Declarative Culture and Imperium in Imperio
Any rules will be part of a tradition of practices, a tradition which also determines how the rules are to be read. We could say that we are just resituating the potential imperio in imperium by saying that, now, privileged interpreters of that tradition actually rule--but the ruler empowers that tradition by inheriting, affirming and supervising it. In this case, rules are really generalizations of precedents, and generalizations that go no further than the particular case being judged or decided. (If someone does try to push them further, that is a red flag indicating the emergence of a rogue power center.) There will still be exceptions (the precedents can themselves be interpreted in varying ways), but in addition to deciding in such cases the sovereign also wants to minimize them. The way to do this is to have all rules relegated to a particular "sub-system," with those in charge of the sub-systems also deciding. Even on the lower levels judgment is exercised. There really are, then, no rules or procedures in general--only rules describing the historically accumulated practices now overseen by this or that judge ("judge" in a broad sense--a general is a judge insofar as he has to decide on a dispute brought to him by inferiors). If someone genuinely wants clarification regarding how to perform his function, he can therefore be directed to a closer study of the precedents and decisions made and to whichever superior addresses that sphere of his activity--rather than turning to a "constitution" or "code of conduct" and saying, "hey, we're not doing this!" If you're not sure you're doing as well as you could, there are ways of finding out how to do better.
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But now we have rules for following and changing rules. Then we will have to have further rules for determining whether judgments about whether the rules have been revised or rejected according to the rules have been properly followed. All this generates new offices and therefore new power bases, which can only justify their existence by finding fault in the way the rules have been applied. My view is that if a social order creates the kind of people who will follow the rules in their "spirit," we will need very few rules and very few people watching to make sure everyone follows them.
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Yes, each institution has its rules and procedures, and under normal conditions most of the activity within those institutions will involve routinely following those rules and procedures. Not everyone can exercise the same level of judgment or be given the same scope of initiative, but just about everyone can exercise some judgment, within some sphere, and those that are absolutely incapable of doing so will simply be wards of some institution. The heads of institution will not overhaul the existing body and tradition of rules except under the rarest of circumstances--they will inherit and then maintain, cull, or adapt as necessary. But at no point can one appeal to the rules against the head--if there is an appeal process, that is also subordinated to the head, who can over-rule or cancel it. The question is, how are the rules understood or conceptualized, and how is rule-following practiced? What I am against is the notion of rules as standing outside the institution and being seen as its "basis" and used as a "check"; what I am for is seeing rules as implicitly and explicitly generalized traditions of practices by the heads of institutions: to follow the rules is to seek to know and adhere to the will of the head without having to ask him what to do. If the heads are well chosen and well prepared, and serve the primary function of the institution, then there will be minimal deviation from protocol and "equipoise" will be maintained. My approach seems to me consistent with your distinction between normal and crisis rule.
You don't need to be concerned about being rude.
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Yes, there are constitutive rules, as you say--this is very important to Wittgenstein as well. What does it mean to be performing a particular practice in the first place, regardless of whether you are doing it well or correctly. Games are always the favored example here, but one could speak about communities and institutions in this way as well. But where do the constitutive rules come from? Games are good examples because they are so self-contained that one doesn't think to ask about their "outside." But games have origins as well, and the rules are not arbitrary. One interesting thing about the US is all the games and sports we have that have been invented fairly recently, and whose history is well known: baseball, football and basketball, for starters, all of which have seen constant and sometimes radical revisions in their rules. In each game or sport there are specific skills or capacities that are tested, and the rules evolve to highlight and make more explicit those skills and capacities. The three-second rule in basketball was introduced because if one player was much taller than the others he could just stand right under the basketball and be given the ball, so he could just put it in the basket virtually unopposed. This made the game boring, but it made it boring because what is central to basketball (and it is "anomalies" like the much taller player that reveal the meaning of the game) is the contest between the team trying to score and the team trying to stop them. All the rules, e.g., regarding "fouls," will be devised so as to make this contest uncertain and therefore dependent on the team member's honing of their skills against a range of possible counter-strategies and the team as a whole working together in the most flexible and integrated way--always while trying to anticipate and, if you like, get inside the other team's OODA loop. So, the referee doesn't have to explain why there is a rule against fouls, but he knows and we know why there is--because, say, if the defender could just tackle the guy with the ball it would be impossible to score (while if the defender is not allowed to touch the player on offense at all, it would be impossible to stop him from scoring).
