All significant
concepts of the modern theory of state are secularized theological concepts….(Carl
Schmitt, Political Theology, p36)
Equally,
our main contention in this piece is that all significant concepts of modern economic
theory and “science”, too, are secularized theological concepts. A “theory” is
an explanation of life and the world that attempts to encompass them in their
“totality” by “con-necting” their “parts” in a “systematic” manner that is
internally consistent and that, through this “consistent nexus rerum”, achieves the adaequatio
rei et intellectus of Scholastic fame. It follows that a theory must
connect the relationship of the parts to one another in a manner consistent
with the “systematicity” of the whole. Consequently, regardless of the content
of the theory, the con-nections between parts and of the parts in their
totality must be “necessary”. This “necessity” removes any “freedom” that the
parts may have had in relation to the totality in such a manner that the theory
admits of no “exception” that is not re-conducible to or con-sistent with the
totality and its “systematicity”.
This
logical notion of “freedom” as the
opposite of logical necessity has nothing to do with the political notion of freedom. Indeed, political freedom is not
analogous to “contingency” or “chance,” it is instead their opposite and in
fact ought not to be called “freedom” at all! Freedom is a political notion –
the opposite of “coercion” (Arendt in ‘Life of the Mind’). Once the notion of
“freedom” is reduced to the opposite of logical necessity, then it becomes mere
“contingency” and is reduced to an “onto-logical” problem. The fact is that, as
we are demonstrating here, there is no such thing as “logical necessity” so
that all “truths” are “contingent”. But
the fact that “truth” can be understood as logical or scientific “necessity”-
that the “necessity” of logic or science is what makes it “true” - and that “freedom”
can be mistaken for “contingency” or “chance” means that “truth” or
logico-mathematical necessity can be
abused or be used instrumentally for the purpose of political coercion! By this
process, “freedom of the will” can be
mistaken for a “telos” that, by positing the “systematicity” of life and the
world as a “totality”, becomes a quest for “freedom from the will” – which is what the negatives Denken quite correctly declaims in bourgeois theory and “science”, whilst at the same time, by denying
the existence of “freedom” in a political sense (because it understands freedom
only ontologically), it in turn quite incorrectly denies the possibility of
political freedom or else reduces it to contingency, to superfluity (Sartre’s “de trop”, Heidegger”s de-jection and Dasein as pro-ject). So whereas
bourgeois theory and science either eliminate political freedom with their
“totality” and “systematicity”, in natural and social science as in
logico-mathematics, or else hypostatize it as “God” or “free will”, in the
negatives Denken freedom is understood as “universal Eris”, as total conflict: freedom
is no longer a function of the will but the will becomes a function of “free-dom”
understood as cosmic “contingency” (Schelling), as “chance” or “uncertainty”
(Keynes).
It is this reduction of political freedom to contingency or chance – to free-dom - that is clearly most objectionable
in the negatives Denken. Yet the
valuable and valid aspect of the remarkably novel and revealing approach to
freedom taken by the negatives Denken
is that it re-introduces the notion of “decision” (in Schmitt, “resolve” [Gewiss] in Nietzsche, and “resoluteness”
or “dis-closure” [Entschlossenheit]
in Heidegger), and therefore of the effect of individual wills coming into
conflict with one another in an institutionally
organized manner - which is the essence of the Political. It is this Political, this organized conflict of wills, that is totally eschewed by all
bourgeois science, from economics to
jurisprudence and political theory. The supreme aim of bourgeois science is to
e-liminate (to place beyond the boundaries) this Political from the subject-matter of its inquiry, to ob-literate
the decision on the exception as the
conflictual antithesis to the bourgeois homologation of all elements of life in
the interests of “science”.
