Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power

In the Western tradition of thought, responsibility, as a word, is of relatively recent provenance. Without making a fetish of etymologies, a cursory glance at the history of its usages is instructive. The earliest recorded appearances in Spanish, English, and French date from the seventeenth and eighteenth century on, with an isolated usage recorded in Middle French during the fifteenth century, according to the OED, and an appearance in Spanish during the sixteenth century, even if usage was rare before the eighteenth.¹ In the English language its meanings and significations include “capability of fulfilling an obligation”; the quality of reliability or trustworthiness, the ability to be held accountable, or “accountability for something”; the idea of being “in charge” of something or having a duty to someone or something (in Spanish: estar a cargo, hacerse cargo de algo o alguien), which also connotes a sense of obligation; the ability to pay a debt or contract, which, revealingly, is an important signification of the term in American English; “the fact of having a duty to do something,” which could be another individual, a cause, or a principle; a calling, burden, or task “for which one is responsible,” which could be a moral obligation or a political one in conjunction “with a person or thing,” and that thing, conversely, can be a politically constituted collective identity and its attendant forms or a form of exercising power; a person or entity to whom one is accountable or for whom one is responsible or charged with; and, finally, the capacity, or capability, of a subject to know, recognize, and thus accept the consequences of her actions.² The last meaning is tacitly found in Shakespeare’s famous line from The Tempest, when Prospero claims, “Two of these fellows you / Must know and own. / This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5, 1, 277–79). However many corollaries there are to this concept—moral, social, legal, political—which branch out in a variety of directions and fields of power and inquiry, what is clear is the pervasiveness of its external connotations, its projection outward, to what is generalized and common—either toward someone or something: principle, person, obligation, etc.—even in the most individualistically conceived definition.

Notwithstanding the recent origin of this word, theoretical elucidations of the practice of ethical and political responsibility are hardly a modern invention. Reflections on the forms of ethical and political action that this concept has come to convey, as well as about its most prominent surrogates, accountability and answerability, abound in Western thought.³ Even the most cursory look shows that in Western traditions of ethical and political theory the practice of responsibility is linked with the dilemmas of political action and the ambiguity of accountability. Nascent democratic Athens—whose advent was mediated by Eastern political developments and ideas, from Egypt to Mesopotamia, but whose particular crystallization still constituted a novum worthy of the name—was forged against aristocratic power and tyrannical rule and inaugurated the momentous idea of ordinary individuals, famously emblematized by the peasant-citizen, sharing in political rule, thus challenging the politically constituted forms of power at the hands of aristocratic elites and their oligarchic orders.⁴ Isonomia, at once anchoring and yielding an institutional framework based on a substantive sense of citizenship, became its signature. It signified a sharp break with monarchy and elite rule, thus disrupting the political forms dominant in the ancient world by forging many trends, practices, and ideas into a particular political experience in which citizenship became the central category, even while haunted by the slavery sustaining it.⁵

The idea of responsibility understood as accountability for political actions carried on by citizens became its obvious corollary, a notion that built on older ideas of attributability and tacit imputability already found in the Hebrew Bible.⁶ Similarly, there are intimations of something akin to the practice of responsibility in the Homeric poems, but not in the sense of agents autonomously choosing a course of action. Rather, even if the character of the actors is determined by fate, each actor still has to fulfill the obligations of his character and is accountable for any breach in doing what his character demands.⁷ Within the Greek tradition the first poetic adumbrations can be found in Greek tragedies, such as Sophocles’ Antigone and Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia. The latter stages the question in overtly political terms, namely, from the perspective of the newly inaugurated democratic order and its relationship with the old, as Athene’s so-called foundational speech in The Eumenides lays out not only a protoconsequentialist political ethic but also suggests the responsibility of citizens for the well-being of the city (681–710). The city was thus questioned on the stage, as the distinguished classicist Luciano Canfora puts it, where, as part of the educational role of Attic theater, questions of ethical and political responsibility in violent predicaments of power were powerfully performed.⁸

But the most sustained discussion of what is now understood as responsibility is found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle theorized accountability in relation to his notion of practical wisdom (phronesis) where the pursuit of happiness, not duty or obligation, is the central aim. Rather than conceiving ethics based on abstract rules, let alone in subjectivist terms, Aristotle forged an intersubjective moral philosophy that paid particular attention to the life of the individual in a concrete collectivity: the city-state. While one is always in some way a “co-cause” of one’s character, Aristotle explicitly emphasized the particulars of the individual and the situation and linked the question of responsibility and purposeful activity with others in situations one partly but never fully constitutes.⁹ He thus squarely located his account of responsibility in the predicaments of power mediating—constraining and enabling—collective life. Similarly, it is equally well known that Aristotle painted an image of humans as purposive creatures whose full realization is attainable as members of a collectivity. In this conception, ethics not only presupposes an account of potentiality and act, agent and telos but also of action, situation, and context.¹⁰ Hence, the centrality and interdependence of ends and means in his ethics, an interdependence whose afterlives pervade present-day concerns: that is, how to properly relate means to ends is one of the quintessential questions of a political ethic conceived as an ethics of collective life.¹¹ This is hardly surprising. For Aristotle’s ethics is only fully realized in the context of political life. And that is why prudence is such a central category in his ethical thought, something that demands a sensibility pivoting on a strong sense of limits.¹² In this conception, political and ethical responsibilities are thus cast from the perspective of an acute sense of the limits of human intellect and action.

With the demise of the Hellenic world and the rise of the Roman republic and empire, the practice of responsibility was significantly transformed. The transition from the Greek to the Roman world represented something beyond a change of scale, since Rome emerged as the first territorial empire in Western history. This, momentously, entailed a different conception of citizenship: from an intense, intimate share in power (for those who actually shared it, the citizens) to a less intense conception of political life in which guarantees against power became the overriding meaning of citizenship.¹³ Philosophies contemporaneous with the Roman Empire—for example, Stoicism—were incapable of mustering the kind of theorizing that the smaller unit, the Greek city-state, produced. The explanation for this reversal, as Sheldon S. Wolin famously argued, resides in the strong political vibrancy of the city-state, especially Athens: “The decline of the polis as the nuclear center of human existence had apparently deprived political thought of its basic unit of analysis, one that it was unable to replace.”¹⁴ The contrast between different spaces, that of an imperial order and that of the ancient polis, attested to the relevance of a question that both Plato and Aristotle had posed: “how far could the boundaries of political space be extended, how much dilution by numbers could the notion of citizen-participant withstand, how minor need be the ‘public’ aspect of decisions before the political association ceased to be political?”¹⁵ These questions pointed beyond the relative homogeneity in the cultural identity of the polis as a political collectivity.¹⁶ Rather, the larger political question involved the fact that the extension of the boundaries of the collective unit represented a shift in the way that citizen participation began to be understood, namely the kind of relationship the citizenry had with its political collectivity. “Where loyalty had earlier come from a sense of common involvement,” Wolin perceptively notes, “it was now to be centered in a common reverence with power personified.”¹⁷

