(1968/1969)
The relationship of the state to the norm of peace is conditioned by its reference to reality in a twofold sense: first, to that reality the state claims for itself and manifests in political actions, and second, to that reality it grants to that which it itself is not. The concept of reality is a contrastive concept; it evades definition, for “only that which has no history is definable.”1 The more compelling claim in a particular case; what can be neither overlooked nor ignored; what we expect and what places burdens on us; what we fight for and what we rebel against; what is able to mobilize emotions and sacrifices—all this and this at least is of the rank of reality. How reality is understood is part of “what is involved in the notion of a form of life,”2 from which can be understood the complex of actions of an individual or a society—beyond the assumption that there are only responses to stimuli—as the unity of a behavior toward reality that gives itself rules or at least can be reduced to rules. It is the concept of reality toward which theoretical and practical attitudes converge.
By way of comparative and competing presence it can be understood what it means to say the state claims reality and grants it to that which exists “beside, above, and beyond the state, and often enough even against it.”3 As if it were a prepared specimen, the extreme situation shows this fact: it is in war that the state sees an upswing of its own reality as the most extreme and exclusive bindingness, of the self-evidence of its necessity and its right, which tends toward absolutism; this occurs not only in war but also on the brink of war, also in the simulation that anticipates war as a “cold” one. Only the crisis essentializes the state’s existence; the state of emergency is the textbook case of its vindication. Whoever campaigns for the state as a “higher reality” and whoever identifies himself with the state thinks it as a subject of crises—and is easily inclined to think it into crises. There is little that is surprising about the insistence with which politicians in power muse about the perfect coordination of a possible “state of emergency.” The external, manipulated crisis as a tool for inner stabilization is another common part of the political trade. Given, however, a technological state in which real wars endanger the state itself and as such, and in which they can destroy its identity even as a subject of crises, the hypothetical war—the “phantom war”—becomes a medium that promises to push states to crystalline solidity. Thus, there is a correlation between the threat to peace and the evidence of the state, and it suggests to infer an analogous correlation that a weakened state would strengthen peace. This correlation, however, does not mean that the disempowerment of the state would be a causality of a peaceful evolution, even if it is true that since time immemorial the state has been the subject of peace only in a state of exhaustion: such peace as it has enjoyed has only ever been “cold.” There is no need specifically to conclude this type of peace; it is the inertial state of the political world, which exists as long as there are no acting forces disturbing it. Only the virulent state is potentially such a disturbing factor. And virulence here means reality, tending toward the comparative of reality.
It is an elementary Aristotelian train of thought that lets us assume that the state, given it is something “existing by nature,” acts toward the perfection of its condition, as do all things in nature, that is, toward the display of its necessity at every place and in every moment, and not merely toward ensuring the preconditions of its naked existence but toward preemption vis-à-vis any possibility of its destabilization. Its entelechy is the densest presence and inescapable potency, which can, after all, only be verified in the medium of crisis. However useful the Hobbesian model has turned out to be, in which the individual’s state of nature is rationally neutralized as the surrender of everyone to everyone into the convention of absolute dominion—the individual simply enters another, albeit mediate, “state of nature,” in which he, powerless, is turned over to “history” as the autonomous execution of this convention, that is, to the self-actualization of the state, which detaches itself from the zero point of the rationality that founded it and transitions into a second naturalness, which—like everything that is “natural”—implies the strictest prohibition against doubting what is and how it is.
However: Is there no other connection between the norm of peace and the reality of the state than that of peacefulness by virtue of exhaustion, from the calculus of power that, just at this very moment, is insufficient, and sees no opportunity to seize? Is the relationship of the state to reality—and thus, its relationship to the norm of peace—a constant in history and thus for political theory? To pursue this question, one is forced to take a detour.
The theory of the sovereign state is a result of the declining Middle Ages. It would be romanticism to hold that against it.4 This theory of the state had found its systematic formulation in the reception of Aristotle’s Politics since the thirteenth century and sharpened it in the exacerbation of the struggle between imperial and papal power in the Middle Ages. What Aristotle had delivered was, in contradistinction to Plato’s Republic, not so much a theory of the perfect state as one of the perfection of the state insofar as it fulfills the nature of humans as “political beings.” From this prerequisite followed two conclusions: first, that of the “naturalness” of the state by virtue of its anthropological foundation; second, the impossibility of the theory of the state being surpassed by a transcending theory of the ordered relations among states or the rationality of their self-abandonment for the constitution of higher structures.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century—and this is not the place to discuss the details of the reception and reshaping of Aristotelian premises in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—this was already a well-known part of the tradition. But now this traditional theory of the state found itself, as it were, caught between two opposing positions: one appealed to the realism of political situations and a theory of acting according to them; the other was the formation of the rational fiction in the shape of a utopia. The first is represented by Machiavelli’s Prince; the second by Thomas More’s Utopia.
Both works—it is worth keeping this in mind—emerged almost at the same moment in history. The tract on the prince was finished in its first draft at the end of 1513, although it was published only posthumously in Rome in 1532. The tract Of a Republic’s Best State and of the New Island Utopia was printed in 1516 in its Latin version in Louvain; the first English edition appeared in 1551 in London. What does the simultaneous occurrence of these two extreme manifestations of political theory mean?
It was Ernst Cassirer who first compared Machiavelli’s Prince to Galileo’s Discourses in terms of their meaning and their historical function, even though more than a century lay between the two works. This comparison is still exciting because it seems so palpably justified and yet evades systematic explication. What is decisive is the separation of politics from the systematic field of analogies of physics and ethics, just as Galileo had to separate physics from metaphysics and, initially, also from cosmology in the vein of Aristotle, or just as Hugo Grotius had looked for an autonomous ground of legal theory this side of metaphysics and theology. Machiavelli was not so much the founder of a new science, the theory of the state, as Galileo was for physics; rather, he was the one who made visible a new object for a possible science by overilluminating the specimen and bringing to light a new reality as such. For Machiavelli was a theoretician despite himself: a man thrown from the trajectory of political success, he found himself forced merely to speak of a thing he deemed relevant only to do. Theory for him was a surrogate, not a requirement of action. But what this literal rethinking forced him to do was itself only a type of being affected by just that absolute reality that cannot be regarded “from the outside.” Even where the amorality of this new political realism met its theoretical resistance in the anti-Machiavellism of the Enlightenment, it could not be the return to an alleged unity of morality and politics; in this respect, Machiavelli’s autonomization of politics has been irreversible.5
By showing the reality of politics in its specimen form, Machiavelli broke with the traditional understanding of reality as nature in the same way that the new physics of the Discourses came about because Galileo went to the arsenali [arsenals] of Venice to fathom the achievements of human ingenuity. Contemplating phenomena, the classical ideal of the theory of the starry sky, was insufficient in both fields. Technology, the principle of “violent motion” in the sense of the Aristotelian tradition, revealed the nature of such things. The principle of the new physics, which Galileo had just touched upon, designates a state of affairs that is not encountered in nature as a phenomenon: the inertia of bodies. Analogously, Machiavelli had forgone the Aristotelian derivation of the state from human nature. What excited him was the state in its, as it were, experimental situation, as if he wanted to represent as well as apprehend “the inborn ineptitude of men to rule or be ruled”6 in contradistinction to the ancient canon of the “political animal.” Thus, he is not interested in the old, historically or spiritually legitimized state structures, whose history looks like growth and which have assumed something like naturalness; he is interested in the emergence and preservation of new dominions and exercises of power. The art of the state, the arte dello stato, has its equivalent in the artificiality of power as the normal case of the political structure—a power whose preservation is always problematic, such that its boundary case is the statics of that historical inertia of survival. The private man who, through his own skill (virtù) or favored by chance (fortuna), has ascended to rulership, is the paradigm of the political artifact; for him, everything given (occasione) becomes mere matter onto which he imprints the form of his decisions.7 Machiavelli uses the model of the Aristotelian hylemorphism to assign political actions to the categories of the artes mechanicae [mechanical arts]. Here, a basic trait of the modern age becomes apparent: the materialization of that which had previously looked like nature—and could thus claim the sanction of all that is obvious—into the substrate of demiurgical processes. Even before the Ptolemaic cosmos had been shattered, the state had lost its peculiar, medieval shell-like character [Gehäusecharaker]. It is no longer the framework in which the scenes of history unfold before a hidden spectator but it is the actor itself. The task of theory is to grasp its actions, not its construction.
