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The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College 2014

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College

Foreword

Volume II of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics andHumanities at Bard College publishes four essays based on talks given at the2012 Arendt Center Conference, “Does the President Matter? A Conferenceon the American Age of Political Disrepair.” As I write in my essay, theconference began with the Arendtian assumptions; first, that public delib-eration and self-government are at the core of human collective life, andsecond, that the 20th century witnessed the decline into irrelevance ofparticipatory government in American politics. The presidency hasbecome the near exclusive focus of American politics. We may bemoan thefact that only half of registered voters vote in presidential elections; how-ever, in off-year elections we are lucky if 15 percent of the registered votersbother. To ask “Does the President Matter?” is to ask: What kind of leadermight once again make people care about politics?

Jeffrey Tulis’s keynote lecture addressed the disrepair, arguing thatthe problem with presidential power today is actually founded upon the“the gross abdication of responsibility by the legislative branch, theCongress of the United States.” What we need, Tulis concludes, is a pres-ident who can be the kind of “constitutional leader that gets Congressreoriented towards doing its own job better.”

Great presidents are largely a thing of the past, writes Tracy Strong.He asks why, and answers: because of the demise of political conventionsand political parties. In Strong’s counterintuitive argument, direct pri-mary voting—a core democratic demand—has weakened the participatoryexercise of self-government. Replacing local parties that “attached localinterests and concerns to national ones” with the mere act of voting hasdistanced people from politics. What institutions, Strong wonders, mightre-invigorate the participatory exercises that conventions once provided?

Anne Norton worries about the “the poverty of public space in ourdemocracy.” Taking cues from Occupy Wall Street, Norton argues that theidea of liberal democracy—the once productive melding of liberalism anddemocracy—has now become an obstacle to democracy understood as thepublic participation and engagement in politics. “[L]iberalism may havesecured democracy in the past, but now liberalism puts democracy inperil.” Norton challenges us to think of democracy outside of its historicalconnection with liberal conceptions of free speech, property rights, andprocedural legalism.

In addition to essays on the matter of the presidency, we publish aswell “The Destiny of Freedom,” a revised version of two lectures given atBard College by Philippe Nonet. In Part One, Nonet sketches the path offreedom understood as “freedom of the will” in Kant’s political philosophyto its culmination in the Nietzschean “will to power.” What needs to beseen is that free will is the metaphysical origin of technique and all tech-nical understandings of freedom. In Part Two, Nonet argues that “Modernmankind is then faced with the necessity of a decision regarding freedom.”Either we remain committed to freedom as freedom of the will, and socondemn ourselves “to servitude in the exclusive service of technique aswill to will,” or, letting go of the “will to will,” we follow Heidegger andput ourselves “in the service of freedom proper, as guardianship of theunconcealment of being.”

Finally, this issue of HA also includes four “Quotes of the Week”reprinted from The Hannah Arendt Center Blog.

Hannah Arendt is the leading thinker of politics and the humanities in themodern era. No other scholar so enrages and engages citizens and studentsfrom all political persuasions, all the while insisting on human dignity, pro-viding a clear voice against totalitarianism, and defending freedom withextraordinary intelligence and courage. An activist and thinker whose workresists simple categorization, Arendt writes with a stunning lucidity thatresonates with scholars and the reading public alike. Her writing continuesto delight and inspire, even as she asks us to confront the most hauntingquestions of our time. HA embodies the desire to remain true to Arendt’sirreverent, provocative, and vibrant spirit. While HA will solicit and publishnew scholarship on Hannah Arendt, the journal seeks above all to publishessays that provoke, surprise, and enlighten as they speak to and about thecommon world.

Acknowledgments: The journal would never have made it to print with-out the invaluable assistance of Bridget Hollenback, Josh Kopin, MatthewGoldstein, and Jennifer Szalai, who generously donated their time to editthese essays. Amy Pedulla and Keziah Weir provided essential editorial sup-port, and Mary Smith shepherded the journal through production. Thejournal offers a physical work, an increasingly rare thing that persists in thephysical world. I hope it returns you to the spirit of provocation andthought characteristic of our Hannah Arendt Center conferences.

Roger Berkowitz

Does the PresidentMatter?

Essay

Quotes of the Week

HA

Does the President Matter?Thoughts on Miracles in Politics 8Roger Berkowitz

Is the Presidency Too Weak? 18Jeffrey K. Tulis

Occupy Wall Street and Liberal Democracy 27Anne Norton

Is the Era of Great Presidents in the Past? 35 Tracy B. Strong

The Destiny of Freedom 42 Philippe Nonet

The Danger of Intellectuals 52Roger Berkowitz

The False Culture of Utility 56Jennifer M. Hudson

Forgiveness 60Grace Hunt

When Power Is Lost 64William Dixon

Contributors 67

Does the President Matter?

public discourse; the astronomical national debt, $17 trillion and countingfor the U.S. (that is, $140,000 for each taxpayer); and the $3 to $5 trilliondeficiency in public pension obligations that will force local and state gov-ernments to close public libraries and starve public schools in order to payfor the comfortable retirements of public employees—the president seemspowerless. So do Congress and other elected leaders. On the transforma-tive questions that most impact us—consider the $1 trillion of inextin-guishable student debt that is creating a lost generation of young peoplewhose lives are stifled by unwise decisions made before they were allowedto buy a beer—it is hard to think of ways in which the president today canor does matter.

The 2012 election should be about a frank acknowledgment of theunsustainability of our economic, social, and environmental practices andexpectations. We should be talking together about how to remake ourfuture in ways that are both just and exhilarating. This election should bescary and exciting. But so far, it’s small-minded and ugly.

The smallness of politics is not limited to the United States of America.Around the world, we witness worldwide distrust and disdain for govern-ment. In Greece, there is a clear choice between austerity and devaluation;but Greek leaders have saddled their people with half-hearted austeritythat causes pain without prospect for relief. In Italy, the paralysis of polit-ical leaders has led to resignation and the appointment of an interim tech-nocratic government. In Germany, the most powerful European leaderdelays and denies, trusting that others will blink every time they arebrought to the mouth of the abyss. From Russia to Japan, and from Chinato Brazil, world leaders are refusing to face the economic, environmental,and metaphysical crises that are engulfing the world. Denial may be anessential part of politics. But crises usually have the virtue of focusingattention on what is wrong. It is from crises that leaders emerge. And yetpoliticians today seem uniquely immune to the oft-remarked advantagesof crises. There is increasingly a real concern that the crisis may come,and little will change.

No wonder that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in the UnitedStates, and the Pirate Parties in Europe, share a common sense that liberaldemocratic government is broken. Anarchists on the left and small gov-ernment reactionaries on the right are united on little else except theirdisdain for democratic self-government. A substantial—and highly edu-cated—portion of the electorate in America and across the globe has

Thoughts on Miracles in Politics Roger Berkowitz 98 HA Does the President Matter?

Does the President Matter?Thoughts on Miracles in PoliticsRoger Berkowitz

In preparation for the 2012 Hannah Arendt Center Conference “Doesthe President Matter? A Conference on the American Age of PoliticalDisrepair,” the Arendt Center placed large chalkboard blocks around theBard campus and invited students to respond to the simplistic yet com-plicated question: Does the President Matter? The blocks generated quitea few compelling comments. Many mentioned the president’s power toappoint justices to the Supreme Court. Quite a few invoked the previouspresident, and his legacy of war and torture. Some were specific to BardCollege, where undoubtedly the president does and has mattered fornearly three decades. And since we are at Bard, one student answered:“It depends what you mean by matter.”

This last comment struck me as insightful. If what we mean by matteris that the president possesses an increasing and unprecedented powertraditionally absent in a democratic leader and largely absent since thetime of enlightened monarchy, the president does matter. We live in anage of an imperial presidency. The president can—at least, he does—sendour troops into battle without the approval of Congress. The presidentcan, and does, harness the power of TV, the Internet, and Twitter tobypass his critics and reach the masses more directly than ever before. Thepresident can, and does, appoint Supreme Court justices with barely awhimper from the Senate; and the president’s appointments can, and do,swing the balance on a prisoner’s right to habeas corpus, a woman’s rightto choose, or a couple’s right to marry.

And yet, we must also ask: What if by matter, we mean something else?What if we mean having the power to change who we are in meaningfulways? What if by matter we mean the resolve to confront honestly the chal-lenges of the present? What if by matter we mean the virtuosity to makeunpredictable and visionary choices, to invite and inspire a better future?

On the really big questions—the thoughtless consumerism thatdegrades our environment and our souls; the millions of people who haveno jobs and increasingly little prospect for productive employment; thethreat of terrorism that evacuates our public squares as well as tames our

For Rauch and Lessig—and even for President Obama—governmentis so concerned with its parochial interests and its need to stay in businessthat we have forfeited control over it. We have, in other words, lost thefreedom to govern ourselves.

The system of influence and corruption through PACs, SuperPacs,and lobbyists is so entrenched, Lessig writes, that no reform seems plau-sible. All that is left is the Hail-Mary pass of a new constitutional conven-tion—an idea that Lessig promotes widely, as with his “Conference Onthe Constitutional Convention” held in 2011 at Harvard. Only by startingover and creating a new system can we free ourselves from the seeminglyinsatiable appetite of government for more power. For that reason, Lessigadvocates the admittedly risky proposition of calling a constitutional con-vention, one that could propose amendments to the U.S. Constitutionor—more radically—go beyond its constitutional mandate and propose afully new Constitution.

One question Lessig must answer is who would attend such a newConstitutional Convention. Fifty-five delegates—leading citizens andthinkers of the time—attended the original convention in 1787, appointedby the 13 states. All were white. They were well off, largely educated, andmost had government experience. Many had fought in the revolution. Allwere recognized leaders. Would it be possible to agree on such a grouptoday? How many interest groups would need to be represented? Howmany races, classes, and genders? To represent American in 2012, howmany people would have to attend to guarantee the convention legiti-macy? And how could we agree on the leading thinkers of today?Choosing those representatives empowered to rewrite the Constitutionwould be infinitely more complicated today than in the 18th century.Probably, it would be impossible. Which is why Lessig argues they shouldbe chosen by lot. His is a compromise solution that seeks to avoid the crisisin leadership by abjuring leadership. But a Constitution written by aver-age Americans chosen by lot would ensure, in all likelihood, a decidedlyaverage document. This returns us to precisely the problem we face today:an inability to decide upon or choose leaders of vision and courage. Whyis it that we have such difficulty electing presidents, members of Congress,and leaders who matter?

The question “Does the President Matter?” is asked, in the context ofthis conference, from out of Hannah Arendt’s maxim that freedom is thefundamental raison d’etre of politics. In her essay “What is Freedom?”Arendt rejects the usual association of freedom with the free will and the


concluded that government is so inept and so compromised that it needsto be abandoned or radically constrained. Are they wrong?

No president, it seems, is up to the challenge of fixing our brokenpolitical system. On the contrary, every president comes to Washingtonpromising reform! And they all fail. According to Jon Rauch, a journalistand Brookings Scholar, failure of political reform is inevitable. He has thisto say in his book Government’s End:

If the business of America is business, the business of governmentprograms and their clients is to stay in business. And after a while,as the programs and the clients and their political protectors adaptto nourish and protect each other, government and its universeof groups reach a turning point—or, perhaps more accurately, apoint from which there is no turning back. That point has arrived.Government has become what it is and will remain: a large, inco-herent, often incomprehensible mass that is solicitous of its clientsbut impervious to any broad, coherent program of reform. Andthis evolution cannot be reversed.

On the really big questions of transforming politics, the president is,Rauch argues, simply powerless. President Obama apparently agrees. OnOctober 8, 2012—just one day before the Arendt Center Conference—the President said, in Florida: “The most important lesson I’ve learned isthat you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change itfrom the outside.”

A similar sentiment is offered by Laurence Lessig, known to many ofyou as a founding member of Creative Commons. In his recent book,Republic 2.0, Lessig writes:

The great threat today is in plain sight. It is the economy of influ-ence now transparent to all, which has normalized a process thatdraws our democracy away from the will of the people. A processthat distorts our democracy from ends sought by both the Leftand the Right: For the single most salient feature of the govern-ment that we have evolved is not that it discriminates in favor ofone side and against the other. The single most salient feature isthat it discriminates against all sides to favor itself. We have cre-ated an engine of influence that seeks not some particular strandof political or economic ideology, whether Marx or Hayek. Wehave created instead an engine of influence that seeks simply tomake those most connected rich.

assassination of Osama Bin Laden. And many great political acts end in fail-ure, as for example John Brown’s raid. Rather than morality or utility, theonly standard for judging political actions is greatness:

Unlike human behavior—which the Greeks, like all civilized peo-ple, judged according to “moral standards,” taking into accountmotives and intentions on the one hand and aims and conse-quences on the other—action can be judged only by the criterionof greatness because it is in its nature to break through the com-monly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whateveris true in common and everyday life no longer applies becauseeverything that exists is unique and sui generis.

For Arendt, politics is an art, and “the art of politics,” she writes,“teaches men how to bring forth what is great and radiant—ta megala kailampra, in the words of Democritus.” Political actions must be greatbecause they must shine and strike others. Only then will others gatheraround and tell stories, write poems, and erect monuments glorifying theact in beautiful artworks or—when the action is rejected—disdaining it ascriminal or an abomination.

When President George Washington stepped down after his secondterm; when President Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves; whenPresident Theodore Roosevelt took on the corporate trusts that were cor-rupting the country; when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt createdthe New Deal; when President Harry Truman seized the nation’s steelmills; when President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the Arkansas NationalGuard into federal service in order to integrate schools in Little Rock,these presidents acted in ways that helped refine, redefine, and re-imaginewhat it means to be an American. Their actions were surprising, bold, andstriking. They upended expectations and demanded that the citizens ofthe United States pay attention, consider the action, and decide how torespond. These actions are remembered and told about today becausethey transformed the way that the American plurality conceives itself as aunified political body. It is in the president’s ability to act in such ways thatthe president can matter in ways that matter.

Political action can only matter when it is seen to be great. Our wordpolitics is derived from the Greek polis that is in turn descended from theverb pelein, which was a word used to describe the circular rings of smokethat arise from a pipe—what we today call smoke rings. Politics is the gath-ering of a circle of plural citizens around a common center, that common


freedom to do what one wants. To praise freedom is not simply to enjoythe right to think—something every human being has. Instead, freedomis the ability to do things, to act with others to bring new ideas and newworlds into existence. So understood, freedom is intimately connected topolitics and public life. “Freedom is actually the reason that men livetogether in political organization at all. Without it, political life as suchwould be meaningless. The raison d’être of politics is freedom.” For Arendt,to be free is to act—to act in public with others in ways that matter andhave significance. “Men are free as long as they act, neither before norafter; for to be free and to act are the same.” Politics is about acting freely.But what does she mean by a free act?