At the foundation
of his [Kelsen’s] identification of state and legal order rests a metaphysics
that identifies the lawfulness of nature and normative lawfulness. This pattern
of thinking is characteristic of the natural sciences. It is based on the rejection of all “arbitrariness”, and attempts to
banish from the human mind every exception. (PT, p41)
It
is most important to note that whilst bourgeois “science” seeks to remove all
“decision on the exception”, all “arbitrariness”, from the object of its
inquiry, it is the most distinctive mark of bourgeois political praxis to concentrate decision-making power in
fewer hands – in effect, to present society as “homogeneous” so as to be
able to equiparate its “scientific method” (Popperian falsifiability) which
implies the necessity of competing
theories with democratic public opinion
based on competing opinions, whilst removing all real decision-making power
from the demos and entrusting it to sovereign institutions, such as Heads of
State and Government or “scientific experts” who then reduce the Political to
Technique. The “ideal type” of bourgeois science involves the elimination of
conflict from theory in such a way that its Science becomes mere Technique (cf.
Heidegger’s Technik) wholly
impervious to “decision” and therefore to critical review. Bourgeois theory and
science therefore eschews first and foremost what we may describe as “the time
of decision”, understood in the objective genitive. In other words, bourgeois
science and theory always postulates that “decisions are made in time”, whereas one of the mainstays
of the negatives Denken is that our
perception of time as an experiential rather than “spatial” notion requires the assumption of an initium, a creative act, of a
“de-cision” that makes an “in-cision in being” – a novus actus interveniens that replaces the “causal chain” of
bourgeois science.
The
aim of bourgeois neoclassical economic theory, for instance, is to reduce
economic activity – and therefore the subiectum
of “economics” – to the mere, pure, formal “exchange” of “endowments” between
individual economic agents. The very purity and “formality” of this exchange,
the absence of any possible conflict
in it – even in terms of how individuals came to possess the “endowments” they
exchange with others -, means that an “economic equi-librium” is possible a priori, deductively, given that any dis-equilibrium can exist only as a
“distortion” or “disturbance” of the “exchange” that is axiomatically implicit
in the definition of “the market” as “free exchange of endowments” that are
purely “economical” in the sense of “utilitarian”, where the utility schedules
of individual market agents exclude again axiomatically anything that may
interfere with the “free exchange” that defines “the market”. Consequently,
individual market participants do not “decide” the ratios of exchange (what
Schumpeter therefore senselessly called “coefficients of choice”, given that
there is no “choice” involved in this exchange!) because these ratios or
“prices” are pre-determined by the
axiomatic definitions of “the market” and by the “utility schedules” of
economic agents. (This was the gist of Hayek’s devastating early [1920s]
critique of the concept of economic equilibrium, now in Individualism and Economic Order.)
The
market assumes thus in neoclassical
economic theory the semblance of a Leibnizian “pre-established harmony”, of a
Hidden God (deus absconditus)
identical with Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. “The market” eliminates all
conflict, and with it all “exceptions” to “market rules”, by defining market
equilibrium tautologously. The point of equi-librium or “equal weight” is that
point at which all the exchange ratios between goods in “the market” can be
“weighed” interchangeably in terms of each good taken as a numeraire. In other words, each good for exchange on the market can
be “weighed” in terms of a “homogeneous medium” (numeraire) that provides a “common measure” so that the individual
exchange ratios between goods can be expressed as “prices”. This is another reason
why all conflict is eliminated from general equilibrium analysis: once all its
component parts are “homogeneous” because reducible to a “homogeneous medium”,
then it is not possible for these com-ponents to be in-com-patible with one
another, which is what the notion of “conflictual decision” and of “the
exception” make manifest in the negatives
Denken. (The analogy between this “homogenization of free and fair
exchange” and the bourgeois theory of democratic
or constitutional liberalism in political theory and jurisprudence will be
discussed in a later section of this study. Cf. for a preliminary discussion,
Part IV of CB Macpherson’s The Life and
Times of Liberal Democracy.)
Once
all conflictual decision, all exception is removed from “economic science”
and its “market mechanism” of “free exchange” through the homogeneity of all its constituent parts, then the sphere of the
Political can be neatly separated
from that of the Economic as the sphere of “scientific necessity” and be homologated as the realm of free-dom, the
sphere of public opinion (ethics,
morality, religion, taste) that can remain “free” only on condition (!) that it does not interfere with the scientific
necessity of the Economic sphere and
its “economic laws”. (As we showed in the Weberbuch,
the identification of science and economics with the realm of “necessity” and
that of politics and beliefs with that of “freedom”, is a common erroneous
thread running through thinkers as disparate as Marx, Weber and Arendt.) It is this harmonious homologation of the Political and the Economic from which all “conflictual decisions” are
removed (!) to the extent that “free” political choices and opinions do not interfere with the “necessary” laws of economic reality that is the
supreme achievement of the “science” of Political Economy both in its Classical
and Neo-Classical expressions. (Arrow and Hahn were quite right then [pace Lawson] to insist on naming Adam
Smith as the father of neoclassical general equilibrium theory.)