With the realist’s new pathos, Machiavelli invokes the factual (verità effetuale della cosa) against the imaginary republic of the Platonic tradition (immaginati repubbliche), which had just enjoyed a renaissance in that very city of Florence in which Machiavelli was trying to ingratiate himself with his treatise.8 Plato had derived his Republic from the three-tiered structure of the human soul; at the center of the work stood the theory of ideas,9 and the famous cave allegory illustrated the necessity of binding the state to the knowledge of absolute reality. Political action was to be founded on the self-evidence of the relation to reality: this self-evidence could be reached at the end of the ascent from the shadows of the cave to the cosmos of the ideas. Plato himself had felt the need to add a genetic presentation to the static construction of his Republic; this was supposed to happen in a trilogy of which only the first dialogue was completed. The Timaios covers cosmology and suggests that this time Plato wanted to derive the state not from the structure of the human soul but from that of the cosmos. If nature could become cosmos, so the state can, in the same way, be cosmos as well—this, at least, might have been the goal of the late trilogy’s argument. In any case, nature and state could be assigned to one homogeneous concept of reality, to which corresponded a similarly homogeneous ideal of “theory.”
Machiavelli’s realist disillusionment was aimed against the Republic and not yet the Utopia. It was only to eighteenth-century readers, who rediscovered the Prince, that the utopia of Enlightenment must have seemed close to the gist of Machiavelli’s argument. But this rested on the misunderstanding—still unresolved today—that regards utopias as belonging exclusively to the Platonic tradition. This ignores that already Thomas More’s Utopia shares an aspect with Machiavelli’s Prince that separates both from the prerequisites of the Platonic as well as the Aristotelian theory of the state: they no longer refer to the natural cosmos—neither to the cosmos of the ideas nor to its likeness in the phenomena nor to the teleology of a human nature that fulfills itself in the state. The political reality, as it looks to both of these sixteenth-century authors, is not the continuation of physical reality “by other means.”
Utopia—its name says as much—has no place. Unlike the cave allegory, no topography can be given for it through which a path leads to the self-evidence of ideas. Its function is of a different kind. It is aimed critically against the facticity of what is. But it does not define what ought to take its place, although it does hint at what could do so: it mobilizes possibility against reality, even if only in order to throw the latter into sharper relief. It is a part of materialization as a basic trait of the modern age that it plays off as enlightenment the scientia possibilium [science of the possible] against what has become and what is extant. “The man of intelligence sees far into the immense ocean of possibilities, the fool scarcely sees anything possible but the actual.”10 But at the same time, this is the weakness of utopia—while it expands the horizon of the possible, it does not find self-evidence for surpassing it. “According to modality, rationalism quits reality without arriving at necessity. Possibility is its immense field.”11 This is what Kierkegaard, in The Sickness unto Death, called “the despair of possibility … due to the lack of necessity.”12 This still contains a residue of Platonic needs, which unmistakably remains in the modern age’s theory of the state.
The difference between the utopian and the Platonic tradition becomes immediately evident in the prototype of the genre, Thomas More’s Utopia. The text explicitly negates the evidence of the model it demonstrates. Toward the end of the report on the island of Utopia, the rite of its inhabitants is described, which comes to an end with a great prayer in which priests and people together give thanks for living in the best of states. But at once they qualify the certainty of this state-mindedness by adding the request that the deity let them know should there be a better political system. This caveat is a gesture of humility, but one that not by accident stands at the end of a political-theoretical demonstration that claims to be a challenger to Plato’s Republic and which indeed has been received as such.
Any Platonism must exclude such a qualification. The beholder of the ideas, who at the same time is imagined as the competent politician, not only learns that the ideal cosmos is the true model of a world but also that it is the only truth. Granted, to abide by the image of the cave, humans had once been able to mistake the shades for the true reality, but it is unthinkable that this illusion could be repeated in the one who has already found the way to knowledge. Ideas are not of the kind that they allowed for a mallon on, an increase in reality. They indubitably let one know the finality of what has been reached. The claim to such certitude of final evidence is, throughout the tradition, part of Platonism, even if, eventually, beyond contemplation a higher stage of unsurpassable certitude is found in “touching” the One. Political philosophy’s trust in evidence always had a “coercive streak” [Zug der Gewalttätigkeit], which Jacob Burckhardt already perceives in Plato.13
Plato’s state in its moderated late form, as it is presented in the Laws, prohibits its citizens from traveling, and commands those who nonetheless had reason to do so to depict circumstances outside as inferior to those within one’s own state. Thomas More’s Utopians, on the contrary, specifically ask for enlightenment, that is, to be told if there is a state anywhere better than theirs. This difference from Platonism is significant for the function of utopia in the modern age. That the fictional state is set in the future—which originally was not part of utopia—is not essential; it can just as well seek the binding force of a historical formation, as continued by Montesquieu’s romanticization of the medieval Frankish legislature, or the exotic imagination of the prototypical travel novel. Even though Hythloday, the narrator of Utopia, claims that the state he depicts was capable of permanent existence, he himself calls this statement a humana coniectura, a human conjecture. It seems more of a hypothesis than an eternal idea.14
In view of the contemporaneity of The Prince and Utopia, another aspect from the prehistory of the utopian state demands consideration: the island of the Utopians is no natural structure but came into being by artificial separation from the mainland. The isolation from the common realities of contemporary political life seemed possible only at a cost that must have reeked of hubris to the humanistically educated reader. The Greeks, as Burckhardt repeatedly proves, deemed “great enterprises, through which the shape of whole landscapes was altered, always as sacrilegious,”15 and the sanction of the inviolata terra [unplowed earth] is indeed present in More’s utopia when the report, which begins with a drastic alteration of nature, closes with the lamentation about the pretensions of man.16 Utopia, the state, thus does not rest on the fundament of eternally valid ideas and their physical replication but on an act of determined disengagement from nature’s givenness. The horizon of the concept of reality, within which Machiavelli and Thomas More draft theories that are antipodal in their content, proves to be homogeneous in pushing for a break with the classic sanctions of the “pre-given.” The aspect of violence and power, which stands at the beginning wherever statehood comes into being, is the common axiom, as is something else: the impossibility of distinguishing appearance and reality [Schein und Sein], the lack of that clear structure of an increase of evidence in the Platonic cave allegory as the result of the political process. In Utopia, this was the invocation of the absolute witness, who alone was capable of revealing the relativity of the supposedly best state over against that which perhaps was better. In Machiavelli, it was, much harsher, the appearance of unbroken continuity and unquestioned naturalness that was to be given, after the fact, to the power won by struggle.
