Liberalism and the Evacuated Center
Center Study's reading of liberalism begins with a structural diagnosis: liberalism is not a stable political order but a specific historical response to the collapse of the sacred center, one that masks rather than resolves the problem of occupying the center. As Katz writes in Scale, "Gans allows us to believe the center disappears in modernity, to be dispersed across the “market,” because this is the only way to bring GA into accord with what he takes, for what I must assume to be reasons external to GA, to be the best form of social organization, “liberal democracy."1. Against this, Katz insists that "if we work with the obvious implications of the originary hypothesis, and, indeed, “scenic thinking,” there must always be a center." Liberalism, on this reading, is less a solution to the problem of the center than an elaborate evasion of it.
The evasion takes a precise mimetic form. As Katz argues in The Prospects of the Hypothesis, all modern political positions — left, right, nationalist, liberal — share the same underlying structure: "These are all very easily identifiable mimetic scenarios—the rival who has usurped my rightful position at the center, who continually anticipates and thwarts my desires, who saturates the space of action so that, ultimately, only the elimination of the other can enable me to arrive at my full subjecthood and achieve liberation."2. Liberalism does not escape this mimetic dynamic; it merely institutionalizes it. In Power and Paradox, Katz observes that "temporary occupants of the center in a liberal democratic order will promote those resentments that enable them to prolong their stay at the center, while their opponents will promote those that will enable them to take over the center themselves"3.
This structural critique is deepened by an account of liberalism's historical trajectory. In After Liberalism 2, Katz argues that "liberalism has done its work" in a very limited sense — "a very localized one, which was to fend off outmoded and especially dysfunctional alternatives to capitalist modernity—absolutism, slavery and the varieties of" Once those alternatives are defeated, what remains? Katz asks pointedly: "Does anyone close to power today propose a model of governance beyond local technocratic fixes to increasingly dysfunctional systems?"4. This is not triumphalism about liberalism's success but a diagnosis of its exhaustion once its purely negative function — defeating the pre-modern — is complete.
The deeper problem is that liberalism's supposed centerlessness is itself a political theology in disguise. In Deferral and Appropriation; Property and the Center, Katz writes that "Center Study has no political theology, because what would be political theology is retracted into anthropology and anthropology is retracted into anthropomorphics, the constitution of the human through signs," and he notes that "supposedly secular political theories and commitments hold in reserve such a theology, in the West usually traceable back to some variant of Catholicism or Protestantism"5. Liberalism's secular self-presentation conceals exactly the kind of theological backstop that Center Study refuses. The postmodern moment, in turn, is liberalism's own symptom: as Katz observes in Formalism all the way down, "postmodernism recognizes, more explicitly than liberalism was previously willing or able to do, the absent center that nevertheless structures our frenzied political existence," and "Democracy is an increasingly broken method of restoring the central figure—investing it once again with the signs of legitimacy, i.e., sacrality—only to smash and remove it once again"6.
The single most concentrated passage crystallizing Center Study's reading of liberalism comes from The Contingency of the Hypothesis, where Katz states that "Gans has channeled the originary hypothesis into Generative Anthropology, with the latter designed as the ideology of liberal democracy"7. The charge is precise: liberalism is not the natural telos of the originary hypothesis but a historically contingent ideological capture of it — one Center Study exists, in part, to undo.
Excerpts
"Pre-modern elements having been thoroughly routed, liberalism no longer seems to provide a frame for the main disagreements in today's social order. This would mean that liberalism has done its work. But the work of liberalism would, then, have been a very localized one, which was to fend off outmoded and especially dysfunctional alternatives to capitalist modernity—absolutism, slavery and the varieties of totalitarianism, which can be shamed merely by being brought into open debate among mobile, self-reliant people."
[After Liberalism 2] · GABlog Read →
"It is not surprising that once human beings, that is, kings, start occupying the center, a similar process of trial and error would be required—in fact, not only have we, or, more precisely, no political leadership, yet completely solved this problem, we could see the centuries of liberal usurpations of the center as both another attempted solution and a hysterical avoidance of the problem itself."
[The Architecture of the Center] · GABlog Read →
"But if allocating rights and using them to deploy resentments against a social order which was removed violently rather than “refuted” was in fact the means by which liberalism and democracy were installed in the first place, then this appearance of naturalness dissolves. If resentment is always resentment of the center, then the center must play a formidable, even formative, role in shaping those resentments."
[Power and Paradox] · PDF Read →
"Gans focuses on the Axial Age acquisitions Judaism and Christianity, and sees their rejection of a sacrificial center and creation of a universal morality as the basis for the ultimate unfolding of liberal democratic market society. Each individual becomes a center with liberalism and the market model."
[Power and Paradox] · PDF Read →
"Part of the critique of the originary hypothesis here is that Gans wants or needs a “happy ending” to the originary event, and this coincides with Gans’s more general desire to highlight the peaceful, productive side of humanity at the expense of its “darker,” more violent tendencies, and so Gans supplies the participants on the originary scene with the historical resolution he attributes to them in the form of the modern “market society,” thereby introducing an anachronism into the scene."
[The Contingency of the Hypothesis] · Substack Read →
"Anti-semitism, then, places Jews at the center—not, though, at the center of a centerless market society as Eric Gans once argued, but at the evacuated center of a democratic society that has constituted itself through its resentment towards imagined attempts to re-occupy that center."
[(Jewish) Social Theory and Anti-Semitism] · GABlog Read →