Habermas: Humanitarian Schmittian?

This post available with visual content at Barry Stocker's Weblog

Looking at Habermas’ paper in NATO intervention in Kosovo (‘Bestiality and Humanity: A War on the Border between Legality and Morality’, Constellations 6:3 1999: 263-227), I noticed an oddity in his way of dealing with Schmitt

Habermas partly expresses his position through condemning the authoritarian conservative political, and legal, theorist Carl Schmitt for reducing international relations to this constant war, which leaves no room for the just war that enforces international order. This criticism comes up in pages 266-7 of the cited article. What he emphasises in Schmitt is the idea that there is not basis for war in human rights or universal values. What Schmitt is opposing is the tradition in which state actions are prescribed and limited, by a hierarchy of laws, and norms, which is erected on the basis of the most universal ethical norms. Schmitt is largely attacking the Jurist and legal theorist, Hans Kelsen; and Habermas makes reference to a normative cosmopolitan tradition from Immanuel Kant to Kelsen in the fourth paragraph of the paper, favourably, which looks like a challenge to Schmitt, A challenge confirmed by remarks on 266-7, which include a quotation from Schmitt that humans are beasts,

Habermas is does not think this intervention can be fully justified by the international law as it previously existed. The UN charter strongly opposes interference in the internal affairs of member states. Habermas did not write to condemn the Kosovo intervention It is an intervention which refers to morality rather than existing law, it is the intervention based on acting as it there is a global civil society, though it does not yet exist. The intervention was not wrong, it was however a precedent that should not be taken as a precedent. Self-legislating improvement should not be accepted. Habermas talks about being between morality and law, but he is halfway between legalism and the sort of decisionism he criticises in Schmit. Some force took the decision to intervene rather than follow international law, and that itself is a welcome intervention. We might wonder if Habermas really has disposed effectively of the Schmittian arguments: there is an Enemy, so terrible that he must be defeated regardless of previous law. Where does that leave Habermas’ transcendental approach to the universalisation of norms? What Habermas is referring to in the article, is Schmitt’s denunciation of humanitarian wars, and prediction ideas of universal values lead to war, to impose them on those lacking sufficient universality . So he agrees with Schmitt that humanitarianism leads to war, and he agrees that we should sometimes break international law, if only in relation to an emergent cosmopolitan morality.

So is Habermas a Schmittian humanitarian?

O Fortuna: Foucault, Rawls, Habermas, Nussbaum

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

In Security, Territory, Population, Michel Foucault is concerned, amongst other things, with the way that the early modern state tries to master fortune and chance. I’m not sure if Foucault quotes Machiavelli’s rather notorious suggestion in The Prince that fortune is a woman who needs to be beaten, but he brings The Prince (but unfortunately not The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy) into his discussion on the early modern state, and the issue of the state controlling chance is a persistent one. As Foucault suggests in Lecture II, there is a tendency from the Renaissance to Napoleonic times, to think of nature and history containing uncontrollable fortune of a rather personified, something that could be traced back to earlier ideas of a wheel of fortune. and the work of the fates.

Yesterday I posted on Foucault and the Physiocrats, which really approaches the issue of new attitude to fortune, fate and chance, in which allowing the market to work ends the repetition of famines which had seemed like the results of harsh fortune. Chance of one kind is limited by allowing chance of another kind.

A contrast can be made with John Rawls’ concern with minimising chance in A Theory of Justice. Chance is limited in these ways, and possibly more: the initial situation and veil of ignorance attempt to eliminate chance from the rational design of principles of justice; theoretical equilibrium between intuitions and reasoning aims to ensure that the optimal principles will be revealed; the attitude to inequality is that it should be compensated and eliminated where it is the result of chance, which must be an unfair outcome.

I would not want to reject all that Rawls says, but this urge to minimise and eliminate chance is unsatisfactory for various reasons, including the way it must allow extremes of state intervention in the emergent outcomes of market, and other voluntary, networks of actions and decisions. There could be a strong case for wanting to modify some outcomes, some kind of state supported social minimum is something I would support, but Rawls’ approach inevitably leads to a gigantic and ramifying apparatus of intervention and rectification from above.

It is is important that Jürgen Habermas, though more Marxist than Rawls in his formation, shows concern with this possibility, though not while discussing Rawls. I don’t see that Habermas has a solution, but at least he recognises the problem.

Martha Nussbaum’s case is interesting here. She pushes further than Rawls in an interventionist rectifying direction than Rawls, or further than Rawls mentions in A Theory of Justice where Rawls is trying to accommodate neutral comparison between many designs for justice. In that respect, Rawls does allow chance in, through accepting many possible outcomes of the initial position.

However, in Nussbaum’s ethics, certainly as presented in The Fragility of Goodness, she is very concerned with arguing that strong rational control of chance is not the best option for ethics as it lacks sensitivity to chance and the passions. Something argued largely against Plato, or some moments in Plato, with reference to Aristotle, tragedy, poetry and some moments in Plato.

