Abstract
This is a welcome and an important book. It is welcome because it significantly develops and advances political theoretical analysis with the uses that can be made of ordinary language philosophy, in particular that of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell. It is important because it raises important critical questions about how a particular central concept of international relations theory—that of sovereignty—has shaped that discourse and blinded scholars to various realities and other possibilities. Sovereignty is “a picture” that has held “the study of politics captive” (p. 1).
That we are (multiply) held captive was a central concern for Wittgenstein (cf. Philosophical Investigations # 115). In any particular case, we are held captive by a particular picture, that is, a way of understanding the world that in turn shapes (at least much of) what counts as relevant. For Havercroft, this picture is that of the sovereignty of states. In its crudest form, this means that inside a state, sovereignty maintains order and is the means to resolve disputes; outside a state, where there is no sovereign, there is no necessary order. The important word here is “necessary”—as Havercroft notes, no serious political scientist thinks that there is only anarchy, only that order is not authorized in any more or less final way.
Not to be held captive is to be freed. How are we held captive? The first question here is why and by what means we have imprisoned ourselves, what Kant called “our self-imposed immaturity.” If social and political order is not finally authorized (the way a Constitution orders, say—think Carl Schmitt), then the danger of skepticism intervenes. Skepticism threatens when it is unclear how one is to apply criteria to political judgments about a particular situation (e.g., “There are WMD’s in Iraq.”—“How do you know? Those aluminum tubes could have other uses.” A resolution was created by Rumsfeld’s assertion on the eve of the invasion: “I am sure that we will find WMD’s in Iraq.” As the then President Bush once remarked: “I am the decider”—prompted, one suspects, by a speech writer who had read Carl Schmitt.) Havercroft’s basic argument is that the picture of sovereignty is our solution to the dangers of skepticism, that is, of not knowing why what should be done when. In cases of serious disagreement, it results, necessarily, in claims that finalize judgment by those with the power of sovereignty (as with Rumsfeld above).
Havercroft is clear that there is much in contemporary political science that finds sovereignty problematic (e.g., “globalization,” non-state-based terrorism, non-state economic actors) but that there are as of yet few alternative theoretical and practical resources by which to conceptualize political authority. This is the task to which he sets himself. As Hannah Arendt noted (cited by Havercroft), “If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.” (“What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future, 165). An initial chapter considers those who have raised normative questions (but not resolved the political ones) about sovereignty (Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, Hardt and Negri).
For Havercroft, skepticism arose as a political problem with the Reformation and the scientific revolution. He focuses on Spinoza and Hobbes, both of whom he interestingly reads as writing in response to the fear of skepticism occasioned by the eroding of papal authority and the rise of science as a separate claim to authority (though he does not cite it, see here Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Airpump and Leviathan). A doctrine of political sovereignty becomes the solution to “the instability created by epistemic doubt and the conclusions of science” (p. 67). This seems to me very convincing and important; Havercroft notes that another part of the solution that developed a bit later was toleration (particularly in Spinoza), which importantly also reinforced the power of the sovereign (see also Ingrid Creppell, Toleration and Identity). In brief, his (quite extended and fascinating) argument about sovereignty comes down to this: if a claim to knowledge is or engenders a claim to action and is not a mere belief, then Hobbes and Spinoza argue, as have almost all subsequent theorists, that any claim to political knowledge must and will in the end be resolved by what the sovereign says (p. 136). (Havercroft notes interestingly that these considerations open the door to the necessity of putting together the political theological understandings of Kantorowicz, Schmitt and others with the secular understandings of early modernity of Pocock, Tuck and Skinner [pp. 131–32].)