A free act is spontaneous. It follows no rules and is unpredictable. Itis something that, as free, is new. It begins a new chain of events, one thatappears sui generis. All human beings have the potential to act in suchunpredictable, extraordinary, and free ways. Human freedom means, atleast in part, that we can act so as to surprise. This is what makes us humanand distinguishes us from animals on the one hand and machines on theother. Animals can be trained to obey; they act in accord with externalstimuli. Machines follow programmed algorithms. But humans are, in theend, mysterious and unpredictable. We are surprising.

Surprise is an essential element of free action in another sense as well.Only an act that is surprising and bold is a political act, because only suchan act will strike others, and make them pay attention. An act, if it is toremake the world in some way, must draw attention to itself. It must seduceothers to attend to it and, in the end, persuade them to agree. But prior tothe question of agreement is the need for attention, which is why actionmust be new and surprising. Indeed, action must be beautiful, in the sensethat it strikes others and draws them to look and to judge. Human freedomis inseparable from the distinctly human capacity to act creatively in waysthat demand judgment of the act’s ugliness or of its beauty. It is preciselythose surprising and compellingly beautiful acts that gather plural anddiverse people around them in agreement that are political. Such acts, fromthe force of their active power, form a unity from a plurality, without in anyway sacrificing the independence of the plurality.

Arendt emphasizes the importance of the surprisingly bold and gloriousnature of action in The Human Condition. Political action cannot be judgedby moral standards of good or bad, or by utilitarian standards of success orfailure. Plenty of great political acts are morally problematic, as for examplethe decision to drop the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the

If Socrates’s ethical action inspires the fundamental moral maxim ofWestern civilization, Achilles’s mortal fame illustrates the basic paradox ofthe human condition, that while we humans can do incredible things andfabricate our world, we are, in the end, subject to forces beyond our con-trol. The acts by Achilles and Socrates are political in Arendt’s sense of theword because the manifest greatness of what they did inspired poets andwriters to tell stories about them. These stories and artworks helped tomold moral and humanist ideas that became the common foundation ofwestern civilization.

For all of the courage and bravery in Achilles and Socrates, their actswould have been politically meaningless without poets and citizens to tellstheir stories. Pericles’s funeral oration and Abraham Lincoln’s GettysburgAddress illustrate the importance of the polis as that place where storiesabout heroes are told and remembered. In Arendt’s words from TheHuman Condition, the polis

gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land tobecome the scene of their daring will not remain without witnessand will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how toturn words to praise them; without assistance from others, thosewho acted will be able to establish together the everlasting remem-brance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in thepresent and in future ages.

A president can matter, then, either as an actor or as a storyteller. Orin both ways, as when a president like Lincoln can memorialize those whoanswered his summons to fight for “a new nation, conceived in Liberty,and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”Meaningful political action must combine both daring doing and the polit-ical promise of remembrance.

Shortly after we began to plan this conference, I heard an interview withformer attorney general John Ashcroft speaking on the Freakonomics RadioShow. Ashcroft said:

Leadership in a moral and cultural sense may be even moreimportant than what a person does in a governmental sense. Aleader calls people to their highest and best. . . . No one everachieves greatness merely by obeying the law. People who do


core that holds a people together amidst its many differences. The politi-cian, according to this understanding, is the person who acts in such a wayas to remind—or to show—the people what they share in common. Thepolis is necessary for politics because it is that space where people can beassured that their actions will be seen, heard, judged, and remembered.

The paradoxical danger of a politics that matters is that all great polit-ical action is—in its nature—inherently risky even criminal. This is aninsight familiar to readers of Dostoevsky. In Crime and Punishment,Raskolnikov says:

Let’s say, the lawgivers and founders of mankind, starting fromthe most ancient and going on to the Lycurguses, the Solons, theMuhammads, the Napoleons, and so forth, that all of them to aman were criminals, from the fact alone that in giving a new lawthey thereby violated the old one.

All leaders are, in important ways, related to criminals, in that theymust act in new ways that break established conventions. Any action, anyoriginal deed, any political act that is new and shows leadership is, ofnecessity, something out of the ordinary, something that partakes in somemeasure of greatness. Those who act must risk themselves in the ventureinto the public world. The actor leaves the security of home and entersthe world of the public. Which is why Arendt insists that courage is “thepolitical virtue par excellence.”

Arendt’s favorite examples of such daring actors are Achilles andSocrates, both of whom were killed in or for the doing of great acts. Evenin Homer’s sympathetic portrait, Achilles’s rage is presented as excessiveand inhuman; his dragging of Hector’s body in mud and his furious dis-emboweling of those who beg for mercy is accompanied by repeated invo-cations of his desire to eat human flesh. The hero Achilles is very nearlyan outlaw. And yet by accepting his mortal fate and choosing heroism overlife, he lends to his actions a patina of humanity that, in Homer’s poem,is transfigured into a thing of beauty.

Similarly, Socrates is known for his physical ugliness, as well as hisimpiety. His public questioning of Athenian nobles diminishes them whileundermining Greek religious traditions. Having written nothing, Socratescould have been reviled as a failed Athenian rebel. But his willingness todie for his belief—his exemplification of the moral fact that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong—so strikes his friend Plato thatSocrates’s act is immortalized as the epitome of ethical action for all times.

realm. To ask: ‘Does the President Matter?” is to ask: Might a president,might a political leader, be able to transform our nation, to restore thedignity and meaning of politics? It is to ask, in other words, for a miracle.

At the end of her essay “What is Freedom?” Hannah Arendt said thisabout the importance of miracles in politics.

Hence it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel ofrealism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to beprepared for and to expect “miracles” in the political realm. Andthe more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster, themore miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear.

Arendt’s invocation of miracles is to be taken seriously. Political actionalways appears as if it were a miracle—unexpected, awesome, and extraor-dinary. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia, it was anact of courage. But no one could have predicted—and certainly no intelli-gence agencies did predict—that this would set off a string of revolutionsknown as the Arab Spring. All truly political acts appear as miracles.

That politics trades in miracles does not mean that Arendt invokesdivine intervention. On the contrary: “It is men who perform miracles—men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom andaction can establish a reality of their own.” What she means is that humanbeings can act surprisingly and spontaneously in ways that initiate chainsof actions that appear as miracles. We need to remember the miraculouspotential of human action, especially when so many are so convinced thatour political paralysis cannot be cured.

I don’t know if the current president matters, or if the next one willmatter more. But I know that he or she must. Which is why we mustbelieve that miracles are possible. And that means that we, ourselves, mustact in freedom to make the miraculous happen.

BibliographyArendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).Dostoevesky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa

Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993).Lessig, Lawrence, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It

(New York: Twelve, 2011).Rauch, Jonathan, Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working (New York: Public

Affairs, 2008).


above what the law requires become really valuable to a culture.And a president can set a tone that inspires people to do that.

My first reaction was: this is a surprising thing for the attorney generalof the United States to say. My second reaction was: I want Ashcroft tospeak at the Hannah Arendt Center conference. Sadly, Mr. Ashcroftrefused. But this does not change the fact that, in an important way,Ashcroft is right. In crisis, great leaders will rise above the laws. They willcall us to our highest and best.

What Ashcroft doesn’t quite say—and yet Arendt and Dostoevsky makeclear—is that there is a thin and yet all-so-important line separating greatleaders from criminals. Both act in ways unexpected and novel. In a sense,both break the law. But only the leader’s act shows itself to be right andthus re-makes the law. A great leader shows the earlier law to have beenwrong and forges a new moral and also written law through the force andpower of moral example. Raskolnikov knew that leaders and criminalswere of a kind; he also knew he was not the great man he wanted to be.

In many ways presidential politics in the 21st century takes place inthe shadow of George W. Bush’s overreach. At least, at this time, it seemspainfully clear that President George W. Bush’s decision to systematizetorture stands closer to a criminal act than an act of great legislation. Oneresult of his excesses is that we have reacted against great and daring lead-ership. In line with the spirit of equality that drives our age, we ruthlesslyexpose the foibles, missteps, scandals and failures of anyone who rises toprominence. Bold leaders are risk takers. They fail and embarrass them-selves. They have unruly skeletons in their closets. They will hesitate toendure the scrutiny of modern politics and they rarely prevail in the pub-lic inquisition that the presidential selection process has become.

Those who are inoffensive enough to succeed in politics in 2012 arebranded as pragmatists by their consultants and spinners. Our currentpragmatists are both products of Harvard Business School and HarvardLaw School. Governor Mitt Romney loves data. President Barack Obamaworships experts. They are both nothing if not faithful to the doctrine oftechnocratic optimism—that with the right people in charge, we can doanything. The only problem is that they refuse to tell us what it is theywant to do. They have forgotten that politics is a matter of thinking andimagination, not a pragmatic exercise in technical efficiency.

And yet, people crave what used to be called a statesman—that polit-ical leader who ventures the unexpected and the glorious in the public

not lie in the presidency. The presidency looks somewhat imperial todaybecause of the failure of the Congress. In other words, the problem ofpresidential power today is actually not the exercise of presidential power;it’s the gross abdication of responsibility by the legislative branch, theCongress of the United States.

The core pathology of national politics today is congressional abdica-tion. Now, you might wonder, how far back does that go? How old is thisproblem? Not too old. It goes back basically to the mid 20th century. The19th- and early 20th-century Congresses were veritable models of consti-tutional responsibility compared to present practice. This is not to suggestthat the 19th century was a utopian era. One can readily point to slavery,racism, gender discrimination, and all sorts of things to argue that timewas deeply flawed compared to the modern period. But with respect toinstitutional politics and the civic education of the citizenry more gener-ally, the 19th century was a really remarkable time. To see this, all youneed to do is look at the congressional globe or the congressional recordat random. Read the debates. You will find them unbelievably engaged,interesting, informed, often—but not always—principled, and of a highquality, rhetorically and politically. And if you do the same thing with thecongressional record today you will find the opposite. American politicsis characterized, believe it or not, by the absence of robust constitutionaldiscourse and a dearth of institutional contestation.

I will come back to the obvious rejoinder: “What do you mean? Isn’tthere too much conflict in DC today?” And the answer is: “Yes, there is.”“Isn’t there too much partisan polarization?” Yes, there is. But these per-verse forms of conflict that we see today are themselves the fruit, orbyproduct, of a kind of institutional amnesia that has led to the absenceof the fructifying, helpful sorts of institutional conflict that was built intoour original political system and was manifest in the19th-century consti-tutional order.

Why would our original political system be properly characterized asdesigned for conflict? It is because the three branches of our governmentwere not crafted to illustrate and embody the separation of powers principle,although this idea is the most familiar to everybody, and can be found inthe original language used. Over time, transformation and misinterpre-tation of the separation of powers discussion have obscured what theConstitution was actually designed to be. I call this new constitutionaldesign a democratic version of the mixed regime, a mixed democracy.

Is the Presidency Too Weak? Jeffrey K. Tulis 1918 HA Does the President Matter?

Is the Presidency Too Weak?Jeffrey K. Tulis

I am going to take up the question that was just posed in that kind intro-duction, “Is the presidency too weak?” I won’t hold you in suspense: theanswer is no. The presidency is not too weak.

For a long time in political science, it used to be thought that the pres-idency was too weak. That was due to the powerful influence of a book byRichard Neustadt titled Presidential Power. Neustadt has a story aboutHarry Truman that sets up his thesis. In the early summer of 1952, beforethe heart of the campaign, President Truman contemplated the problemsof a general’s becoming president, should Eisenhower win the forthcom-ing election. Truman said that Eisenhower would sit here, “tapping hisdesk for emphasis, and he’ll say ‘do this, do that’ and nothing will happen.Poor Ike, it won’t be a bit like the army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

And so the dominant understanding of the presidency in Americanpolitics for the 1950s and ’60s tried to wrestle with the fact that it’s difficultnot only for the president to get his will in Congress, but even for the pres-ident to control and direct the executive branch. But in the late 1960s andearly 1970s, well-known public intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.claimed that the opposite was true; that presidents were far too powerful.The idea of the imperial presidency took hold, which suggested that pres-idents were actually dominating the American constitutional order. Today,the most influential literature in political science about the presidencyemphasizes the enormous ability of presidents to exercise unilateral pow-ers in a variety of ways. For example: across all administrations since FDR,we see the increasing ability of presidents to use executive agreements inplace of treaties, to withhold information from Congress, and to use theprocesses of regulation instead of legislation. President Obama has alreadysignaled that he is prepared to do all sorts of things on his own authorityif he doesn’t get cooperation from Congress. Because so many of theseexecutive actions have been used effectively to implement important pub-lic policies, in recent years we’ve had a spate of books on the “new imperialpresidency.”

I want to suggest something different—that the presidency is verystrong, but not imperial. This executive strength may indeed pose prob-lems for democratic governance, but the source of those problems does

encouraged by the original design. A lot of Obama supporters were sur-prised that Obama continued some of the policies of the Bush adminis-tration, with respect to foreign policy and national security. To someextent they shouldn’t have been surprised because he adopted a moder-ate stance during the campaign. But there were some ideas or campaigncommitments that he did change. His views changed because, as presi-dent, he looked at the world from a security perspective. Now sometimesthat security perspective can be too narrow of a perspective for the polityto take, but it’s his job to take that perspective, and if you’re concernedabout the foreign or defense policy result, you should be concerned aboutCongress not articulating its contending or competing perspective.

In the 20th century, however, Congress is no longer the agonistic,viable contender in national politics it once was. It gives up, or abdicates,its power to the presidency. For example: in the 19th century, one out ofevery three Supreme Court justices was turned down—either by resigningafter the debate, or actually being voted down. In the 20th century, onlya handful have been turned down. And more than one out of three werecontroversial in the earlier period, including some that weren’t turneddown. That’s a huge change. And the still more important change is thatwe’ve come to the view that it’s a bad thing to have political argumentover, for example, ideology, or jurisprudence, or the political views thatjustices bring to the table. In the 19th century, the full array of consider-ations that a president might have for nominating somebody—whichranged from crass political concerns regarding geography or representa-tion of some group, to the higher considerations regarding the meaningof the Constitution and methods to interpret it—were ripe for considera-tion by the legislature as well as the presidency. In the 20th century, thoseconcerns are no longer taken on and debated by the legislature. That is aserious abdication of power.