At this beginning of modern philosophical thought about the state it is confirmed that “reality” is always understood in a relation of contrast. Realities are quantified as such precisely by their ability to be defended against the charge of irreality. Platonism meant: the idea as an authority against what was “merely appearance.” Machiavellism meant: appearance as an authority against what was “merely idea.” Utopia meant: the fiction of the possibility as an authority against what was “merely contingent fact” and thus less than its rational surpassing.
But these antitheses have not yet revealed anew the elementary antagonism that was contained in the making of the metaphysical tradition: Plato’s demonization of Sophism, his turn away from rhetoric by means of philosophy. The concept of reality that this metaphysical tradition would have to work through and with whose consequences it would have to come to terms could ultimately be reduced to the fundamental opposition between “words” and “things.” Platonism is a philosophy against the rule of the word, the postulate of visual perception against listening, of self-evidence against persuasion, of res [things] against verba [words]. “Only words” is the pervasive topos denoting the irreality of that which is unimportant. The disrepute in which political rhetoric stands is, already in Plato, based on the precondition that truth had its own potency and would prevail if the weaker logos was not, by a perversion of proportions, made into the stronger. The technical conception of politics, which gave rhetoric its enduring ambivalence, was supposed to be put in the wrong by appealing to an ultimate and actual reality of a type like that of the ideas. That in modern-age “realism” this problematic was latent and pressed toward becoming explicit again belongs to the late perceptions of the epoch; to let it come into its own and to analyze it without prejudice is still hampered by the power of tradition.
We begin to hesitate to dismiss verbal demonstrations of politics by calling them “mere rhetoric,” a designation that has long spelled anathema. Occasionally, perhaps even increasingly, we may take comfort in a politics of “mere words” being conducted. Have we not all too often dared to demand that the state should, after all those words, finally follow up with actions? An analysis of our most recent history demonstrates how preferable, particularly with regard to global structures, is the substitution of words for facts and actions, proclamations for decisions. Everything can depend on leaving it at words, to—as one has become accustomed to saying—“settle for declarations.” What, since Bernard Baruch’s coinage during the discussion of the Truman doctrine in 1947, has been called the “Cold War” has become a behavioral pattern on the part of the superpowers, in which words are increasingly passed off as realities—and no one would say that we would have preferred to see the realities themselves instead. As a behavior in a world in which the risk of acting is apt to disqualify all the possible achievements of acting, the “big words” begin to sound reassuringly sweet. I see little sense in abstracting from this situation to get to morality more quickly. “From a higher point of view,” this may seem far from satisfactory. But is this point of view obvious and rationally compelling, and does it not share in the contempt for Sophism with its metaphysical implications? The disdain of the pragmatic in favor of what is supposed to be above all reason comes under scrutiny from a skepticism that rejects being told what the “actually real” [eigentlich Wirkliche] is.
We do not know how stable such a situation is and can be. Thus, one probably should not accept as obvious and final the thesis that “the technical world does not stabilize itself.”17 It is, in any case, a threshold notion of all technicity that its functionality has to follow from objective immanence [aus der sachlichen Immanenz]. Let us suppose we were able to approximate this threshold value of immanent regulation, in which case the axiom would gain validity whereby political action best fulfills its purpose by only simulating the classical quality of “decisiveness” [Entscheidungsfreudigkeit], and perhaps only to assuage cravings for functionality and endogenous dissatisfactions. This is an irritatingly exaggerated formulation, but it seems useful to me as an antidote against overestimating the traditional scope of political “reality.”
One needs to understand how little is done and can be done where the great political alternatives are at stake, and that not only in foreign but also in domestic politics. It is, of course, itself a political need to uphold the understanding that much could be done if only this or that—especially people—were different. Occasionally, there are reckless demonstrations that the reserves of the completely different are exhaustible. The widespread disappointment with the Grand Coalition in the Federal Republic18 is based on the fact that something was realized too hastily and arose from superficial necessities, which, as the last resort for producing the capacity for political agency, had been a pragmatic myth and needed to be well guarded as such. It is comparable only to the last great reserve of the general strike: the strong arm that makes all wheels stop remains a fascinosum and a tremendum only if it remains on this side of the disenchantment of its application.19 With respect to what could be decided, what can be decided is ever more reduced; if this does not become tangible in the phenotype of what happens, it is due to the need of the modern news services for “events,” which corresponds more to its capacities than to the realities. Ultimately, even the possibility of war will pass over into “verbal modality.” This does not mean that one will not be able to think of war as a means anymore, but it means that this notion can no longer be thought through to the end. Such a state would be a bad peace but not the worst—not that kind of peace that stems from an insight and a conviction, from a great human effort, and that to expect and to demand man cannot stop, and on whose conditions to meditate he cannot cease, but the kind of peace resulting from the certainty of disappointment and the inevitable catastrophe should its opposite be attempted. It has been said often enough that the extreme sensitivity of modern structures in terms of supply, administration, and production renders any notion of violence, even of the most conventional kind, risky in the extreme. The reason that today this statement still needs to be qualified is that this sensitivity of the organization of daily life has not been attained everywhere in the world; at a lower degree of sensitivity, the risk of the “little adventures” remains liable to be underestimated.
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker has put forward the thesis that world peace is inevitable but by no means certain.20 According to him, this lack of certainty is not only a weakness in the theoretical calculation but also has an immanently rational function: it secures the constant necessity for the great effort that the goal of world peace demands. This argument is, in its logical structure, reminiscent of Kant’s postulate of the existence of God, which had to remain theoretically unproven not only because it cannot be proven but also because of the practical results the theoretical certainty of divine judgment over all action would yield for moral autonomy: freedom would become calculation. Whether, because of its inevitability, world peace is also certain is thus not only what no one can know but also what no one may know. But this paradox needs to be stated more radically. A state that concluded its certainty from the inevitability of peace would neglect its own armament and would, through the vulnerability of its internal structures, offer the opportunity for extortion to anyone ready to attack; by so doing, it would make possible the subcutaneous shift in power structures that always entails the risk of greater conflict. Even the uncertainty of the reaction to an act of aggression must be preserved and remain relevant.
The consequences for the “peace morality” of the individual citizen are most peculiar. The obligation to perform military service has become more compelling, for it alone sustains the uncertainty of the reaction to a violation of peace. But should this risk not be enough to uphold the self-evidence of the inevitability of peace, then a conclusion follows that cannot be anticipated politically but is essentially private. If the only definable aim for armed power and the alliances it makes possible—to render war pointless by making it more dangerous—has manifestly failed, then military service ceases to be bound by that aim. Whatever comes next does not compensate for the aims that might have made it bearable. What is politically almost unthinkable would be logically inevitable: the armed forces would have to be dissolved and all alliances declared unrealizable. No state could or would be permitted to announce this beforehand; each would have to do so at point X and most likely would do it. When considering the antinomies of this situation, one must expect the charge of a new Machiavellianism and its attendant gestures of revulsion. To give the determined, self-avowed, or recognizable violator of the peace what he wants after no demonstration of the risks could deter him and to surrender before the showdown—that is a thought which is hard to bear even when expressed in terms such as these. But especially over against any resistance the classical political mentality might put up, here too the premise must be upheld that no victory can any longer be accounted as a gain, that the loser may trust in the aggressor soon being confronted with the complexity of the problems of a world that is only possible by virtue of technology, and that the illusion of his gain must soon become clear to him. Can one count on the aggressor thus being forcibly turned toward rationality?
