SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Against Normative Political Theory

Mark G. E. Kelly

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438467627
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book comprises a series of staged confrontations between the thought of Michel Foucault and a cast of other figures in European and Anglophone political philosophy, including Marx, Lenin, Althusser, Deleuze, Rorty, Honneth, and Geuss. Focusing on the status of normativity in their thought, Mark G. E. Kelly explains how Foucault's position in relation to political theory is different, and, over the course of the book, describes a distinctive Foucauldian stance in political thought that is maximally anti-normative, anti-theoretical, and anti-political. For Foucault aims to undermine attempts to discern the appropriate form of political action, instead putting forward a rigorously critical program for a political theory that lacks any moralizing or totalizing dimension, and serves only to side with resistance against power, and never with power itself. Looking at attempts to think radically about politics from Marx to the present day, Kelly traces a novel history of political thought as a trend of attempts to overcome the constraints of normativity, theoreticism, and subordination to public policy. He concludes by assessing and rejecting recent attempts to reclaim Foucault for a form of normative politics by associating him with neoliberalism.

1

Marx

Anti-normative Critique

Critique is not, for Marx, the judgement which the (true) Idea pronounces on the defective or contradictory real; critique is critique of existing reality by existing reality.

—Althusser 2006, 17

Introduction

Why does this book begin with Marx? Since ideas do not spring fully formed out of the heads of great thinkers, any starting point for any historical survey is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, as indeed is every point picked out on its trajectory. Still, the choice of Marx is far from accidental. He is a pivotal figure in the history of political thought. This status may itself have been somewhat arbitrarily acquired, inasmuch as there may have been other thinkers whose thought had the potential to have historical consequences as wide-ranging as his, but contingently did not. As things stand, however, Marx’s thought has had a political influence no other thinker’s ever has: it spawned a political movement, Marxism, for which his writings formed the touchstone in the way no other philosopher’s has ever done, and this movement moreover achieved hegemony over swathes of the planet during the twentieth century, constituting the official ideology under which billions lived. Marxism has declined since, but rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated: large sections of the world continue to be ruled by parties officially adhering to Marxism, and Marxism continues to be a major oppositional discourse in much of the rest of the world.

I am interested in Marx as a precursor to Foucault in rejecting normative political theory. Historically, Marx represents a sea change away from moralism. As Foucault (1988a, 113) puts it, Marx “refused the customary explanation which regarded [workers’] misery as the effect of a naturally rare cause of a concerted theft. And he said substantially: given what capitalist production is, in its fundamental laws, it cannot help but cause misery. Capitalism’s raison d’être is not to starve the workers but it cannot develop without starving them.” The point here is that Marx does not morally condemn capitalists for their actions, but analyzes capitalism qua system. One could of course claim that he condemns the system on moral grounds, but Foucault’s point is that this would be senseless: the critique of a system works simply by showing how the system cannot but work broadly the way it does.

One can place Marx—somewhat artificially—then as a pivotal figure in the emergence of anti-normative political thought, though he antedates positive use of the term “normative.” The turn against normative thought relates, in his own terminology, to his orientation toward materialism in opposition to idealism. Idealism and normativity are close allies, though not synonymous: idealism’s faith in the value of ideas makes it apt to see normative principles as the appropriate means for shaping reality. Marx explicitly stood this order on its head, seeing reality as shaping ideas rather than vice versa, a viewpoint from which normative precepts appear to be produced by history rather than offering a way to shape it.

Materialism is not new at this time, however, but a millennia-old viewpoint, and one can find many precursors of the view that morals are not universal. It is my position, indeed, that the moral universalism properly called “normative” emerged only in modernity, and that the importance of Marx is not that he is the first to take a view that is not normative, but that he represents a landmark in the development of anti-normativity, which is to say in taking a view that reacts against normative universalism. These claims depend, however, on a full genealogical account of the birth of normativity that I intend to develop elsewhere and cannot elaborate here. Suffice it, perhaps, to say for now that Marx establishes a horizon for political thought, by dint of the significance his thought is accorded during the twentieth century, in which Foucault and most of the other thinkers I will consider here begin to think.