With respect to budgets, the legislature is the place that’s supposedto do the budgeting. A legislature’s fundamental job is to allocate money,particularly in an advanced, industrial, liberal-democratic society like ourown. What else is there to do, legislatively speaking, that’s important? Weno longer need a democratic legislature to spend its time arguing aboutwhether we should be a democracy, as in old mixed regimes. The big ques-tions have, in a way, been answered for us. The questions that are gravetoday actually have a technical dimension to them, such as how to bestspend our money in order to make the country as a whole more prosper-ous, or more just. The modern-day Congress has found itself incapable


The classic mixed regime, some of you may know, was the idea that apolity might be better off if it could somehow represent the alternativeregime possibilities in one polity so that one branch would be representinga monarchy, another one aristocracy, and another democracy. Takentogether, they would insure a kind of continual agonism over who shouldrule. The polity as a whole would benefit from a continuing, institutional-ized argument regarding fundamental political alternatives. The virtuesof each alternative could be exploited and the vices of each contested.

America did not adopt the mixed regime, partly because we did nothave pre-existing social classes that might represent these regimes, butalso because we were committed to becoming some form of a democracy.The American choice, at least the founding choice, was to represent dif-ferent desiderata of a democracy itself in different institutions. To repre-sent energy and a need to attend to security in one, to represent a popularwill and deliberation in another, to represent rights and judgment inanother—and to structure these institutions so that the way they werebuilt, even more than the powers we assigned to them, would incline themto see the very same problems from different angles, different democraticperspectives. And the reason to do that is to make sure over time, eventhough you didn’t know who would actually inhabit these institutions, youcould count on the relevant considerations for democratic deliberation,discourse, and decision being raised. If the institutions inclined their occu-pants to look at the world in the way the institutions were designed tomake them look at it, rights should be attended to in every case—whatpeople wanted should be attended to and the security needs of a country,which is not a peculiarly democratic issue but is an issue for all regimes,would be attended to. The relative weight that should be given to thesecompeting considerations would be a bi-product of the political contesta-tion between these vigorous proponents of different ways of seeing politics.

In order for this new design to work, the institutions have to beengaged to do it. The occupants of the institution need to see—and bemotivated to see—the world from the designed point of view of thosemajor branches of government. The Federalists described this as “tyingthe ambition of office holders to the duties of the place.” It meant that theordinary ambitions of people, once they inhabit an institution, would betransformed as they looked at the world from that institution, in order toadvance their own political ambitions.

Now, how does all of this bear on American politics today? Well, infact, the presidency works pretty much the way it was anticipated and

on. That’s what a budget is. And the problem has been that Congresswould just spend money on whatever they wanted, beyond any limit onwhat money was coming in. In response to this problem, Congress said,“Let’s figure out how much money we can spend, and if we fail to comeup with a budget within those limits, we will delegate somebody to actuallycut the budget, across the board, by a percentage amount.” It’s like tyingyourself to the mast.

The difficulty with that solution, of course, is that in the end nobody,including the delegated executive or whoever the functionary is who exe-cutes this policy, has ended up doing the essential activity that legislatureswere designed to perform—which is to decide among the priorities howmuch you want to spend on each. It’s obviously a dumb thing to cut every-thing by 15 percent, since some things are going to be killed by doing that,and other things are going to be hardly affected at all. The whole point isto make those legislative decisions about what’s more important, and thatis not being done.

A final example: war powers. The president, as you know, has enor-mous authority over war and peace. Enormous authority. That’s where alot of the credible claims about the imperial presidency come from. Yet,the president should be pushing the envelope regarding national defense.That is a principal job of the executive—to figure out how to defend ourcountry. It is the Congress, however, that has not been doing its job—either by retrospectively evaluating those actions or, in the case of thingslike offensive wars, by insisting that they can’t happen unless the legisla-ture authorizes them. I happen to be one who liked, for example, theObama policy in Libya, but it was simply wrong and clearly unconstitu-tional for the president of the United States to execute it on his ownauthority. There is no compelling constitutional case that can justify anexecutive decision to take the nation from a state of peace to a state of warwith another country on his own authority—but Congress did not standup for itself.

One of the reasons for Congressional abdication of war power goesback to something that was mentioned earlier this morning. During RogerBerkowitz’s introduction to the conference, he listed several moments ofleadership greatness: the Emancipation Proclamation, George Washington,Truman and the steel seizure. And I was thinking, wait a minute, howdoes this sequence work? The steel seizure case is generally thought to beAmerican history’s most dramatic instance of presidential failure andweakness.


of budgeting and so it is increasingly giving that responsibility to the exec-utive. Initially the executive itself insisted that it was better at doing thisbecause it had the tools—the technical tools—to do budgeting. And in theNixon administration there was a really good and robust debate about thisas President Nixon was impounding money. He was refusing to spendmoney that had been appropriated for particular things on the groundsthat he had custody of the whole and they were thinking too much aboutthe parts. Congress responded to that by cutting back his power toimpound, but also by creating the Congressional Budget Office, the leg-islature’s own technical support institution, which over time has developeda reputation for being better than the executive branch. Even the execu-tive branch now cites the Congressional Budget Office if it wants to makea credible claim about whether their budget means x or y. It’s theCongressional Budget Office numbers that they use, not those of theOffice of Management and Budget—the executive’s institution.

Despite those resources, Congress punts on the budget, and they dothis in a way that is very interesting. They do this in a way that resemblesthe story of Ulysses and the Sirens, from Greek mythology, in whichUlysses’s ship sails past beautiful sirens, whose singing causes sailors tojump overboard and swim toward them until they all die. In that myth,Ulysses decides he has to solve this problem, and he says, “Look, coveryour ears, so you can’t hear these sirens, and put me up there and tie meon the mast so I can see what’s going on, but I can’t kill myself.” (It struckme as an odd solution. I would have said, “Why don’t we take a differentroute?” but he said, “No, no, no, I have to hear what is so special aboutthese sirens.”) So that’s a kind of approach that’s actually been thought tobe a form of political and ethical responsibility—that you can anticipateyour own weakness in advance, and make advance arrangements for it,so that it doesn’t harm you. Now this idea, this notion of pre-commitment, isthe one that Congress absorbed and tried to model for itself to deal withthe budget. On the surface, it looks like a potentially responsible, not irre-sponsible, response to this problem.

In the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, for example, and in proposedbalanced-budget amendments, and in the recent sequestration that hasbeen a subject of political debate, Congress said, look, “we’re going todevise a process in which if we don’t successfully make a budget ourselves,the budget will still get made.” By the way, a budget is simply a mechanismto figure out what amount of money is being collected, what amount ofmoney is available to spend, and what one is going to spend the money

does with respect to its own powers, it tends to go to the court to figureout if it can do what it should be doing, rather than stand up and developits own constitutional conscience, its own constitutional position, and itsown articulate view. The Court hastened the legalization, and depoliti-cization, of formerly robust constitutional contestation between Congressand the president.

So those are examples of congressional abdication. As a result of thedemise of constitutional conflict in the United States, we have seen a stun-ning reversal of the use of Congress. In the 19th century, ideologues andpartisans would be transformed into constitutional officers. I sometimestell my students that hypocrisy is a virtue of constitutional design eventhough it’s a defect of individual character. You certainly don’t want yourfriends to be hypocrites. But a lawgiver who figures out how to makepoliticians intentionally hypocritical—which is to say, induces politiciansto say the right thing whether it’s in their hearts or not—that is thesupreme triumph of modern liberal democracy. It happened in 19th-century America.

The irony is that this defining feature of modern constitutional designhas been reversed in our century. Rather than ideology and party beingco-opted by the institution, we now have the Congress of the United Statesbeing hijacked by a political party. I could say “by political parties,” exceptI happen to think that what’s called polarization is wrong to the extentthat you think of it as a symmetrical problem with ideologues on the leftand ideologues on the right. It’s not. There are some ideologues on theleft, but in general the Democratic Party has been rather moderate ideo-logically, and prone to compromise with the Republican Party. The entireideological spectrum has moved toward the right, and the right hasbecome intransigent. The right has increasingly used constitutional insti-tutions for partisan purposes—for examples, filibusters, temporary budgetresolutions, and debt ceilings. So we do have too much conflict, too muchof what’s called polarization, and too much gridlock in American politicstoday; but it is due to the perversion of institutions that were originallystructured for a different kind of conflict.

Let me end by saying what this account says about presidential lead-ership and its needs. I think that one possible ill consequence of a confer-ence like this is to focus too intently on presidential leadership as theprincipal instrument of democracy. The worry that the president is tooweak to contend with the demands of modern governance captures thisfocus and this error. If our meaning of leadership is an ability to do what


Some of you may know that Truman seized the steel mills in theKorean War to intervene in a labor-management dispute. There were allsorts of mediation efforts. Labor agreed to the mediators’ proposals, butmanagement did not. Due to the intransigence of management, a strikewas looming. The president decided the war effort would be hindered ifthe state did not have ready access to steel, so he seized these steel mills.The case was quickly taken to the Supreme Court. And the SupremeCourt, in a decision that is the most confining of presidential power in thehistory of the Republic, hammered the president.

It was a highly unusual moment for the Court to refuse to ratify anassertion of presidential power. From the point of view of the opinion,from the people’s reaction to the opinion at the time, and from the judg-ment of historians since—the decision was received as a great triumph forAmerican democracy—Truman was wrong in this received understanding;this was a supremely bad exercise of presidential leadership. I actuallythink Truman was right, and I think the Supreme Court opinion waswrong. The unnoticed piece of this story is that, unlike exercises of pres-idential power today, when Truman seized the steel mills he sent a letterto the Congress of United States saying, “I know this action is unprece-dented; it does require your authorization. But the circumstances of warimpel me to seize the steel mills. Here are my reasons but I will followyour guidance, your legislative judgment. You need to either ratify whatI do democratically, or you need to suggest something to do instead, oryou need to countermand my decision. Whatever you decide, I’ll follow.”No response from Congress. He sends another letter to the Senate 14 dayslater: “I don’t know if you got my first letter but . . . ” He repeats basicallythe same argument. Nothing happened.

The steel companies brought the lawsuit and the Supreme Courtdecided to arbitrate this dispute, or alleged dispute, between Congressand the President. Truman interpreted Congress’s failure to respond astacit consent—“It’s your job to deliberate, I’m doing my job to win a war.”He believed that whatever separation of powers issue was raised by hisaction was one to be resolved by the two political branches—Congress andthe President. But the court decided that they were going to do Congress’sjob on its behalf. They said, this is not right, the President should be fol-lowing the Congress, and the Congress did not authorize this. Thatextraordinary Supreme Court decision had enormously unfortunate con-sequences for the conduct of American politics subsequently. It means nowthat if Congress ever has the wherewithal to care about what a president

Occupy Wall Street and Liberal DemocracyAnne Norton

I’m a very obedient person, so I do want to address the question asked bythe conveners of the conference: “Is Occupy Wall Street a symptom of anirreparable loss of faith in liberal democracy?” And I want to argue that ifit isn’t, it should be, and that we should lose faith in liberal democracy. Ormore precisely, if we want to keep faith with democracy, we need to losefaith in liberalism. We need to begin to question insistently, fundamentally,whether liberalism is securing or damaging democracy.

We tend to speak about liberal democracy as if one word slid easilyinto another, as if there were no space between the protection of individualrights associated with liberalism and the democratic form of government;in other words, that liberalism solves the problem of democracy.Liberalism was supposed to guarantee rights, establish the rule of law,establish regular transparent procedures; it was a little supplement todemocracy that would tame and domesticate it and make it safe—safe forminorities, safe for unpopular opinions. But instead, I think liberalismhas acted as a supplement in the Derridean sense: it’s something that addsonly to replace. That liberalism may have secured democracy in the past,but now liberalism puts democracy in peril.

Now, I’m not the only person who thinks this. Sheldon Wolin, a friendand colleague of Hannah Arendt, argues that democracy has become dis-torted—principally by liberal economics, by capitalism; that reliance onthe free market to spread wealth and power has concentrated power; thatthe press, under the conditions of the free market and the concentrationof the media, has become a gatekeeper and a censor—not something thatgives us access to more information, more opinion, more thought, butsomething that constrains what acceptable thought is, what can be said,and who can say it. Rather than protecting minority opinions, the liberalpress today often mutes or silences them. So the institutions that we weretaught to think of as undoing private power have come instead to serveand consolidate private power. The institutions that were represented tous as securing means of the liberation of our people have become the toolsof a more effective dominion.

Occupy Wall Street and Liberal Democracy Anne Norton 2726 HA Does the President Matter?

many effective leaders that have come to this conference do—to mobilizegroups of like-minded partisans—then at the presidential level, to be effec-tive as that kind of leader and to normalize that idea of a leader is to actu-ally undermine democracy. Democracy requires deliberation—democraticdeliberation—and leadership of the sort most familiar to students of thepresidency supplants deliberation.

For this reason, the greatest ancient statesman-lawgivers—those greatpolitical problem solvers—were not the model for presidential leadershipwhen the American Constitution was designed. George Washington was themodel of a presidential leader, and his kind of leadership did not supplantdeliberation in the manner of ancient lawgivers. He was not thought to bea Lycurgus or a Solon. He did not want to be a statesman-lawgiver and hedid not want to have the power to remake a people—to make a people intoa different people. A constitutional leader needs to be, in Washington’smodel, representative of a people already made and making itself.

So our constitution envisions leadership as constitutional officershipthat only occasionally has to step out of that more limited notion of offi-cership in times of war and emergency, where the presidents becomesomething a little bit more like the statesman-lawgiver-leader of the past.But, in general, constitutional leaders are supposed to make the Congressdo its job better. The kind of leader we need now is not necessarily theone who is more effective at getting a particular policy agenda rammedthrough Congress, or one who accomplished partisan policy goals outsideof Congress—although, in present circumstances, an effective partisanpresident may be the best we can get. The kind of leader we most neednow is a constitutional leader that gets Congress reoriented toward doingits own job better. And in order to do that, the citizenry is going to requirea high level of civic education that is almost unimaginable—an educationthat equips us to better monitor the Congress, so that the Congress isresponsible to the citizenry. I’m not talking about civic education as par-ticipation, such as going to rallies and so forth. (I’m all for going to ralliesand I also think movements that have been described in sessions here areprofound and important.) The kind of education that is relevant to thepathology I have described is a constitutional education, and it requires akind of deliberative discourse that is in serious decay today.

Street if you’ve got a kid to feed, or you have yourself to feed, and so wehave to take time into account. And so that is, I think, part of rethinkingassembly—raising the questions of how you call people together for amoment and what can you do in that moment.