This restructuring of political space amounted to a relative autonomization of political power.¹⁸ That depersonalization of political power not only facilitated the defense of private property forms, so eloquently and vehemently defended by Cicero, and the codification of property extracted by means of imperial plundering, it also had the effect of relegating political participation to an ascendant nobility. The result of this was the depletion of citizenship in a political order fostering the conditions for detached and remote forms of depoliticized political identification. In this context the political meaning of citizenship became transmogrified. Citizenship, then, increasingly served a different role: that of an abstract category to encompass cultural, economic, and religious differences—and, most of the time, inequalities—by way of a common status that nevertheless claimed ultimate primacy over other forms of fidelity, fealty, and identification. Henceforth a sense of alienation from the political community brought about a subtle but important shift in the way membership in the collectivity was increasingly understood. In a memorable formulation, Wolin stated, “To compensate for the loss of identity with the community, men looked to legal guarantees against the community.”¹⁹ Shared power and its responsibilities rely on proximity and continuous involvement. Only in such continuous closeness is a political actor able to see through the consequences of actions undertaken, sanctioned, or authorized. But the distancing and autonomization of citizenship, its severance from shared rule, enact a different way of conceiving the responsibilities of citizenship for ordinary citizens. It fosters political forms in which a relatively leisured strata is concerned with responsibility in the meaningful sense of shared power. Citizens, in turn, obey rules that protect them, while others govern the political order sanctioning those rules.

With the onset of this order, the idea of being held “responsible” or “liable” became formulated in overwhelmingly legal terms. These formulations found expression mostly in relation to juridical ideas of obligations within the context of Roman law and in terms of individual promises and pledges.²⁰ The Latin terms spondeo and respondeo—with their connotations of obligation and promise, appropriate action or reaction, answerability and response—enacted the social dialectic underwriting these ideas.²¹ And these reciprocal pledges were presided over by an increasingly vast imperial state. It is thus not incidental that this is the context in which ideas of world ordering gained ascendance in tandem with cosmopolitanism and, eventually, the universalism of a Christianity cloaked by the imperial mantle. All of this constituted historic developments that represented a veritable transition from a visual to an abstract politics and could be considered the first great experience of depoliticization in the Western tradition.²² Herein, ruling was no longer conceived as a question of shared power, but of legal rule, and the politics of interest trumped the politics of participation. From political life being understood as an association, the onset of an imperial political form increasingly begot a conception of political life as an organization in which citizenship signified a common status, the only common denominator, so to speak, in a rather diverse population that could not even claim autochthony to Rome, much less to the other lands it conquered, looted, and subjugated.

This transformation of the meaning of citizenship is tacitly at work in Cicero’s well-known discussion of his two patriae in The Laws: the first, the country of origin, the place where one’s ancestors rest; the second, and more politically meaningful, the country of citizenship, the one that during Roman times subsumed the other and to which one’s ultimate sense of duty is owed (II.5).²³ With the demise of the republic and onset of the empire, this patriotism would become even more abstract as the process of “Romanization” continued to expand and sought to integrate urban patriciates under the one civic patria that was Rome. In this context, responsibility was not primarily conceived as a practice, at least not in the Aristotelian sense of the term, but as something closer to an externalized duty, as notably articulated by Cicero’s treatise On Duties (De Officiis). But duty here is understood as office, an acceptation of the term that lacks the autonomy and imperative tenor of subsequent connotations, especially within Kantianism. In Giorgio Agamben’s exact formulation, to invoke duties signified “what is respectable and appropriate to do according to the circumstances, above all taking account of the agent’s social condition.”²⁴ Tacitus’s Agricola bluntly evidences this contextual dimension and how responsible rule was exercised by a virtuous conqueror, as he soberly foreshadowed some of the themes to which Machiavelli’s political ethic would grant powerful theoretical expression (sec. 4, 18–20). Tacitus’s, to be sure, was a realist disposition that emerged from sojourns at the outposts of the empire, where the pieties of “a benevolent empire” given expression in Cicero’s On Duties (II.26–27) were implausible in light of the violence defining these predicaments of power (Agricola, sec. 21, 30–32).²⁵ But it is precisely Cicero’s On Duties that provides the most formidable theoretical monument of this sense of responsibility. Here the obligations of ruling are laid out alongside the bonds of responsibility that sustain and structure collective life. Candidly, Cicero unveils the devoirs de situation that could foster the civic ethic needed to preserve and sustain fealty toward collective life at a time when the aristocratic republican order was disintegrating; equally situational were the multifarious circumstances demanded by the effective exercise of imperial rule.²⁶

Written at a moment of acute crisis, On Duties is a “manual of civic virtue” that depicts the ideal statesman as a civilian political actor and lays out the necessary virtues that would cement bonds of fidelity and fellowship conducive to the sustainment of a republican order.²⁷ In On Duties Cicero writes about Roman patriotism: “For when with a rational spirit you have surveyed the whole field, there is no social relation among them all more close, none more dear than that which links each one of us to our country—our res publica. For this, our native land—our patria—weaves together fast and around itself all our loves” (I.57).²⁸ Political responsibility consisted in fidelity to the patria and its republican political form. The imperial diremption of the two patriae, however, created the need for an abstract conception of citizenship in a dual sense: as an abstraction that while providing important legal guarantees is increasingly emptied of any connotation of shared power and as an entity symbolized externally, as above the texture of life that defined the first patria, that of origin; hence, the political significance of Cicero’s insistence on codifying the obligations to one’s kin vis-à-vis one’s fellow citizens as different degrees of fellowship (I.53–57). It is precisely this dislocation, as it were, that led to an acute sense of “context” in Cicero’s thought, something that constituted a crucial vector in his account of obligations and how these are to be responsibly enacted (I.31, II.60–61).