To the extent I am doing intellectual history here, it is, as Foucault would say, a “history of the present”—albeit in a stronger sense than this phrase meant when applied to his work. Where Marx himself both reacted against and thought within a horizon provided by Hegel’s philosophy, I, a century and a half after Marx, am defining my position against a neo-Kantian orthodoxy in political philosophy less sophisticated than Hegelianism. The aim of this chapter is not to study the historical appearance of Marx’s position, then, but rather to argue against recent attempts to read him as a neo-Kantian transcendental ethicist, though I will also reject Hegelianism. What I mean to do here is to assert a European tradition of post-Hegelian anti-normative thought against the mainstream of contemporary political theory that ignores this tradition, or at least fails to comprehend the radicalness of its alterity.

Speaking within this tradition, Étienne Balibar (2007, 4) says that “after Marx, philosophy is no longer as it was before.” This is perhaps true from a French perspective, but “Marx” refers there to a different event to the one that the name refers to in Anglophone or German philosophy. In Germany, Marx’s work became fashionable in a period after Hegelianism, in which neo-Kantianism was ascendant. Marx did not in fact change German philosophy decisively, it seems to me. While many philosophers after Marx did engage with his thought in various ways, I do not believe Marx fundamentally altered the course of German philosophy, though Marx was for a time the touchstone for thinkers of the left, and during a different period Marxism was the state ideology of a part of Germany. In France, by contrast, Marx’s thought arrived as a shock, because French philosophy had in the nineteenth century largely ignored developments in German philosophy, particularly Hegel, in favor of its own indigenous philosophers. The 1917 Russian Revolution’s impact on France, as elsewhere, was enormous, and it was this that decisively brought Marx’s thought to prominence in France, with Hegel’s ideas spreading there on the back of Marxism, itself primarily a political movement, with intellectual Marxism trailing behind. The role of the French Communist Party in resisting occupation during the later stages of the Second World War propelled Marxism to a general level of prominence and esteem it never had in English- or German-language contexts. In particular, Marx’s challenge from his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, that philosophers have only interpreted the world where the point is to change it, influenced French philosophy to lastingly orient itself toward politics as an ineluctable element of what it means to do philosophy, something that also happened in Germany at the same time by the need to account for the collaboration of certain philosophers with the Nazi state, but which never happened in English-language philosophy, where rarefied forms of logic and epistemology remain the most prestigious parts of the discipline.

In Anglophone philosophy, things had unfolded in a quite opposite way. Hegelianism had spread in England and America to become the dominant philosophical school in the early twentieth century, a time when its star had waned in Germany. The First World War was the greatest single event in Anglophone philosophy of the century: Hegelianism was abandoned wholesale, displaced by the nascent tradition of “analytical” philosophy that continues to dominate the discipline to this day. This meant that, just as Marxism waxed as a force in the world, the philosophical audience in Britain capable of engaging with its underpinnings disappeared. Marxism came to minor prominence within Anglophone philosophy only decades later, as a marginal school within the marginal subdiscipline of “political philosophy” that had emerged in the English-speaking world in the 1970s, inaugurated by the seminal theory of Rawls—prior to this, political philosophy had existed so far on the margins of analytical philosophy as to be practically nonexistent. In this context, Marxism had to be translated into a neo-Kantian, idealist, universalist political thought.

It is against this background that I begin, seeking to attack this conception of political thought by showing, against the arguments of ostensibly Marxist political philosophers, that it is coherent for Marx to think non-normatively about politics. This endeavor may seem gratuitous to readers from the continental tradition, including mainstream Marxism, because they are not under the sway of the presupposition that political theory should be normative. For those steeped in political philosophy, the point here is to begin to show how non-normative political thought is possible; for those from outside this way of thinking, the point is, conversely, to show how normative colonization of political thought works, before going on to sniff out relatively mere traces of normativity in continental or allied thinkers in subsequent chapters.

Method

I have defined “normativity” narrowly as prescription. It does not seem that Marx prescribes personal conduct in the sense of providing a conventional morality. Rather, what is alleged is that Marx prescribes the kind of society we should live in, morally condemning capitalism and commending communism.