To answer this question, another paradox of our political reality needs to be thought through: the paradox of the powerless power. The instruments of power have increased in today’s world by a tremendous measure. It is possible to think that they accumulate to an almost absolute degree by a cartel of the superpowers. But this conventional view of power ignores the question of what equivalent of the exercise of power is adequate to the dimensions of which we are speaking here. Doubtless there always have been ends that could not be achieved by mere power. But the question that is relevant here is, What share in all that can be or ever has been the object and aim of political power do those things have that can no longer be achieved by power, and of what dignity are they in relation to classical conceptions of power? And furthermore, In which direction is the proportion of this share developing?
One must begin with the most primitive form of the exercise of power to answer this question, with the identification of humans with their physical capabilities and the command over them. In this elementary view, the capacity for work and battle can be calculated from the number of people in a political structure’s orbit of force. But this very type of power in the classical sense has become as uninteresting as it is irrelevant. To control industrial and military capacities today means to rule over “heads” in the strict and strictest sense, and thus no longer in the sense of a pars pro toto. The failure of colonial rule as well as the formation of blocs are connected to this process. The expansion of borders, disposition over territories and their populations have become ineffective, because one loses the aforementioned heads by ruling them against their will. While the force of human power and dexterity that needs to be coerced can be replaced by technology almost at will, spontaneous intelligence and the capacity for invention continue to elude the grasp of force. Whatever one may wish to call the powers and qualities that might at this moment be the objective of an expansive political will to subdue, they can no longer be separated from the free consent to this will as were pure work and armed service, the skills of artisans, and the minds of officials. This explains the inevitable late and belated attempts to pursue imperial politics as ideological politics.
That power should lose its terror at the moment it is represented, as it were, in its pure state, is due less than some believe to the terror that can be brought to bear against it, but rather to the fact that its exercise has, to an almost laughable degree, become futile, and its debasement must proceed quickly as a political goal. Though it may seem as if the paradox of powerless power consisted above all in the unwieldy and outsized weapons on which it rests and with which it is not allowed to do anything, this superficial phenomenon conceals the, if I may say so, humane surprise that the substance of what can be neither won nor ruled by power has become crucial, in modern reality, to the continued existence of that very reality. The point in the technological-cultural development of a state from which on its political sphere can no longer afford conflicts with the intellectual one is revealing in this regard. We live in a world in which exercising power must become onerous, and the allure of power is out of all proportion to the risks that have to be taken for its sake. This need not mean that political behaviors as phenomena change radically. But such immutability can be mere appearance. In other spheres, too, for instance in labor struggles, we can observe that the classical repertoire of historically acquired behaviors is retained as a ritual. The verbal modality of which I spoke can be understood as atrophied, purely phenomenal constancy. The res–verba antithesis would have become the verba pro rebus [words in place of things] thesis—and this in turn would be something like the return of Sophism from its Platonic exile, of course under a new aspect that the tradition could not have imagined.
Anybody rethinking the present from the vantage point of that tradition and by its means will be disappointed or even horrified by this analysis. Should the state no longer be the true and actual realization of the zōon politikon [political animal] but the bearer of a “role”—a mere speaking role at that—in the economy of human history? And should what in its dignity was once to be grasped by contemplating the cosmos now be assigned to the sphere of institutionalized rhetoric? If disappointment and horror are to be expected here, then the very obviousness of this reaction requires investigation. Insights might be gained here by referring back to the concept of reality.
Just as over the course of the history of European culture nature lost its fatedness to politics, politics in turn seems liable to be surpassed by the relevance of other structures. What animates life and determines its vagaries is real in the highest degree: the weather can be the epitome of all realities, and the weather god the absolutely supreme being. For a long time, the political medium of human life has surpassed the physical in its implacability. Science and technology have led to a neutralization of nature, and thus to the peculiar irreality for humans that it has adopted in its reserves within modern civilization. The difficulty of this state of affairs is that the central strand of the history of science in the modern age is the science of nature, but the very success of this natural science has dimmed and leveled nature as the epitome of fateful pre-givenness for humans. Only hesitantly did philosophical thought follow this change in the primacy of realities against the paradigms set by tradition. How hard it was to follow in thought the primacy of the political is expressed in a letter by Marx dated March 13, 1843, in which he discusses Feuerbach’s Preliminary Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy [1842]: “Feuerbach’s aphorisms seem to me incorrect only in one respect, that he refers too much to nature and too little to politics. That, however, is the only alliance by which present day philosophy can become truth.”21 Is it possible that this phase, too, in which politics is the epitome of fateful reality for humans, is already of the past or on its way there? A sober appreciation of the facts that matter here seems hidden from our sight by the sleight of hand by which new and heterogeneous factors are simply subsumed under the heading of the political, because the institutional schemata of the classical political portfolios have been applied to them. It has become almost self-evident for us that there is something like economic politics that no longer is exclusively, or even is at all, trade politics in the classical sense. And as soon as science as a basis of the modern possibilities of life had become acute enough, “science politics” was dignified by being made capable of constituting a department, and thereby integrated into the corpus of politics. “Educational politics,” too, only looks as if it were the continuation of the classical cultus department.22
To declare everything “politics” obfuscates the change in the real circumstances. If the exercise of power at home and abroad became the definition of the political, then this was based on the idea of the self-preservation of the state as the epitome of its being an end in itself. And self-preservation was one of those categories of the political derived from the concept of nature. It may be that in the supersession of these categories rests the humane potential of the process outlined here. What speaks in favor of this chance is that the traditional repertoire of political substance has been dislodged, those “grand” concepts of natural borders, legitimate claims, sovereignty, Lebensraum, of independently securing one’s existence and being master of one’s domain—the displacement of all these notions that so often have been examined and abused, on which life and death have been staked, by a new scale of regulatives and possibilities of thought. Rousseau was still able to express the result of his experience of his stay in Venice as one of the “great truths, useful to the happiness of the human race”: “I had seen that everything depends radically on politics, and that, from whatever aspect one considers it, no people ever would be anything other than what it was made into by the nature of its Government.”23 But would he have allowed this “substantial” concept of politics to be applied to what today, as economic politics, is not only called politics “as well,” but politics above all else?
It is undoubtedly a fact that elections, crises, formations of governments increasingly occur under the influence of economic factors and situations. Not to mention that the interests of economic existence are behind the enforceability of almost all demands of different provenance, for instance science and education politics. But above all: where only a few years or decades ago a government would have been toppled by a lapse in foreign policy, it survives these situations easily today, while a minute decrease in the growth rate of production or an increase in unemployment plunges it into a desperate situation. Economic policy is not only a portfolio in the cabinet that has existed in Germany for fifty years (namely, since October 21, 1917). Although this portfolio—for the greatest part of its short history as part of the cabinet—existed in the shape of a dull management politics, it has increasingly become the substance of politics, or, what is essentially the same, the desubstantialization of its historically sanctioned form. And it seems that the shift of political quality toward the economics department is advancing: the “Freiburg imperative” Walter Eucken formulated, which limited economic policy to “creating the forms by which the economy is ordered,”24 will retreat in favor of the postulate that growth needs to be steered since the automatism of self-controlling systems has evinced alarming fluctuations.