After the eclipse of the republic for which Cicero had crafted his political ethic, a narrative of pietas, patriotism, and self-sacrifice emerged, which provided an imperial narrative famously allegorized in Virgil’s Aeneid: an epic poem retrospectively endowing a much needed legitimating narrative to the new foundation furnished by the Augustan order in the immediate aftermath of the civil wars, which effectively converted partisans into patriots.²⁹ Patriotism, as Nicholas Xenos has observed, allowed “Augustus to cloak his transformation of Rome’s political order in a continuous narrative of the patria.”³⁰ Herein, the duties of leadership were closely associated with the founding and preservation of an empire. In this imperial context a strong sense of participation in a community was present in early Christianity, where political thought was at once revived and neutralized.³¹ Although the Gospels of the New Testament do not envisage anything resembling political questions, strong ethical concerns were formulated. The Sermon on the Mount articulated the precepts of a Christian life, while offering a robust critique of the pernicious effects of the accumulation of wealth that characterized the Roman aristocracy in the age of empire (Matthew 6:24, 11:28, 19:16–30). Fidelity to these principles and the figure of Jesus Christ constitute the core of the New Testament’s ethics of conviction. Even so, there is a practice of responsibility in this ethic, but it is not conceptualized in terms of Cicero’s contextualism or as a protoconsequentialism. Rather, it is expressed in terms of a particular situation demanding a response that in a memorable occasion even invokes “the sword” and thus entails drawing enmity lines (Matthew 10:34–36, 12:46–50). Responsibility was thus recast in ethical terms and in imperatives that were communal in their outward expression, but nonetheless remained restricted to the ethical and theological domain in terms of salvation in Christ Jesus and his message. For, when the Day of Judgment arrives, “He will repay everyone as their deeds deserve” (Romans 2:6), thus conjoining ideas of answerability and imputability.

By the end of the fourth century, the Roman Empire witnessed a significant centralization of power and the effective determination of a hierarchy of status and privilege, with an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top of that hierarchy.³² At the time, as the Roman Church was beginning to assert itself more forcefully, Christian universalism was increasingly defined by “an atmosphere of relaxed hierarchy” evoking the world of “late Roman society with a gentler face.”³³ This is also the historical conjuncture in which a Christianized version of “civic euergetism” structured a transformation in the role of wealthy patrons: from giving to citizens and the city—love of the city—to the vocation and responsibility of giving to the poor—love of the poor—in what constituted yet another step in the eventual consolidation of the church as the locus of civic life in an era of political closure largely due to imperial pacification and depoliticization.³⁴ If, from the late third century to the fall of the Western empire, the political responsibilities of ruling were the purview of emperors, and the bond tying all cities of the empire to each other was fealty to the emperor by his servants, by the late fourth century this changed significantly.³⁵ In an age of intense proselytism, bishops bore special responsibilities and acted as “ecclesiastical rulers” answerable to the Last Judgment in a context in which Christianity had become the only meaningful bond between aristocrats and their subordinated dependents.³⁶ Emblematic of this moment is Ambrose’s rewriting of Cicero’s On Duties.³⁷ In Ambrose’s version, Cicero’s emphasis on intense bonds of cohesion is recast in terms of fidelity to the Church. The Church thus emerges as the res publica, a displacement at once politicizing the Church and depoliticizing political discourse. The structures of duties—officium, with its connotation of action and both its subjective and objective determinants, and originally devoid of the moralism that modern ideas of duty convey—were transformed according to these new specifications.³⁸

Responsibilities and duties were accordingly recast in terms of a new configuration of politically meaningful space, as the universal Church reconceived the spatial coordinates of these commitments in terms of its growth and spread while severing these virtues from the space of a political community. The res publica at once enabling and actualizing responsibilities was no longer the city, but the Church. By the fifth century, in places like Gaul, bishops were aristocrats; by the seventh century “a clerical elite” occupied the place and responsibilities once bestowed to the Roman senate, thus transforming the aristocratic-senatorial love of libertas and its locus, Roma aeterna, into “the solemn façade of Papal Rome.”³⁹ Subsequently, especially in the Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, an image of humans as purposive creatures, as makers of their own domain and locus of action, continued to lend credence to collective notions of responsiveness and avowed the collective texture of responsibility by depicting a self that is an agent within a community of agents under rubrics of morality and virtue. Still, only within the universal Church could these commitments be actualized; and this in a hierarchical context in which papal authority theoretically coexisted with the independent roles of councils sharing power and responsibilities.

That the categories of political thought were largely transmogrified in the political theology of the universal Church, and political practice was mostly visible in its engagement with the temporal world, need not eclipse the modicum of political life found outside its purview during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. There was another configuration of political space that coexisted with the universal Church and the sense of community it simultaneously fostered and relied upon. Here the Carolingian Empire’s attempt to reweld the unity of the West by refurbishing the imperial structure of the fallen Roman Empire is emblematic: Charlemagne presided over an imperial system that sought to recreate a political order in the form of “public” authority presiding over private jurisdictions that involved local public authorities and office holding with political responsibilities as well as sanctioned local rulers, in the forms of lords and bishops, through offices conforming to the supervening grid of public power it sought to establish.⁴⁰ Equally illustrative are the transformations generated by its demise and the disappearance of the tenuous public authority it represented. With its collapse, the onset of feudal relations brought with it the “parcellization of sovereignty” that defined this period.⁴¹ Before the onset of absolutism and, with it, the first interstate system, the “political map” of Europe all through the Renaissance was not composed of homogeneous, let alone clearly demarcated, political units: rather, as Perry Anderson writes, “its political map was an inextricably superimposed and tangled one, in which different juridical instances were geographically interwoven and stratified, and plural alliances, asymmetrical suzerainties and anomalous enclaves abounded.”⁴²

In the Italian peninsula, the early communes that emerged within the interstices of seigniorial structures represented “anomalous” political enclaves.⁴³ Initially conceived as mostly informal assemblies, these early communes recreated aspects of civic life and constituted a productive precondition for the emergence of the more recognizable political city-states that defined the Renaissance.⁴⁴ Creative adaptation within received inherited parameters of elite rule, as part of a defensive response to the demise of public power and the perceived failures of traditional hierarchies, is what ushered the distinctive assemblies that defined the advent of the early communes and their conquest of autonomy. The formalization of these autonomous orders was a steady but nonteleological process in which autonomous city government was increasingly consolidated.⁴⁵ In due course, this formalization—which, among other things, encompassed institutionalizing informal assemblies and office rotation—was no longer the defensive response to a power vacuum but represented the actual regularization and routinization of the power these elites had attained.

Institutionally, these communes displayed ingenious creativity and relied on collaboration from below, even if any sense of “communal identity” was a retrospective projection, an invented origin. These were elite bound and ruled and, as such, “shot through” with hierarchies codified along with aristocratic and militaristic values.⁴⁶ The formation of the communes pitted traditional aristocratic elites, especially bishops, against the new elites, even if bishops proved adaptable and in some instances continued to exert power in ways that compromised any actual autonomous practice. Stated differently, bishops no longer presided over these autonomous collectivities but became actors within them, acting in complex relationships of competition and alliances with other elites with whom they shared political responsibilities. While hierarchical and violent, these late medieval communes retrieved a stronger sense of self-governance, fostering proximity to the exercise of power, its responsibilities and consequences.