Marx himself wrote in a left-wing milieu in which moralizing was hardly unknown, as he noted (The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 6, 312; henceforth ME). After him, some Marxists sought either to hybridize his thought with ethical theories, particularly German neo-Kantians in the early twentieth century who identified communism with Kant’s Kingdom of Ends. There have also been occasional attempts to extrapolate novel moral theories from Marx’s thought. However, Marx himself explicitly disavowed morality, inveighing that “communists do not preach morality at all” (ME 5, 247). All commentators agree that Marx, at least at some point in his life, holds that morality is an ideological artefact relative to given modes of production. Conversely, however, all readers of Marx agree that there is some juvenile phase of Marx’s thought in which he held opinions that are not those he held later in life, but rather opinions that he would himself repudiate—conventional, bourgeois, idealist opinions. At this early point, he clearly did engage in moralism. Exactly at what point and to what extent Marx breaks with immature views is a matter of intense and longstanding disagreement, though it is generally agreed (even by Althusser, the anti-Hegelian Marxist par excellence) that some of Marx’s youthful Hegelianism in particular continued to inform his perspective throughout his life.

My business here is not hermeneutic Marxology: while I do mean to interpret Marx accurately, my primary aim is to argue that it is possible and desirable to avoid normativity in political thought. I cannot engage in a systematic reading of Marx’s entire output in this relation—others have attempted this, but it is clearly a matter for entire books—so I constrain myself for the most part here to refuting serially arguments that Marx did have a normative stance. Much of this is a matter of explaining how instances of allegedly moral vocabulary in Marx’s work can in fact operate in a non-normative way. There is no question that Marx uses polemical vocabulary, but I question whether it is meant to express anything more than subjective disapprobation.

I focus here on a particular, recent episode of the long history of Marxist or pseudo-Marxist moralizing, namely, Marxist analytical political philosophy since 1970. This episode was contemporaneous and overlapped with a movement called “analytical Marxism,” that is, the attempt to inscribe Marxism within an “analytical” framework. Analytical Marxists left behind what they saw as Marx’s tendency toward Hegelian mystification, instead reinterpreting Marxism within a framework of “methodological individualism,” that is, by starting with individual humans as the basic units of analysis and attempting to justify Marxism as a rational choice. This diverges from Marx’s thought in multiple respects. Analytical Marxism is itself primarily a social-scientific movement, only marginally concerned with the question of normativity, hence most of the commentators I will refer to here are not “analytical Marxists” in the strict sense, but rather analytical philosophers who are Marxists, concerned with articulating Marxism as a perspective within post-Rawlsian “political philosophy,” understanding it therefore as a normative enterprise, providing a prescriptive theory of social organization, closely related to or synonymous with normative ethics. Thus, Marxism is for them the claim that communism is good and just and right, by contrast with the existing way of doing things, capitalism, which is held to be bad, unjust, and wrong; hence, we have a moral duty to be communists.

It does indeed seem prime facie plausible to suggest that Marxism involves such a normative evaluation of capitalism. Now, it is generally recognized that Marx’s attitude toward capitalism is somewhat ambivalent, in that he makes some apparently laudatory remarks about capitalism vis-à-vis previously existing systems, but he nevertheless clearly opposed capitalism in favor of what he calls “communism.” However, I will maintain that, with the exception of some very juvenile work, he never normatively condemns capitalism. He did use undeniably normative vocabulary as late as 1847, though not in any of his major works after his 1844 Manuscripts. Some scattered normative invocations after this would in any case still be compatible with my claim that Marx’s mature political thought is essentially non-normative. But I will argue that even such apparently normative terms as he is alleged to use after 1847 do not genuinely have normative force.