In
this regard, whilst the theoretical “necessity” of all science – its
“systematicity” – becomes immanent to “the totality”, to its “truth”, and
therefore is deprived of any political freedom, at the same time this immanent
identification of “the system” with a “mechanism” turns the so-called
“mechanism” into a Supreme Will or Sovereign, into a Hidden God (deus absconditus) as in Leibniz’s
pre-established harmony and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand or Hobbes’s Leviathan
or State-machine or deus mortalis.
The sovereign who
in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside the world,
had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed
aside. The machine now runs by itself. (PT, p48)
But
“the machine”, “the market”, cannot “run by itself” because the Ratio-Ordo
behind it, the “scientific truth” that is its “law of nature”, cannot be “legal”
if it is not “necessary”, if it is not an “order” that is an immanent feature of the world; and this “scientific
truth” cannot be “legitimate” if it is not “free”, if it is not “spontaneous” or "contingent" as a feature of the world that is com-prehensible by a transcendental consciousness. (The phrase “spontaneous order” is
used by Hayek in Law, Legislation and
Liberty.) Indeed, starting from its own axiomatic assumption of
“self-interested individuals”, neoclassical economic theory in particular has
developed its theoretical premises of economic liberalism whereby the Political
and the Economic are homologated to a point where, once a “free market” is
established in the sense prescribed by the theory, even political interference
no longer suffices to condition or disturb or constrain “the economic laws of
the free market economy or commerce” because, as Benjamin Constant argued, it
is possible for capitalists to discipline such “political” interference by means
of the simple “mobility of capital”, that is, by setting up “competitive
political regimes” that reward those States that respect the laws of the market
and penalize those that do not, until such time as these “anomalous” States
either perish or return to free market conditions! Constant offers the most
pervasive example of how the so-called “laws of neoclassical economic science”
come to be applied to human history and to be hypostatized as the culmination
of the interests of individuals and of humanity in its entirety and for
eternity! Whence comes Constant’s famous distinction between “ancient freedom”,
meaning the direct participatory democracy of Antiquity, and “modern freedom”,
which refers to the “exchange” by individuals in mass societies of their direct
participation in politics for the “guarantees” of their “private rights” by the
all-powerful modern “representative State” of liberal constitutional regimes
founded on the capitalist “market economy”. Thus, in Constant’s thesis, “private”
hedonistic consumption has replaced “public” political involvement.
Today
nothing is more modem than the onslaught against the
political.
American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists,
and
anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding
that
the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic
management
be done away with. There must no longer be political
problems,
only organizational-technical and economic-sociological
tasks.
The kind of economic-technical thinking that
prevails
today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea.
The
modem state seems to have actually become what Max
Weber
envisioned: a huge industrial plant. Political ideas are
generally recognized only when groups can
be identified that
have a plausible economic interest in
turning them to their advantage.
Whereas,
on the one hand, the political vanishes into
the
economic or technical-organizational, on the other hand the
political
dissolves into the everlasting discussion of cultural and
philosophical-historical
commonplaces, which, by aesthetic
characterization,
identify and accept an epoch as classical,
romantic,
or baroque. The core of the political idea, the exacting moral
decision,
is evaded in both. The
true significance of those
counter-revolutionary philosophers of the
state lies precisely in the
consistency with which they decide. They
heightened the moment
of the decision to such an extent that the
notion of legitimacy,
their starting point, was finally
dissolved. As soon as Donoso Cortes realized that the period of monarchy had
come to an end
because there no longer were kings and no
one would have the
courage to be king in any way other than by
the will of the
people, he brought his decisionism to its
logical conclusion. He
demanded a political dictatorship. In the
cited remarks of
de Maistre we can also see a reduction of the state to the moment
of
the decision, to a pure decision not based on reason and
discussion
and not justifying itself, that is, to an absolute decision
created
out of nothingness.