Even as the right to assembly has been compromised by the loss ofthe commons, so too has free speech, the greatest contribution of liberal-ism, been turned against democracy. It has even been turned against indi-vidual rights. Globally, freedom of speech is used to secure majority powerover minorities and to affirm imperial hierarchies. When people tell youthat the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in the Jyllands-Posten inDenmark is about freedom of speech, or that the French antireligioussatirical journal Charlie Hebdo is about individual rights, think again. Theseclaims of free speech serve to protect the powerful against the powerless.That is not freedom of speech, properly used, to advance democratic gov-ernment and to challenge authority; that is freedom of speech used tosecure authority, to secure hierarchies, to limit freedom, to limit what peo-ple can say. Now, if the Danes had decided to defend the wearing of theburqa, that would have been a courageous act in support of the freedomof the powerless. If Hebdo had decided to argue for the public chanting ofthe call to prayer in the streets of Paris, I would speak out in support ofits courage. But what it is doing is not courageous and not what we shouldmean by freedom of speech because it does not secure democracy.

I should say too, to clarify things, that I am a free speech absolutist. Ido think people should be able to say anything, and in that respect I amvery American, although I think I would like America to be moreAmerican; I think free speech should extend from the boardroom to theshop floor and I’d like to see more of it aired. But, what troubles me aboutthese great spectacles of free speech that dominate the press is that they’reprofoundly fictional. For example, in the case of the Mohammed cartoons,at issue were commissioned cartoons. It wasn’t the case that one couldn’tfind a picture of Mohammed in Denmark. The publication of the cartoonswas a piece of theater.

I emphasize, the newspaper had every right to do it; it was contemptibleto publish these cartoons, but it was their right. And further, the publicationwas a nonevent in Denmark. What happened in Denmark? Nothing. NoDanish Muslims were upset. Other people were upset, there were somedemonstrations, but no one was hurt, no one was killed. Nothing happened.In fact, in the entirety of Europe, and the United States, and Canada, andAustralia, the entirety of the west, nothing happened. There was one death


The subjection of democracy to the liberal rule of law and liberal pro-ceduralism serves in the same way. Consider, first, the freedom of assemblyand how thoroughly that has been abridged. I mean, the idea that youmust obtain a permit for a demonstration, that you must go to the stateand say “May we demonstrate, sir?” is fundamentally counter to what ademonstration is meant to be—that it is meant to demonstrate that thepower of the people is beneath, beyond, and above the power of the state.And that reminder is obscured; instead, demonstrations are tucked awaywhere they can’t be seen, where they become powerless and often invisible.

What strikes me most about this subjection of democracy to liberalproceduralism is that it reminds me of the poverty of public space in ourdemocracy. Think about how difficult it is to find a public space. I mean,if you’re looking for a public space in which to assemble, you readily findout that most of them are privately owned, and so it’s actually quite diffi-cult; the places where people naturally assemble, like shopping malls, areobviously privately owned places. They’re highly regulated places, wemight say non-places. And they’re very policed, so there is a poverty ofpublic space.

I’ve been teaching the Twelve Articles of the Swabian peasantry writ-ten during the German Peasants’ War of 1525. There are many interestingthings about these Twelve Articles, one of which is that the Swabian peas-ants insist on the return of their commons. In the very poignant ArticleSeven, the peasants demand that they will not be oppressed anymore. Butthe pressure to create a commons, I do believe, has changed. I continueto believe in the importance of physical assembly, but I am struck by theway that it works with technology—by the way in which people can nowcall to one another to organize, assemble and advocate virtually. As physicalspaces for assembly become overregulated and insufficient, the virtualrealm can play a powerful role in bringing voices together and projectingthem publicly. So, I think it is enormously important to create a virtualcommons, in addition to a physical commons.

I should say that I’m one of those people who regard the term scholar-activist as not a nice name, and so I rarely speak as an activist; I speak as ascholar. But one’s mind does sometimes go to questions of strategy, andthat raises the importance of time. One of the interesting things about vir-tual assemblies that are called up by the social media we have now is thatthey can come and go. They can appear and disappear. The possibilitiesof the flash mob are very interesting, but they also remind us that assemblyis a matter of time as well as space. You can’t go camp out in Occupy Wall

eye out for those chances to make an alliance. An alliance doesn’t have tolast forever, it can be a really short alliance, but I would happily join upwith the most hardened, old-school conservative in resisting the PATRIOTAct. Not only would I never think twice about it, I would be doubly grate-ful, because, as you say, it breaches that partisan wall, breaches the bubble.You learn certain things, and also, all of a sudden your alleged opponentsare obliged to think of you as human.

Moving beyond both freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, wecome to the great problem of liberalism and liberal economics; namely,the problem of property. And this is in some respects a strangely scholarlyproblem. For John Locke, property meant something quite different.Property meant first of all that which was most one’s own: the body, yourbody, the rights it sheltered, the claims that it made, the needs that it had.The body was the center of the rights, and only secondarily did it refer tothings, things you held in your hand, things you had mixed your laborwith. Yet, for liberalism now, property means something different.Property means wealth, goods—or a cipher for wealth and goods, a littleentry in a bank that says “You have more power than that person has.”How does the sacred right to property sound, when it means the sacredright to money? Or, the sacred right to my stuff? That, I think, is not aright that can claim any sanctity, and yet, that is the right we have.

What would happen if we understood the sacred right of property tobe concerned with what Locke thought it was concerned with? What if itwas concerned with what is properly one’s own? With your body? Withyour mind? With your rights? With your thoughts? What if it conferredthe rights the body requires: the right to food, the right to shelter, theright to health care? What if it conferred the rights that the mind requires:the right to have rights, the right to exercise those rights, the right to edu-cation, the right to access power? Some of the changes that would forcewould be quite benign changes—policies more sympathetic to universalhealth care, a little economic redistribution. But some things would beterrifying. We would have to consider what we can actually claim, justly,to be our own. That’s the old question of equality—equality of needs—and it’s an old question, it’s an old struggle. Why is it so hard? I think it’shard because property has a perverse logic: those who have are servedbetter by it than those who have not, but those who have the least havethe most to lose. If you lose a million dollars, and you’re a billionaire, it’san inconvenience, it’s a fluke of the stock market, it’s nothing to troubleyou. But if you’re poor, and you lose a dollar, that’s the loss of a meal, or


associated with the Mohammed cartoons—it was the death of a Muslim inpolice custody. No death, no injuries, nothing. That’s what happens infree countries when you have free speech that you don’t like. We shouldbe really proud of that. We should say, “That’s what free speech looks likeamong free people.”

We also have to understand the reactions to such spectacles of freespeech in non-free countries. When people who live under censorship seesomething like the Mohammed cartoons, the logical assumption theymake is that the offensive speech has the sanction of the state. They livein a world in which news and the distribution of ideas are censored andregulated. Their presumption is that such speech must have the sanctionof the state, and this is a rational presumption based on the standards thatpertain in most of the world. In most of the world there are things thatare forbidden, such as hate speech and Holocaust denial, so the presump-tion is that the state is giving its seal of approval. That presumption is anerror, it’s a most unfortunate error, and it testifies to the need for morespeech. But it is not a question of a given culture, a given civilization beinghostile to the freedom of speech. On the contrary, it’s an objection to thestate, it’s an objection to certain persistent hierarchies.

The real core of free speech in a democratic society is the right tooppose, and for minority viewpoints to be heard, so that all people in ademocracy have to listen to people who are alien to them. It’s importantto listen to people who you think are your enemies, who are your enemies,and whom you hate. That’s enormously important, and it’s also surprising.It is surprising because some of the people we disagree with most tend tobe closer than we think. They are people we choose to listen to, ratherthan balk from, because we assume they share our fundamental views. Toooften in gatherings like this one people say, as someone said earlier, “We’reall liberals, we all agree.” That is absolutely not true, and let me give youa really serious fault line that runs through any liberal community. I meanthe question of big government. I’m a small government democrat. I’mvery suspicious of big government. I live with a woman who is a bigbeliever in big government. We vote for the same people most of the time,but we have very different views about specific political issues and abouthow it should go, and in many respects that becomes a big dividing line.When the Iraq war broke out, I found my first and most vigorous alliesamong old-school conservatives because they were really angry. They wereangry about the USA PATRIOT Act—they were more angry about thePATRIOT Act than my fellow liberals—and it’s important to keep your

I have enormous respect for Occupy Wall Street, but you have toknow that nobody was likely to die in New York City. We are learning fromwhat other people do who had more to risk. It should change our senseof ourselves from teachers of the world to students of the world, and itshould make us refuse the claim, forever, that Islam is alien to democracy.What happened in Tahrir Square was and remains a democratic demand.

And, moreover, Tahrir teaches us certain fundamental democratic les-sons. First, that individual rights are not opposed to collective action, butthat they issue in collective action. Second, that democracy rests on some-thing which is profoundly difficult—democracy requires daring.Democracy is not the work of domesticated people who vote in elections,and obey the law. Those are parts of democracy. Democracy is also thepeople who dare, the people who will put their bodies on the line.

Which is why it is deeply important that political theorists write aboutthe world, and not just about other theorists. It is so much easier to writeabout the world, and so much more pleasurable. And it helps you thinkbetter, because the particularities of the world are constantly throwing upthings that you don’t anticipate, that no one has taught you about, andthat you can’t easily come to grips with. That need to deal with particu-larities— historical particularities, local particularities—is, I think, bothdemanding and enormously rewarding.

With regard to the question, “Does the president matter?” I want toput on the table the symbolic character of the presidency. I think there’s atendency to regard that as trivial, and I don’t think it’s trivial. I think it’senormously important. There is a particular dimension of the Obama pres-idency that I have personally benefitted from in my daily life. And that is,I live in Philadelphia—Philadelphia is a majority black city, and I live in anintegrated neighborhood—and when I walk on the streets now, I have adifferent set of interactions than I did before Obama’s election. AfricanAmerican people are more likely to greet me, to talk to me. This becameespecially visible to me after the shooting of Trayvon Martin because thereI am, walking my dogs—I have corgis, like the Queen of England—andI’m walking the dogs, and there are two young black men about the sameage as Trayvon Martin kind of circling around me. And they have theirhoodies on, and I know what they want. They want to pet my dogs.

But that used to be a really different situation. Young black menwouldn’t approach a white woman, my age. Why would they? Theywouldn’t know if I could be trusted. They would have good reason not to


what passes for one. If you lose a house, it’s not a burden if you have sixor seven, like John McCain. You might not even remember where thatother house was. But if you lose your house and it’s your only house, youcan lose a world. So it is the person who has the least who has the most tolose, in losing that sacred right of property. And so those with plenty havean army of those with little to defend their claims. They profit, as thosewith plenty have always done, from the labor, and the needs, and the des-peration of those who have not. It is this perverse logic concerning prop-erty that I think continues to guarantee that the needs of the neediestcitizens will not be met. It is what makes it so very hard to move forwardat the question of equality.

I honor Occupy Wall Street because it has brought attention to thatproblem of inequality. If Occupy Wall Street seems to have withered away,the language of the 1 percent and the 99 percent—that has lingered. It isdeployed in the presidential election, where it now includes somethingabout the 47 percent. But I think it’s possible, too, that Occupy Wall Streethas not withered. Dispersed, maybe, but perhaps it isn’t itself yet. It’simportant for me to remember that Occupy Wall Street has still not occu-pied Wall Street; it has occupied Zuccotti Park, not the floor of the stockexchange. There are occupy movements and tents and encampments onuniversities, but they aren’t in the banks. They’re not in the headquartersof CitiBank, and they’re not in your local branch. That would be different.That would take thought, it would take risk, it would take courage.

And then, thinking of that, I want to say a word about courage, andremind us of one of the places that Occupy Wall Street came from. I mean,there are many practices and movements that fed into Occupy Wall Street,but Occupy Wall Street was conceived in part as an emulation of what hap-pened in Tahrir Square. It was called up by people who were inspired byTahrir Square, and that’s quite interesting. It reverses the direction ofimperial influence; it puts the west—it puts Americans—in the position ofstudents. It is important that we remember this; that we learn from others,that we have learned from others, that we have seen courage greater thanour own. Because, frankly, it took a hell of a lot more courage to occupyTahrir Square knowing what was going to happen; knowing that peoplewere going to be beaten, that people, women, men too, probably, weregoing to be raped—that they were really facing death. And when you seethat, when people pushed back the tanks on Qasr al-Nil bridge; that’scourage, and that is democracy in action.

Is the Era of Great Presidents in the Past?Tracy B. Strong

Government includes the art of formulating a policy as will receivegeneral support; persuading, leading, sacrificing, teaching always,because the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate. —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Papers 1:755-756

What makes a president great? The following seems important. A greatpresident must bring about change and leave a legacy—arrangements thatdefine an era. A great president is a democratic president in the sense thatthere is an interdependence of leader and led. The president is accountableto his followers and he enables them to follow him (her?). He does notmake the public more passive but more civic minded. As Felix Frankfurtersaid about Roosevelt, “He takes the public to school.”

In the United States, the changes that a great president brings aboutneed to be reconciled with the American constitutional tradition. He is arevolutionary and a conservator. Thucydides in his description of Periclesnotes that the Athenian both respected the liberty of his people and heldthem in check; when they were over-confident he could bring them backto a sense of danger; when they were discouraged, he would restore theirconfidence.1

Arguably the last possibly great president was Lyndon Johnson—thisdespite massive flaws and a willingness to go along with Kennedy’s advis-ers on foreign policy. No one else at that time except Johnson could havepassed the Civil Rights bills that he did—and that is not all. One mightremember also: health insurance for the elderly and the poor; federal aidto elementary, secondary, and higher education; repeal of the 1924National Origins Act giving favored treatment to Western European immi-grants; environmental protections promising cleaner air and water; urbanrenewal under a Department of Housing and Urban Development; moreeffective and integrated means of national movement under a Departmentof Transportation; National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities;National Public Television and Radio; Head Start; and the War on Poverty.

Is the Era of Great Presidents in the Past? Tracy B. Strong 3534 HA Does the President Matter?

trust me. And on my side, I want to prove “that I’m a nice human being,”but how do I do that? So we do this little dance on the street, but the dancedoesn’t take as long as it used to. There’s a possibility for me—and there’sa possibility for them as well—that did not exist before Obama won theelection. That is not a small deal. That’s a change that has transformedAmerican racial relations, even if just at the edges. America is still a nationof white supremacy. But it’s a nation of white supremacy with a black pres-ident, and that changes daily life.

It also means that during the election, we got a phone call from afriend who’s an Algerian communist, and she is not a friend to the UnitedStates of America. Alya calls us up and she says, “You have shown theworld that you are a great nation.” You couldn’t wring that out of Alyabefore the Obama presidency. His election makes a difference. It makes adifference locally on my street, on my sidewalk, in my neighborhood. Andit makes a difference globally. We may squander the opportunity forchange, but the possibility is there.

smoke-filled rooms, I will come close. Parties were not an original part ofthe conception of American government. Indeed, Madison’s railingagainst “faction” would also apply to parties. We owe the sense of theimportance of parties to Jefferson and to the response to the 1824 electionin which the House selected John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson,despite the latter having more popular and electoral votes. As a result,through the efforts of Martin van Buren and Jackson, partisan politicalparties that were militantly decentralized became part of what was calledthe “living constitution.”

