Chantal Mouffe: The Return of the Political. New York: Verso, 1993.
John Exdell: “Feminism, Fundamentalism, and Liberal Democracy.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994) 441-464.

 

Chantal Mouffe and John Exdell offer contrasting, though equally vigorous, critiques of John Rawls’s political liberalism from the ‘Left.’ In some respects the unintended dialogue between themselves is more illuminating than either of their dialogues with Rawls.

Exdell brings Rawls before the bar of feminism, arguing that political liberalism fails to join the battle against “the fundamentalist values of the religious right” with sufficient force. Rawls apparently consigns those “values” to the private realm, ruling them out of public discourse. Not good enough, Exdell rejoins: “To achieve justice for women, liberals must abandon the search for a legitimating consensus and take sides in what may be the most impassioned cultural and political struggle of our time.” What goes on in families, houses of worship, and workplaces affects what goes on in the public sphere in a thousand ways.

Perhaps Rawlsian liberals will altogether refuse to intervene in private life, or perhaps they will intervene but only in ways legitimized by public discourse. Insofar as they do interfere, Exdell contends, liberals will encourage secularization, making themselves anathema to fundamentalists. Thus, given the authoritative character of the public sphere, particularly its governance of public schools, the liberal state will threaten the religiosity of the children of many fundamentalists. At the same time, these interventions will likely be too flaccid to satisfy feminists. Neither side will rest content with the relativism (or, to put it more cautiously, the self-limitation) of Rawlsian liberalism, and therefore will work to undermine it as the agent of peaceful pluralism.

Feminists demand regime change—specifically, “a form of democratic socialism” in which “the state can provide much of the material and educational resources” to reconstruct social institutions. These resources will include sex education, abortion rights backed by abortion provision, and “various measures to alter the balance of power between husbands and wives.” The means by which democratic socialism will arrive at decisions concerning such provision will not be based upon liberal-democratic (even if ‘progressive’) pluralist “consensus” à la Rawls. “The quest for legitimacy through consensus cannot be undertaken without betraying core liberal commitments to equality and self-determination for women.” Because Rawls’s ideology cannot secure these types of equality and self-determination, liberal democracy must give way to social democracy.

I am calling Exdell’s position ‘neo-Hobbesian.’ By Hobbesian I mean the use of state power to enforce equality and to impose opinions. In his characteristic tough-mindedness, Hobbes sees that social life constantly generates inegalitarian institutions; churches and other associations are breeding grounds for authoritarianism. The Hobbesian monarch to some degree recreates natural equality by re-atomizing society: All members of civil society will be equal before the One who is unequal, the One who will use his power to enforce equal conditions on all others. (In this enterprise, atomizing economic competition will replace polarizing religious contention.) At the same time, Hobbesian civil society avoids the poverty, nastiness, brutishness, and shortness of life in the state of natural equality by imposing ‘equality’—i.e., sameness—of opinions on his subjects.

By ‘neo’-Hobbesian I mean whatever it is that Exdell may mean by a statism that is social-democratic while at the same time ‘orthodox’ with respect to feminism. I am not sure exactly what that means, inasmuch as Exdell gives his readers no guidance. Monarchy need not apply, I trust, but some form of statism is involved. This state might or might not be overbearing; for example, it might use such mild means as tax incentives to foster family restructuring. Even so, tax incentives imply a tax code; a tax code implies tax lawyers to write the code and then spin through the revolving door to the ‘private sector’ in order to manipulate the code. This implies a certain priesthood, a certain inequality. Also, a state powerful enough to enforce a far-ranging tax code will likely gather inertia for any number of purposes, none of them unqualifiedly egalitarian. And of course the socialist side of social democracy must regulate and/or nationalize the means of production, again empowering the state apparatus. If the social-democratic state reaches into the household itself, as Exdell proposes, then it will need even more power at its disposal.

That is, the softer Hobbesianism gets the more it collapses into the arms of John Locke (‘liberal’ democracy). The softer Exdell’s neo-Hobbesian social democracy gets, the more it will look like Rawls’s liberal state, in practice if not in theory. The ‘harder’ it gets, it will end by out-Hobbesing Hobbes.

