William E. Connolly: Politics and Ambiguity. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1988.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, October 19, 1988.
Politicians muster certitude, so the country can act. Thinkers question more convincingly than they answer. This difference makes politicians and thinkers natural enemies, so to speak.
Modern political philosophers have attempted to end this conflict, usually by some form of the ‘Enlightenment’ strategy: Make politics rational, and make rationality certain, typically through deductive and inductive thought based on sense perception—a.k.a. the ‘scientific method; then town will consort more amiably with gown. This works only insofar as politicians and other citizens actually become rational—that is, to a limited extent. Push the scheme too hard, and tyranny will follow as surely as the Terror followed the French Revolution of 1789.
Professor William E. Connolly will cause no terror, great or small. He is a ‘postmodernist,’ not an ‘Enlightenment’ man. In the 1960s, when the ‘Enlightenment’ project began to suffer from bureaucratic sclerosis, the ‘New Left’ opposed the ‘New Deal’ and ‘Great Society’ projects with a form of romantic anti-rationalist communalism. This failed. The more clever ‘New Left’ operatives then migrated into the bureaucracies themselves, especially the academic bureaucracies. Armed with the anti-‘Enlightenment’ doctrines of ‘postmodernism,’ they have attempted to turn the West away from rationalism from within the entrails of the bureaucratic beast. Connolly would weaken if not dismantle the modern bureaucratic state the ‘postmodern’ way, by giving the ambiguities of thought “institutional expression.” It’s not clear whether he can do so without either making dogma so ambiguous that the ‘postmodern’ enterprise itself becomes ineffectual, or making ambiguity dogmatic, and therefore unambiguous.
He begins with an insight of Tocqueville’s: In seeking to make life more free, modern democracy “draws a larger portion of life into the fold of thematized norms,” exerting pressure on the individual to conform, or else to give up his freedom. The tyranny of the majority, sometimes wielded by a bureaucracy that takes on a life of its own, replaces the tyranny of the usual one-man or several-man gangs. Connolly looks for ways to check the all-pervasiveness of this democracy, without doing away with democracy, and without the now-fashionable retreat into “localism” or small-scale communitarianism—”a symptom of retreat and despair on the left” today, nothing more than “the ‘beautiful soul'” (much-derided by Hegel) “in radical disguise.”
Connolly fails to discover—or, as he would say, construct—any solution as workable as the American regime itself. A carefully articulated commercial-republican constitutionalism does most of what Connolly wants to do. Unremittingly leftist, he cannot bring himself to admit this. Instead, he claims that contemporary ‘tax revolts’ are nothing more than ‘disciplinary techniques’ of the established order. He imagines that, in America, “neither major [political] party today speaks to the deep anxieties Americans feel about thermonuclear war,” although obviously both do, each in its own way. He wants to “tame the growth imperative” driving America’s economy by reducing consumption (that would do it), and to form a third party to pressure and/or replace the Democrats by “speaking to the civic disaffection generated during the period of hegemony by welfare liberalism.” The latter task has been undertaken already, with modest success—by the Republicans. As for Connolly’s other projects, they are implausible, especially as counters to increasing state power.
Connolly notes that in premodern times, and in parts of the world untouched by modernity even today, yearly festivals are staged whose purpose is temporarily to invert the established social order. Kings become lackeys, and lackeys rule for a day. Connolly likes the idea. It is a said measure of his irremediable academicism that he would attempt to achieve this end by the tamer and far less enjoyable method of institutionalizing it—allowing “slack” in our public machinery, “space” for the toleration of eccentric and dissenting voices. This differs hardly at all from standard liberal tolerance. It is rather less coherent than liberal tolerance.
That, Connolly might argue, is precisely the point. Coherence is the very death of tolerance. Freedom needs incoherence to thrive, and, for what it is worth, Connolly theoretical efforts are indeed quite incoherent. In his treatment of civic morality, he dismisses God and natural law as self-destructing notions irrelevant to the modern era. In their place he offers question-begging rhetoric about “treating individuals with the respect due them” and such tautologous admonitions as, “the life we share in common requires commonalities of action.”
Epistemology interests him more. Dissatisfied with the traditional conception of language as a reflection of reality, and almost equally displeased with subjectivism, he avails himself (as is consistent with his love of ambiguity) not with one new theory but two. First there is Charles Taylor’s “expressivism,” which secularizes the medieval concept of anagogical thought: The world conceived as a book written (and here is the modern twist) not by a Creator-God but by itself, including us. How this differs from Hegelianism, which Connolly elsewhere calls a “heroic failure,” never comes clear.
To supplement “expressivism,” Connolly commends “genealogical” theory, the Nietzschean insistence that all respectable ‘constructs’ be negated and overcome. Connolly hopes for a democratized Nietzscheanism, a Nietzscheanism ‘from below.’ “The genealogist publicizes subordinate discourses and phenomena—for example, the thoughts and actions of women and ethnic minorities—”to loosen the hold that the most basic unities of our day exercise over official discourses.” He admits that “genealogy” itself is as closed as the ‘constructs’ it attacks, in the sense that it denies in advance the possibility that the ‘constructs’ may not be constructs at all, but discoveries. He nonetheless finds “genealogy” useful in freeing thought “from the tyranny of assumptions.” More than anything else, his vision of our future society resembles a freshman philosophy class.
There is a problem with such contentless freedom. It cannot account for itself, either genealogically or teleologically. If it tied to do so, it would fall into either objectivism or subjectivism all over again. It moreover (perhaps therefore) can have no practical political effect; in politics, as they say, you can’t beat something with nothing.
The dialogue between Hegel and Nietzsche makes sense in philosophy, indeed in political philosophy. As political philosophy in defense of democracy, however, it makes no sense at all. Neither Hegel nor Nietzsche was a democrat. Egalitarianism left them cold. Neither grafts onto the tree of civil liberty. Both would see that a ‘politics of ambiguity’ could never bring itself to rule.
Recent Comments