The above is a very condensed version of the first half of Havercroft’s book, material that is very rich and widely researched. In the second part, he moves to the twentieth century to take up the work of Wittgenstein and Cavell (and to some degree Austin) in order to demonstrate “a way of conceiving of political order that can take account of the skeptical challenge without necessarily resorting to the institution of sovereignty” (p. 141). He writes against three contemporary schools: (1) classical liberals, who hold that as there is no ultimate political ground for values the political realm should provide the maximum possible amount of individual autonomy; (2) conservatives who hold that a strong sovereign is necessary to ensure “necessary conditions to nurture and sustain the common good”; and lastly (3) deliberative democrats (Habermas stands in for most of the lot) who make communicative reason the final arbiter in the “diverse political spheres” of the modern state (pp. 164–65).
Against these understandings, the ordinary language philosophers cited above. As Havercroft’s Wittgenstein and Austin are in general those of Stanley Cavell, I shall concentrate on what he has to say about him. Political theorists have for some time sensed that Cavell’s work was of particular importance for a reconceived political theory. Hanna Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice (1973), some work of mine, and Andrew Norris’s edited volume The Claim to Community (2006), all surprisingly missing from the bibliography here, are only a few cases in point. But it is fair to say that Havercroft’s is the first book to work out extensively the implications of this thought for a particular political theoretical question.
His starting point is to reconceptualize the idea of a social contract along lines set out mostly in Cavell’s The Claim of Reason. The standard view of a social contract is that it answers the question of “why should I obey the state?” by responding “because you have agreed to it.” Yet this misses the fact that in speaking for oneself, one is inevitably speaking also for the group. Here the analogy—it is only that—is to language (p. 174): when I use a word I am not free to mean whatever I want (I cannot in fact actually mean anything I want) but my words must reflect the fact that I speak as a form of life in which “the community generates the meaning of our words through their daily use in ordinary practice” (p. 168). (By saying “I promise,” I have in fact committed myself to certain forms of ordinary practice: that I do not choose to follow them does not mean that I did not commit myself.)
The fact of the matter is that we did not agree to obey the social-political order any more than we agreed on the meaning(s) of “promise” and that we are nonetheless committed by our association much as we are by our language to our words. Here I need to emphasize a point Cavell makes to which Havercroft pays, to my mind, insufficient attention. When Cavell following Wittgenstein speaks of our existence in a “form of life” he means first that we exist as and in a “form of life” and only secondarily as a “form of life.” The second gives us an anthropological understanding (in the manner of, say, Winch or Kripke); the first refers to our existence as human beings. What is at stake in the form of life argument is our humanity—something only possible in that we share with others. I will return to this at the end of this review.
Whereas in the traditional view of the social contract, consent is agreement and dissent refusal, “for Cavell, consent to the social contract is speaking for others and being spoken for by others. It is not consent as agreeing to the social contract, but consent as agreeing in the social contract” (p. 173). In a nutshell: when I say “I am an American” I am making a claim that I (do) claim applies to myself and to all others who might say that sentence. That you may disagree with me about the meanings and implications of my claim does not obviate the fact that I (we) am (are) necessarily making it for myself (us).
The question now is as to what my relation to my words is to be. Here Havercroft points out that the attraction of sovereignty is that it releases us from the obligation to be responsible for our words: we can “turn to the sovereign,” who will resolve such matters for us (p. 177). The attraction of skepticism is that it makes it easy to rely on a sovereign rather than claim responsibility. As Cavell writes in The Claim (NB) of Reason (p. 207): “It is as though we try to get the world to provide answers in a way which is independent of our responsibility for claiming something to be so (to get God to tell us what we must do in a way which is independent of our responsibility for choice.” We become conformists.
