Means and Ends in Politics
Definitions of politics – or of what is often called “the political” – frequently circumscribe the end or ends of politics. This is as true for those who regard politics as a branch of practical or moral philosophy, in other words those who believe that politics is about justice, the rightful and fair organization of society, as for those who believe that politics is about efficiency, good governance and the competent establishment of a legal-institutional framework for the advancement of individual interests. The latter group also includes those who define politics in terms of the state, for whom statecraft, national interest, sovereignty, security and defense are the watchwords of politics. Only rarely is politics defined by the means that may be specific to its realm. One of these rare exceptions is Max Weber, who defines politics in terms of violence, or better, Gewalt. The German term Gewalt captures a vacillation between the English words power (Macht), domination (Herrschaft) and violence. The power of the state, for example, is in German referred to as Staatsgewalt; the separation or balance of powers is called Gewaltenteilung, the executive, legislative and juridical powers are each known as the three Gewalten. Weber’s point in defining politics in terms of violence was a scientific one. Instead of the philosophical debates about how politics should be conducted and about how the state ought to be organized, Weber wanted social scientists to focus on how politics actually operates. By displacing the attention from the moral and normative questions of justice, fairness and right and wrong to the instruments of politics, Weber hoped to make the debates about politics more scientific or at least open up a route to scientificity.
So far, so good, but this still leaves open the question why a focus on the means of politics is any less normative than the concern with ends. Whether nukes and bombs are regarded as the privileged means of politics or ballot boxes and pamphlets makes a huge difference and is precisely that which distinguishes the self-styled realists from the democratic theorist. Not so, Weber would retort, for whereas democracies are historically specific and contingent, the fundamental relations of power and authority are common to all human groups and can thus be analyzed in terms of the structure of human association. The real problem with the Weberian shift is the relation that is established between means and ends. This is most obvious if we look at one of Weber’s most notorious student who is of late so popular among political theorists: the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt famously rejects Weber’s account of politics as circular, because it relies on a notion of the state, and instead defines the political as the domain of the distinction between friend and enemy. This definition is far less clear and obvious than one might think, and than Schmitt lets on. For Schmitt vacillates between the position that the political does not have its own domain and that it merely designates the level of intensity of an association or dissociation, and the position that the political is defined by the extreme case of this relation, which becomes the relation between friend and enemy, which in turn is thought according to a decision. In his later work, Schmitt will turn away from this decisionism, but that is not relevant for now. In any case, the point is that Schmitt wants to keep politics free of any content and define it in purely formal terms, as a relation (or decision) between friend and enemy, without any specific social or cultural content. It could quite easily be shown, however, that Schmitt immediately gets himself into a whole host of contradictions, as soon as one thinks through this formalistic understanding of politics. For once, politics ends up being not about a conflict (or war, in its most radical form), but about difference and alterity, about the relation to the other, the one who is essentially and existentially different. Yet the norm, according to which difference is determined, or the instance that judges what difference might be recognizable as existential and essential is not specified. We are free to speculate, whether it is the sovereign, in his capacity as decision-maker on the state of the exception, that decides whether a given difference is relevant, and whether it is hence sovereignty that defines the space between difference and alterity, regulating the conditions of difference and the point at which it turns into otherness. In this case sovereignty would have to be understood as not only a position within a legal-institutional order (and outside it, given the capacity of the sovereign to suspend the order in the name of its proleptic re-instantiation), but also as the mastery of language and truth, as indeed Hobbes proposed, three hundred years before Schmitt. The alternative, and perhaps somewhat less generous reading, is to consider the examples Schmitt proposes of the kind of difference that is convertible into political enmity. The privileged examples here are cultural and ethnic categories – the Turk, the Muslim, the Asian – whom Schmitt at various points presents as others.
Schmitt’s text remains ambiguous on these issues, though it does clarify that the epistemological question of who can decide about the enmity status is fundamentally an existential one. The political hence becomes by fiat, an existential concern, before the ultimate political decision can even be taken. This clarifies in what respect a potential enemy has to be different or ‘other’ in order to be awarded proper enemy status. His ‘otherness’ has to be existential, that is, it must threaten the very being of the presumed ‘self’, it has to constitute, in other words, an ontological threat. But this still begs the question of what the being of self and other is, what this existential form of life consists in. The self-evidence, with which Schmitt presents the idea that humanity is naturally distributed in peoples (Völker), and that these peoples naturally organize themselves according to friend and enemy should make any reader wary. For the meaning of the political hinges on what is meant by a people. And isn’t a people by itself already a political association? A reader of Rousseau might by permitted to think so. After all, Rousseau famously starts the Social Contract with the statement that before asking how a people gives itself a king, we should ask how a people constitutes itself.