Parties were local, but they legitimated the presidency by providing abroad base of popular support during periods of realignment. Theyattached local interests and concerns to national ones. (I am not sayingthat the substance was always one of which all might approve; what isimportant is the connection.) As Jefferson and Jackson conceived of them,parties were localized political associations that provided a link especiallybetween the executive and the people.

This began to change, in particular, with the advent of what some ofhave called the “modern presidency.” FDR had established an adminis-trative state that preserved individual rights (both civic and social) andoperated an interventionist foreign policy, nominally dedicated to liberaldemocratic principles—it was so in fact, particularly with the HenryWallace wing of the party, far more so than have any recent presidentsbeen. Loosely, what happened post-World War II, was that the partyincreasingly dropped out.

Bluntly speaking, the demise of the centrality of parties is consolidatedas a consequence to 1968. Hubert Humphrey’s nomination flew sostrongly in the face of the orientation of large segments of the DemocraticParty—for the first and last time in my life I did not vote the Democraticnominee—that over the next few years, the Party reorganized thePresidential selection process along contested primary lines. The primarysystem, as Stephen Skowronek says, tends “to vent the most passionateinterests in the electorate and to turn politicians . . . into masters of theirown political machines.”4

Now, primaries have been around since the Progressive era, but it wasgenerally the case until the 1960s that nominations came from a mixedprocess. Stevenson was drafted at the 1952 convention, and even in 1968Humphrey was nominated without having seriously contested any pri-mary. But the extraordinary chaos of the Chicago convention put inmotion a set of reforms that have changed things.


Until the Community Action Projects of the Great Society were killed bya combination of war expenses and senatorial interests, they were seriousattempts at bypassing deadening and corrupt state interests in order tobring money and resources directly to the grass roots. By April 1964,Johnson’s approval rating was 77 percent and only 9 percent of theAmerican public disapproved of the job he was doing. I do not need to goto what happened in the following years.

There are those who might nominate Ronald Reagan. The Reagancase is interesting: in this space I would say rather that Reagan was theperfect imitation—the perfect acting—of a president. One might evenremember—these coincidences are surely scripted—that at the end ofKings Row—arguably his best movie—he plays Drake McHugh, a well-to-do young man forced to work on the railroad after his trust fund has beenstolen, who has his legs run over by a boxcar and has both legs amputated.On awakening from the operation he asks: “Where is the rest of me?” Theresonance to FDR was strong.

But this is not the issue. The question is why it is that present presi-dents are not great—or rather what is it that made presidents great. Oneanswer is too easy, and it is to refer to character, smarts, political cunning,and related matters. This is the Machiavellian version of politics and manyof those who presently lament Obama’s failures blame it on his inabilityto manipulate necessities—to “jump from wheel to wheel” as Machiavelliput it in his Tercets on Fortune.

There is some truth to this view, but it is limited. It sees politics withoutpaying attention to institutions, as a manner of individual skill—RichardNeustadt is to some degree responsible for pushing this understanding.2

What, however, are the political institutions that make possible enduringpresidential greatness? And here the answer must come from an under-standing of the profound changes in the American political system overthe last 60 years.

The danger with the Machiavelli/Neustadt view is that it thinks thatone makes possible great presidencies by enhancing the power of the pres-ident. Such thought continues. A bipartisan group of advisers to formerpresidents and would-be presidents calling itself No Labels3 has put fortha plan for radically expanding the powers of the presidency (coupled, itshould be said, with a few British-type nods to accountability). Carl Schmittwould have been happy.

Here one should look rather at the transformation of the Americansystem of political parties. And while I will not quite make the case for

body that discusses much and does little. Party makes for links betweengovernment and the citizen—links that are essential if a President is toeducate and reshape a country. Party is essential if politics is to offer aneducation to reshaping the people, reshaping being a good operating def-inition of greatness. The effect of the primary system is the decline of theparty’s ability to filter candidates; hence the nominating process is definedmore and more by the media and by money—now doubly true after theSupreme Court decided Citizens United. What counts now is the cultivationof elites rather than the development of relationships with and betweenordinary Americans—a brief moment of hope that this might be reversedwith Obama now appears increasingly less the case. Nor can social mediafill this gap. James Fowler has recently shown that voter turn-out is posi-tively affected by person-to-person contact (knowing that someone youknow voted) and not by media.7 American politics has become capitalintensive rather than labor intensive.

With the disaffection of the populace, politics is all the more open tovolatile appeals—to anything that claims to cut through the mess. MaxWeber had already warned of this in his 1921 “Politics as a Vocation”address, in which he reminded us that politics was a strong and slow bor-ing of hard boards—not a magical solution. Nor is it the case that tech-nology will change matters. Technology brings resources but notdemocracy. It may unsettle old elites, but only to create new ones, and itproduces techniques that are beyond the capacities of the mass public.Being a party member increasingly means contributing money, almostnever deliberation about policy or vote for office. And technology alsochanges the nature of representation. I am constantly solicited to con-tribute money for campaigns in states and localities that are not my own.The effect is to diminish the already tenuous relationship I might have to“my” congress-person, “my” senator.

In the face of this, except to some degree in foreign policy, the presi-dent has little recourse but to succumb. Without localized parties, therewill be no democratically great presidents. It is no accident that theoristslike Benjamin Barber have recently begun to look to mayors as the lastsurviving centers of political power that have direct contact with their con-stituencies.8

What to do? Perhaps I should close with this letter that de Tocquevillewrote to his friend Arthur de Gobineau in 1853: “After having believedourselves capable of transforming ourselves, we now believe ourselves


Note that during the convention-centered process it was not the casethat we did not get people of quality. Wilson Carey McWilliams has esti-mated that of the 36 party nominations between 1900 and 1968, only ninewere by any accounting second-raters (Coolidge, Cox, Davis, Goldwater,Harding, Landon, McKinley, Nixon, Parker).5 Today, conventions nolonger mean anything except for media time.

The danger of the primary process has to do with what it does to themeaning of voting. Voting is a final act. However, if there are more thantwo candidates, as there always are in the primaries, it is not clear what Iam voting against. If there are only two, my vote for one is known by meto be a vote against the other. But if I were Republican, was my vote forMcCain a vote against Gingrich, or against Romney? Not only do othersnot know, I do not know—and I don’t have to know. This in turn leads tothe paradox that, in primaries, we vote too early, as it were. Once I havevoted, I have in some important sense shut down deliberation—thatprocess that keeps alternatives open, postpones decisions, multiplies alter-natives, and strives for consensus. In 1980, a majority of Democrats wouldhave preferred someone other than Carter or Kennedy; a majority ofRepublicans would have preferred Ford to Reagan. Ford delayed too longto stop Reagan and the die was cast by the time of the convention.

When political parties break down the president has trouble. After1976, Carter, who had by and large simply ignored the party, was in trou-ble—in great part because the election had swept into office a large num-ber of neophyte Congresspersons who owed little to the party and whohad generally run ahead of the president in getting elected. The samehappened in 2010 with the Tea Party. The consequences are important: abreakdown of consensus in all aspects of policy; a weakening of the insti-tutional ties that bound elites together; proliferation of political entrepre-neurs with secure positions of their own; transformation of the media intoa scandal-mongering and confrontational mode; concentration of interestsand financial resources in professional organization.6

How does this affect the president? A fractured Congress, where theparty is multiply beholden to a disparate set of first choices, as it were, can-not do anything well other than not do anything. We complain about thedo-nothing Republicans but one has only to read Robert Caro’s volumeson Johnson to see that the “do-nothing” Congress is not a recent devel-opment, even if at present it is do-nothing in spades. It was no accidentthat Carl Schmitt designated the legislature as a clasa discutidora, a petty

40 HA Does the President Matter?

incapable of improving ourselves; after having had an excessive pride, wehave fallen into a humility that is just as excessive; we thought that wecould do everything, and now we think we can do nothing . . . This, toput it simply, is the great malaise of our age.”9 The thought is dismal—but it is not clear which institutions might help us shake off this malaise.

Notes1. I here owe a debt to Bruce Miroff, Icons of Democracy: American Leaders as Heroes, Aristocrats,

Dissenters, and Democrats (St. Lawerence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

2. See here his classic Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley &Sons, 1960) and later Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadershipfrom Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1991).

3. www.nolabels.org: “No Labels is a citizens’ movement of Democrats, Republicans andindependents dedicated to a new politics of problem solving.”

4. Stephen Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraised (2ndedition) (St. Lawerence: University Press of Kansas, 2011).

5. Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Democratic Soul: A Wilson Carey McWilliams Reader, eds P.Deneen and S. McWilliams (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). And somewould now argue about Nixon.

6. Skowronek, op cit.

7. James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How TheyShape Our Lives with Nicholas A. Christakis (New York: Little, Brown, and Company,2009)

8. Benjamin R. Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (NewHaven, CT.: Yale Univesity Press, 2013).

9. Alexis de Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau (NewYork: Doubleday, 1959).

Essay

opening of a more original possibility of freedom, detached from the will.It focuses on the teaching of Heidegger.

I. “Free Will” as the Metaphysical Origin of Technique.A striking ambiguity pervades Kant’s ethics. On the one hand, Kant groundsethics in “pure” duty, free from all utilitarian calculation. On the other hand,pure duty is thought to rest upon the will to will, which, as the cornerstone ofmodern metaphysic, culminates in the sway of technique, and the reductionof all good to the “value” of means, i.e. the radical opposite of pure duty. ThusKant’s law of duty ends up being destroyed by the very ground it lays for itself.

For present purposes, it suffices to read one sentence, perhaps themost widely misunderstood of all his ethics, namely the first sentence ofthe first chapter of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten :

Es ist überall nichts in der Welt, ja überhaupt auch ausser dersel-ben zu denken möglich, was ohne Einschränkung für gut könntegehalten werden, als ein guter Wille.

Roughly translated, the German words say: “It is impossible to thinkof anything in the world, or indeed outside of the world, that could beheld as good without limitation, other than a good will.” In brief: No goodcan be thought unlimited, other than a good will.

What is a “will”? To Kant, the will is a power of the understanding topropose to itself an aim, and to move itself to actualize this aim; that is, tobring the aim into actuality, to cause the effectuation of the proposed end.

What then is a “good” will? The power to will is good, in Greek ἀγαθόν,insofar as it is indeed fit to will, and thus itself desirable as an aim of willing.

Only such a good will can be good “without limitation,” i.e. uncondi-tionally, absolutely, infinitely good. A good is absolute if it must always bewilled along with the willing of every other contingent good a will may pro-pose to itself. Then every willing, however contingent, harbors in itself anabsolute will to will, by virtue of which the will actualizes itself as will, causesitself actually to be a good will. The Kantian concept of a will to will followsfrom the Cartesian cogito, cogito me cogitare, in accordance with which everythought rests upon a fulfillment of the self as a being who thinks.

This absolutely good will to will is the causa prima, the first cause, ofall possible willing of the good. As cause prima, it must be causa sui, the solecause of its own actualization. Causa prima and causa sui are long estab-lished names of the god of metaphysic.

The Destiny of Freedom Philippe Nonet 4342 HA Essay

The Destiny of FreedomPhilippe Nonet1

Ἀρχὰ μεγάλας ἀρετᾶς῎ωνασσ’ Ἀλάθεια, μὴ πταίσῃς ἐμάνσύνθεσιν τραχεῖ ποτὶ ψεύδειPindar, fragment 205

Origin of what fits [man] for greatness,queen Alètheia, may you never make myunderstanding stumble upon harsh deceit

The following remarks may seem to present a sketch of the history of free-dom in modern times, namely from Kant to Heidegger. They do notintend to do so. They do not concern history as such—that is, as the suc-cession of events in the passing of calculable time. They concern the pastonly insofar as it opens a destiny for modern man. Hence their title: “TheDestiny of Freedom.”

The past indeed puts modern man before the necessity of a decisionregarding the future of freedom, a necessity that he can evade, but only atthe greatest danger. To anticipate, the following argument in brief is this:

Until today, freedom has been thought as an attribute of the will,indeed as the will’s highest possibility. However, “freedom of thewill” attains its most extreme power in the rise of modern tech-nique. Technique in turns threatens to extinguish human freedom.“Freedom of the will” thus turns into an illusion that conceals aradical form of servility, such as mankind has never known before.

When this illusion and concealment become apparent to modern man,there opens the possibility of a new birth of freedom, now grounded in whatHeidegger called “the truth of being,” “die Wahrheit des Seins;” “truth” hereemployed in the Greek sense of ἀλήθεια, namely “un-concealment.” Sogrounded, freedom itself is freed from the will’s imprisonment in technique.

The remarks are accordingly divided in two parts. The first concerns“free will” as the metaphysical origin of technique, and ranges from Kantto our times. The second concerns the present sway of technique as the

All this follows from the principle that the essence of “life,” namelythe essence of “being” in the sense of das Sein, is will to power. The lawthat governs its fulfillment is “the eternal recurrence of the same,” the for-mal structure of which is identical with Kant’s “categorical imperative”:“always act in such a way that you may will your deed eternally to recur.”

In our times, when the age of technique comes into full sway, Westernmankind (with the rare exception of a few descendants of Nietzsche,notably R. M. Rilke and E. Jünger) ceases to ask metaphysical questions,with the consequence that the will to will becomes unchallenged, andtransforms itself in unexamined ways. All matters concerning humanityare now referred to the “sciences of man” (biology, history, psychology,sociology), all of which are constitutionally incapable of even posing anyquestion regarding the essence of man.

In accordance with the teachings of Nietzsche, the concept of “value”comes to exclude all other possible forms of the good, and guarantees inprinciple that all human ends are possible objects of calculation, radicallycommensurable and thus interchangeable. In lawyers’ parlance, all goodsbecome res fungibiles.

At the same time, the will loses all character of self-command and self-surpassment. Its freedom, now conceived of as the power to dispose of allforces of nature, becomes a never-ending task at which man is to devotehis labor. The homo animal rationale turns into the homo animal laborans:labor takes the place of reason as the destiny of man.

Thus the freedom of the will gives birth to universal servitude, anastonishing phenomenon long ago pointed out by Nietzsche (Also sprachZarathustra, Vorrede, par. 5, and Dritter Teil, “Von der verkleinernden Tugend”:“Ich diene, du dienst, wir dienen.”) and later again by Max Weber, whocoined the phrase “die herrenlose Sklaverei,” slavery without master(Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 709), and last but not least by E. Jünger (DerArbeiter, passim). [See Appendix 1]

Now the question arises: What is it to which this servility gives obedi-ence? One answer to it, and so far the only answer known to mankind, isto be found in the thinking of Heidegger.