It is in this context that the changed significance of financial policies belongs. In the form of the parliament’s right to permit and reject budgets, it used to be the classical instrument of exercising power in the state, that is, of politics in the most precise sense. For some time now it has been degenerating visibly to the status of a dependent variable in economic politics. The reason is that economic politics is responsible for the growth of state revenue, which alone remains to limit the latitude of governmental action. Parliamentary budget debates—once among the greatest moments of controlling the executive—now have taken on the character of a fictitious reenactment of a formerly great role.
It is surprising how disproportionate, by traditional measures, the fatedness of economic politics is to the fact that its instrument is essentially the word in public discourse: the trustworthy piece of information, the call to nonintervention by others, guiding principles, planning projections, and encouragements to consume. However much economic politics gives itself the appearance of an embodiment of “measures”—everyone knows how little can be done with such things once the winds turn against them, when elementary trust fades and an indefinable reticence emerges. Instead of the levers that power might pull, there is talk of “discussing” an economic boom “to death,” of exuding confidence, of verbally anticipating the intended turnaround, of the effect the prognosis might have on its object, of the investment climate (which, like the “working climate,” is always in need of attention), and of the “impetus of fine words.” Such verbal politics is, whatever else it may be, certainly also a demonstration of the powerlessness of power, that is, of nonpolitical politics, if one were to imply that politics is an ahistorical constant. But it is precisely in a field that has not always had the dignity of the political that rhetoric is most likely to lose the disrepute whereby its indispensable function resides in the falsification of truth, the manipulation of an otherwise free faculty of decision making, and confounding appearance and reality. Indignation at separating words from realities, of course, always lies ready at the heart of a tradition that claimed to concern itself with what really is and with the things themselves. “[H]e who is solicitous about truth ought not to frame his language with artfulness and care, but only to try to express his meaning as he best can. For those who are particular about words, and devote their time to them, miss the things.”25 That misunderstanding should be nearly inevitable if this sentiment is not taken to the most obvious norm is due to the elementary “complex” of our intellectual heritage, which seeks to render Sophism impossible and accept as real only that last reality itself, which after Socrates has always been a reality beyond and above man. The state has been ontologically weakened as the “actuality of the ethical Idea,” while “the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life” only by virtue of his membership thereof.26 This weakening is, to be sure, a rule for a reorientation in thought that has yet to be enacted. But it is not such a reorientation that would draft a new concept of reality and, as it were, prescribe the course of events; rather, it is simply one that reenacts [nachvollzieht] the aporia of the disempowerment of power and saves it from false disappointment.
One might object that all this resembles, by consequence or infelicitous approximation, the thesis of the withering away of the state in the communist final state Marx described. Alas, I dare not comment on final states. My concern is with an analysis of tendencies. In this matter, one should not be deterred by the reproach of working with a prepared specimen, for specimens render the invisible visible. The expression of the “withering away of the state” turns out to be itself realistic, that is, bound to a specific concept of reality, one that would hold the state to be nonexistent at the moment when, in the schema of the res–verba antithesis, it had shifted completely to the side of the “mere words.” But the transformation of internal and external conflicts, disturbances, threats, and aggressions onto the plane of the word is, anthropologically speaking, a familiar fact already, and we are beginning to get used to the idea that the often vilified “endless discussion” can very well replace and transpose the momentary discharge of a conflict. In Plato’s critique of Sophism, it was considered the epitome of rhetorical-demagogical depravity to try to turn the weaker logos into the stronger. That this critique, during the whole of our tradition, was met with approval was due to the polyvalence of the Greek term “logos.” The precondition for the discriminatory formula was that the weaker logos was weaker because it lacked truth and reason; left to their own devices and their inner strength, the truer logoi would be the stronger. Rhetorical artifice falsifies this natural relationship. The modern equivalent to this position is the superstition that without resorting to propagandistic arts, political parties would prevail by virtue of the political truth contents of their platforms. However, an effective democracy’s schema of succession essentially excludes this assumption. Rather, it implies that whoever is in power is likely to gamble away the right to remain there, because the burden of proof for what before had only been an argument is now on him, while the opposition has alternative arguments up its sleeve for exactly this case. Here, power neither resides in truth, nor truth in power. Power means potentia—and it must remain so: possibility is its reality. Equally wrong is the assumption that possibilities would “push” for their realization, truth for being recognized, the tool for its use, the weapons for the battle. It may not yet be moral progress to persuade someone who is about to strike because he believes that conflict is inevitable to stop in his tracks and talk it over. But where morality never could be realized, it may not be the only and best way simply to keep demanding it, or, under the heading of “reethicization,”27 to suggest with deceptive romanticism that it had once existed; instead, it might be better to question that reality itself, from which something was for so long demanded in vain.
The cynical maxims contained in his mirror of princes have made Machiavelli’s separation of ethics and politics suspect. It seems intolerable to us indeed that he should give the prince, newly risen to power, counsels so fundamentally different as, on the one hand, not to let any member of the ancestral dynasty live, and, on the other, to change nothing about laws and taxes. But this type of political technique is not only aimed at the free use of poison and dagger; it also hints at the unfolding of a rationality content to refrain from, prevent, or simulate certain actions. As paradoxical as it may sound, Machiavelli’s separation of ethics and politics is consistent with a theory of the political minimum. To make the transition into the verbal modality presupposes that actions in this realm can no longer be too sacred not to be “reoccupied” by means of quasi-actions. Only somebody prepared to risk praising the blessings of realism could shy from the resulting political nominalism.
Of course, demagoguery and propaganda—a technique availing itself of big words, not words alone—are also located on this lineage. But what has been become equally apparent for a long time is that there is a solid technique of at least placing speeches ahead of actions, and information ahead of intervention, of replacing the latter by the former. It has become the epitome of political strategy to prevent mistakes and misjudgments with regard to intentions and potentials, and thus the irreversible actions of a potential opponent, to treat him as long as possible as a competitor within the field of rationally planning thought, to establish a set of signals regarding shared structures of thinking and to let him know what and how one thinks oneself. It has become a strategy that can no longer permit politics by any means other than those of the word. The meaning of immense technical and economic efforts consists to a good part in rendering this information—these words and signals—credible and maintaining this credibility. Of course, it is itself a play on words to say that here words have become actions and not “mere” words. How to Do Things with Words is the title of an important book by J. L. Austin—maybe another one still needs to be written: How to Do Nothing with Words.28
The idea of an “open world” can prevail—in fact, it is in all likelihood already doing so—and not only because the defeats of secrecy have become evident, the instruments of technical reconnaissance omnipresent, and the inner logic of scientific and technical processes in isolated systems has resulted in a virtual equivalent of the disabled communication. It is doing so also and above all because the availability of information has proved to be the most important factor in avoiding crises. One of the key reasons for major crises has been the difficulty of estimating risks. In a world that has been made more transparent and permeable, the poker player will come to seem an anachronistic type of politician. In this game, rules have developed for securing mutual understanding—without there being an understanding to that effect. Powers that, in the style of classical enemies, demonize, deride, and threaten each other maintain, below the surface of official rhetoric, constant contact, like the United States and China in Warsaw. Even the great cases of espionage have been reevaluated as a type of economy of involuntary information, at least if one notices how despite upholding draconian penalties its consequences are neutralized by exchanging agents. While in the past even one’s own man in the other camp was barely considered an honorable subject, today, after his work is done, he can be presented and decorated as a hero of preempted information. Not only does one want to be safe from surprises but one also wants to let the other side know that one is. The unlikelihood of great secrets being kept must be demonstrated, the synchronicity in the expansion of potentials must be verified. The great world powers failed to reach an agreement on “open skies,”29 but only few years later, reconnaissance satellites began to do the very same work, and it is astounding that there has never been a reaction comparable to the U-2 incident,30 or even a clear protest. The press, too, does similar things, straddling the “abyss of treason” [Abgrund von Landesverrat]:31 it impedes governmental attempts to wield the forces of fate and to pursue foreign policy in secret, under unverifiable conditions. The uncertainty about what in the future can still be placed under the heavy interdict of treason is symptomatic of the fact that the aggregate state of political reality is changing.