But this
decisionism is essentially dictatorship, not legitimacy. (PT, pp65-6)
This
reduction of the Political to the technical sphere is common to all
economic theory, Classical and neoclassical. Let us recall that for general
equilibrium theory in economics it is the aforesaid political interference – the decision, which it dismisses and
eschews as a “disturbance” or “noise” - that confutes the validity of the theory, that provides its insuperable exception . As Don Patinkin sharply
observed, one of the chief objections to equilibrium theory is that if the
theory of “economic equilibrium” were to be accepted as reality or even to be
applicable to any reality, then it would be quite impossible for an actual
economic system ever to be historically
in dis-equilibrium because
“equilibrium” is a “state” of simultaneous
exchanges incompatible with any notion of “time”, whether chrono-logical or dia-chronic, that is
understood as a “time of decision” in which an “act of will” can occur. Equilibrium
theory is time-less in the sense that
we have described: in the sense that it does not allow of any “time of
de-cision”, of any act of will upon which the Political may be founded.
Equilibrium theory therefore understands “time” as a mere logico-mathematical
sequence, only in its “spatial” sense, and consequently its description of how
equilibrium prices are reached through
the “mechanism of free market choice” is entirely devoid of meaning! Yet this is not to say, as we
argue below, that equilibrium theory is thereby devoid of purpose: its “purpose” is to allow the instrumental mathesis of human action, the measurement of human political activity
in accordance with a “rule” aimed at preserving the existing bourgeois
political, social and economic order. A
“market mechanism” that must be in
equilibrium is a “system” or “rule” from which all notion of “decision” or
“choice” has been removed and which by that very reason is not and can never be – a “market”!
Hayek’s
early essays in Individualism and
Economic Order, and Brian Loasby’s Equilibrium
and Evolution where he defines “the state of equilibrium” as a state of
“total slavery” offer insuperable critiques of these antinomies and apories of
bourgeois theory and science. Both theoreticians quite validly and definitively
confute the “reality” of Walrasian tatonnement
or “groping auctioneering” whereby the final equilibrium or “market-clearing”
prices are “reached” through a series of auctions that last until every market
participant has maximized his welfare. They do this by noting correctly that
this process is illusory because the
market participants can “grope” their way to equilibrium prices only on
condition that they are already ab initio
(from the beginning of the auction) in possession of all the information that
will allow them to reach those “final” equilibrium prices! In other words, the
“simultaneity” of this tatonnement deprives
it of any reality whatsoever as a
historical process. As a result, partial prices before equilibrium is reached,
when market participants can still be said “to decide freely and independently
of one another” on these “prices”, cannot be the “final equilibrium market
prices”.
But worse
still,
once equilibrium is reached and prices can therefore be said to indicate the
“real market exchange ratios” of all endowments between all market
participants, at that precise point these “exchange ratios” or “equilibrium
prices” lose all meaning because it
is then impossible to determine what
these “equilibrium prices” actually indicate – equilibrium prices are only “relative” (in terms of a numeraire) and
cannot tell us what they are “pricing”!
Once again, market participants cannot be said to be exercising any “free
choice” in the determination of “market prices”. At that precise point, were it
not for its instrumental purpose as a means of “measuring” human activity,
bourgeois economic “science” is exposed most damningly as sheer and abject
metaphysics of the most contemptible kind, that of an astute theology in which “the market” and its “laws” serve as a
Hidden God, one who in its guise as a “pre-established harmony” does not decide, and yet, in its guise as legislator does nothing but decide by
enforcing “the laws of free market competition”!
What
bourgeois economic “science” removes from economic relations is their political foundation in the “decision”,
which Schmitt above erroneously confines to “an exacting moral decision”. And
it does so above all in the name of a
mythical homogeneity of “the people”
and “the will of the people” – homogeneity that is supplied fundamentally
by “the laws of economic science” and the homologation of Politics and
Economics that they allow, as we just described above.