II. Das Gestell and the Service of Being (das Sein).Heidegger’s answer says: the domination (die Herrschaft) to which modernman has fallen into servitude is that of a “law,” but a law of a distinct kind,for which we have no name in English. Heidegger calls it “das Gestell.” The


Such a good will is “pure,” that is, unaffected by causes alien to its ownpower. It is entirely determined by laws it gives itself in accordance withits own essence. Thus it is absolutely “free.” Freedom, so conceived, is thepower of a will to actualize itself in accordance with its own essence.

As the summum bonum, the highest good, such a free will is the being,das Seiende, that most is, the summum ens, in German, das Seiendste, inPlatonic Greek, τὸ ὄντως ὄν. This highest “being,” in the substantive senseof das Seiende, fulfills in itself the essence of “being,” in the verbal sense ofdas Sein. Accordingly, the essence of being is willing.

Here are, in a nutshell, the fundamental principles of modern meta-physic since Kant. They remain unchanged all the way through our times,however oblivious modern man may be of the way they still govern hismind. They aim to show a presence of god in man in the form of anunconditional will—and an unconditional obligation—to will freely.

We must, for want of time, pass over the thought of Hegel andSchelling, who, on present matters, do not differ from Kant. We now turnbriefly to the last of the great thinkers in the history of metaphysic,Nietzsche, whose work precedes the extinction of metaphysical inquiryunder the sway of technique. (For an overview and basic references, seethe table at the end of this section.) As the following hints indicate,Nietzsche’s thought is, at bottom, an extreme form of Kantianism, albeitinverted.

With him, the Kantian will to will takes the form of “will to power.” “Will” here is the power of a being to command itself, i.e. (as Kant

would say) to give itself laws. “Power” is the will’s mastery of the conditionsof its causal effectiveness. The will to power commands itself to commandthe fulfillment of its “values,” namely of the ends it posits for itself as meansto the preservation and enhancement of its power.

Among the highest values of the will is “truth,” the illusory “knowledge”by which the will seeks to secure the power it has gained. (Compare withKant’s account of the transcendental constitution of objects of experience.)

But higher still is the value of “art,” which stimulates the will toenhance its power, and thus to attain ever higher levels of “life” (i.e. will).(Compare with Kant’s account of beauty and the teleology of nature).

The will to power is thus, ultimately, a will to surpass itself. Man him-self is nothing but a “bridge” for passing over to the “overman.”

Accordingly, this will to power deifies itself as the god of the highestlife, Dionysos, the being (das Seiende) who “lives,” and therefore “is,” themost (das Seiendste), the summum ens.

Bestellens. Things are thus robbed of their being (Sein): They are uprootedfrom their formerly essential relations to man and God, to sky and earth,to past and future. That is to say, they become worldless, insofar as worldsignifies the opening of the openness of those essential differences.

In proportion as things cease to be, man experiences a correspondingimpoverishment of his own existence, namely the loss of all capacity tomarvel, to wonder, to revere, and the corresponding debasement of lan-guage. This impoverishment shows itself in the massive boredom fromwhich modern man suffers to no end, as he needs always to be somewhereother than where he is, craving forever “new” distraction and excitement.

But the abandonment of being, die Seinsverlassenheit, is nothing tobemoan as mere privation. The devastation of beings (die Verwüstung desSeienden) shows the power of evil in being (das Sein). This showing, how-ever, entails the first emergence of being (das Sein) out of centuries of obliv-ion in Western history. (On this point, a key text of Heidegger is discussedin the table attached at the end of this section.) At bottom, “das Gestell” isthe first revelation, albeit in disguise, of the law, das Gesetz, of the mutualbelonging of being (das Sein) and man. Heidegger calls this law “dasEreignis,” that by virtue of which being and man are destined to be eachother’s “own.” “Das Gestell,” says Heidegger, “ist der Schleier des Ereignisseserstes Erblitzen,” the veil of first lightning of das Ereignis (Vorträge undAufsätze, marginal note f, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 7, p. 20).

The imperiousness of “das Gestell” shows how being (das Sein) lays aclaim upon the service of man. It demands that man attend to the uncon-cealment of beings (das Seiende) in the openness of truth as ἀλήθεια, dieLichtung des Seins, i.e. “the clearing of being.” Technique itself is in the endonly one mode of such unconcealment.

The deceptiveness of “das Gestell” reveals how being (das Sein) deniesitself unconcealment in its own truth. It conceals itself, and so sends manon the pursuit of misleading metaphysical representations of being (dasSein), thus furthering distortions of man’s own essence as the being (dasSeiende) who understands being (das Sein). The truth of being, die Wahrheitdes Seins, therefore requires an unconcealment of the concealment of being(das Sein): the saying of the mystery of being, das Geheimnis.

Being’s abandonment of beings, die Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden,reveals how man’s own flourishing is bound to the richness of the worldhe inhabits, and thus to the care with which he serves the truth of being,die Wahrheit des Seins. This service of truth is no servitude. “Das Gestell”brings servitude only insofar as its exclusive pursuit of expendable energy


word is untranslatable. Like Gesetz, the common German name for “posi-tive law,” Gestell is formed from the passive participle of a verb: “stellen.”

Stellen conveys above all the extraordinarily imperious character ofGestell. It does not only guide man, it compels him. This law is indeed a“higher” law, to which all other law must conform. Characteristically, itcompels all legal thought to recast itself in the form of policy calculation.Most generally, it compels man to think technically: Gestell summons allmankind to summon all nature (including mankind) to release energy foraccumulation at man’s disposal (bestellen). Thus it threatens to transformman himself into a disposable “resource.”

At the same time as Gestell reduces man to servitude, it misrepresents(verstellen) technical thought as an instrument in the hands of man, a toolby means of which man enlarges the power of his will, and elevates himselfto “lordship over the earth.” The law induces the metaphysical illusionthat technique is a promise of “freedom” and “progress” through science.

Imperious and deceptive as it may be, this law, by virtue of which tech-nique rules over modern man, does not issue from will at all, be it the willof God or the will of man, be it by command, or enactment, or contract.Gestell is no positive law at all. It does not issue from any “posing.”

From where then, or from whom, or from what does “Gestell” pro-ceed? Answer: From nowhere, from no one, and from nothing. “Gestell”can be traced to no being, “kein Seiendes,” that could function as its“ground.” It is a groundless explosion of groundless grounding, an irra-tionality of rationality.

But this “no-thing” is not nothing at all. “Das Nichts,” as Heidiggersays, “ist der Schleier des Seins,” the no-thing is the veil of being (Was istMetaphysik? Nachwort, p.52). What shows itself in “das Gestell,” in its impe-riousness as well as in its deceptiveness, is being in the sense of “Das Sein,”which “is” “nicht selbst ein Seiendes” (Sein und Zeit, p. 6), not itself a being inthe sense of das Seiende. Heidegger’s thinking owes its depth to this insight,which sets it apart from all attempts at causal explanations of modernity.The insight is rooted in Heidegger’s profound experience of dieSeinsverlassenheit des Seienden, the abandonment of das Seiende by das Sein.

Under the spell of “das Gestell,” all beings are turned into disposableand fungible quantities of energy. In Kant and Nietzsche, and already inDescartes, things were reduced to the standing of objects (Gegenstand)capable of representation (Vorstellen) for the purpose of scientific-technicalinquiry. With technique, even objects dissolve: They become measuredamounts of “value” capable of being expended: der bestellbare Bestand des

Appendix 1Notes on Free Will

Kant:

“Es ist überall nichts in der Welt, ja überhaupt auch außer derselben zu denken möglich,was ohne Einschränkung für gut könnte gehalten werden, als allein ein guter Wille.”Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in Werke, IV, p. 393 (1785).

Der Wille ist eine Art von Causalität lebender Wesen, so fern sie vernünftig sind, und Freiheitwürde diejenige Eigenschaft dieser Causalität sein, da sie unabhängig von fremden sie bes-timmenden Ursachen wirkend sein kann.Ibid., p 446.

Schelling:

“Es gibt in der letzten und höchsten Instanz gar kein andres Sein als Wollen. Wollen istUrsein.”Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit, in Sämmtlishe Werke, ErsteAbteilung, 7. Band, p. 350 (1809).

Hegel:

“Der Boden des Rechts ist überhaupt das Geistige und seine nähere Stelle undAusgangspunkt der Wille, welche frei ist, so das die Freiheit seine Substanz und Bestimmungausmacht und das Rechtssystem das Reich der verwirklichten Freiheit, die Welt des Geistesaus ihm selbst hervorgebracht, als eine zweite Natur, ist.”Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, § 4 (1820).

Nietzsche:

“Unser Intellekt, unser Wille, ebenso unsere Empfindungen sind abhängig von unserenWertschätzungen: diese entsprechen unseren Trieben und deren Existenzbedingungen.Unsere Triebe sind reduzirbar auf den Willen zur Macht.

Der Wille zur Macht ist das letzte Factum, zu dem wir hinunterkommen.”Kritische Studienausgabe, Bd. 11, p. 661; Grossoktav Ausgabe, Bd. XVI, p. 415 (1885).

“Man liebt zuletzt seine Begierde, und nicht das Begehrte.”Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 175 (1886).

“Lieber will noch der Mensch das Nichts wollen, als nicht wollen ...”Zur Genealogie der Moral, III, § 28 (see also § 1) (1887).


rules out a wealth of other ways of unconcealment, and so impedes theflowering of the essence of man. Far from bringing servitude, the serviceof truth is nothing other than the service of freedom.

The essence of freedom lies indeed in the essence of truth. “Freiheit istdie Zugehörigkeit in das Eigentum des Seyns. Das Eigentum des Seyns is die wesendeWahrheit als Lichtung des Verbergung.” Freedom is belonging into the prop-erty of being. The property of being is essential truth as the clearing ofconcealment (Die Geschichte des Seyns, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 69, par. 174).

Kant already knew the identity of freedom and truth (Grundlegung zurMetaphysik der Sitten, p. 448). Indeed, he thought of thinking (in the serviceof truth) as a kind of willing (in the service of freedom). Accordingly, justas he conceives truth as an attribute of thought (namely the adaequatio intel-lectus ad rem, the accordance of thought with thing), he also regards free-dom as a property of the will. In this, he follows a longstanding traditionthat originates in Ancient Greece.

Heidegger points out that an accordance of thought and thing mustrest upon a prior disclosure of beings (das Seiende) in the openness of theunconcealment of being (das Sein). In this openness lies the ground of bothtruth and freedom. To free a being (ein Seiendes) is to save it, that is, to letit stand in truth in accordance with its own way to be (Sein). The essenceof freedom is the capacity to free, i.e. to let be: “Im Seinlassenkönnen, nichtim Anordnen und Beherrschen beruht die Freiheit,” freedom rests in the abilityto let-be, not in ordaining and mastering (Feldweggespräche, GesamtausgabeBd. 77, p. 230). Of all beings, man alone is granted the capacity to letbeings (himself and others) be themselves, which capacity always restsupon the simultaneous gift of the being of beings (das Sein des Seienden).Over that gift, he has no power other than to refuse it. Man alone is thuscharged with the guardianship of truth, i.e. freedom.

Modern mankind is then faced with the necessity of a decision regard-ing freedom. Either it remains committed to freedom in the Kantian senseof freedom of the will, and so condemns itself to servitude in the exclusiveservice of technique as will to will, or it sees the essence of “das Gestell,”and surrenders all thought of the absolute self-determination of the will,be it that of the individual or that of a people (autonomy, democracy, sov-ereignty). Having let go of the will to will, man would have freed himselfto place himself in the service of freedom proper, as guardianship of theunconcealment of being. [See Appendix 2]

50 HA Essay

Appendix 2Note on “Die Kehre.”

A key statement occurs in Die Technik und die Kehre, Opuscula edition, p. 40 (GesamtausgabeBd. 11, p. 118):

“Das Wesen des Gestells ist die Gefahr. Als die Gefahr kehrt sich das Sein in die Vergessenheit seinesWesens von diesem Wesen weg und kehrt sich so zugleich gegen die Wahrheit seines Wesens. In derGefahr waltet dieses noch nicht bedachte Sichkehren. Im Wesen der Gefahr verbirgt sich darum dieMöglichkeit einer Kehre, in der die Vergessenheit des Wesens des Seins sich so wendet, daß mit dieserKehre die Wahrheit des Wesens des Seins in das Seiende eigens einkehrt.”

“Das Gestell” is the summoning claim that das Sein lays upon the essence of man.

“Die Gefahr” is das Verstellen des Gestells, by virtue of which it (das Gestell) presents techniqueas a means in the hands of man. That deception is the instrumental and anthropologicaldetermination of the essence of technique. That is: the metaphysical account of techniqueas a means of the will to power, i.e. the will to will.

As this Verstellen, das Sein “turns itself ” into the forgottenness of its Wesen, and thus away fromthis Wesen, and against the truth of its Wesen, namely the clearing of das Sein. This turn is themovement by which, while letting das Seiende appear in the clearing of das Sein, das Sein itselfwithdraws from the clearing and lets itself fall into oblivion. This turn is nothing other thanan extreme form of the Unterschied or Zwiefalt of Sein and Seiendes in the fulfillment ofnihilism, i.e. in metaphysic.

In the Wesen of this Verstellen, conceals itself the possibility of a reversing of this turn.

In this reversing, the forgottenness of being “turns itself ” in such a way that the truth of theWesen of das Sein turns-in eigens in das Seiende: namely in die Verwahrlosung des Dinges (p. 44),that is, die Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden. This too is nothing other than the Unterschied orZwiefalt in its most extreme form, the hidden Gunst in die Gefahr, das Rettende.

The opposite of die Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden is τὸ κάλλος. Hence the unique suitability ofποίησις and its τέχνη as counters to the nihilism of Gestell. It is “the unconcealing that brings-forth truth in the splendor of the shining,” and is thus “fromm, πρόμος, fügsam dem Waltenund Verwahren der Wahrheit” (p. 34). Perhaps then das Dichterische, ποίησις proper, can bringdas Rettende to shine in die Gefahr.

Note1. Emeritus Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley. This article was first read as a

series of two lectures at the Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College, in October 2012, and at theEdmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University, in January 2013. The author is gratefulfor the support of these institutions, and above all for the abiding friendship of ProfessorsRoger Berkowitz and Shai Lavi, who took greatest care of all preparations.