The reality one refers to when claiming to be a political “realist” acquires its gravity and authority only once the state, in its own claim to reality, ceases to compete with it and no longer pretends to be the necessity it only has to satisfy. This becomes clear when decisions that have become possible today can no longer be made as political ones. This is what is called a loss of substance, but whether it is rightly called a loss ought to be questioned, and whether a loss of substance remains bound to the assumptions of the concept of reality and its permanence that are at issue here.
When it becomes impossible to demonstrate under what conditions world peace might be attainable as the result of comprehensible processes, the sense of resignation regarding its enforceability moves this indispensable norm close to the realm of eschatological hopes, which always imply that only the end of the world renders a new world possible. Once its religious trust has been exorcised from this schema, it can be rethought as the magical formula whereby the quality of that which is yet to come is vouchsafed by the destruction of that which is. Yet one must not lose sight of the fact that all that the weakening of the state can make possible is a peace of, as it were, a technical quality. Its imperative would be hypothetical, not categorical. It would be desired as the precondition for something else. But what would this something else be?
The idea that once people are made happy they become peaceful all by themselves is deeply rooted in the utopian tradition. But it presupposes that the reality of the state is not of such autonomous density that it could evade its citizens’ will to peace. That this precondition is not given forces us to treat the problem of peace as a matter of technical reason, as a question preliminary to a more fundamental (though not, it would appear, more pressing) topic: that of how humanity would live in peace, what it might make of the opportunity that came to them by means of technology. The inevitability of peace is not its certainty, but nor does it explain why it should be attractive to human imaginations of happiness. Utopia does not imply rationality; it must outdo it without destroying it. There are reasons to recall these attributions. To a lofty imagining of human possibilities, it must seem a betrayal of utopia to entertain the possibility that what ought only to be realized as a human effort, with the emphatic gesture heralding great change, might be but a rational consequence.32 The two problems need to be disentangled. Utopia cannot promise peace, because peace is the precondition of utopia. Global peace does not, as such, entail the global happiness of humanity. The former is only the first step, to avoid despairing of the latter. It is alarming to see how few human problems are solved by world peace; nevertheless, it is the problem of problems. Yet enthusiasm and kindling constructive powers can only affect what might come after peace is achieved. Such a future will call into question any present, but that must not mean to deny it the indulgence of the minimum of rational expectations for which it can take credit.
Even if one insists that the norm of peace cannot be part of a utopia—because as the condition of the possibility of any projects about happy states of affairs it possesses the evidence that must elude all such projects—there is nevertheless an important connection between utopia and the problem of peace after, in the modern age, utopian thought became the essential factor for the contingency of the state, that is, against the Platonic element in the theory of the state. But the historical function utopia assumes in support of the possibility of world peace cannot obscure the difference that the problem of peace must be regarded under the condition of consistency with circumstances as they exist at present, because approaching this necessary state requires “that each intermediate form, each transitional phase must be able to exist independently.”33 It may be possible to demand a mutation of man so that all men would be happy, but one cannot begin with the demand for a radical change of human attitudes to reach the inevitable, namely, humanity preserving its own bare existence.
Utopia confronts any reality with the possibilities it has spurned, and in so doing it renders the conditions and institutions objectionable by way of the contingency of everything merely actual. Reality does not admit its own contingency, but rather conceals it by obtaining for itself the proof of necessary consistency. Because the modern age attempted to define itself through a concept of its own history’s consistency—namely, progress—it resisted being called into question not only by theological transcendence but also by the transcendence of utopia. As the permanent realization of possibilities, progress makes us forget that it is always only the extension of the possibilities inherent in a present reality. Utopia as a literary genre is displaced from its original function as soon as it is made to serve progress: its transcendence is interpreted as the apparent omission of a period of time and is thus retrieved into the immanence of the one time. The utopia situated in the future as an extrapolation of what must come to pass anyhow is capable of generating optimism or resignation, but both attitudes tend to leave history to its own devices. In light of this, the displacement of the exotic utopia by the utopia about the future, of the social by the technical utopia, is a loss of function, because in this process, the concept of reality of consistency is adopted along with the category of progress. That the province of utopia has, by its very name, no place signifies exactly that it is located outside the context of realities.
It is for this reason that utopias remain unaffected by Hegel’s dictum in the preface to the Philosophy of Right rejecting all attempts to develop the ideal state: “issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function.”34 Utopia, of course, cannot issue instructions on how the world or a state ought to be, but it can at least teach that they do not have to be as they are, that the consciousness of their self-evidence is contestable. The contingency following from utopia is the antithesis to the self-evidence of the ideal from which metaphysics had deduced the cosmos. This inevitable order that occupied the space of all possibilities could be tyrannical, as already the Gnostics had felt, and could inspire the sense of imprisonment and the yearning for deliverance, or point to the resort of escaping into private mysticism. The threat of this lapse into coercion applied to no less a degree to the state, which sought to evoke its cosmic dignity: it was impossible to deny it the right to make claims of a fundamental nature on the life of its citizens. Chaos was the only alternative the cosmos held in store, and this is at the root of the inevitability of resigning to the given order. As late as Hobbes, this is the structure of the argument demonstrating the indissolubility of the state contract and the absolutism he deduced from it as the epitome of reason itself: the self-preservation of the state as the elementary definition of all political acts is the delegated self-preservation of the individuals. The individual enters into the mythically preexisting contract as he does into original sin. He is always supposed to have already surrendered himself as a legal entity and yet legitimizes the pure coercion directed against himself as the consistency of a legal condition that he is responsible for. In this way, reason submits to the “surplus” it finds in the factual state, instead of calling it into question from the perspective of the economy of the inevitable. However, it is not the rationality of this model of the state’s founding as such that is doubtful, but the contradiction between the motive for entering into the contract and the surrender of being a legal entity that supposedly follows from it: one cannot be forced to surrender oneself to preserve oneself.