None of this will muffle Mouffe, who wants to get out from under liberalism, the Hobbes-Locke-Kant axis, altogether. Mouffe endorses Rawlsian pluralism, “the end of a substantive idea of the good life.” But she goes further. Do not recognize pluralism as a mere fact of modern life, she urges. View it rather as “constitutive at the conceptual level of the very nature of modern democracy.” That is, get rid of such overarching principles as natural right or the categorical imperative altogether and replace them with pluralism, plurality or ‘diversity’ as the principle of the regime. Liberalism from Locke onwards has wanted to preserve a balance between liberty and equality. Following Derrida, Mouffe wants for the first time to fuse liberty and equality by recognizing that equality must involve the perpetual deconstruction of all inegalitarian institutions. This sounds very much like Trotsky’s notion of the ‘permanent revolution,’ but apparently without the statism, apparently by starting with ‘the withering away of the state.’ Subordinating power relations can only be demolished freely, and the typical liberal problem of governing for equality can only be solved, by denying ‘essentialism’ and recognizing that “everything is constructed as difference.” Power is not an external relation among pre-constituted ‘atoms’ (as in Hobbes). Power constitutes the ‘atoms’ or identities themselves. E = MC, squared. Not Hobbesian or Lockean peace (a “dangerous utopia of reconciliation,” vulnerable to inegalitarian ossification) but Heraclitean conflict and flux can alone bring genuine equality or “democratic determinacy.” Professor Heidegger, meet the New Left.

Mouffe’s position might appear to lead toward the same goal as certain forms of ‘conservatism.’ Conservatism is obviously an empty term, its content dependent upon what a given ‘conservative’ wants to conserve. Throne and altar? The ‘free market’? The New Deal? There are at least two kinds of contemporary ‘conservatism that would oppose Exdell. Libertarianism of the sort defined by Murray Rothbard and Richard Epstein puts a premium not on equality but on liberty. It opposes inequality only insofar as it impinges upon personal liberty, and is particularly concerned with economic liberty. A second ‘conservatism,’ the small-government or Jeffersonian type espoused by such writers as the late M. E. Bradford and Thomas Fleming, would regard Exdell as the latest version of Herbert Croly—or maybe, horror of horrors, Abraham Lincoln—urging Hamiltonian means at the service of Jeffersonian ends. Sorry, they would say, but you can’t get to Monticello by way of Pennsylvania Avenue any more than you can get there by way of Wall Street. To these ‘conservatives,’ Mouffe would reply: smallness does not preclude inequality. It may only make it more concentrated and intense.

Even as Exdell does not say much about social-democratic statism, Mouffe does not say much about how the deconstructionist society would hold together—remain a society. It appears that Mouffe harkens to Derrida, who harkens to Heidegger, who harkens to Heraclitus. Mouffe and Derrida say that flux is not an invitation to authoritarianism, as Heraclitus and Heidegger evidently suppose, but the only ground (more accurately, anti-ground, anti-foundation) for radical equality. To which Hobbes would reply: ‘Congratulations. You have converted civil society into the state of nature, in which no human being will want to stay for long. Welcome back into my web, the tensile structure of egalitarian statism.’

Charles Taylor et al.: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

 

At the conclusion of his essay, “The Politics of Recognition,” Charles Taylor proposes a modest, decent neo-Burkeanism. The demand for cultural recognition can be prevented from sliding down the slope of relativism—a slide that would destroy the rationale for recognition itself—if liberal democrats view longstanding ‘cultures’ as likely to have respectable aspects, even if these are “accompanied by much that we have to abhor and reject” (72-73) in order to remain liberals and democrats. The “ultimate horizon” (73) or ‘end of history’ (when we can finally judge the worth of all cultures) has yet to be worked out. But we can make the provisional determination: The sheer fact of long-term survival suggests that a given ‘culture’ has or at least has had some real ‘strengths’ or virtues. Dialogue with its adherents should be fruitful; their cultural destruction might well be a loss not only to them but to members of the dominant culture. Taylor thus advocates a generous and prudent probabilism.

To this, the prominent feminist Susan Wolf responds in her “Comment” on Taylor’s argument: Women have long been recognized, all right, but this recognition has too often been restrictive or injurious to them (and, presumably, to self-deluded men as well). An appeal to the ‘long-standingness’ of a tradition cannot tell us which durable aspects of the tradition deserve abolition, and which deserve retention. What if the long-standing culture is compounded of a long series of abuses and usurpations?

Wolf is right, although the reason she is right cannot be found in her essay. In saying that non-recognition involves “insults and damage” (80), she too easily conflates insult and damage. Was the insulting gadfly Socrates damaging to Athenians—or beneficial? For surely feminism would insult and damage—indeed dismantle—any ‘culture’ of misogyny or patriarchy. If feminists say, ‘Destroying misogyny is good for the misogynist,’ that the best thing you can do for a pagtriarch is to depose him, in order to justify their claim they need some criterion not to be found in misogyny as such. To argue, as Wolf does at the end of her essay (84-85), that our own ‘culture’ will have hidden resources—that patriarchy (for example) will have aspects (e.g., the care for and protection of women) usable in a critique of patriarchy—may well be true. But it only gets us back to something like Taylor’s inter-cultural dialogue. Critique presupposes criteria. By what criteria can one launch a critique of a ‘culture’?

Wolf’s criticism of Taylor is right because Taylor refuses two themes Rousseau keeps apart: the citizen and the human being, the city and nature. I take this argument not in order to ‘catch’ Taylor in a misinterpretation of Rousseau, but in order to make the substantive point: Rousseau (and Hegel after him) see the problem of recognition more clearly than Taylor does.

As Taylor observes, Rousseau sets up the master/slave image, the import of which is a logical conclusion: I cannot ‘have’ the dignity I seek if I depend upon you for it. To be really ‘had,’ a thing must be inherent, either in the person, in the relationship with the ‘other,’ or both. Rousseau has at least two solutions to this master/slave dilemma. One is the political community described in the social contract, wherein man in ‘the state of nature’ exchanges natural for civil rights. In this model, equal respect is precisely social and therefore artificial; it is ‘built in’ by the Legislator. Taylor sees this quite clearly (48-49). The other solution is that of the Reveries. But the philosopher is no citizen. He is a solitary walker. Despite his very considerable degree of ‘culture,’ he remains—or rather becomes natural, in but not of whatever society he strolls through. His self-respect is ‘built in’ by his dialectical return to nature, to reason—his personal overcoming of ‘cultural’ detritus.

Taylor wants to combine these incommensurables. Whereas Rousseau requires the philosophic legislator of the social contract to disappear, Taylor wants something like a continual philosophic self-legislation within the political community. This assumes what Rousseau denies: that philosophers can somehow not only stay inside the political community but achieve that degree of prestige within it that would enable them to become legislators-in-residence.

One coherent way to do what Taylor wants to do, to marry tradition and Enlightenment, is to abandon democracy and make the Hegelian move: At the top of the political community will be not a philosopher-king but a monarch-sage (no mere wisdom-lover but a wise man). This is possible only if ‘history’ has ended, the slaughter-bench wiped clean and stored out of sight. But Taylor regards this aspect of Hegelianism as arrogant; multiculturalism in Taylor’s view demonstrates that ‘history’ is not over, at least insofar as ‘history’ has combined multiculturalism with democracy. The egalitarianism as much as the pluralism of modern democracy precludes any strong Hegelianism.

And so Taylor is stuck in a sort of nice guy’s muddle. Wolf is right: As a philosopher, Taylor is English-all-too-English, or perhaps Canadian-all-too-Canadian. To argue that liberal democracies should “weigh the importance of certain forms of uniform treatment against the importance of cultural survival, and opt sometimes in favor of the latter” (61) leaves the reader with no philosophic criterion for critique (or for affirmation). What is the scale upon which one is to do the weighing? Taylor’s neo-Hegelianism (more accurately, his democratic Burkeanism) leaves the philosopher, the ‘natural’ or reasoning person, without either the authority to legislate or the freedom to ‘walk.’ Taylor must make liberalism an “organic outgrowth of Christianity” (62), not a product of the collision (understood personally by Rousseau) of Christianity and modern philosophy. This not only distorts the history any historicist must rely upon, but it leaves citizen and philosopher alike adrift. There is too little dialectic in Taylorian ‘dialogue’ because he fails to separate dialectical reasoning form politics with Rousseauian rigor. He ends by reinventing (in academic life) Rousseau’s bourgeois: neither fully man nor wholeheartedly citizen. [1] If liberalism, as an allegedly organic outgrowth of Christianity, is a “fighting creed,” Taylor’s liberalism will leave the citizen-soldier unsure of what he or she is fighting for. [2]

Taylor’s paradigm is not devoid of all defenses against Wolf’s criticism, although they will not likely hold. The best move might be to make political and social egalitarianism the explicit criterion by which he will assess, reject, and appropriate ‘cultural’ traditions, mirroring one aspect of the Constant/Tocqueville response to Burke’s critique of the French revolutionaries. That is, he could say that democracy is still inevitable in the modern world.

A cautious way to make Taylorian traditionalism consistent with feminism would be to argue for an egalitarian version of the division of labor. Tradition requires men to hunt, women to gather, and, more recently, for men to bring home the bacon and women to cook it. Applying the egalitarian principle, societies would reward these activities equally. Married couples would enter a family benefit system, whereby all income is legally required to go into a joint account, with benefits, pensions, and other disbursements requiring consent of both parties. Such reforms would work better in economic life than in political life, where rights for women cannot be described as longstanding and participation cannot be compartmentalized so easily. There, Taylor would need to argue that the logic of longstanding democratic traditions requires women’s equal political rights. Moreover, even on the economic level such laws would miss the point of ‘second-wave’ feminism, which is about equal opportunity, not only equal economic rewards.

More radically, he democratic principle of equality could be used as a sociopolitical version of Ockham’s razor, cutting out those parts of tradition that are patriarchal, allowing those parts of tradition that are egalitarian to grow unimpeded. An advantage of ‘radicalized’ Taylorian feminism over some other forms of feminism would be an opportunity to retain ‘masculinism,’ i.e., whatever practices from the patriarchic tradition that still serve democratic purposes. Such an approach could (for example) seek ways of counteracting the feminization of poverty caused by gutter Rousseaus who walk away from households. The dismantling of patriarchy need not mean the destruction of fatherhood and its responsibilities. And of course (under the terms of egalitarianism) reciprocity in fatherly benefits (such as time with children) would go along with the responsibilities.

The danger of radicalized Taylorism would be the danger of pulling pieces out of any tradition. Can the virtues of a ‘culture’ survive the elimination of its defects? At some point, such pruning might damage the ‘organic’ tree of Taylorian traditionalism. The more any abstract criterion (such as equality) dominates, the less ‘organic’ things get.

In some sense, then, Wolf’s challenge looks sound. In Taylor’s defense it could be said, one could do worse, much worse, than to be ‘English.’ One can surely ‘think’ better, philosophize better than English dons do. Can one also do better, have a better politics than the politics of quiet, decent Canada? Looking around the world, one might say, ‘Maybe, but not everywhere and always.’

 

Notes

1. A concrete example of this error may be seen in Taylor’s discussion of Frantz Fanon (69). Taylor treats Fanon as a spokesman for the ‘Third World,’ thereby ignoring Fanon’s forthright Marxism-Leninism, with its clear set of criteria for judging any tradition. There is obviously nothing more ‘Western,’ more a part of modern rationalism, than Marxism; it is anything but an outgrowth of any tradition or traditions indigenous to the ‘Third World.’
2. In contrast, Wolf has the merit of insisting on knowing exactly what she’s fighting for. But although she knows what she believes, she does not indicate how she might attain a characteristic philosopher’s insight: that she knows she doesn’t know. She does not begin to think of a way of living the philosophic life in a democratic regime.

I. Back to the Political
In Book VIII, Socrates resumes the argument interrupted at the beginning of Book V. There the manly Polemarchus and the seeming-moderate Adeimantus raised the issue of women and children held in common. This turned out to be the problem of philosophy, the problem of Socrates in Athens. Having returned to the cave after glimpsing the philosopher, who glimpses the Good, Glaucon recalls the threat that dropped, Now that political philosophy has been inaugurated, Socrates is free to inaugurate political science.

There were four remaining regimes in addition to that of the philosopher-kings. Socrates describes their nature, including their genesis. Each regime honors a particular human type, characterized by a particular form of eros. The man of the aristocratic regime loves justice; the timocrat loves victory, ruling, and honor; the oligarch loves money; the democrat loves license; the tyrant is, so to speak, in love with love.

a. Aristocrats
Why do philosopher-kings, lovers of the best, lose track of the eugenics plan and thus lose rulership of the city? Perhaps because you can’t philosophize and rule at the same time? (It IS difficult to think and command at the same time.) Perhaps because you can drag the philosopher out of the sunshine, but not the sunshine out of the philosopher? That is to say: because the philosopher’s heartfelt opinion of the city is, ‘Let it slide’? Chance, not choice, rules the city, Publius to the contrary.

b. Timocrats
The eros of thumotic men depends too much upon unstable things. The children of the men who do not share in the city’s honors are corrupted by mothers who secretly deride decent but unsuccessful fathers. (Raskolnikov’s mother does that: Crime and Punishment is an Orthodox Christian rewrite of the Republic.) Honor itself is unstable, a kind of opinion; opinion, notoriously can shift from day to day. The love of money, the timocratic love that dares not speak its name, undermines timocracy in a thousand ways.

c. Oligarchs
Having dropped the mask of honor, men now openly love gain. Money being theoretically limitless, oligarchs finally cannot maintain the self-government necessary to discipline the quest. Rich kinds run riot, “gripped by the love of changer” (555d). (This is yet another illustration of the towering genius of Bill Clinton, who finished off the regime of the 1980s by crying “Change! Change!” to a bored and surfeited people. The man is a Platonist, when not an Epicurean.) The city splits between rich and poor. The many poor wrest the ruling offices from the few rich.

d. Democrats
Democracy is the most beautiful regime (557c) and “a sweet regime,” too (558c). It “dispens[es] a certain equality among equals and unequals alike” (558c)—and therefore is not very just. But, in its license, it permits a thousand flowers—some of the ragweed—to bloom in full luxuriance. It is therefore by far the most instructive regime for would-be founders (557d), and a fine subject for philosophic inquiry. In its license it tolerates philosophic inquiry, to a point. The democrat’s soul comes to believe that all desires are equal. It eagerly hears “false and boasting speeches” (560c). It does not want to hear a painful truth, which is why it will finally kill Socrates. It prefers to dream of a ‘Marxian’ utopia (561c-d), flattering itself as it reveals itself in daydreams. No wonder its teachers fear and imitate the young. Soon a demagogue will arise, purging the city of the ‘enemies’ of the many who are poor. Can equality and extreme liberty or license ever cohere for long?

e. Tyrants
The love the tyrant is in love with is eros in its most material form. The erotic tyrant takes the place once occupied by the philosopher-king. The tyrants lives the life democrats secretly want. He is the wish-fulfillment of the democrat, who was the wish-fulfillment of the oligarch, who was the wish-fulfillment of the timocrat, who was not the wish-fulfillment of the philosopher, whose wishes are fulfilled, or at least not frustrated in such a way as to contradict, destroy, himself. Because he loves only things, wants all of them for himself, and is therefore the enemy of all, the tyrant “never tastes freedom or true friendship” (576a). The tyrant is “in truth a real slave” of flatterers (579e). The tyrant’s soul is “forcibly drawn by a gadfly” (577e); elsewhere in the dialogues, Socrates compares himself to a gadfly, stinging the sleepy horse that is Athens; perhaps Athens, perhaps any city, is a sort of tyrant, now somnolent, now frenzied. All the citizens of the real cities (after the nowhere-regime of aristocracy or philosophic kingship) had material eros driving them.

II. Back (briefly) to the Philosophic
The king now replaces the aristocrat in Socrates’ enumeration of rulers (580b). The philosopher enjoys the purer and more self-sufficient pleasures than the tyrants, Glaucon now agrees. He had been the one who had more or less openly disbelieved that the philosopher could have any advantage over the tyrant with respect to happiness. The philosopher attends to the truth (581e), “lays hold of the truth” (572b), and experiences the “truest pleasures” (586d-e). The philosophic life is 729 times more pleasant—that is, more pleasant every day and night of the year—than the tyrant’s. For the philosopher, “the regime within him” (591e) far surpasses any regime outside him. Political men keep hoping, ‘If only this candidate, that reform, those new laws could be had, then I should be happy.’ Glaucon now sees that happiness in the cave is impossible in cave-terms, no matter who rules the cave—even himself.

III. Back to the Poetic
Socrates tells Glaucon: Homer, the man, must not be honored before the truth (595c). He has persuaded Glaucon of the forms, which may or may not be real, in order to dissuade him of the love of any person, particularly a poet. Tragic poets extol tyrants, like Oedipus, because they take passions too seriously. Their music is mere fury. Like the semi-redundant solecism, “New School University,” they represent the triumph of sound over sense, image over substance. They make a democratic audience weep over the woes of a tyrant; they teach the democrat how to grieve for his own insatiable, material eros, rejecting the true good for the false. The audience for tragedy looks at its own tyrannical self and pities without self-knowledge.

(The similarities and differences between Athenian and American democracy give useful instruction in the application of Platonic political science. At first sight, Socrates’ critique of democracy seems off the mark in contemporary America. The founders of commercial republicanism intended to make tragedy—in both the classical and the Christian senses–a much more remote experience than it had been. Heroes and martyrs had spilled too much blood. Thumoerotic passion needed moderation and redirection. Nobility became a casualty. As Allan Bloom remarked, the modern tragic hero is an anti-hero: Willie Low-man. But thumoetotic passion can hardly die off; it remains a human possibility. The commercial democrtat instead thrills to the current Swollen-Ego instead of Swollen-Foot—Elvis, Mick, Madonna—or whatever inflated thumoerotic ‘image’ gyrates on the walls of the cave, strings pulled by commercial puppet-masters. Tragedy becomes melodrama; Erica Kane is a thumoerotic type, all right, even if no one confuses her with Medea.)

Poets practice the third, and most dubious kind of art. Some arts are useful (political science aspires to be that); some are productive (‘applied science’ can be that). some arts are neither useful nor productive but imitative. Unfortunately, “imitation keeps company with the part [of the soul] that is far from prudence” (603b); when it produces anything, it “produces a bad regime in the soul of each private man” (605b) by “making phantoms that are very far removed from the truth” (605b). Poetic imitation flatters its audience, watering passions instead of drying them, making pleasure and pain the rulers, not law and argument. Philosophers do not fight over Helen of Troy, or her image (586c); poets encourage such shadow-boxing, leading men to spill real blood for the sake of shadows.

Like any art, poetry is finally neutral, as Socrates finally admits by admitting poets to the city on condition of good behavior. Socrates concludes the dialogue with a poem, the myth of Er. To teach Glaucon that the soul is immortal may be a lie, but it is an inducement to encourage him to think about which life is best chosen—that is, best deliberated about, in a state of moderation, free of the passions of the law court and the marketplace. wily, lying Odysseus replaces ‘sincere,’ ‘authentic,’ but mad-running Achilles, and the Homeric gods are nowhere to be seen. Here is a myth without tragedy, and therefore with no inducement to self-pity. It is not so much a noble as a useful, good, and potentially productive lie. Socrates now speaks of the soul “as it is in truth” (611c)