Quotes of the Week

She has in mind those consultants, talking heads, and commentatorsin and out of government who create logically convincing hypotheticalconstructions of future events. This could be the claim, heard so oftentoday, that if Iran gets a nuclear bomb they will use it, or that Al Qaedaand terrorism threaten the existence or freedoms of the United States.For Arendt, such claims always begin the same way, with a hypothesis.They state a possible outcome of a series of events. They then discuss anddismiss alternative possibilities. Finally, this hypothesis turns “immediately,usually after a few paragraphs, into a ‘fact,’ which then gives birth to awhole string of similar non-facts, with the result that the purely speculativecharacter of the whole enterprise is forgotten.” In other words, we movefrom the speculative possibility that Iran would use nuclear weapons, orthat terrorism is a meaningful threat to the United States, to the conclu-sion that these outcomes are facts. The danger of intellectuals in politicsis that they have a unique facility with ideas and arguments that are quitecapable of so enrapturing their own minds with the power of their argu-ments that they lose sight of reality.

When Arendt speaks about the danger of intellectuals in government,she has in mind the example of the Vietnam War. In her essay “Lying andPolitics”—a response to the Pentagon Papers—she hammers at the sametheme of the danger that intellectuals pose to politics. The PentagonPapers were written by and about “professional ‘problem solvers,’” whowere “drawn into government from the universities and the various thinktanks, some of them equipped with game theories and systems analyses,thus prepared, as they thought, to solve all the ‘problems’ of foreign pol-icy.” The John F. Kennedy administration is famous, very much as is thepresidency of Barack Obama, for luring the “best and the brightest” intogovernment service. We need to understand Arendt’s claim that suchproblem solvers are dangerous.

These “problem solvers,” she argues, were men of “self-confidence,who ‘seem rarely to doubt their ability to prevail.’” They were “not justintelligent, but prided themselves on being ‘rational,’ and they wereindeed to a rather frightening degree above ‘sentimentality’ and in lovewith ‘theory,’ the world of sheer mental effort.” They were men so familiarwith theories and the manipulation of facts to fit logical argumentation,that they could massage facts to fit their theories. “They were eager tofind formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language,that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality pre-sented them.” They sought to transform the contingency of facts into the

The Danger of Intellectuals Roger Berkowitz 5352 HA Quotes of the Week

The Danger of IntellectualsRoger Berkowitz

[T]here are, indeed, few things that are more frightening thanthe steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded braintrusters in the councils of government during the last decades.The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to “thinkthe unthinkable,” but that they do not think.—Hannah Arendt, “On Violence”

Hannah Arendt’s warning about the power of educated elites in govern-ment is one of the most counter-intuitive claims made by an irreverentlyparadoxical thinker. It is also, given her writing about the thoughtlessnessof Adolf Eichmann, jarring to see Arendt call Ivy League graduates withPh.D.s both dangerous and thoughtless. And yet Arendt is clear that oneof the great dangers facing our time is the prestige and power accordedto intellectuals in matters of government.

Arendt issues her warning in the introduction to her essay “OnViolence.” It comes amidst her discussion of the truth of Lenin’s predic-tion that the 20th century would be a “century of wars” and a “century ofviolence.”

And it follows her claim that even though the technical developmentof weapons have made war unjustifiable, war nevertheless continues forthe “simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in internationalaffairs has yet appeared on the political scene.” It is “under these circum-stances” of extraordinary violence, Arendt writes, that the entry of socialscientists and intellectuals into government is so profoundly frightening.

Whereas most political thinkers believe that in violent times we shouldwelcome educated and rational “scientifically minded brain trusters” ingovernment, Arendt is skeptical. Her reasoning is that these social scientistscalculate, they do not think. She explains what she means, writing that,

“Instead of indulging in such old-fashioned, uncomputerizableactivity, [scientifically minded brain trusters] reckon with the con-sequences of certain hypothetically assumed constellations with-out, however, being able to test their hypotheses against actualoccurrences.”

We see a similar flight from fact to theory in the Trayvon Martin case.Shameless commentators on the right continue to insist that race playedno role in the altercation, ignoring the fact of racism and the clear racialprofiling in this case. But similarly hysterical leftist commentators insistthat Zimmerman killed Martin primarily because of his race. Let’s stipu-late that George Zimmerman followed Martin in some part because of hisrace. But let’s also recognize that he killed Martin—at least according tothe weight of the testimony—from below after a struggle. We do not knowwho started the struggle, but there was a struggle and it is quite likely thatthe smaller and armed Zimmerman feared for his safety. Yes, race wasinvolved. Yes, racism persists. Yes, we should be angry about these sadfacts and should work to change the simply unethical environment inwhich many impoverished youths are raised and educated. But it is nottrue that Martin was killed primarily because of his race. It is also likelythat the only reason Zimmerman was put on trial for murder was to satisfythe clamor of those advancing their theory, the facts be damned.

If Arendt is justifiably wary of intellectuals in politics, she recognizestheir importance as well. The Pentagon Papers, which describe the folliesof problem solvers, were written by the very same problem solvers in anunprecedented act of self-criticism. “We should not forget that we owe itto the problem-solvers’ efforts at impartial self-examination, rare amongsuch people, that the actors’ attempts at hiding their role behind a screenof self-protective secrecy were frustrated.” At their best, intellectuals andproblem solvers are also possessed of a “basic integrity” that compels themto admit when their theoretical fantasies have failed. Such admissions fre-quently come too late, long after the violence and damage has been done.And yet, the fidelity to the facts that fires the best of intellectual and sci-entific inquiry is, in the end, the only protection we have against the self-same intellectual propensity to self-deception.

The Danger of Intellectuals Roger Berkowitz 5554 HA Quotes of the Week

logical coherence of a lawful and pseudo-scientific narrative. But since thepolitical world is not like the natural world of science, the temptation tofit facts to reality meant that they became practiced in self-deception. Thatis why the “hard and stubborn facts, which so many intelligence analystswere paid so much to collect, were ignored.”

For Arendt, the “best-guarded secret of the Pentagon papers” is the“relation, or, rather, nonrelation, between facts and decision” which wasprepared by the intellectual “defactualization” enabled by the problemsolvers. “No reality and no common sense,” Arendt writes, “could pene-trate the minds of the problem-solvers.”

Arendt’s suspicion of intellectuals in politics long predates her concernabout the Vietnam War, and began with her personal experience ofGerman intellectuals in the 1930s. She was shocked by how many of herfriends, and how many educated and brilliant German professors, lawyers,and bureaucrats—including but not limited to her mentor and loverMartin Heidegger—were able to justify and rationalize their complicity inthe administration of the Third Reich, often by the argument that theirparticipation was a lesser evil.

Similarly, she was struck by the reaction to her book Eichmann inJerusalem, in which intellectuals constructed elaborate critiques of her bookand her argument that had nothing at all to do with the facts of what shehad written. In both instances, Arendt became aware of the intellectualfacility for massaging facts to fit theories, and thus the remoteness fromreality that can infect those who live too easily in the life of the mind.

The Iraq War under George W. Bush, and the war on terrorismwaged under Bush and President Barack Obama are, today, clear exam-ples of situations in which now two U.S. administrations have convincedthemselves of the need for military action and unparalleled surveillanceof citizens under indisputably false pretenses. Iraq, contrary to assertionsthat were made by a policy of elite of brain-trusters, had no connectionwith the 9/11 attacks and had no nuclear weapons.

Similarly, terrorism today does not pose a threat to the existence orthe freedom of the United States. What terrorism threatens is the contin-ued existence of the United States as the world superpower. What we arefighting for is not our survival, but our continued predominance andpower. Some might argue that the fight for continued world dominanceis worth the costs of our privacy and liberty; others may disagree. But weshould at the very least be honest about what we are fighting for and whatthe costs of that fight are.

will ever confront the great works of our past in their most challengingform. Eventually, the watering down of once immortal works can make itdifficult or impossible to perceive the importance of culture and culturaleducation for humanity and our common world.

However, Arendt does not offer simply a banal critique of reality tel-evision as fast food. We might recognize a more insidious form of the risksshe describes in the new intellectualism that marks the politics, or anti-politics, of the tech milieu. What has been termed Silicon Valley’s anti-intellectualism should instead be understood as a forced colonization ofthe space potentially inhabited by the public intellectual.

The prophets of the tech world see themselves as fulfilling a social andpolitical duty through enterprise. They unselfconsciously describe theircreations as sources of liberation, democracy, and revolution. And yet theyeschew politics. Their abnegation of overt political activity is comprehen-sible in that, for them, “politics” is always already contained in the projectof saving the world through technological progress.

We see such exemplars of technological cultural salvation all aroundus. Scholars and cultural figures are invited to lecture at the “campuses”of Apple and Google, and their ideas get digested into the business modelor spit back out in the form of TED talks. Even Burning Man, originallya “counter-cultural” annual desert festival with utopian pretensions, hasbeen sucked into the vortex, such that Stanford professor Fred Turnercould give a PowerPoint lecture titled “Burning Man at Google: A culturalinfrastructure for new media production.” The abstract for his article inNew Media & Society is even more suggestive:

[…]this article explores the ways in which Burning Man’sbohemian ethos supports new forms of production emerging inSilicon Valley and especially at Google. It shows how elements ofthe Burning Man world—including the building of a sociotech-nical commons, participation in project-based artistic labor andthe fusion of social and professional interaction—help to shapeand legitimate the collaborative manufacturing processes drivingthe growth of Google and other firms.

Turner’s conclusion virtually replicates Arendt’s differentiationbetween 19th-century philistinism and the omniphagic nature of mass culture:

In the 19th century, at the height of the industrial era, the cele-bration of art provided an occasion for the display of wealth. In

The False Culture of Utility Jennifer M. Hudson 5756 HA Quotes of the Week

The False Culture of UtilityJennifer M. Hudson

“Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things,produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functionsfor the life process of society, as though they are there only to ful-fill some need, and for this functionalization it is almost irrelevantwhether the needs in question are of a high or a low order.” —Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture”

Hannah Arendt defines the cultural as that which gives testimony to thepast and, in preserving the past, helps constitute our common world. Acultural object embodies the human goal of achieving “immortality,” which,as Arendt explains in The Human Condition, is not the same as eternal lifeor the biological propagation of the species. Immortality concerns the lifeof a people and is ultimately political. It refers to the particular type oftranscendence afforded by political action. In “The Crisis of Culture,”Arendt demonstrates that culture has a political role insofar as it createsdurable and lasting objects that contribute to the immortality of a people.

The danger Arendt confronts in “The Crisis in Culture” is that massculture makes art disposable and thus threatens the ability of cultural lifeto produce lasting and immortal objects. The source of her worry is notan invasion of culture by the low and the base, but a sort of cannibalizationof culture by itself. The problem is that mass culture swallows culture andsubsumes it under the rubric of need. The immortal is degraded to a bio-logical necessity, to be endlessly consumed and reproduced. Durable cul-tural objects that constitute a meaningful political world are therebyconsumed, eroding the common world that is the place of politics.

Arendt’s point is first that mass culture—like all culture under thesway of society—is too often confused with status, self-fulfillment, or enter-tainment. In the name of status or entertainment, cultural achievementsare stripped down and repackaged as something to be consumed in thelife process. She would argue that this happens, for example, every timeHamlet is made into a movie or The Iliad is condensed into a children’s edi-tion. By making culture accessible for those who would use it to improvethemselves, the mass-culture industry makes it less and less likely that we

frictionless success and efficient progress, and these can be realized viathe technological fix. “It worked for us, what’s the matter with you?”

For Arendt, culture is not meant to be useful for employment or eventhe lofty purpose of self-cultivation; our relationship to culture nurturesour ability to make judgments. Kant’s discussion of taste and “commonsense” informs her notion of the faculty of judgment in art and politics.In matters of taste, judging rests on the human ability to enlarge one’smind and think with reference to an “anticipated communication withothers” and “potential agreement.” Common sense, as she uses it, “dis-closes to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world.”Culture and politics are linked in that both can only exist in a world thatis shared. She writes:

Culture and politics, then, belong together because it is not knowl-edge or truth which is at stake, but rather judgment and decision,the judicious exchange of opinion about the sphere of public lifeand the common world, and the decision what manner of actionis to be taken, as well as to how it is to look henceforth, what kindof things are to appear in it.

That culture and politics are about enacting judgments, rather than truthor technique for the advancement of biological life, is a point that is clearlymissed by the tech intellectuals. The establishment of utility as the sole goalof higher education represents only one section of a general lens throughwhich the world appears only as a series of practical problems to be figuredout. In this paradoxical utopia of mass accessibility, insulation, and narrow-mindedness, applied knowledge threatens to occupy and pervert cultureat the expense of political action and care for our common world.

The False Culture of Utility Jennifer M. Hudson 5958 HA Quotes of the Week

the 21st century, under conditions of commons-based peer pro-duction, it has become an occasion for its [i.e. wealth] creation.

The instrumentalization of culture within polite society has given wayto the digestion and reconstitution of culture in the form of gadgets meantto increase convenience. Would-be cultural objects become rungs on thehamster wheel of life’s progress. At the same time, progress as the ultimategoal of technological innovation declaring itself as culture is a vague con-cept because it is taken for granted. This is due to the self-contained andself-enclosed nature of the industry. Where progress is defined, it is simplydemonstrated through examples, such as the implementation of the smartparking meter or the use of cloud networking in order to better adminis-ter services to San Francisco’s homeless population.

In a recent New Yorker article on the tech revolutionaries, GeorgePacker writes, “A favorite word in tech circles is ‘frictionless.’ It capturesthe pleasures of an app so beautifully designed that using it is intuitive,and it evokes a fantasy in which all inefficiencies, annoyances, and griev-ances have been smoothed out of existence—that is, an apolitical world.”Progress here is the increasingly efficient administration of life.

When tech does leave its insular environment and direct its energiesoutward, its engagements reflect both its solipsism and focus on utility,which for Arendt go together. The Gates Foundation’s substantial invest-ments in higher education impose the quantitatively verifiable standardof degree completion as the sole or main objective, which seems odd initself, given Gates’s notoriety as a Harvard drop-out. The efforts of theFoundation aim less at placing Shakespeare in the hands of every fast-foodworker, and more toward redirecting all of cultural education toward thedevelopment of a cheap version of utilitarian aptitude. Such tech intellec-tualism will ask, “What is the point of slaving over the so-called classics?”The claim is that the liberal arts vision of university education is insepara-ble from elitist designs, based on an exclusive definition of what ‘culture’should be.

“What is the use?” is the wrong question, though, and it is tinged bythe solipsistic mentality of a tech elite that dares not speak its name. Thetech intellectual presents the culture of Silicon Valley as inherently egali-tarian, despite the fact that capital gains in the sector bear a large burdenof the blame for this country’s soaring rate of inequality. This false senseof equality fosters a naïve view of political and social issues. It also fuelstech’s hubristic desire to remake the world in its own image: life is about

giveness is an unanticipated, uncaused and undetermined act; it is trulyspontaneous. Arendtian forgiveness seems to take on a metaphysicalstature; it appears to be able to change the nature of reality, undoing theirreversible. It acts against necessity, undoing what was done by releasingthe doer from the deed.