Any rational argument for how the norm of peace may be served will have a formal similarity to the conception of the state contract: just as the state represents the rationality of the individuals for whom the state of nature would be their demise, the protection of peace represents the rationality of the states to whose demise an international “state of nature” must lead today. If the political theory of the modern age makes the self-preservation of the state the highest political principle, it must be measured not only according to whether it serves this principle with every one of its theoretical steps; it must also prove that it is satisfying it. This criterion holds especially for the “state of nature,” recurring on the international level, of the right of everyone to everything and thus the absolute conflict of the conditions of everyone’s self-preservation. Was not the same rationality that had motivated the individual to enter into the pactum subiectionis [pact of subjection] as the abandonment of their absolute natural right also bound to assert itself on the level of the absolute right of states? That can only mean that as a consequence of the idea of giving up rights through contracts, a treaty between states was necessary if the force of reason emanating from the principle of self-preservation was to be served. Yet the classical theory of treaties had not advanced into this opening of its consistency, for it advocated not the abstract principle of the preservation of the state but rather the concrete principle of the preservation of specific states and state forms that had arisen historically from the given physical entities of peoples and their territories. It was with according explicitness, and as a consequence of the theory of treaties, that the demand for a “treaty between states” was voiced by Destutt de Tracy in his commentary on Montesquieu from 1819.
“Nations, as they respect each other, stand in precisely the same relations as savages, who, belonging to no nation, and being bound by no social obligations among themselves, have no tribunal to which they can apply for redress, no public power of which to claim protection, and consequently, each, so circumstanced, must submit or make use of his individual strength in self-defense.”35 What the states lacked to reach a condition of a “society which is organized and perfected”36 was the founding of a common court of law and a superordinate coercive power. This aim had admittedly always been taken for a pipe dream, but seen from the perspective of the treaty, this second step for overcoming the “state of nature” was probably even less difficult than the first must have been. Here, utopia is drawn into the consistency of progress. But could logic alone be trusted? Probably not as long as the “state of nature” between the states did not yet entail the threat to everyone by everyone that Hobbes had assumed to obtain between individuals. At least the subjects of history, the fictitious entities of the states, could still be thought of as able to survive any war and any crisis; this prevented the idea of repeating the state contract on a higher level from being self-evident. But it was not for this reason alone that it seemed unthinkable that the act of the second and final overcoming of the “state of nature” could be analogous to the first; rather, the element of surrender to a superordinate power was what absolutely contradicted the final reality of the state.
Thus, even Kant, in his philosophical sketch Perpetual Peace of 1795, could not go beyond the construction of a “pacific federation”37 of sovereign states that would create international law, although he expressly writes that in their relationship among themselves they must be treated as if in a “state of nature.” He does not infringe upon the unquestionability of hypostatizing the state since he demands this foedus pacificum [pacific federation] to come into being without states having “to submit to public laws and to a coercive power which enforces them, as do men in a state of nature.” The future of the great peace in the “idea of federalism” as the “substitute for the union of civil society” lies between, not above the states.38 The positive rational idea of a “world republic” he deems to be logical but not historically inevitable, because it would, given the existing pluralism of states, presuppose the self-contradiction of going against the will to self-preservation inherent to each state. From this, Hegel deduces in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right that the state is “[i]ndividuality, as exclusive being-for-itself.”39 States are not only factually “in a state of nature in relation to one another” but this state remains unsurpassable, for “their rights have their reality not in a universal will with constitutional powers over them, but in their own particular wills.”40 Those who wish for a superordinate totality, be it even of the type of a federation of states, “know little of the nature of a totality and of the self-awareness which an autonomous nation possesses.”41 If it manifests the “march of God in the world”42 that the state is, then this absolutism of the reality of the state is at the very least the dead end for the norm of peace, and then it follows that “conflicts between states can be settled only by war.”43 To see the state as “something technical more than something spiritual,”44 that is, something that according to Hegel “will not be deemed to deserve the emphatic designation of being real,”45 at least opens up the latitude of that which “has no greater value than something that is possible.”46 Once again it becomes clear what it means to address the concept of reality as the foundation of the theory of the state and to subject it to critical inquiry with regard to its implications for the norm of peace. The consistency of the theory of the state contract, which is, as it were, truncated, is merely an illustrative model for this.
Classical theories of the state suffer from the weakness that the process of constituting the state is supposed to lead to a self-contained structure in a single decisive step. This unspoken normative requirement even caused the reception of Montesquieu’s theory of the state to ossify into the dogmatism of the separation of powers, and caused it to join the ranks of other “blueprints.” But a reading of the Spirit of the Laws reveals that it is not about describing the emergence of the state from the precivil condition; instead, it aims at reducing the always already historically extant state to the measure of human tolerability. Montesquieu’s aversion to the theory of the state contract rests upon his not aiming to provide a foundation for the state and “building” it, but to absorb and inhibit the genuine dynamic of power. The urge to exercise power seemed to him a given energy that had been introduced into history as nature, and nothing was too insignificant or small if it might counteract this energy. Even the despot might occasionally be swayed by human sentiment—just as the beach’s most minute obstacles, its pebbles and grasses, can offer resistance to the sea, which appears to want to flood the whole world.47 Voltaire crushed this simile with ridicule. Laconically, he remarks that it is the laws of gravitation that make the sea recede, not the grasses and pebbles.
Such collision of elementary metaphors makes one feel with terror how the constructive weakness of the idea provokes the critic to the most severe vividness: once something is typified as a natural occurrence, it excludes even the smallest latitude of the word and of human affect. Correcting the image by referring it to the laws of nature makes the notion of moderating the state appear unreal. Almost as an illustration of this clash of metaphors, the first trace of the problem of peace appears in Kant, forty years before he wrote his tract on perpetual peace. In November 1755, news of the Lisbon earthquake with thirty thousand dead shook Europe; Kant thrice picked up his pen to explain the event to his fellow citizens and to reconcile it with the theodicy of German Enlightenment once more. But as Kant finished his “History and Natural Description of the Earthquake,” the conflict that would become the Seven Years’ War had begun. The book’s last sentence is addressed to the Prussian king, to whom Kant had recently dedicated his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens: “A prince who, activated by a noble heart, allows himself to be moved by these hardships of the human race to avert the miseries of war from those who are threatened on all sides by serious misfortune, is a beneficent tool in the gracious hand of God, and a divine gift to the peoples of the earth who can never assess its worth in keeping with its magnitude.” Kant throws his pebble against the flood, appealing with the natural against the political catastrophe; his argument, however, is in the phrase “hardships of the human race.”48
Translated by Hannes Bajohr
Originally published as “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Staatstheorie” in Schweizer Monatshefte 48, no. 2 (1968/69): 121–146.
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 80.
2. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1990), 41.
3. Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (New York: Ungar, 1983), 107.
4. “Sovereignty” here does not mean a boundary concept [Grenzbegriff] in the sense of Carl Schmitt’s definition: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 5. But the political quality, which is able to present itself “purely” only in the extreme state, has a tendency toward being independent from the question of whether this condition is actually met, and instead takes the right of definition for what is extreme into its own hands. This conceptus terminator [boundary concept] is not essential to the political, but it is essentially attractive to it. Herein lies the connection between the claim to reality and the problem of peace. The question of the competency for what lies beyond ordered competences is no longer a problem within political reality but concerns the competition of a heterogeneous reality with the political one. It is here that every resistance against comparativization has to start.
5. On Machiavelli and Galilei, see Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946), 116–128; on Galilei and Grotius, see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 241–242.