In this context the principal locus of political responsibility was found in the peculiar institution of the podestá.⁴⁷ This is not to deny, however, the extent to which at the local level—cappella, contrata, populus, vicinanza—the political experience gained by a modicum of shared power fostered participation and nurtured a sense of political responsibility. It is also not meant to diminish the transformations brought about by political mobilizations of the popolo.⁴⁸ But it is hard to overlook the limited significance of these instances of shared power in the political space that was the thirteenth-century city-state, as the experience of shared power and political responsibility was increasingly centralized and thus concentrated in offices like the podestá and its sometimes ally and sometimes antipode capitani del popolo.⁴⁹ Even allowing for the great variation that characterized this office across the different communes, the authority of the podestá frequently included representing the commune in foreign relations, presiding over communal councils and having a voice in the commune’s major decisions, enforcing civic order, and, last but not least, the enforcing of justice. Although a salaried officer, not “an independent ruler,” this office was often held by wealthy individuals, including lords, who for all their autonomous self-government remained de jure subjected to the late Roman Empire.⁵⁰ Indeed, in the late twelfth century the podestá was basically an “imperial vicar,” something that began to change with the ascendance of local communal power during the thirteenth century, which is a period also defined by the emergence of the popolo.⁵¹ Of greater significance is that these vicars frequently were not citizens of the city over which they presided. More to the point, these “external lords” sought to preserve or rescue a modicum of civic order by pacifying “factions and feuds” within the cities, yet external lords who not only mediated but also defended and exploited these communities.⁵² It is in the city-states of the Renaissance that inherited this autonomy that a robust revival of political life effectively took place. As fitting to a Renaissance sensibility, this period evoked the intense sense of proximity and political life of the cities of antiquity in a unique combination of the forms of participation associated with Athenian democracy and the Roman republic. In the formulation offered by a leading historian, “Right from the start in fact, the notion of rinascita, with the whole Renaissance scheme of history, was closely linked in Italy with the revolutions of towns: the revival or survival of civilitas or municipal libertas.”⁵³ These Renaissance city-states were first and foremost urban units of commercial industriousness, but, like the seigniorial lords ruling the countryside, these cities were violent war-making entities.⁵⁴ Yet these republics had limited military capability, as their vulnerability to external incursions and the predatory behavior of neighboring kingdoms and principalities, the encroachments and predations of the papacy, and, later on, the absolutist monarchies of Spain and France amply attest.⁵⁵

These violent city-states provided the spatial configuration for the practices of ethical inquiry that mediated not only Machiavelli’s political ethic but that which found subsequent expression in Montaigne and Vico.⁵⁶ These humanist inquiries tended to place ethics at the center of social and political life, even if the center of gravity was the individual as an ethical and political actor: inquiries that sought to confront the uncertainties of action in violent predicaments of power by articulating ethical consciousness and political agency in a human-made world. What emerged was either reflection on the ethical dimension of social life—Thomas More in England; Juan Luis Vives in Spain; and Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Lorenzo Valla in Italy—or a reconfiguration of the intersection of ethics and politics most prominently formulated in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. Whereas these figures often converged on the rejection of scholasticism and the authority of the Church, what is most significant is the absence of ethics, or ethical treatises, as part of these ethical inquiries. In place of philosophical elucidations of morality, these inquiries constitute reflections about the ethical dimension of existence or individual and collective life. Forms of inquiry that emerged in tandem with the new humanism of the Renaissance reverberated in selective forms of ethical discourse to the present; yet forms of inquiry that are tied to the advent of Cartesian rationality in the seventeenth century, the autonomization of ethics, and the turn to the apodictic in eighteenth-century philosophy ultimately became recessive and remainders, at best, of a different, bygone era.

Similarly, the spatial configuration to which these republican cities conformed, and the forms of republican political responsibility in the context of the self-government they fostered, turned out to be short-lived. Indeed, Machiavelli’s Discourses could be seen as not only a theoretical monument of this political experience but also an eloquent lapidary statement. At the very historical moment that Machiavelli was composing his political theory and its corollary political ethic, which he famously likened to the voyages of the age that were causing so much awe in Europe for their connection to the classic trope of embarking on “an untrodden path,” absolutism was gaining ascendancy in Europe and with it the modern crystallization of monarchical political forms.⁵⁷ These momentous historical processes inaugurated a political order that rendered self-government anachronistic, along with any sense of political responsibility associated with participation and shared power. Additionally, a particular diremption of the ethical and the political also occurred within the Renaissance, which had significant implications for the transmogrification of responsibility and its emergence as a concept anchored in the individual. This was partially the result of the breakdown of traditional forms of authority and obligation. It could be seen in philosophical attempts to formulate rational justifications for morality whose context of occurrence can be traced to the onset of political absolutism and the scientific vocation and subsequent revolution.⁵⁸ Now the moral domain was sharply divorced from the theological realm. And with such separation came the need to rethink autonomous principles of action for rulers and a concomitant ethics for the ruled.

Within the spatial coordinates brought about by the age of absolutism, yet another transformation of ethical and political life emerged. The word responsibility started to appear within the intellectual contexts of two distinctively modern traditions of inquiry: an ethical account of responsibility that took shape within broad Kantian parameters and a political conception of responsibility folded within theorizations of modern constitutionalism in both its monarchical and republican variations. What these have in common is reliance on the individual as the locus of responsibility and action, even if such actions are carried out in the name of reason or the republic.⁵⁹ Also in common is the disaffiliation of responsibility from active involvement in collective life: whereas responsibility for humankind tends to despatialize the concept, even while such invocations had important political implications in specific places, responsibility for a republic still had a clear spatial locus, even if its exercise often relied on a ruling elite. The latter still contained a robust connotation, albeit the responsibilities of citizenship became diluted as the sharing of political power was minimized. This diminishment became further exacerbated by the most momentous change of the time: the encounter with the New World and the wave of European imperialism that it inaugurated. This is the historical crucible in which the spatial configurations lending credence to earlier accounts of political responsibility were irreversibly transformed. Citizen, senator, bishop, lord, consul, and podestá—these bearers of political responsibilities were either transformed beyond recognition or rendered anachronistic.

Carlo Galli has rightly identified the origins of modern politics in a series of spatial revolutions: the Copernican revolution and the decentering of the earth; the “discovery of the new world” and its transformation of planetary space, and its ensuing consequences, from changing cosmologies to displacements of trade routes; the crisis of economic spatiality (spazialità), from “open fields” to enclosures and the violent spatial transformations that accompanied the “primitive accumulation” of capitalism in Europe; the challenge to Christian conceptions of space by the Lutherans and their conception of interiority, something that greatly contributed to the rise of modern individualism and its rather solipsistic relationship with God, the Other.⁶⁰ The Reformation is like a vanishing mediator not only for the advent of the profane modality of politics that eventually governed the onset of republicanism, which contained the most robust sense of political responsibility during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but for the emergence of philosophical accounts of modern subjectivity. However solipsistic ideas of salvation or “the priesthood of all believers” often were, they had collective dimensions that modern theorists of power and philosophies of the subject mostly disavowed.

Similarly, in the midst of theological elucidations, questions and problems associated with political thought were worked out. Nowhere was this the case more remarkably than in the retrieval of political responsibility at work in Calvin’s account of civil magistrates, their office and duties: for it presaged the account of personation that figures so prominently in Hobbes’s civic ethic.⁶¹ In Calvin’s account, political office was thoroughly depersonalized, and the figure of the magistrate emerged as an actor who actualizes a law he does not originate. Magistrates and subjects alike owe fidelity to the institution, not its occupant, even if ultimate responsibility was owed to God. Subsequently, in a text that was almost contemporaneous with Hobbes’s Leviathan, but that belongs to a thinker of a radically different milieu and intellectual temperament, one finds a significant usage of the term responsible that tacitly adduces its most important political connotations, even if couched in theological terms. In Pascal’s Provincial Letters (1656–57), a fictionalized Jesuit priest states: “Do you not know yet that our Society answers [répond] for all the books of our Fathers?…Thus our whole body is responsible [responsable] for the books of each of our fathers.”⁶² Here ideas of personation and collective identity are evidently at work. And the idea of responsibility is formulated in terms of a corporate body authorizing individual works, with its members owning up and collectively answering for them. Answering and responding thereby emerge as two connotations of responsibility that are related to a collective entity, a collectivity with shared purpose whose members own up to the words and actions bearing its name. The implication of Pascal’s Jesuit formulation is clear: every Jesuit, qua member of the order, is responsible for what is collectively authorized by the order and thus bears its name. A sense of responsibility that assumes a diachronic identity, which establishes binding responsibilities across generations of Jesuits for what is publicly authorized and sanctioned in their name.⁶³ Unlike a political collectivity, spatial coordinates do not bind it, albeit it establishes representations of the place and relations that constitute the identity in question among its members.⁶⁴

Even so, political and philosophical individualizations of responsibility did not develop on a par, as each responded to different imperatives internal to the two very different fields. But, precisely because these are different semiautonomous orders, their coeval actualization is even more striking. Hobbes’s Leviathan brings philosophical and political individualization, along with abstract and dedifferentiated ideas of space and time, and ideas of necessary political obligation, into a single field of vision as part of a coherent conceptualization of personation before the philosophical-subjectivist conception of responsibility constructed within German idealism.⁶⁵ One of Leviathan’s achievements is to show how “Naturall Reason” is able to scientifically deduct binding principles of sovereignty and obedience encompassing the “Right of Soveraigns” and the “Duty of Subjects” by way of the “Science of Naturall Justice” through which “men may learn thereby, both how to govern, and how to obey.”⁶⁶ Hobbes thus exacerbates the severance of ethics and politics by radically autonomizing political life away from ethical considerations.⁶⁷

Hobbes’s political thought thus offers a striking theoretical articulation of the perils the fragmentation of public authority represents by advocating the establishment of a public authority, but without any free legitimized politics. In this scheme the sovereign power has a monopoly on political life and its responsibilities. Individuals are privatized, and there is no deliberation, let alone legitimized contestation, between sovereign and subjects over the public authority the sovereign enacts, its uses and resources, within the “Frontiers of their Kingdomes.”⁶⁸ It is in chapter 16 of Leviathan, titled “Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated,” that Hobbes establishes nothing less than the basis of what J. G. A. Pocock has characterized as a “civic morality” of personation.⁶⁹ This account prefigured an important aspect of the political and ethical dilemmas subsequently confronted by theorists of political responsibility in the context of the transatlantic age of revolutions: Hobbes formulates a strong sense of the attributability of actions to those who generate the forms of power that make the actions possible and suggests that those who originally generate that power authorize it. But he also poses the important question of the ineluctability of limits in any politically meaningful sense of responsibility qua attributability of the actions of the state to its subjects.⁷⁰

The chapter’s opening establishes Hobbes’s definition of personhood. By then he is already addressing aspects of the quintessential question of political power, “who, whom” (as Lenin once formulated it) and he stresses the centrality of imputability: “A PERSON, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction.”⁷¹ Who personates whom and under what authority? Better still, who has power over whom and is thus ultimately responsible for its exercise? These questions have critical bearing on larger questions of political power and responsibility. Fictional or not, at this point Hobbes is concerned with establishing how a person is an agent to whom actions can be attributed. At the center of this conception of personation is the idea that actions, either a person’s or someone else’s (as a person can act in the name of someone else and that someone else could either be an individual or a collectivity), are imputable to an authorizing agent or entity that is ultimately responsible for the actions undertaken. Drawing on theatrical metaphors, Hobbes makes the point in the following way: “So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to Personate, is to Act, or Represent himselfe, or any other; and he that acteth another is said to beare his Person, or act in his name…and is called in diverse occasions, diversely; as a Representer, or Representative, a Lieutenant, a Vicar, an Attorney, a Deputy, a Prosecutor, an Actor, and the like.”⁷² All these figures personate the actual source of the actions they carry out, the person or entity that is ultimately responsible for them.

Personating someone is thus to “act in his name.” And authority, defined in terms of “the Right of doing any act,” is then cast in terms of authorization. But Hobbes then introduces another aspect: authorship. For not only is authority conferred to a person, but “he that “owneth his words and actions, is the AUTHOR.”⁷³ Consequently, Hobbes argues, imputability to actions is broadly conceived in terms of authorization and authorship. What is more, the sovereign actor has the prerogative of drawing from the resources and power generated by the authorizing authorship of a multitude: “And in him consisteth the Essence of the Commonwealth; which (to define it) is One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude, by mutuall Covenants one with another, have made themselves everyone the Author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their Peace and Common Defense.”⁷⁴ Hobbes, accordingly, formulates one of the cruxes of a genuinely political sense of responsibility: even if it is someone else who enacts and actualizes forms of power, the members of the collectivity generating that power, and thus authorizing their actualization and enactment, are responsible for the actions carried out by an officer or state acting in their name. While authorization, pace Hobbes, is never entirely coextensive with coauthorship, it does enact a sense of accountability and draws a distinction between how actors, authorizers, and authors may be held responsible.⁷⁵ In this conception, degrees of responsibility are adduced: responsibility as liability, codified criminally and in terms of positive law for an actor; political responsibility in terms of structural beneficiaries; and responsibility in terms of citizenship. Naturally, access to power largely determines the degrees of responsibility adjudicated to the last category.

Yet, even if Hobbes’s theorization opens the possibility of establishing these levels of responsibility, the overriding logic of his account tends to close, if not collapse, the gap between authority and authorization. That this is something attributable to the despotic theoretical temperament that Leviathan exhibits goes without saying. Equally attributable to it, even if less noticed, is how Hobbes’s civic morality involves thinking of responsibility in hyperventilated terms, a modality of responsibilization avant la lettre.⁷⁶ In this civic morality, individual subjects are responsibilized for the acts of the sovereign through the identification of authorization and authorship on the basis of which a binding covenant is enacted. Political responsibility is thus made consonant with neutralization and pacification in order to stabilize a political order guaranteeing peace, security, and industry.⁷⁷ Rulers rule, while the ruled just assent but nevertheless remain responsible for the actions of their rulers.

This order, however, is based on volition and covenants of words: fragile notions that remained fraught with anxiety throughout the seventeenth century.⁷⁸ Hobbes, accordingly, sketched the corollary notion of obligation that ultimately undergirds this idea of responsibility by way of his account of a covenant. No continuous involvement is necessary in the adjudication of responsibility for the author of a binding covenant: “when the Actor maketh a Covenant by Authority, he bindeth thereby the Author, no lesse than if he had made it himselfe; and no lesse subjecteth him to all the consequences of the same.”⁷⁹ Obviously, as it is widely known, enacting a covenant in Hobbes’s Leviathan has strict specifications, not to mention clear external limits—the Law of Nature—constraining the extent of the powers surrendered by those entering a covenant, especially as these are secured by the monopoly of violence, its simplification and conversion, which sustains the political order Hobbes figures—“And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”⁸⁰ And this is especially so in “an ungrounded political order,” one produced by a “self-consciously scientific political theory” replacing older, cultic, approaches that emphasized the need to tend and cultivate political life with the spatial abstractions of modern science.⁸¹

Still, what is of great significance but largely underappreciated is the centrality of limits to responsibility. Limited responsibility therefore runs in tandem with radical responsabilization. “For no man is obliged by a Covenant, whereof he is not Author; nor consequently by a Covenant made against, or beside the Authority he gave.”⁸² Forged by the passion for order that is reason, these covenants are completely binding, but limited.⁸³ Precisely because they are politically binding and supported by politically sanctioned violence, there have to be clear limits to the extent of the responsibilities involved as well as a clear locus of action. Or, as he clearly formulates it: “Every man giving their common Representer, Authority from himselfe in particular; and owning all the actions the Representer doth, in case they give him Authority without stint: Otherwise, when they limit him in what, and how farre he shall represent them, none of them owneth more, than they gave him commission to Act.”⁸⁴ Hobbes clinches his argument by simultaneously invoking the multitude while neutralizing it. “A Multitude of men are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented,” Hobbes writes. The unity evoked by oneness is the key term here: “For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented that maketh the Person One…. And Unity cannot otherwise be understood in Multitude.”⁸⁵ So central is unity, and Hobbes is careful to note how when “the Representative consist of many men” there is a chance of division, which risks an equal split and thus the neutralization of both sides, leaving the actor “mute, and uncapable of action.”⁸⁶ But in his preferred solution, which bestows unity in the “Representer” who acts, the multitude is then neutralized and bound by a covenant at once enacting and limiting the range and extent of the political responsibility of the authority legitimizing its power.

Personation, accordingly, entails a transfer of the responsibility to act, while tacitly relying on a dual sense of accountability: that of the actor to the broad script provided by the terms of the covenant and that of the author, the ultimate source of authority, and the one in whose name the actor speaks and who ultimately owns the actions carried by his authority and in his name. Herein Hobbes’s complicated articulation of the intersection between authorization and authorship reemerges once again.⁸⁷ Complicated, since at first glance it seems that Hobbes wants to have it both ways: to claim that authorizing is authorship, and thus collapse the gap between the two for the purpose of legitimizing the ensuing order, while also severing the authority and authorization by way of an account of personation in which only the unity of the actor can be an author, even if a multitude authorizes it. What is one to make of this seemingly antinomian argument? One way of parsing out the stakes is to read the passages in question politically; namely, by looking at what it is that Hobbes is trying to do by binding the multitude to the unity of the one, which is the only thing that can make it capable of speech and action; but also by considering how he wants the individuals, not any intermediary or corporate body, to be held responsible for the actions of the sovereign, thus at once insulating the actor from ultimate responsibility, thereby excluding any form of collective agency, while also recognizing limits to sovereign power.⁸⁸ Responsibility is thus borne by whoever owns the action, not its agent. Conversely, responsibility is conditional. But the ultimate message of Leviathan implies an unmediated relation between the individual and the state that excludes any modicum of shared power; it rather “places all the rights at the representative’s disposal and all the burdens at the represented.”⁸⁹ Similarly, it authorizes the codification of property relations by abstractly making people authors of an allocation that only the sovereign power, qua “Person that Represents” the “Common-wealth,” could undertake.⁹⁰ This emphasis on the unmediated relation between individuals and the state and on the limits to sovereignty keenly reflects sociological realities of English absolutism; and these are sedimentations that constitute part of the content of Hobbes’s theoretical forms.⁹¹ In the architecture of Hobbes’s argument, the contrast and displacements of a civic morality of personation, along with its sociological and spatial presuppositions of early modern period absolutism, can be grasped.

The political truncations of Hobbes’s conception are real enough. Whereas the capacity for personation is important for a political ethic, its politicalness is depleted in Hobbes’s account. Although personation entails the intersubjective ability of politically owning up to the actions of political actors to which one is bound in a covenant, something which is, in and of itself, a central component of a political sense of responsibility, nowhere does Hobbes avow the shared power that genuine authorship and responsibility presupposes and thus requires. What instead emerges are the lineages of a logic of responsibilization that demands shared liability but not shared power. This is, indeed, the nub of Hobbes’s argument: whereas personation is emphasized, the continuous sense of shared power and proximity in the exercise of political rule is debarred from his account. For personation to actualize its more robustly political import, authors need to at least have the capacity to meaningfully act in a political order in which shared political power is not secluded to one-time gestures of sanction or approbation, but rather involves its active mobilization and participation. Its depletions notwithstanding, Hobbes’s articulation of personation delivers some basic political truths: it portends an economy of political responsibility and obligation that structured subsequent debates about the mystification of authorizations, and the limits of responsibility and accountability, in the republican political forms binding emergent liberal and, later, liberal-democratic orders. But the despotic cast of mind that defines the architecture of Hobbes’s theory truncates such articulation and renders it abstract and dehistoricized. It not only remains indifferent to culture and political economy—even while formally reproducing some of the imperatives of the nascent agrarian capitalism underpinning the social formation that is Hobbes’s immediate locus of reflection—but his construction has a remarkable ex nihilo ring to it. And it is equally indifferent to space and time beyond the smooth spatiality of abstract geometrical reasoning that supervenes his theorization of a realm.⁹²

These were the main contours of the situation in which the concept of responsibility emerged in seventeenth-century Europe. Sediments of this historical situation, its imperatives and forms, remained in subsequent formulations of responsibility. That this is so can be readily seen in the turn to subjectivity, which became conjoined with the emergence of agrarian capitalism and commercial relations—all of it anchored in individual actors and transactions that created the conditions for an even more overwhelmingly individualized sense of responsibility. Unsurprisingly, with the onslaught on tradition associated with the Enlightenment came a new sense of responsibility in the context of the new social morality proposed by the French philosophes.⁹³ But this was a sense of responsibility dirempted from political space and often devoid of any political involvement. The entry for philosopher in the 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française tells the tale: “Philosopher: one who devotes himself to research-work in connexion [sic] with the various sciences and who devotes himself to research and who seeks from their effects to trace their causes and principles. A name applied to one who lives a quiet and secluded life remote from the stir and troubles of the world. It is occasionally used to denote someone of undisciplined mind who regards himself as above the responsibilities and duties of civil life.”⁹⁴ Fidelity to a philosophical vocation and its freedom of inquiry became a leitmotif, as the political valences of responsibility were truncated in monarchical orders, with many philosophes indifferent to political life and its forms.

But the transmutations of ideas of the self, with attendant claims of authenticity in the context of this new morality, eventually led to the reclaiming of the idea of the citizen as the bearer of responsibility for a political order that could enact the conditions for its flourishing.⁹⁵ It is with the advent of transatlantic revolutions during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that enlightened ideas of citizenship in republican orders fully recast the Enlightenment’s new morality politically. Such recasting and enactment, however, demanded a radical transformation of space. This radical change of scale, and the ensuing transformation of power and political space, can be seen in the rather contemptuous attitude of The Federalist Papers to decentralized, local politics. The republicanism advocated in The Federalist had specific spatial specifications that bear directly on its plea for a transmogrification of republican tenets to make them consistent with an “extended republic” at once invulnerable to the turmoil and instability that, in their view, led to the demise of its antecessors and suitable for further expansion. This is the historic moment in which principles of New World patriotism and the creation of republics coextensive with nation-states, often of semicontinental size, crystallized.⁹⁶

In this context, a new conception of political responsibility was formulated and actualized. The writings of Simón Bolívar, Benjamin Constant, and James Madison are testaments to how in the settlements following transatlantic revolutions and wars of independence, the democratic moment reactivated by these travails, which required reanimating the idea of ordinary people sharing responsibility for their fate, was transformed, accommodated, and contained by republican constitutions.⁹⁷ From then on, political responsibility was circumscribed by an elite of elected officials, and its locus of action was mostly conceived in relation to institutions devised to curtail the possibility of arbitrary power, while the citizen’s sense of responsibility was significantly smothered. Simón Bolívar, for instance, spoke about political rights, duties, and responsibilities, in the context of the Latin American wars of independence and the constitutional settlements that followed, in terms of sustaining a new order that involved little political participation on the part of its dutiful citizens.⁹⁸ Meanwhile, for Hamilton and Madison, in a “compound republic” the state cannot be “a servile pliancy” to the passions of the moment (no. 51, 71). Rather, its responsibility is toward the people, even when it sometimes leads to clashes with the people. Even if something like “executive power” ultimately depends on the people as a source of legitimacy, it has to be kept above the fray of the democratic passions of the day (no. 10, 63).

That The Federalist articulates a republicanism embodying a synthesis of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, while emptying out the last of any substantive meaning by radically redefining popular sovereignty, is clear enough. What bears mention in the present discussion, however, is the centrality of responsibility and the distinction of means/ends for these advocates of republicanism, especially in light of their advocacy of an enduring central power. One of Hamilton’s formulations constitutes a good starting point for the means/ends question: “A government ought to contain itself every power requisite for the full accomplishment of the objects committed to its care, and to the complete execution of the trusts for which it is responsible; free from every other control but a regard to the public good and to the sense of the people.”⁹⁹ Hamilton’s comment about the need to allocate appropriate powers consonant with the responsibilities imputed to the national government takes place within the context of an intervention that opens up with a rather philosophical elucidation of some of the “maxims of ethics and politics,” which offers an explicit engagement with the relationship between “means and ends” that are offered as “primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.”¹⁰⁰ Here, to be sure, Hamilton is mostly concerned with the extent and range of federal power, not the responsibility of its exercise. But his discussion is relevant for a consideration of the latter. For in elucidating these maxims he suggests that “there cannot be an effect without a cause; that the means ought to be proportioned to the end; that every power ought to be commensurate with its object; that there ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose which is itself incapable of limitation.”¹⁰¹ Limitless purposes thus logically require potentially limitless power as a means for their enactment and realization.

The immediate occasion for these remarks was the hotly contested question of taxation. Even so, Hamilton’s own appeals to logic and primary axioms suggest a wider, more general applicability of these maxims. “As the duties of superintending the national defense and of securing the public peace against foreign or domestic violence involve a provision for casualties and dangers to which no possible limits can be assigned, the power of making that provision ought to know no other bounds than the exigencies of the nation and the resources of the community.”¹⁰² And a national government, as Madison elsewhere emphasizes, holds “not only an authority over the individual citizens, but an indefinite supremacy over all persons and things, so far as they are objects of lawful government” (no. 40).¹⁰³ Such momentous power, authorized by “the people” but duly insulated from the masses of ordinary people, demanded an exceedingly powerful yet delicate sense of responsibility on the part of rulers. In the eyes of Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., a champion of Madisonian constitutionalism, every political form ought to be concerned with tyrannical power, including republics.¹⁰⁴ And these have to reckon with the “tyranny of the majority,” something particularly ubiquitous in a postrevolutionary political order with long-standing traditions of popular involvement in collective life. The autonomization of the exercise of responsible power, and its concomitant structural insulation, bestows upon this power a delicate sense of responsibility: what Mansfield calls “a new kind of responsibility in executives—constitutional and republican,” for the constitution and institutional forms that prevent the tyranny of democracy.

How exactly is responsibility so conceived actually defined? While occasionally presented by Hamilton mostly in terms of the fulfillment of duties assigned (no. 23), it is Madison who forthrightly elucidates this notion. In the context of ruling a large republic, responsibility carries a dual meaning. First, there is responsibility in the exercise of power for the people by agents that exhibit temperance in their use of power. Madison’s rendering: “Responsibility, in order to be reasonable, must be limited to objects within the power of the responsible party, and in order to be effectual, must relate to operations of that power, of which a ready and proper judgment can be formed by the constituents” (no. 63).¹⁰⁵ Or in Mansfield’s formulation: “‘accountable,’ ‘responsive’ to the people, but also on their behalf: responsible politicians in this sense do for the people what they cannot do for themselves but can form a judgment about.”¹⁰⁶ Responsibility is thus displaced to representatives and ministers who rule in the name of the people. This set the stage for an idea of responsibility whose fidelity is to the institutions sustaining a particular form of life and for a conception of responsibility as the prerogative of an elite.

