in North Carolina, it was a master stroke. Having learned from Chile’s experience how hard it is to change economic power, now he was ready to woo it. He projected to financial markets the image of a president willing to overrule his own people to keep faith with investors. Since he was a socialist, investors could bank on the voters not electing a president to the left of him who would reverse his decisions.
During his term of office Lagos made many master strokes. He won the confidence of investors, and Chile enjoyed the fruits of their confidence. He became perhaps the most popular president of Chile ever, certainly the most popular in recent memory, leaving office with approval ratings well above 70%. Shortly before turning the presidency over to Michelle Bachelet, he received a standing ovation at a dinner held in his honor by the Chilean equivalent of a national Chamber of Commerce.
Ricardo Lagos gave the right answer in Region 8 in 2000 to the question, “How can Chile woo investors?” He and Chile reaped the fruits of many such right answers, although some of us expect their long run fruits to be less sweet than their short run fruits. As part of the Popular Unity coalition of 1970-73, Lagos had previously joined in giving some wrong answers to the question, “How can resources best be mobilized to meet needs, starting from a situation which meeting needs is a byproduct of making profits, and in which maximizing profits does not coincide with an optimal solution to any human problem?” If the latter question is still a key question, albeit a question to which the best answers are largely unknown; then it seems unlikely that Ricardo Lagos gave the best possible answer to it in Region 8 in 2000, and it seems likely that he gave a suboptimal answer because he was thinking within limited conceptual frameworks I have been discussing under the label “power.”
References
Anti populists
Sergio Bitar, Ernesto Edwards, Carlos Ominami, Cambiar la Vida. Santiago: Servicio Editorial, 1988
Sergio Bitar, Transicion, Socialismo, y Democracia: La Experiencia Chilena. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1979.
Karl Deutsch et al, Political Community in the North Atlantic Area. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Escobar
Hugo Fazio, Crece la Desigualdad, Otro Mundo es Posible. Santiago de Chile: LOM Editores, 2001.
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
Michel Foucault, Il Faut Défendre la Societé. Paris: Gallimard/Seuill, 1997. (posthumously published lectures given at the Collège de France in 1976).
Government of Chile, (text by Jaime Valdés), Chile 1973-1983, Ten Years of Achievement. Boulogne France: Editions Delroisse, 1983.
Alexis Guardia, Chile, El Pais Centauro. Santiago; Ediciones BAT, 1990.
Antonio Gramsci, Il Materialismo Storico e la Filosofia di Benedetto Croce. Turín: Einaudi, 1949.
Robert Keohane (editor), Neorealism and its Critics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. (“Neoliberal institutionalism” can be seen as a variant of institutionalism.)
Lappe and Collins
Steven Lukes, Power: a Radical View. London: Macmillan 1974.
Gonzalo Martner, El Gobierno de Presidente Allende 1970-1973, Una Evaluacion. Santiago: Editorial LAR, 1988.
John Mearsheimer, “A Realist Reply,” International Security, volume 20, number 1, Summer 1995, pages 82-93.
Augusto Pinochet, El Dia Decisivo
Augusto Pinochet, El Camino Recorrido
reenchantment
Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace. New York: Norton, 2001.
Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth” in David Hoy (ed.) Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
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