6. This is how Goethe puts it in “Flüchtige Schilderung florentinischer Zustände,” the addendum to his translation of Benvenuto Cellini, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche (Zurich: Artemis, 1948), 15:883.
7. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. David Wooton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 18–19.
8. Machiavelli, The Prince, 47.
9. [Ideenlehre, often also translated as the theory of forms; here and in the following, “form” is reserved for the German Form.]
10. Diderot, “Philosophical Thoughts,” in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, trans. Margaret Jourdain (Chicago: Open Court, 1916), 46. Translation altered.
11. Friedrich Schiller to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, January 19, 1798, in Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805, ed. L. Dora Schmitz (London: Bell, 1890), 2:17.
12. [Soren Kierkegaard, “The Sickness unto Death,” in Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 306.]
13. [Jacob Burckhardt, History of Greek Culture (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), 101.]
14. Recent philological analysis has removed Utopia from its designation as being part of the Platonic tradition and reception. See Hans Süßmuth, Studien zur Utopia des Thomas Morus (Münster: Aschendorff, 1967); Karl-Heinz Gerschmann, “Nicht-platonische Quellen zur Utopia des Thomas Morus,” Der Staat: Zeitschrift für Staatslehre und Verfassungsgeschichte, deutsches und europäisches öffentliches Recht, no. 7 (1968): 471–486. What testifies a Platonic influence and dependence in More falls into the work’s last formation phase and is already a piece of self-interpretation toward the thought of “competition” with Plato’s Republic. This self-stylization quickly fixated the readers of the soon successful book onto the impression of Platonic succession. But the assumption of a tradition only serves to highlight the idea of competition: already the first edition begins with a Latin poem in which the utopian is praised as the possible victor over the Platonic state, and the following introductory letter by Petrus Ægidius [Peter Giles] recommends Utopia as a more important possession for every man than Plato’s work.
15. [Jakob Burckhardt, Griechische Culturgeschichte, 3 vols., ed. Leonhard Burckhardt et al. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002), 2:99; this section is not included in the English translation.]
16. “Isthmum perfodere” [to dig through the Isthmus] was among the proverbs on which Erasmus—since 1499 part of More’s circle of friends—commented in his Adages (Desiderius Erasmus, Adages IV iii 1 to V ii 51, ed. John N. Grant [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006], 76). For the formula of the inviolata terra, see the Dicaearchus quote recorded by Varro (Greek Philosophy: A Collection of Texts with Notes and Explanations, ed. C. J. de Vogel [Leiden: Brill, 1953], 2:243).
17. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, “Friede und Wahrheit,” Die Zeit 26 (1967).
18. [The term “Grand Coalition” refers to a governing coalition between the two largest parties. In the Federal Republic of Germany, this was the case when, under chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats first formed a coalition (1966–1969).]
19. [Blumenberg refers here to the concept of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the religious experience of terror and rapture—that religious scholar Rudolf Otto described in his 1917 book The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923).]
20. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Ist der Weltfriede unvermeidlich? Bergedorfer Gespräche zu Fragen der freien industriellen Gesellschaft 24 (Hamburg: Decker, 1967), 7.
21. Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 1:400.
22. [The German term for ministries of science, education, and the arts; it descended from the ministries of religion that were once also responsible for schooling.]
23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondences, ed. Christopher Kelly et al., trans. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), 340.
24. [Walter Eucken, Grundsätze der Wirtschaftspolitik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1960), 336.]
25. Clement of Alexandria, “The Stromata,” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and Arthur Cleveland Coxe (New York: Scribner’s, 1900), 2:347.
26. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 275–276.
27. [Von Weizsäcker, Bergedorfer Gespräche, 12.]
28. [J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).]
29. [In 1955, the United States put forward a proposal for a treaty with the Soviet Union that would allow reconnaissance flights over each other’s territory; while not adopted, it is regarded as a significant moment of détente politics in the Cold War.]
30. [In May 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory. The incident caused the collapse of the “Four Powers” summit and a deterioration of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.]
31. [This is a reference to the so called “Spiegel affair” of 1962, a political scandal in which Defense Secretary Franz Josef Strauß accused news magazine Der Spiegel’s reporting on the state of the defense forces to be treasonous. In the wake of a police raid at the Spiegel’s offices and the imprisonment of its editor in chief, Strauß had to resign.]
32. [In an earlier draft of this text, Blumenberg at this point added a passage that he later worked into the essay “Dogmatische und rationale Analyse von Motivationen des technischen Fortschritts” (Dogmatic and Rational Analysis of Motivations for Technological Progress, 1970), posthumously published in Hans Blumenberg, Schriften zur Technik, ed. Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 258–276:
In a certain way, Walter Benjamin’s phrase is correct that realizing the idea of technology [Technik] would constitute treason against utopia. For utopia idealizes a target value beyond the line of progress; a state whose essential property is unsurpassability, that is, static finality. Progress does not lead toward unsurpassable states and this is what it means to call it “infinite.” Utopia, and in this lies its significance, calls into question any factual state that progress is capable of reaching by confronting it with the qualitatively wholly other. Yet at the same time, progress renders every utopia problematic because it demonstrates the practice of surpassing factual states while utopia always remains silent on the question of how the transition into its state comes to pass. The most consistent form of utopia is the refusal of what Adorno has called the “brushed-in portrait of utopia” [Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 151]—any positive determination is withheld, for it can only be developed under the very circumstances that have to be overcome, that is, under those of an extrapolation of progress. Here, we are asked to trust in the absolutely unknown, which only by virtue of a sleight of hand, the double negation, can be passed off as positive. The antithesis of utopia and progress rests upon a very elemental suspicion inherent to all critiques of progress: progress never brings qualitative change, which means that it does not have a direction that could be qualitatively specified. What is meant here could be put thus: the changes effected by this progress leave man unchanged, and have, above all, no moral correlate. (Blumenberg, “Dogmatische und rationale Analyse von Motivationen des technischen Fortschritts,” 261.)]
33. Von Weizsäcker, Bergedorfer Gespräche, 12. This important principle of any discussion of the problem of peace is described by von Weizsäcker as “a special case of the very general proposition of Darwin’s theory of evolution … that only those living beings can exist today whose ancestors were all viable at every moment of past history.” Von Weizsäcker, 9.
34. [G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23.]
35. [Antoine Destutt de Tracy, A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws (Philadelphia: Duane, 1811), 86.]
36. [Destutt de Tracy, A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, 88. Translation altered.]
37. [Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 104.]
38. [Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 104.]
39. Hegel, Elements, 359 (§322).
40. Hegel, 368 (§333). [Translation altered.]
41. Hegel, 360 (§322).
42. Hegel, 279 (§258).
43. Hegel, 369 (§334).
44. Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris (New York: Ungar, 1987) 107.
45. [Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part 1: Science of Logic, trans. and ed. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 33 (§6). Translation altered.]
46. [Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, 34 (§6). Emphasis removed.]
47. Charles de Montesquieu, “L’Esprit de Lois,” in Oeuvres complètes de Montesquieu (Paris: Didot, 1846), 198 (II,4), with Voltaire’s note.
48. [Immanuel Kant, “History and Natural Description of the Most Noteworthy Occurrences of the Earthquake That Struck a Large Part of the Earth at the End of the Year 1755,” in Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 364.]