Some interpreters of Marx, particularly in the Frankfurt School tradition, take the view that his early writings hold the key to understanding his thought because they give us the normative basis on which the later work is articulated. At the opposite extreme, in Althusser’s interpretation, Marx’s early work is considered “non-Marxist” precisely because it contains “humanist” subjectivist concepts, which he was later to jettison. Normativity in and of itself is not Althusser’s concern, though anti-normativity is certainly in line with the thrust of Althusser’s “anti-humanist” interpretation of Marx, and Althusser (1969, 45) does explicitly reject “ethical” interpretations of Marx’s thought as such (see also Kain 1988, 6). A rather different approach is pursued by Foucault (1980, 76), who sidesteps the entire problem by saying that “Marx doesn’t exist,” in the sense that there is no single theoretical position represented by all of Marx’s writings. Myself, I have no horse in the race of Marxology, but rather am concerned only to show against normative interpreters that it is at least possible for Marx to avoid normativity in a sense that they think is impossible.

Vocabulary

I am not aware of any scholar who claims that Marx adopts a straightforwardly normative perspective consisting in labeling certain things “good” and others “bad.” In any case, Marx does not do so. If one investigates, for example, occurrences of the word “evil” in Marx’s collected works (a term used to translate multiple terms from Marx’s original German), one finds it used in a normative sense only in his early writings, for example, in a short set of 1847 notes on wages not intended for publication, where he talks about the “evil” (Verwerflichkeit) of wages (ME 6, 436), by contrast with what he calls there the “positive aspect” of capitalism. After this, “evil” does not appear in his works again in such a direct way.1 He frequently criticizes the use of good and evil as a conceptual pairing, and often invokes the word “evil” to mock his theoretical opponents, particularly the anarchists, especially Bakunin, for deeming the state evil. Most occurrences of the word are in passing, in quoted speech, discussing the views of others, in a loose, idiomatic way of talking, or in private correspondence pertaining to personal matters (Marx more than once calls the moment where his personal financial affairs will collapse into penury as “the evil hour”). There are perhaps only two exceptions, where he uses the adjective in a serious and political context. In The Civil War in France, Marx does speak of an “unavoidable evil,” but this simply means a thing the Commune would have dispensed with if it could, but couldn’t yet; compare Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels’s use of the same phrase, writing about military matters, describing the digging of inadequate trenches as “an unavoidable evil” (ME 14, 546). In a newspaper article, Marx describes Napoleon III as an “evil genius,” but this is pure polemic. Perhaps the best candidate for a normative use of the term after 1847 is in an 1849 article in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where he speaks of “the evil effects of the division of labor” (ME 9, 226). The German word translated as “evil” here is unheilvoll (Marx-Engels-Werke 6, 420; henceforth MEW), which doesn’t mean “evil” in a moral sense, so much as in this case that there are effects for the workers—specifically, in this case, falling wages and lengthening hours—straightforwardly unpleasant for those who experience them.

Alienation

Let us move on, then, to terms that actually are in contention among commentators. Perhaps the most contested of these is “alienation.” This concept is often held up as the key normative notion of Marx’s entire thought. I regard it, however, as descriptive rather than normative. In this I oppose both proponents of a normative critique of alienation, and Althusser, who deems this concept idealist baggage to be avoided altogether.

Marx’s invocation of alienation might seem to involve positing a natural, unalienated state as a norm and then decrying its nonexistence under capitalism. But the basis for his critique of alienation is actually a Feuerbachian conception of humans as having indefinite potentiality (Barbour 2012, 83).2 Alienation is according to this interpretation ultimately simply a matter of the limitation of potential. Opposing the limitation of human potential might take on the character of a normative value, if it is used to say that any system that limits us is eo ipso bad. This is not Marx’s position, however; it is rather that limiting human potential means that the system itself will be resisted and overthrown by humans who want to do more than allowed, with a society without alienation the teleological end of the historical dialectic of human liberation this sets up. This is a descriptive thesis, even if it is one that I would reject as speculative. The category of alienation does not in itself imply such a teleology, however. Jacques Lacan, for example, unde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Foucault and Political Philosophy
• 1. Marx: Anti-normative Critique
• 2. Lenin: The Invention of Party Governmentality
• 3. Althusser: A Failed Project to Denormativize Marxism
• 4. Deleuze: Denormativization as Norm
• 5. Rorty: Relativizing Normativity
• 6. Honneth: The Poverty of Critical Theory
• 7. Geuss: The Paradox of Realism
• 8. Foucault: The Lure of Neoliberalism
• Conclusion: What Now?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover