The Polis and the Political's: Civic and Territorial Views of Association

Thesis Eleven

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 33-65

  Ely, John ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34247679075     PISSN: 07255136     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0725513696046000003     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. For examples, see Oskar Negt, Otto Kallscheuer, Martin Jay, et al., Die Zukunft des Politischen: Ausblicke auf Hannah Arendt (Fischer, Frankfurt, 1993).
2. See Stefan Berger, ‘No More Sonderweg. Germany's Return to the “Normality” of the Nation State’, Journal of Area Studies, no. 7 (1995)
3. John Ely, ‘Libertarian Ecology and “Civil Society”’, Society and Nature, no. 6 (1993), pp. 103–116.
4. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in On Max Weber (Oxford University Press, New York, 1952), p. 78.
5. Mack Walker, German Home Towns (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1971), pp. 111, 113.
6. See Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993). Current examples of this movement from left to right can be found in the adaptation of a version of ‘federalism’ inspired by Schmitt by Paul Piccone and the American journal Telos as a defense of the Italian Northern Leagues. Piccone, along with paleo-conservative Schmitt-follower Paul Gottfried, has been publishing Alain de Benoist's defense of culturally exclusive democracy and his view of the Holy Roman Empire as models for a confederal regionalism in Europe. See Telos, issues no. 91, 94, 97, 98–99 and 100.
7. See Samuel Clark, States and Status: The Rise of the State and Aristocratic Power in Europe (McGill, Montreal, 1995), pp. 59–64.
8. See Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (Bouvier, Bonn, 1929, 1954)
9. Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution (F. Vorwerk, Stuttgart, 1989)
10. Karl-Heinz WeiBmann, Ruckgriff auf die Geschichte (Ullstein, Frankfurt, 1994).
11. On the role of irreducible difference among the neo-Nietzschean political theory, see William Connolly, Identity/Difference (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1989), pp. 29ff.
12. Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, in Margins of Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982), p. 20. Writes Mouffe: ‘While politics in a liberal democracy aims at creating a “we”, at constructing a political community, a fully inclusive political community can never be achieved since, as Schmitt tells us, in order to construct a “we” it must be distinguished from a “them”, and that means establishing a frontier, defining an “enemy”.
13. There will therefore exist a permanent “constitutive outside”, as Derrida has shown us, an exterior to the community that makes its existence possible. On this point Schmitt's ideas converge with several important trends in contemporary theory which reaffirm the relation character of every identity, the unavoidable couple identity/difference …’ (The Return of the Political I Verso, London, 1992]), p. 114.
14. Carl Schmitt, DerNomos der Erde (Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1950), p. 13.
15. See Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Atheneum, New York, 1975), pp. 294ff.
16. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1974), pp. 101–140.
17. Hermann Lubbe, ‘Hochfoderative oder gar nicht,’ Mut, no. 299 (July, 1992), a new right ‘ethno-pluralist’ serial.
18. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Doubleday, New York, 1959), pp. 122ff.
19. Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde, pp. 36–42.
20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 122, 130–9.
21. See Jiirgen Habermas, ‘Sovereignty and the Fuhrerdemokratie’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 Dec. 1986, p. 1053.
22. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1976), pp. 19–21.
23. J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book III, ch. 1: ‘Now the less relationship there is between private wills and the general will, that is, between mores and the laws, the more repressive force ought to increase. Therefore … the government must be relatively stronger in proportion as the populace is more numerous.’ (trans. Cross, Hacket, New York, 1986), p. 173.
24. Aristotle, Politics, Book. III, ch. 3, 1276a 25–34.
25. See, in general, Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1978).
26. Otto Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, ed. Antony Black (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988).
27. Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde, p. 22.
28. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 26ff.
29. For a post-structuralist reading, see Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, pp. 105–143.
30. Christian Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 14.
31. Elman, R. Service, Origins oj'the State and Civilization (Norton, New York, 1975), pp. 71–112
32. Robert Griffeth (ed.), City-States in Five Cultures (Clio, Oxford, 1982).
33. See Lewis Mumford's contrast between the civic layout of Athens and the larger imperial cities to the east in The City in History (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1964).
34. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (Knopf, New York, 1993), pp. 244–254.
35. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1964), p. 126.
36. Oppenheim quotes the Barker translation of Aristotle's Politics (Book VII, ch. 11, 1330b 18–1330b 20) in Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 126.
37. Keegan, A History of Warfare, pp. 256f.
38. See Alain de Benoist, ‘Democracy Revisited’, Telos, no. 95 (Spring, 1993), for a Schmitt-based new right version of democracy emphasizing cultural ascription. However, since the publication in English of Meier's Discovery of Greek Politics, the Schmittian focus on ‘identity’ and walls, culture, and exclusion has influenced even American classics.
39. See for example Cynthia Farrar, ‘Ancient Greek Political Theory as a Response to Democracy,’ in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992), pp. 18–21.
40. See Peter Murphy, ‘The Birth of Humanism’, Thesis Eleven, no. 40 (1995).
41. Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1992).
42. Republicans can take interest in Marsiglio, noting the pains Leo Strauss has taken to esoterically prove to beginners in political philosophy that he was no democrat, not unlike Strauss's anti-Hegelian attempt to bury Aristotle under Plato, or his continuation of a tendentious German, Meineckeian reading of Machiavelli as a ‘teacher of evil’. See Leo Strauss, History ofPolitical Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1973). Marsiglio and Machiavelli are two thorny republican thinkers he trusted to no disciples.
43. The ‘council’ is the most characteristic feature of this personal association forming the living cell-tissue of the ‘commune’ in this sense, having emerged originally as an attributive, as ‘common counsel’, or in deliberations ‘in common’. In this manner, as Daniel Waley observes, it comes originally to mean a ‘substantive in its own right, signifying the citizens or their assembly’ (The Italian City Republics [Longman, New York, 1969, 1988], p. 34f.).
44. Walter Ullmann, ‘Personality and Territoriality in the ‘Defensor Pads’: The Problem of Political Humanism’, in Law and Jurisdiction in the Middle Ages (London: Variorum, 1988), p. 404, my emphasis. See also Gary Nederman's excellent work on Marsiglio.
45. Ullmann, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1975), p. 397.
46. Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1956), pp. 134f.
47. Antony Black, Political Theory in Europe: 1250–1450 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992), pp. 108f., 113ff. Carl Schmitt's land-based orientation in this respect can be contrasted with the maritime one with reference to his obsessive anxiety of pirates, which are a symbol of democratic and democratizing politics from Athens to the ‘privateers’ of the Dutch and early American republics, and the naval revolutionaries of Kiel and Kronstadt.
48. Schmitt, like Ernst von Salomon, disliked pirates with a rather serious ‘intensity’. Schmitt insists on a distinction between ‘tellurian’ and ocean-going bandits (Theorie des Partisa-nen [Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1963, pp. 34f.), and prefers the former. ‘Privateers’, military tools by republics in the making who fight empires, are romanticized by republics that have become imperial and with a global reach. They are perhaps inhibitors rather than catalysts of primitive accumulation.
49. See Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1984)
50. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993). Putman, however, celebrates the northern Italian cities for their money-making.
51. See Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States: 1990–1992 (Routledge, Boston, MA, 1993), pp. 67ff
52. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (University of California Press, Berkeley; 1988), pp. 83–117, 222–4. The actual legislator of the European Union is the Council of Ministers in the particular regions of competency. This institution of the governing leaders of the member states, combined with the presidents of the EU Commission, leads individual governments (‘Luxembourg Compromise’) to choose a consensus format for the decisions over structural changes. This leads to centralist, executive control. Each national government has insisted on retaining direct executive control.
53. Barrington Moore, The Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1966), pp. 4l4ff.
54. Charles Tilly, The Formation of the Nation-State in Europe (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1975), pp. 632–635.
55. Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984), pp. 54ff.
56. Charles Tilly ‘Entanglements of European Cities and States’, in Charles Tilly and Wim Blochmanns, Cities and the Rise of States in Europe AD 1000 to 1800 (West-view, Boulder, CO, 1994), pp. 6–12.
57. Note the pathbreaking early work by Bookchin on this theme, Urbanization Without Cities (Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA, 1986).
58. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, pp. 99f.
59. Tilly, Coercion, pp. 130ff.
60. Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, chs 3–5.
61. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, pp. 1, 4, 6f.
62. Max Weber, Economy and Society (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 52f.
63. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1970 [1928]), pp. 77–79.
64. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei’, Marx-Engels Werke, vol. 4 (Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1977), p. 464f.
65. On this sense of ‘identification’, see Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Norton, New York, 1977), pp. 4–5, 20–4.
66. Charles Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes (McGill, Montreal, 1994)
67. Michael Sandel, ‘Democracy and the End of the Nation State’, New Political Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 4 (1992). Sandel's communitarianism can be compared with the White House advisor William Galston and Amitai Etzioni.
68. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ‘Welches Europa Wollen Wir’, Die Zeit, no. 26 (19 June, 1992).
69. Claudia Roth, ‘Neue Chance fur einen Demokratisierungsschub in Europa’, in Wilfried Telkamper et al., Europa ja - Maastricht Nein (Die Griinen, Berlin, 1993), pp. 3f.
70. Where the Greens were always weaker and never clear of their character as socialists, there is more, not less, ambiguity. Political developments in the European Parliament suggest that the influence of Greens who are still ‘neither right nor left’ and purist on ecological issues, such as Amendola's ‘smiling sun’ in Italy and the French Greens dominated by Anton Wachter, until he finally quit, will continue to dilute European Green political programs, despite the fact that they have done poorly recently at the polls. Purist Green influence on the European Greens' statutes and program is evident in the least common denominator, milque toast nature of the June, 1993 resolutions. For an intellectual perspective, see Robyn Eckersley, ‘Green vs. Ecosocialist Economic Programmes: The Market Rules OK?’, Political Studies, vol. 40 (1992), pp. 315–333.
71. See Otto Kallscheuer, ‘Raumordnung und moralische Verwirrung’, Transit, no. 7(1994), pp. 5–11.
72. Benjamin Barber, ‘Jihad vs. McWorld’, The Atlantic, March (1992), pp. 53–55.
73. See Umberto Bossi, Jorg Haider, et al., Europa derRegionen (Volk, Vienna, 1994)
74. Allesandro Campi, ‘Gianfranco Miglio's Challenge’, Gianfranco Miglio, ‘Beyond Schmitt’, and Paul Gottfried, ‘Miglio's Political Quest’, in Telos, no. 100 (Summer, 1994)
75. Paul Gottfried, ‘Second Thoughts on Traditions’, Telos, no. 94 (Winter 1992–1993), pp. 72ff
76. Hermann Liibbe, ‘Selbstbestimmung und Alltagskultur,’ Mut, no. 295 (March 1992).
77. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1989)
78. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Coming Clash of Civilizations - Or, the West Against the Rest’, The New York Times, 6 June, 1993. ‘Civilization’ here refers largely to what Marxists call ‘cultural’ issues, above all ethnic and religious identity ascription.
79. See Hannah Arendt, Imperialism (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1968), pp. 101f., 145ff.
80. Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, Cultural Politics (Blackwell, London, 1995), p. 23.
81. Frederic Jameson, ‘Post-modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, no. 146 (1984).
82. Mike Davis, The City of Quartz (Verso, London, 1992).
83. R. J. Johnston, A Question of Place: Exploring the Practice of Human Geography (Blackwell, Oxford, 199D, pp. 187ff.
84. David Harvey, ‘The Geopolitics of Capitalism’ in John Urry (ed.), Social Relations and Spatial Structures (Macmillan, London, 1985).
85. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity’, in John Rajchman (ed.), The Question of Identity (New York, Routledge, 1995), pp. 98ff.
86. Jordan and Weedon, Cultural Politics, p. 33.
87. Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde, p. 120.
88. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 38–45.
89. See Kallscheuer, ‘Raumordnung,’ pp. 7f.
90. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, pp. 20ff.
91. Jordan and Weedon, Cultural Politics, pp. 34ff.
92. Jordan and Weedon, Cultural Politics, p. 16.
93. Frederic Jameson, ‘On Cultural Studies’, in Rajchman, The Question of Identity, pp. 286ff.
94. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, p. 376 and pp. 276ff.
95. ‘Identity’ is crucial to Schmitt's definition of both nation and federation (though he thinks the latter is an inherently unstable political form), and those advocating federalism who are influenced by him. See Piccone, ‘The Case Against Liberal Federalism’, Telos, no. 93 (Fall, 1992), pp. 36ff.
96. Dario Durando, ‘The Cultural Roots of Federalism’, Telos, no. 97 (Fall, 1993), p. 27, emphasis in the original
97. Gianfranco Miglio, ‘The Cultural Roots of Federalism’, Telos, no. 97 (Fall, 1993), pp. 38–39
98. Paul Piccone, ‘The Case Against Liberal Federalism’, Telos, no. 93 (Fall, 1992), pp. 36ff.
99. On jurisdictions, see Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde, p. 18.
100. See Benoist, ‘The Idea of Empire’, Telos, no. 98–9 (Winter-Spring, 1994)
101. Miglio, ‘The Federalist Revolution’, p. 19
102. ‘Beyond Schmitt’, p. 124–6.
103. Hannah Arendt, Was ist PolitW (ed. Ursula Lutz, Piper, Munich, 1993), pp. 28f.
104. Hannah Arendt, review of La Nation by J.-T. Delos, now in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1994), p. 210).