In a sense, then, there is an internal morality governing these activities and all institutions: everyone, ultimately, wants basketball to be a good and successful game, and what makes it good and successful is that it elicits a distinctive and rare set of physical and mental capabilities. This is really McIntyre's notion of a "practice."
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First of all, it's good to hear from you.
I like reading IE's blog--he brings in lots of interesting writers and theories and that I may have little familiarity with, and he synthesizes them in useful ways--I always learn something. I also enjoy dialogues like the above with him--he helps bring out the essential differences between modes of political thought. But you're right to see him his work as presupposing the liberal subject, and ultimately a liberal understanding of sovereignty insofar as the sovereign simply maintains law and order and leaves all non-violent activity alone. So, we're very different in that regard.
I see Chris as trying to solve the same problems I am, though. Aside from what I consider some very valuable historical or, in Foucault's terms, "archaeological," work on "power" through his reading of Jouvenel, he is interested in Girard and Gans and the question of the "center" in a way I don't see with anyone else; what this also means, to me at any rate, is that he is always thinking things through and trying to solve a specific set of problems without getting stuck in a particular formula. He is restless, in a good way, in a way i also consider myself to be. You've pointed to deficiencies, what it seems to me you see as obstinately insisted upon deficiencies, in his readings of Jouvenel, Filmer, MacIntyre and others, but I think we always approach texts like this with a very specific question in mind; it's good to let the text give you a new question as well, but we can always come back to them, once they've been made "canonical."
Regarding the passage you refer to, maybe it will be better if we can stop thinking in terms of "individuals" altogether, and thinking in terms of relations to the center.
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Yes
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Thanks for the link. I actually like that group, but didn't know this song.
He can often sound as if he thinks sovereignty must be imposed, but I wonder whether that often isn't in polemical situations, where he's arguing against something else, like "spontaneous organization." He also speaks of sovereignty as something that "always already" exists, i.e., absolutist ontology, but he has also recognized need for an anthropological grounding for this claim. Without the anthropological grounding, it can sound like an arbitrary claim, and the sovereignty it justifies will therefore also seem forced or "imposed." The notion of a "sacred center" provides such a grounding, which accounts for the role it is starting to take on in his thinking. The "negative" critiques of liberalism, individuals, spontaneous organization, and so on can get ahead of the "positive" foundations one has to lay, and it's easy to take on some of the language of the concepts you are attacking until the more "ontological" and "anthropological" thinking is done. You may have noticed that Chris hasn't been blogging or tweeting for at least a few months--he's working on a book, which will try to think these things through more systemically.
We're trying to rethink everything here, so a bit of unevenness has to be expected.
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Thanks for responding to the question of the "liberal subject." I've read those posts, but would not be prepared to respond to them, especially with regard to this question, now. I'll keep it in mind, though.
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It would be better to say that a center always exists, and once an individual occupies the center, central power. It's true that "sovereignty" is a concept that comes much later and is much more specialized in its meaning. Central power can't exist outside of understandings of the center that tacitly recognize that power, so central power does "always already exist" precisely because it is tacitly recognized.
So, the warlord in your example wouldn't be "sovereign," for the reasons you give. Does he occupy the center? Well, does he organize some distribution, of land, power, goods, prestige? Let's say he doesn't but, for now, the guys with the guns still shoot whom he says. So, what's going on? We have our axiom (or I have my axiom), there is always a center, but here it seems uncertain. Well, we have to use the concept--it's not a question of yes/no answers. Maybe the guys with guns listen to him because they tacitly realize there has to be a center and he's the closest thing to it right now. Maybe their tacit realization that it's a highly insecure center will account for how they end up using their guns. They may always have in mind that if this center doesn't hold, they will have to scramble to look for another--an ethnic or tribal center, or some other gang. But it might also be that the warlord in question, if he manages to hold power for a while, will start to take on some of the attributes of something like "sovereignty"--ensuring communications with those he rules over, imposing some "doctrine," and primitive "law," even making treaty-like agreements with other warlords or even some UN institution and the intelligences agencies of genuine states. If he doesn't move towards doing those things, he will be much more likely to be replaced, one way or another.
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A new center can be imposed, and it can incorporate or simply replace the previous one. This has happened regularly throughout history. Was Great Britain sovereign in India, France in Algeria, Belgium (or King Leopold) in the Congo. How about William the Conquerer? I don't know what the specific political and legal arrangements were in each case, but they could have been. The foreign sovereign will also have to discipline itself, or acclimate itself. It will find native "collaborators," probably work at least to some extent with existing religious and other institutions. The new sovereign will understand enough about the center to know that he has to understand more. Over time, the Norman and Danish Kings become "all-English" kings. Even home-grown sovereigns have quite a bit of the "colonizer" about them--a single language has to imposed, so dialects need to be stamped out, "barbaric" local religious practices need to be eliminated. Imposition/importation of a distinct center and Power learning to discipline itself may be at different ends of a continuum, but they're not mutually exclusive.
But may the more important thing to say here (maybe better say the more important thing) is that the center is constitutive and structural: no human community can be without it. The relation between center and periphery can, of course, be more or less reciprocal and mutually enabling.
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It's easy to imagine situations where the imposition of a distinct center and the requisite disconnection from the original would be unavoidable. We don't have to imagine it--it happens, still. After the Khmer Rouge has wreaked incredible destruction on Cambodia, and was engaged in destabilizing neighboring Vietnam, the Vietnamese government invaded, removed the Khmer Rouge and put a "puppet" ruler in power. Now, I don't know how "distinct" the new center was, and how much the original, or existing, one needed to be displaced or destroyed, but let's say it was "a lot." Let's say the Vietnamese couldn't find a native Cambodian willing to take power (maybe the likely candidates were all too afraid of being branded Quislings), let's say they had to put a Vietnamese ruler in power. Let's say all the schools and media institutions were run by hard core Pol Potists, and had to be shut down and new ones created. Etc. Let's say the Vietnamese couldn't do this and a more distant, and dissimilar power had to intervene. (Some of the colonial projects started this way.) If the alternative is allowing a genocidal regime that won't live in peace with its neighbors to continue to run amok, a responsible foreign power will do what it has to do. So, what do you do. Let's say you start with an absolutely distinct center and completely obliterate the existing one (imagine the society had descended into institutionalized cannibalism, for example). So, you put the new, alien center in place, and at first it will rely on force and the exhaustion and relief of the population. Then you try and make it less alien. You recruit locals to staff the institutions. You promote a recovery of native myths, or literature. You encourage the cultivation of lapsed kinship ties. You gradually let power descend to the local level. Etc. In the end, you want a fully participatory people, whether you accomplish that by incorporating the country as a region within your own country or ultimately giving it back its independence.
It may be necessary to seize power in an undesirable way in a serious emergency, and in that case a lot of things would need to be imposed, but even if any "absolutist" alternative government that were to emerge had to be ready to do something like that it can remain aware that it doesn't want to and most likely won't have to. How you take power is part of how you rule, and it would best to cultivate new loyalties and new ways of thinking (new ways of framing resentments) as far in advance as possible so as to make the transition as seamless as possible. But we're talking about what would be the biggest social transformation in human history, and it can only be carried out by humans. It would be irresponsible not to think about a full range of possibilities.
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Cannibals might be a tough nut to crack, it's true. But they can at least be deprived of their customary nutrition, and they'd be better for it. And then we'd see.
Even the most alien center would have to interact with the periphery, and even the most alienated periphery has to interact with the center. Liberals and democrats want to calibrate the alienation to preserve their own access to power; absolutism wants to keep minimizing it, to the point of abolition, if possible. Is that salvation by the state? There's no civilizing without the state. A good state will make invaluable contributions to civilization, and the more those on the periphery understand that, the better.
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Cannibals might be a tough nut to crack, it's true. But they can at least be deprived of their customary nutrition, and they'd be better for it. And then we'd see.
Even the most alien center would have to interact with the periphery, and even the most alienated periphery has to interact with the center. Liberals and democrats want to calibrate the alienation to preserve their own access to power; absolutism wants to keep minimizing it, to the point of abolition, if possible. Is that salvation by the state? There's no civilizing without the state. A good state will make invaluable contributions to civilization, and the more those on the periphery understand that, the better.
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Do we have one?
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It's polemical. Polemics reduces things to T/F, multiple choice type answers: central power or spontaneous order. If I had to choose at the point of a gun, I'd say "central power." I want to be less polemical myself, but don't want to polemicize against those who find it useful.
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Proclaimed christian?
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You don't need to be Christian to praise Christianity. GA certainly sees Christianity as a tremendous moral advance (not in as unqualified a way as Girard, though), and I agree with that. I am an anomalous Jew on the outer right.
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"Weren't there Jews who claimed that Cyrus was their Messiah?"
If so, I doubt they left any traces.
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I haven't gotten to it yet.