Back to square one. There is much more to be said – and criticized – about Schmitt’s Concept of the Political. But the aim of this rather lengthy excursion was simply to show how one of the best students of Weber and a theorist who attempted to be more catholic than the pope by remaining committed to a pure formalism, is unable to maintain a purely formal definition of politics.
Let’s get back to the original issue, namely the relation between means and ends in politics. The Weberian (and Schmittian) attempt to refocus on means instead of ends poses three main problems. First, as we saw, the distinction tends to break down as soon as it is given any kind of determinate content. This raises the further question of whether the means-ends relation is at all applicable to politics, whether the nature of politics (if there is such a thing), or its definiens (to use a slightly less committed vocabulary) can be captured within the framework of the means-ends distinction. The means-ends dichotomy is not a neutral lens through which the objective means and ends of politics can be analyzed. In other words, it is by no means obvious that politics is split between means and ends and that one can meaningfully think about politics within this distinction. It may well be that the separation between means and ends is an imposition upon the sphere of action that we call politics. The Weberian idea, hence, that a focus on its means makes the object of politics any more available to a scientific and neutral analysis than the previous emphasis on ends must thus be rethought, for it is by no means clear that the very terms of analysis here are appropriate.
Fine. This seems to be the point where we always end up. Having deconstructed all the categories in use and having shown how they fail to do justice to the object in question, exert symbolic and conceptual forms of violence on the material world and must therefore be rethought, reviewed, reconsidered and re-assessed, we are left in a big mess without analytical categories. Great. And now what?
Let’s backtrack. The fact that the distinction between means and ends is unstable does not necessarily mean that we must abandon it. The separation might nonetheless be useful. After all, what is interesting about the breakdown between these two categories is that they tend to contaminate each other and thus pervert their respective purity. Such that Weber’s social scientist cannot remain in a position of neutral exteriority to the debate about the ends of politics, once the means have been determined. Or, similarly, to the distress of the moral philosopher or social revolutionary, who, once the ends of a just politics determined, is left to find out that the means available are either radically inadequate to the ends in view, or that they contradict the very ends they are set out to achieve. This has often been the charge leveled against thinkers who contemplate radical social change, namely the question, how the means to establish a new order can be established prevented from undermining the very principles of that new order.
According to Gramsci, this is one of the fundamental paradoxes of politics, and it is Machiavelli’s contribution to have pointed this out. Machiavelli’s Principe is the figure of this fundamental inadequacy, the gap between means and ends and the impossibility of adequating means to ends. Recall the debate among political theorists, whether Machiavelli’s tract was intended as a manual for the prince – a lesson in tyranny – or, as Rousseau and Spinoza thought, whether it was a book written for republicans. According to Gramsci, Machiavelli’s book was intended for the rising Florentine bourgeoisie, as a call to take charge politically and to empower a new prince. Since the bourgeoisie lacks the power to institute a new order and go beyond feudalism on its own, it needs the alliance with a new prince in order to outmaneuver the nobility. So it has to rely on the prince in order to move beyond the feudal order and gain the upper hand in the class struggle with the landed aristocracy. And even though absolutism might be against the republican principles and aspirations of the bourgeoisie, this chasm between means and ends is precisely incarnated in the figure of Machiavelli’s prince, in the odd unity of contradictions the prince represents, both as a figure and as a book.
In contrast to the idea that a system of just ends legitimates the means, Machiavelli – in Gramsci’s reading – points to an irreducible gap between ends and means, a difference and a mismatch that cannot be patched over and that indicates that means and ends are of different orders and the latter ill-suited to justify the former. For Gramsci, this discrepancy, what we might term a fundamental disagreement between means and ends, is not only a historical category that structures the transition from feudalism to absolutism, but a central feature of politics. It reappears in the French revolution in the guise of the Jacobins and in the Russian revolution as the vanguard party. Gramsci writes in the context of Fascist Italy and is a contemporary of the likes of Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels, who are usually understood to be the founders of elite theory. The question, hence, whether power necessarily gravitates towards elites and whether it is therefore necessarily minoritarian in character was thus an important debate at the time. Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli allowed him to adopt some of the theses developed by the elite theorists (in particular Mosca) without surrendering his Marxist social analysis and theory of history.