In the last 60 years—notably in tribunals and reconciliation commis-sions characteristic of transitional justice—forgiveness has become a polit-ical and legal ideal in cases where massive moral injury threatens toextinguish human plurality and dignity. Seen as a willingness to continu-ally participate in an imperfect world with civility, those willing to forgivedemonstrate the ability to begin again, not only despite the social facts ofmoral injury and misrecognition, but also, as Arendt teaches, despite onto-logical facts of irreversibility, contingency, and unpredictability. Forgivingvictims who are able to respond creatively rather than vindictively are saidto escape the vicious cycle of violence and exemplify their moral agency.

What does forgiveness really do as a political tool? Arendt’s forgivenessresponds creatively to the fact of injury. What I’d like to suggest is thatArendt understands forgiveness as a cure for the irreversibility of action,not of violence. Unlike many contemporary (theological and secular) polit-ical views that see forgiveness as an act of compassion in response to atroc-ity, Arendt insists that forgiveness is an activity of politics.

Understood politically, forgiveness is about surviving these effects ofirreversibility. Because linear time shapes human experience, irreversibil-ity is unavoidable. Taking aim at what cannot be undone, forgivenessreleases actors from what would otherwise become a mechanistic or rou-tinized cycle of retaliation.

Arendt describes forgiveness as the act of constantly releasing the wrong-doer. Quoting Luke 17:3-4, she says “And if he trespass against thee . . .and . . . turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt release him.” If thewrongdoer shows signs of contrition or transformation, he should bereleased from the trespass.

In Roger Berkowitz’s essay “The Power of Non-Reconciliation” onHannahArendt.net about Arendt’s judgment of Eichmann, he argues thatArendt adopts the language of release or dismissal (which I find very sim-ilar to Nietzsche’s understanding of forgetting) in order to characterizethe action of forgiveness, a move that greatly limits the scope or reach offorgiveness. Berkowitz explains,

Arendt critically limits the province of forgiveness to minor tres-passes . . . As she notes, the Greek word in the Gospels tradition-

Forgiveness Grace Hunt 6160 HA Quotes of the Week

ForgivenessGrace Hunt

Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very natureof action’s constant establishment of new relationships within aweb of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing in order to goon by constantly releasing men from what they have doneunknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release fromwhat they do can men remain free agents, only by constant will-ingness to change their minds and start again can they be trustedwith so great a power as that to begin something new.—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt relates Augustine’s Christian con-cept of forgiveness to human action and agency. Forgiveness solves animportant problem inherent to the activity of action. Since “men neverhave been and never will be able to undo or even control reliably any ofthe processes they start through action,” human beings are met with thedisabling reality of processes whose outcomes are both unpredictable andirreversible. Knowing that our actions may lead to evil or unhappiness,why would anyone take the risk of action at all? Remarkably, Arendt findsthe remedy to this predicament within the faculty of action itself. The anti-dote for irreversibility is forgiveness, which “serves to undo the deeds ofthe past” by releasing actors from the consequences of their actions.

The beauty of forgiveness is that it interrupts otherwise automaticprocesses. For example, forgiveness enables actors to become freed fromvengeance, “which encloses both doer and sufferer in the relentlessautomatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to anend.” Within the space created by the interruption, forgiveness creates anew relationship that is radically different from what existed before.

As something startlingly new, forgiveness is not conditioned by thewrong that provokes it and it can therefore never be predicted. Arendtadmits as much. She explains, “forgiving, in other words, is the only reac-tion which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly.”Released from vengeful reactions, I can act in ways that are not predeter-mined or compelled by another’s trespasses against me. In this sense, for-

This is our first clue that the offenses to which forgiveness respondsare within the reach of dismissal, whereas crimes against the human statusare not. Moreover, forgiveness releases those who “unknowingly” trans-gressed. The predicament of action is that people cannot know the con-sequences of their actions (action is unpredictable). When the act isintended to harm, the law calls for punishment. It would be a mistake,therefore, to think that Arendtian forgiveness is intended to cure anythingoutside the realm of action.

It is a striking absence that Arendt did not refer to the concept of for-giveness as it is developed in The Human Condition in her decision inEichmann in Jerusalem. And yet Arendt wasn’t attempting to create a com-plete system of concepts across her work. As her views changed, her con-cepts also shifted. But having in mind the limits of Arendt’s forgivenesscan nonetheless, I think, help us understand her judgment againstEichmann. Because Eichmann’s decisions and rule-following annihilatedspontaneity and plurality, he cannot be released from his deeds.

Forgiveness Grace Hunt 6362 HA Quotes of the Week

ally translated as “forgiveness” is aphienai, which Arendt suggestsmeans to “dismiss” and “release” rather than “forgive.” As arelease, Arendt’s defense of forgiveness does not reach the forgiv-ing of crimes and sins. Instead, forgiveness is limited to the “con-stant mutual release” that allows men to continue to act in theworld.

People can release each other, but the capacity as denoted by the orig-inal Greek amounts to dismissal rather than pardon or exoneration.

Whereas forgiveness releases, its opposite, vengeance, binds people tothe past crime and to the process of reaction. Vengeance, unlike forgive-ness, is not creative of new possibilities for action. Instead, it “acts in theform of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from puttingan end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains boundto the process.” But note that it is the deterministic character that threat-ens the sphere of action and which morphs a trespass into an unforgive-able crime. The magnitude of the crime is a necessary—but notsufficient—condition for crimes against plurality.

Unlike the common imperialist tactic of legalized discrimination,Arendt explains in Eichmann in Jerusalem that war crimes committed bytotalitarianism gave rise to the unprecedented:

It was when the Nazi regime declared that the German peoplenot only were unwilling to have any Jews in Germany but wishedto make the entire Jewish people disappear from the face of theearth that the new crime, the crime against humanity—in thesense of a crime “against human status,” or against the very natureof mankind—appeared.

She continues,Expulsion and genocide must remain distinct; the former is anoffense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack uponhuman diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the‘human status’ without which the very worlds ‘mankind’ or‘humanity’ would be devoid of meaning.

Arendt described such actions as those which “transcend the realm ofhuman affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which theyradically destroy wherever they make their appearance.” Eichmann’sactions destroyed human potentiality. Arendt cannot forgive such crimes.

of kill lists and drone strikes and the power of due process for Americansaccused of terrorism. We weigh our powerlessness in the face of globalwarming against the powerlessness caused by the Great Recession, wherethe hoped-for “recovery” will be defined by consumption-led “growth,”rendered tangible by lower gas prices and more crowded shoppingmalls. Or, we may think that U.S. power in the globalizing world of freetrade and faster capital flows is dependent upon “securing our nationalborders,” achieved through the quasi-militarization of immigrationenforcement. Hard choices are the stuff of politics—they are supposed tobe what power is all about—but the dilemmas of modern powerlessnessare peculiarly wrenching, in large part because they are not readily nego-tiable by political action, by those practices of public creativity and initia-tive that are uniquely capable of redefining what is possible in the commonworld. Rather, these “choices” and others like them seem more like dead-ends, tired old traps that mark the growing powerlessness of politics itself.

The death of the body politic, which can only occur by way of the pow-erlessness of politics itself, is Arendt’s main concern in the above quote. Incontrast to Hobbes, Rousseau, Weber, and Habermas, among others,Arendt distinguishes power from domination, strength, rationality, prop-aganda, and violence. Located within the open and common world ofhuman speech and action, power reveals its ethical and political limitswhen it is overcome by deception, empty words, destruction, and “bru-tality.” Rooted in the human conditions of natality and plurality, and con-stituted by the gathered actions of many in a public space of appearance,power exists only in its actualization through speech and deed. Likeaction, power depends upon the public self-disclosure of actors in histor-ical time. Actors acting together with other actors generate power. Yetbecause we do not know “who” we disclose ourselves to be in the courseof collective action, or what the effects of our actions will turn out to meanin the web of human stories, power itself is always “boundless and unpre-dictable,” which in part explains its peculiar force. Given its boundlessnessand unpredictability, power cannot be stored up for emergencies, likeweapons or food and water, nor kept in place through fixed territories, aswith national sovereignty. Power therefore co-exists only uneasily withmachpolitik. Power can overcome violence and strength through the gath-ered voices and acts of the many; it can also be destroyed (but notreplaced) through the dispersal of the many and the dissolution of thespace of appearance. In between gathering and dispersal, power is pre-served through what Arendt calls “organization,” the laws, traditions,

When Power Is Lost William Dixon 6564 HA Quotes of the Week

When Power Is LostWilliam Dixon

Power is actualized only where word and deed have not partedcompany, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, wherewords are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, andwhere deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establishrelations and create new realities.—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Arendt’s conception of power is one of the most subtle and elusive featuresof her political theory. Here Arendt poses the problem of power in termsof power’s loss, of powerlessness, which is also what she calls “the death ofpolitical communities.” What is powerlessness? What, exactly, is lost whenpower is lost?

There are many ways to become powerless in the world of 21st centurypolitics. In the United States we often imagine that citizens would be power-less without their constitutional rights—the vote, free speech, dueprocess. In and around the world’s many war zones, the loss of militaryprotection seems to produce a very different kind of powerlessness, onethat is linked to both our physical vulnerability to violence as humanbeings and the persistence of violence between sovereign states (and withinthem.) There is also the powerlessness that seems to follow from the dis-locations or migrations of peoples, a condition that Arendt calls masshomelessness, which may come from the movement of peoples across bor-ders, or the redrawing of borders across peoples. Poverty appears to beanother form of powerlessness altogether, one that disrupts our capacityto appropriate nonhuman nature through labor and work and therebysustain our lives. Arendt argues that mass destitution, alongside masshomelessness, is a form of powerlessness that is peculiar to the politicalcondition of the modern age.

Many other kinds of powerlessness can be added to this list. The listis disturbing not only for its variety and length, but also because the felturgency of each danger invites us to elevate one or two above the others,so that we risk settling for powerlessness of several kinds in order to securepower in one or two “emergency” domains. We choose between the power

Contributors 67

Contributors

Roger Berkowitz is academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center forPolitics and Humanities at Bard College. He is the author of The Gift ofScience: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition and coeditor of Thinking inDark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics and The Intellectual Originsof the Financial Crisis. He is editor of HA: The Journal of the Hannah ArendtCenter for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.

William Dixon, a former doctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center,teaches in the Bard Prison Initiative. He is a political theorist and a Ph.D.candidate in political science at Johns Hopkins University.

Grace Hunt is assistant professor of philosophy at Western KentuckyUniversity. She completed her Ph.D. in philosophy at The New School forSocial Research in New York in 2012. She is a former postdoctoral fellowat the Hannah Arendt Center.

Jennifer M. Hudson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Centerand teaches in the Bard Prison Initiative. She holds a Ph.D. in politicalscience (political theory) from Columbia University.

Philippe Nonet is professor of law (emeritus) at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley. He is the author (with Philip Selznick) of Law andSociety in Transition, among many other volumes.

Anne Norton is professor of politics at the University of Pennsylvania, andauthor of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire and 95 Theses onPolitics, Culture, and Method.

Tracy B. Strong is professor of political theory and philosophy at theUniversity of Southampton. He is the author of Politics Without Vision:Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century, among numerous otherbooks. From 1990 to 2000 he was editor of Political Theory.

Jeffrey K. Tulis is associate professor in the Department of Governmentat the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of The Presidency in theConstitutional Order and The Rhetorical Presidency, among other books.

66 HA Quotes of the Week

habits, and institutions that sustain the space of appearance during thoseinterims when actors disperse temporarily and withdraw back into the pri-vate realm, only to reappear later.

For Arendt, the loss of power is the loss of our capacity to act with oth-ers in a way that generates, sustains, and discloses a common world. Powerlessness is marked by the receding of public spaces. This may occur,for example, through the gentle decline of a formally constituted publicrealm into the technocratic shadows of the social, or through the brutalsovereign repression of spontaneously emergent spaces of appearance. Inboth cases, our ethical and political incapacities to act together, and thephilosophical inability to recognize power when we see it, are at the rootof modern political powerlessness. Power-seekers, in Arendt’s view, wouldbe well advised to cultivate a deeper political appreciation for both theimmaterial force and fragility of human natality, plurality, and publicspace, which will be lost when power is mistaken for its rivals, like reason,strength, violence, or sovereignty.

Editor Roger BerkowitzAssociate Editor Wyatt MasonAssociate Editor Jennifer SzalaiAssistant Editor Bridget Hollenback

Editorial Intern Matthew GoldsteinJosh Kopin, Amy Pedulla,Keziah Weir

Editorial Board Jerome KohnPatchen MarkellThomas Wild

ISSN 2168-6572

Cover: Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust

Published by The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College

Printed by Quality Printing, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

©2014 Bard College. All rights reserved.

About Bard College

Founded in 1860, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is anindependent, nonsectarian, residential, coeducational college offering afour-year B.A. program in the liberal arts and sciences and a five-yearB.A./B.S. degree in economics and finance. The Bard College Conservatoryof Music offers a five-year program in which students pursue a dualdegree—a B.Music and a B.A. in a field other than music—and offers anM.Music in vocal arts and in conducting. Bard also bestows an M.Musicdegree at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge,Massachusetts. Bard and its affiliated institutions also grant the followingdegrees: A.A. at Bard High School Early College, a public school with cam-puses in New York City (Manhattan and Queens) and Newark, New Jersey;A.A. and B.A. at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, in GreatBarrington, Massachusetts, and through the Bard Prison Initiative at sixcorrectional institutions in New York State; M.A. in curatorial studies, M.S.in economic theory and policy, and M.S. in environmental policy and inclimate science and policy at the Annandale campus; M.F.A. and M.A.T. atmultiple campuses; M.B.A. in sustainability in New York City; and M.A.,M.Phil., and Ph.D. in the decorative arts, design history, and material cul-ture at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Internationally, Bard con-fers dual B.A. degrees at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St.Petersburg State University, Russia (Smolny College); American Universityof Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan; and Bard College Berlin: A Liberal ArtsUniversity; as well as dual B.A. and M.A.T. degrees at Al-Quds Universityin the West Bank.

Bard offers nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions. Total enroll-ment for Bard College and its affiliates is approximately 5,000 students.The undergraduate College has an enrollment of more than 1,900 and astudent-to-faculty ratio of 10:1. For more information about Bard College,visit www.bard.edu.

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Documents

HA Journal: Volume II