As far as I can see Nussbaum has failed to apply the lessons of her ethics to her political theory. I think she would probably reply that the complex kind of welfarist interventionism she favours is necessary to respond to the complexity of different kinds of human, and human situation, and she would want to add the complexity of allowing for animal rights as well.

I claim that Nussbaum has overlooked the dangers of too much control of chance in the socio-political sphere. It would be a good idea to reflect on what she has written with regard to her ethics, and with regard to Habermas and Foucault.

O Fortuna. Not in the rigid sense of fortune as an agent, but in the sense of pure chance and indeterminacy in the natural and social universes.

Foucault, Libertarianism and Europe

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog

I’ve pasted in a conference abstract below. It’s an expanded version for the conference book of abstracts and serves as a summary of themes I am interested in around liberal political philosophy, European identity and politics.

‘Political Theory and the End of Europe: Foucault against Habermas’

I’ve taken the opportunity to look at Habermas’ status as a philosopher of the European idea, examine his political concepts critically and take up Foucault from a Classical Libertarian political point of view. Thee Foucault versus Habermas debate is well established, but the the best of my knowledge no one has looked at them in these terms before. I’ll look at how the anarcho-conservative Hoppe takes up Habermas, and the areas of difficulty that suggests in Habermas’ progressive liberal-Marxist synthesis; and look at Foucault’s relation to Antique Republican and Classical Liberal ideas in his later texts. This is in the cause of suggesting that Foucault provides a better basis for European political integration, because it is less reliant on ideal harmonisation than Habermas.

The conference is Beyond Boundaries: Media, Culture and Identity in Europe, hosted by Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, 2nd to 3rd October 2009. The conference is supported by an EU funded project run by Bahçeşehir University, University of Potsdam, and the University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam.

Jürgen Habermas is almost the uncrowned Philosopher Prince of the emergent European polity (the European Union, and more loosely the Council of Europe, with the EU as its ‘hard core’); and its cultural and media ecology. Habermas’ analysis of deliberative democracy, and cosmopolitanism, is of obvious relevance in constructing a European polity; and is embedded in theories of discourse ethics and communicative action which provide strong, ethical, and epistemological context for his political theories. Habermas tries to overcome two polarities: hierarchy of the political system versus democratic participation; individual rights versus economic egalitarianism. He works on this through notions of ethics, and rationality, in which it is assumed that both lead the individual to act according to the rules of the public sphere and a cosmopolitan political order. Habermas is sometimes troubled by the relation between the consensual aspect of the state and its more coercive ‘steering aspect’; and the difficulties of instituting democratic, and legal, accountability for the complex bureaucracy, which administers the social state through administrative orders, rather than to democratic political decisions, or court judgements, in accordance with legal norms. Habermas’ analysis also, more indirectly, suggests a problem with harmonising democratic decision with the power of judges in a law governed democracy. These tensions in Habermas’ work find expression in the work of Han-Hermann Hoppe, who wrote his doctorate with Habermas, but has since turned discourse ethics into a foundation for a ‘propertarian’ anarcho-conservative position. Without endorsing Hoppe’s position, it does give a very useful indication of how Habermas touches on areas of concern to Classical Liberal and (free market) Libertarian thought. Foucault’s thought is better adapted to these problems. From Society Must be Defended onwards, Foucault distinguishes between the more despotic forms of power and the more limited form of power; between absolutism, or totalitarianism, and govermentality. The idea of governmentality is not the idea of a perfect liberal consensus based on government by consent; it is investigated itself with regard to attacks on the body in biopower and disciplinarity (power over life and death; imposition of regularised activity). Foucault’s approach to liberal government is highly critical, but his analyses of political and ethical thought, and practices, since Antiquity, strongly suggest that he finds individualistic liberty, market economics and limited government to be the best possible counter to the most coercive aspects of power. Comments by associates like Jacques Donzelot on Foucault’s later thought, and the social theory of associates like François Ewald, confirm the impression that Foucault was aiming for balance of individualistic market liberalism, and welfarism. His late comments on Austrian School free market economics, certainly suggest Classical Liberal, and Libertarian, sympathies. The cultural, and media, legitimacy of the emergent European polity can be best elaborated through this kind of analysis, which address those aspects of trans-national European sovereignty which cause most disturbance to critics of European integration. Foucault allows us to avoid the utopian dream of a seamless relation between individualism and collective welfare, between democratic participation and political hierarchy, because he sees legal sovereignty and coercive power, autonomy and mastery as intertwined, in an unavoidable paradox. This establishes a way of thinking in which European sovereignty, including its cultural, and media context, can be both affirmed and seen as in need of restraint, and dispersion. Though Foucault did not directly address issues of the emergent European polity, his later texts are deeply concerned with pan-European ideas of sovereignty and government, including the way that modern European nations emerged as fragments of Roman sovereignty, which they saw themselves as preserving.