PSCI: Spinoza

Yesterday, I attended my weekly PSCI class again. This time we talked about Spinoza. (see other works by him as well)

Of course, I had heard of him before. However, usually he seems to be regarded as something of a footnote to Thomas Hobbes. But he has a lot more to offer. (Hobbes' philosophy with democratic twist, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, separation of church and state)

Unfortunately, I am in a hurry. I hope to write more about Spinoza later.

Hannah Arendt: power and violence

Yesterday, that PSCI class was on Hannah Arendt and the opinion that Habermaß had on her work.


I am sorry, but I am in a hurry. So I am afraid this post will not be comprehensive.

When I mentioned last week that Carl Schmitt had very clear (easy to understand) definitions for the main terms of his work this is even more true for Hannah Arendt. We talked about "Macht und Gewalt". (This might be the English edition but I am not quite sure.)

She differentiates between terms like strength, power, force, authority and violence because using those terms synonymously would imply that politics could be reduced to the simple question of who governs whom? She disagrees and give definitions of the terms.

She says that power can never be exercised by a single person (that would be strength or violence) but only by a group acting jointly. This means for states that the power can only come from the people. In democracies this is obvious but she explains why this would even more so be the case for a monarchy.

The monarch is only one. If his people decide not to follow his orders he will be killed. Only as long as a significant proportion of the people backs the monarch he can rule.

So, one could ask the question: What do I need power for if I can exercise violence?

Her point is you wouldn't be able to exercise violence for a long time. The monarch can't do anything if his orders aren't followed.

This ties into her analysis of the phenomenon of revolutions.

She says that whenever revolutionary violence met state violence then the state won.

However, successful revolutions happen when the state loses its means to exercise violence (meaning if army officers refuse to fire at the people).
The downfall of the GDR might be explained this way. The policemen just opened the border to West-Berlin instead of shooting at the crowd although they had received no order to let anyone through. Infact, people who had ben trying to come to West-Berlin had been fired at for more than 20 years at the time.

However, Arendt is not saying that revolutions are bound to occur whenever a regime is powerless. Regimes like that can last a while if there is no (organised) group who would claim the power and responsibility by acting jointly. She gives France as an example. (In the 1960s there was a student revolt which in her opinion could have overthrown the regime. But that had never been the intention of the students.)

Arendt's concept of power also is related to legitimacy. (this is obvious from the way she defines power in contrast to violence) The people are sovereign in Arendt's philosopy.

I'll have to run now. Maybe I'll post more later. Comments and additional info are welcome (as usual).

Political theorist Carl Schmitt and Nazi ideology

On Tuesdays I attend a psci class on modern theories of democracy.
Yesterday we talked about Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political (in the edition of 1932).

For Schmitt politics comes down to a simple question. Friend or foe? Therefore political action is uniting with your friends to fight the foe. If you quarrel with someone but none of you would be (at least theoretically) willing to use arms then it is not politics.

He mainly views politics as something international (conflicts between states). However, he says that so-called partisan politics can be politics if there is a chance for civil war emerging from the differences.

He also states that politics is completely separate from good/evil, beautiful/ugly, useful/harmful. This means your enemy could be good and beautiful and useful and still be your enemy.

The only thing determining the enemy would be the feeling that someone/something would be so foreign and different that you feel threatened in your way of life by it.

Of course it is obvious that the Nazis shared these positions when singling out the Jews as their enemies using this kind of reasoning for their genocide. Your Jewish neighbor could be morally good, nice, helpful and still would have to be eliminated because "Jewism" would threaten the "German way of life".

While the connotations are not clear in this edition in 1932, they are implied. The more we get into the 1930s the more Schmitt is coming clearer with what he means. In later works he names the foe. The foes are the Jews.

Schmitt felt his work as an answer to earlier theorists, especially to Thomas Hobbes. Therefore he published a discussion on the Leviathan himself in 1938.

Schmitt agrees with Hobbes that the state of nature is brutal, a war of everyone against everyone. While Hobbes constructs a social contract that enables people to fly from that grim state at least within a nation(Hobbes is a liberalist in that sense because it is the people who constitute society even if it is an absolute monarchy) Schmitt denies that ability. For him the state of nature is a reality that we have to recognize in order to be ready to deal with it. This is how he comes to the simple question: friend or foe?

In summary, Schmitt's theory is fit to justify genocide out of some paranoid notion.

Endless discussions have been going on about whether one can use some parts of his work in modern political discourse. Some would distinguish between his very clear analysis of political processes and the conclusions he and his followers drew from that analysis.

The fact that Schmitt's thinking still prevails (sometimes people don't even know that they think along Schmitt's lines) makes it obvious at least that we will talk about his ideas in the future.