Yet, one might say, the alternative then is that “anything goes” for anything can be challenged if there be no final authority. (Such was the accusation made by the rather sharp interrogating secretary against Luther at the Diet of Worms). The answer to this fear is that not anything will count as a dissent or questioning for which one can be responsible. Havercroft adduces the case of same-sex marriage. The proper response to Rick Santorum’s fear that the legalization of same-sex marriages will lead to that of “man and dog”—Justice Scalia made much the same argument—is that such a claim cannot responsibly be made. Marriage manifests—is made possible by—criteria such as these: it is consensual, monogamous (in the West, at least), involves co-habitation, commitment, a promise to remain together, commitments to care for the other in case of illness, to share financial burdens and resources, to share responsibilities for children, and so forth. To make the only criterion of marriage that it be between a male and a female is simply willfully to abandon responsibility for one’s words—as it is to the vows one took at the ceremony. (See his discussion, p. 194). As such, the position is not liberal (it does not require a final arbiter), is not “Habermasian” (does not require a general communicative rationality to escape passive acceptance of existing customs), and is not conservative (is not nihilistic or ethical relativist).
In his final chapter, Havercroft brings the analyses of the first six to bear on contemporary debates in international relations theory, in particular the security dilemma, classically analyzed in Herz’s 1950 article. That dilemma results from an “epistemic uncertainty” about which state actions are merely defensive and which are threatening—hence one may act as one sees fit. Secondly, it leads to a situation where each actor must “assume a worst-case scenario or run the risk” of defeat (p. 199). Havercroft deals with a number of realist (Jervis, Glaser, Schweller, and Copeland among others) and constructivist (in particular Wendt) theorists. They are not as different as one might first think. His argument is that whereas in many cases Wendt’s pragmatism (in general there is not a total lack of knowledge about the intentions of others) is relevant, in the end Wendt and the constructivists are forced to acknowledge that “in cases where the cost of not being right about the motive of others is high . . . the dismissal of uncertainty cannot assume away the problem” (p. 207).
Another way is provided by Havercroft’s analyses. It is a significant modification of the constructivist position and rests on three premises (which seem to me correct). First, very often the problem that gives rise to conflict is not one of (mis-)interpreting intentions (the fear of the unknowability of intentions was at the basis of the epistemic uncertainty described above) for, indeed, much of the time, intentions are simply not in question (I meet you on the street; you extend your hand and say “hello Tracy”—intentions do not enter the matter. Likewise with the use of nerve gas in Syria). Second, that one shares a language (a means of communication) necessarily is based upon criteria that make communication possible—see here, perhaps oddly, Kissinger’s discussion of negotiating with China in his recent On China. Thirdly, we do not need to “get inside a person’s head to understand what s/he is doing” (p. 212). Why? Because we are to some important extent part of a general community of meanings, of shared criteria. Criteria do not establish that something is, but (this is Cavell’s analysis) they do establish what something is. The conclusion for these considerations is that “some type of international community”—not based on sovereignty—“already exists” (p. 213). There are, notes Havercroft, “alternative, transnational and grassroots ways of responding to and preventing war”—he instantiates various pacifist organizations, the Lincoln Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, the anti-war movements in the last century (ibid.). In terms of global justice, this involves an abandonment of the (unthinking) a priori commitment to a general and consensual international ethics: to pursue this inevitably leads to the invocation of some form of sovereignty. Instead, one needs to turn one’s attention to “the rough ground of everyday global political challenges” (p. 225). What do state-actors actually do and say in particular situations? As Wittgenstein once expostulated: “Don’t think but look!” (Investigations, #66).
Here the expectation remains Socratic: people can actually be brought to see that their actions and their words do not cohere. Something like this was demonstrated in the Civil Rights movement in the United States (that is why we call them “demonstrations”); Nelson Mandela’s exemplar provided a reference point in South Africa. Some earlier work has been done on this: one thinks of Rom Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, or the forthcoming work on “sacral spaces” in Nancy Luxon’s Crisis of Authority, or the work of Daniel Bell on the example of Confucian ethics.
An issue remains though: it is that of the “banality of evil.” Leaving aside all the disputes over Arendt’s work, what would one do about actors who had simply no sense of responsibility to their own words, who could not, under any circumstances, mean what they say? Over two hundred years ago, Rousseau pointed out that being human is something that is attained and not something given. It is the great merit of Havercroft’s book to remind us of this truth.