Where does this leave our original concern – the definition of politics? If we take Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli seriously, we might be able to go beyond the original dichotomy between instrumental and normative definitions of the political. What if politics were reducible neither to the level of instrumentality, nor exhaustively accounted for within the normative categories of practical philosophy? What if it were precisely the inadequation between the dimensions of instrumentality and normativity that defined the horizon of politics as a domain of social action?
So far, so good, but this still leaves open the question why a focus on the means of politics is any less normative than the concern with ends. Whether nukes and bombs are regarded as the privileged means of politics or ballot boxes and pamphlets makes a huge difference and is precisely that which distinguishes the self-styled realists from the democratic theorist. Not so, Weber would retort, for whereas democracies are historically specific and contingent, the fundamental relations of power and authority are common to all human groups and can thus be analyzed in terms of the structure of human association. The real problem with the Weberian shift is the relation that is established between means and ends. This is most obvious if we look at one of Weber’s most notorious student who is of late so popular among political theorists: the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt famously rejects Weber’s account of politics as circular, because it relies on a notion of the state, and instead defines the political as the domain of the distinction between friend and enemy. This definition is far less clear and obvious than one might think, and than Schmitt lets on. For Schmitt vacillates between the position that the political does not have its own domain and that it merely designates the level of intensity of an association or dissociation, and the position that the political is defined by the extreme case of this relation, which becomes the relation between friend and enemy, which in turn is thought according to a decision. In his later work, Schmitt will turn away from this decisionism, but that is not relevant for now. In any case, the point is that Schmitt wants to keep politics free of any content and define it in purely formal terms, as a relation (or decision) between friend and enemy, without any specific social or cultural content. It could quite easily be shown, however, that Schmitt immediately gets himself into a whole host of contradictions, as soon as one thinks through this formalistic understanding of politics. For once, politics ends up being not about a conflict (or war, in its most radical form), but about difference and alterity, about the relation to the other, the one who is essentially and existentially different. Yet the norm, according to which difference is determined, or the instance that judges what difference might be recognizable as existential and essential is not specified. We are free to speculate, whether it is the sovereign, in his capacity as decision-maker on the state of the exception, that decides whether a given difference is relevant, and whether it is hence sovereignty that defines the space between difference and alterity, regulating the conditions of difference and the point at which it turns into otherness. In this case sovereignty would have to be understood as not only a position within a legal-institutional order (and outside it, given the capacity of the sovereign to suspend the order in the name of its proleptic re-instantiation), but also as the mastery of language and truth, as indeed Hobbes proposed, three hundred years before Schmitt. The alternative, and perhaps somewhat less generous reading, is to consider the examples Schmitt proposes of the kind of difference that is convertible into political enmity. The privileged examples here are cultural and ethnic categories – the Turk, the Muslim, the Asian – whom Schmitt at various points presents as others.
Schmitt’s text remains ambiguous on these issues, though it does clarify that the epistemological question of who can decide about the enmity status is fundamentally an existential one. The political hence becomes by fiat, an existential concern, before the ultimate political decision can even be taken. This clarifies in what respect a potential enemy has to be different or ‘other’ in order to be awarded proper enemy status. His ‘otherness’ has to be existential, that is, it must threaten the very being of the presumed ‘self’, it has to constitute, in other words, an ontological threat. But this still begs the question of what the being of self and other is, what this existential form of life consists in. The self-evidence, with which Schmitt presents the idea that humanity is naturally distributed in peoples (Völker), and that these peoples naturally organize themselves according to friend and enemy should make any reader wary. For the meaning of the political hinges on what is meant by a people. And isn’t a people by itself already a political association? A reader of Rousseau might by permitted to think so. After all, Rousseau famously starts the Social Contract with the statement that before asking how a people gives itself a king, we should ask how a people constitutes itself.
Back to square one. There is much more to be said – and criticized – about Schmitt’s Concept of the Political. But the aim of this rather lengthy excursion was simply to show how one of the best students of Weber and a theorist who attempted to be more catholic than the pope by remaining committed to a pure formalism, is unable to maintain a purely formal definition of politics.