Although the liberal bourgeoisie wanted
a god, its god could not become active; it
wanted a monarch,
but he had to be powerless; it demanded
freedom and equality
but limited voting rights to the propertied
classes in order to
ensure the influence of education and
property on legislation, as
if education and property entitled that
class to repress the poor [60]
and uneducated; it abolished the
aristocracy of blood and family
but permitted the impudent rule of the
moneyed aristocracy,
the most ignorant and the most ordinary
form of an aristocracy;
it wanted neither the sovereignty of the
king nor that of the
people. What did it actually want?
The curious contradictions of this
liberalism struck not only
reactionaries such as Donoso Cortes and F. J. Stahl but also
revolutionaries such as Marx and Engels…..
In his Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung
in Frankreich Lorenz
von Stein spoke in detail about the
liberals: They wanted a monarch,
in other words a supreme personal
authority, with an independent
will and independent action. Yet they made
the king
a mere executive organ with his every act
dependent on the
consent of the cabinet, thus removing once
again that personal
element. They wanted a king who would be above parties, who
would
thus also have to be above the people's assembly; and
simultaneously
they insisted that the king could not do anything
but
execute the will of this people's assembly. They declared the
person of the king to be inviolable but had
him take an oath on
the constitution, so that a violation of
the constitution became
possible but could not be pursued. "No
human ingenuity," said
Stein, "is sufficiently sharp to
resolve this contradiction conceptually."
This must be doubly peculiar to a party
such as the
liberal, which
after all prides
itself on its rationalism. (PT, pp59-60)
In
other words, the scientific immanentism
of bourgeois theory and science – its “systematic necessity” – immediately
turns into formalistic transcendentalism
the very instant that it reaches its “apotheosis”, its Ver-geist-igung, - when,
that is, its claim to “scientific truth” or “necessity” collides with the
empirical “falsifiability” or “contingency” or “arbitrariness” of that “truth”
which otherwise would lose its “scientificity” because of its “freedom” or
“contingency” and its “truth-fulness” because of its “necessity”! The concept
of “truth” is im-possible, as we demonstrated in our exegesis of Nietzsche’s
In-variance in the Nietzschebuh, because
truth cannot be “necessary” for the reason that it must be com-prehensible, and
it cannot be “free” because, as “truth”, it cannot be partial or contingent.
Politically, the bourgeoisie desires a world in which “the king reigns but does not rule” – in which, that is, the capitalist system, its “market”, and
its “science” is “spontaneous” (free and therefore “legitimate”) and yet is “orderly”
(necessary, and therefore “legal”)! In
reality, however, what bourgeois theory and “science” manage to reveal is the
im-possibility of their “truth” because bourgeois “truth” must be at once “free”
(transcendental) and “necessary” (immanent).
It
is simply not possible to argue then, as does Weber, that bourgeois science,
like general equilibrium in economic theory, is an “ideal type” that merely approximates reality – and thus transcends it ideally - without ever being able to embody it immanently.
As we have shown in our Weberbuch,
any “ideal type” that is antinomic and aporetic exactly at that point where it
is ful-filled and com-plete, at the
point where it presumably becomes real
– any such ideal type or theory is entirely devoid of any and all theoretical merit and analytical usefulness however “proximate”
(!) except as a tool of coercion, as an “instrument” of policy – for the
simple reason that it ceases to be a “theory” or a “science” and becomes
instead an inexorable fate! (This is
the great insight of the Italian Marxist theoretician Massimo Cacciari in Krisis, pp65 et ff.)
Weber
himself often comes very close to this crucial realization in his work. It is
myopic in the extreme, however, for Gunnar Myrdal (and the likes of Joan
Robinson) to chide equilibrium theory for being “meaningless” (in The Political Element in the Development of
Economic Theory) – because the whole point of equilibrium theory is not to
be “true” or “meaningful” but rather to be, as Schumpeter perceived, an
“instrument” – we would say, a political
instrument, or worse still, a Kafkaesque condemnation as fate. The whole point of bourgeois economic “science”
is not to describe reality as it Is (Sein)
or still less as it Ought to be (Sollen):
rather, the whole point of bourgeois “science” is to theorise reality as it
Must be (Mussen).