Let’s get back to the original issue, namely the relation between means and ends in politics. The Weberian (and Schmittian) attempt to refocus on means instead of ends poses three main problems. First, as we saw, the distinction tends to break down as soon as it is given any kind of determinate content. This raises the further question of whether the means-ends relation is at all applicable to politics, whether the nature of politics (if there is such a thing), or its definiens (to use a slightly less committed vocabulary) can be captured within the framework of the means-ends distinction. The means-ends dichotomy is not a neutral lens through which the objective means and ends of politics can be analyzed. In other words, it is by no means obvious that politics is split between means and ends and that one can meaningfully think about politics within this distinction. It may well be that the separation between means and ends is an imposition upon the sphere of action that we call politics. The Weberian idea, hence, that a focus on its means makes the object of politics any more available to a scientific and neutral analysis than the previous emphasis on ends must thus be rethought, for it is by no means clear that the very terms of analysis here are appropriate.
Fine. This seems to be the point where we always end up. Having deconstructed all the categories in use and having shown how they fail to do justice to the object in question, exert symbolic and conceptual forms of violence on the material world and must therefore be rethought, reviewed, reconsidered and re-assessed, we are left in a big mess without analytical categories. Great. And now what?
Let’s backtrack. The fact that the distinction between means and ends is unstable does not necessarily mean that we must abandon it. The separation might nonetheless be useful. After all, what is interesting about the breakdown between these two categories is that they tend to contaminate each other and thus pervert their respective purity. Such that Weber’s social scientist cannot remain in a position of neutral exteriority to the debate about the ends of politics, once the means have been determined. Or, similarly, to the distress of the moral philosopher or social revolutionary, who, once the ends of a just politics determined, is left to find out that the means available are either radically inadequate to the ends in view, or that they contradict the very ends they are set out to achieve. This has often been the charge leveled against thinkers who contemplate radical social change, namely the question, how the means to establish a new order can be established prevented from undermining the very principles of that new order.
According to Gramsci, this is one of the fundamental paradoxes of politics, and it is Machiavelli’s contribution to have pointed this out. Machiavelli’s Principe is the figure of this fundamental inadequacy, the gap between means and ends and the impossibility of adequating means to ends. Recall the debate among political theorists, whether Machiavelli’s tract was intended as a manual for the prince – a lesson in tyranny – or, as Rousseau and Spinoza thought, whether it was a book written for republicans. According to Gramsci, Machiavelli’s book was intended for the rising Florentine bourgeoisie, as a call to take charge politically and to empower a new prince. Since the bourgeoisie lacks the power to institute a new order and go beyond feudalism on its own, it needs the alliance with a new prince in order to outmaneuver the nobility. So it has to rely on the prince in order to move beyond the feudal order and gain the upper hand in the class struggle with the landed aristocracy. And even though absolutism might be against the republican principles and aspirations of the bourgeoisie, this chasm between means and ends is precisely incarnated in the figure of Machiavelli’s prince, in the odd unity of contradictions the prince represents, both as a figure and as a book.
In contrast to the idea that a system of just ends legitimates the means, Machiavelli – in Gramsci’s reading – points to an irreducible gap between ends and means, a difference and a mismatch that cannot be patched over and that indicates that means and ends are of different orders and the latter ill-suited to justify the former. For Gramsci, this discrepancy, what we might term a fundamental disagreement between means and ends, is not only a historical category that structures the transition from feudalism to absolutism, but a central feature of politics. It reappears in the French revolution in the guise of the Jacobins and in the Russian revolution as the vanguard party. Gramsci writes in the context of Fascist Italy and is a contemporary of the likes of Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels, who are usually understood to be the founders of elite theory. The question, hence, whether power necessarily gravitates towards elites and whether it is therefore necessarily minoritarian in character was thus an important debate at the time. Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli allowed him to adopt some of the theses developed by the elite theorists (in particular Mosca) without surrendering his Marxist social analysis and theory of history.
Where does this leave our original concern – the definition of politics? If we take Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli seriously, we might be able to go beyond the original dichotomy between instrumental and normative definitions of the political. What if politics were reducible neither to the level of instrumentality, nor exhaustively accounted for within the normative categories of practical philosophy? What if it were precisely the inadequation between the dimensions of instrumentality and normativity that defined the horizon of politics as a domain of social action?
posted by Yves at 1/24/2006 02:30:00 PM
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