But there is a second element to Madison’s theorization that opens a different vista within the landscape of republicanism. This consists in the tacit avowal of how political responsibility is reinvigorated by the accountability of rulers—in this case “the senate,” which is then presented as a “select and stable member of government”—to the people through regularized elections, even if Madison submits that a certain irresponsibility emerges out of the electoral process: “the want, in some important cases, of a due responsibility in the government to the people, arising from that frequency of elections which in other cases produces this responsibility.”¹⁰⁷ Elections breed accountability and establish the political equivalent of a community of fate between rulers and ruled, but elections open the possibility for popular passions to have undue influence on government and thus threaten Madison’s precious goal of blending “stability with liberty” in an extensive republic whose further expansion the authors of The Federalist Papers not only envisioned but encouraged.¹⁰⁸ In this republican order, democratic citizenship is conceived not in terms of equality and shared power, but is recast as equality in consenting to the responsible exercise of power.¹⁰⁹ With the neutralization of popular majorities threatening the new political order by virtue of the dual role of the spatial coordinates of the “compound republic”—its vastness debarred any large majority from coalescing, while it encouraged ideologies of self-reliant improvement on the basis of the expectations and hopes that its “unoccupied space” provided—the stabilization of a republican regime that not merely protected private rights, but encouraged commerce and expansion, was conquered.¹¹⁰

That more than just a modicum of depoliticization was purposefully built into the American “compound republic” is, therefore, clear enough. Madison famously sought to drown factions in the vastness of the republic, in the “greater sphere of country,” to insulate the central power from threats, especially that “rage…for an equal division of property.”¹¹¹ And an expansive republic dilutes the spatial coordinates of political life, thereby impairing the formation of large majorities that might threaten the mainstay of collective life. “Extend the sphere,” Madison famously wrote, “and you take in a variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.”¹¹² One need not go beyond the paper in question to see what the actual meaning of the phrase “the rights of other citizens” is and how the overriding concern is to neutralize threats to the property relations underpinning the social formation, which are cast as necessities “in civilized nations.”¹¹³ Of course, much has taken place since Madison penned these words, including the vast transformation of the American polity, the virtual disappearance of the democratic threats from which he sought to insulate the federal government, and the exacerbation of the depoliticization he saw as constitutive of the dynamic stability of the republic. Still, it set the overall coordinates that would pacify political life and made very clear the spatial presuppositions of such neutralization. It runs in tandem with the subsequent individualization of responsibility. Both at once symptomatize and dilute the sphere of political life.¹¹⁴

If classical republics had to be small, which was an important element of the antimonarchical core of republicanism—in contrast with the vastness of kingdoms and realms—now republics could dwarf royal realms. In this transatlantic context, representation dislodged participatory conceptions of politics, thus reworking the architecture of Hobbes’s theorization while retaining its decidedly antidemocratic bent cloaked in ideas of order and stability. And it is precisely the quest for stability that would become a signature of Constant’s political thought, arguably the thinker that reflected most forthrightly on the question of responsibility in the context of “representative” institutions. But a watershed event separates Madison and Constant’s ideas of representation and the political responsibilities associated with it: the French Revolution, an event that further altered the spatiality of modern political thought. With characteristic metaphoric intensity, Jules Michelet recorded this change, as he noticed how fidelity to the revolutionary credo and its universalism—liberty, equality, fraternity—fundamentally transformed the stratification of internal political space: the revolution “killed geography,” for its eventuation “disregards time and space” by shattering the old regime while smoothing out the political landscape in the name of the revolutionary triad.¹¹⁵ This reconfiguration of space also had an international dimension, especially during its externalization, the exportation of the 1804 “civil code” across Europe, and the rise of romantic nationalism to resist it.¹¹⁶ These processes triggered yet another transformation of political space whose implications would reverberate through the concatenations defining the nineteenth-century moment of the transatlantic age of revolutions: from the ascendance and subsequent cordoning of Haiti, the first black independent nation-state in the Western hemisphere, to the republics emerging out of the wars of independence in South America. If Hobbes’s theoretical despotism abstracted space for the sake of a variation of absolute power, the French Revolution brought about a dialectic of differentiation and dedifferentiation on the construction of political space that offered a new way of conceiving spatial coordinates for political life in tandem with the necessary neutralization that could eventually render the imperatives of commerce to operate unhindered.¹¹⁷

It is in this context that Constant formulated his ideas about political responsibility. In a fundamental way, he conceived it in terms that were largely indifferent to questions of political form: namely, the formal structure of his account could be actualized either as a republic or a constitutional monarchy.¹¹⁸ For, despite early republican sympathies, Constant’s main concern was not the enactment of a republican political form and the forms of responsibility needed to sustain it. Rather, his overriding concern was with stability, the need for a neutral power to stabilize a constitutional settlement that could eliminate arbitrary exercises of political power.¹¹⁹ It is in terms of these concerns, which he consistently pursued, from his speech in 1798 advocating the eviction of Jacobinism from the French political scene to his speech on the liberty of the ancient and the moderns at the Athénée Royal in 1819, that he posed the question of responsibility.¹²⁰ Constitutional limits and responsible political action within them: that was the tenor of Constant’s reflections on political responsibility. Or, as he states in his Principles of Politics (1815) apropos of “The Responsibility of Ministers”:

It seems to me that responsibility must, above all, secure two aims: that of depriving guilty ministers of their power, and that of keeping alive in the nation—through the watchfulness of its representatives, the openness of their debates and the exercise of freedom of the press applied to the analysis of all ministerial actions—a spirit of inquiry, a habitual interest in the maintenance of the constitution of the state, a constant participation in public affairs, in a vivid sense of political life.

On the question of responsibility…what is essential is that the conduct of the ministers be readily subjected to scrupulous investigation and that, at the same time, they should be allowed ample resources for avoiding the consequences of such investigation, if their crime, were it proved, is not so odious as to deserve not mercy not only from the laws, but also in the eyes of universal conscience and equity, which are more indulgent than the written laws.¹²¹

Constant’s reflections can be fruitfully contrasted with Tocqueville’s sporadic references to political responsibility. Consistent with the tenor The Federalist Papers, Tocqueville writes about the “accountability of public officials,” responsibility and freedom, and how in a democracy no centralized power can merely command one to “assume responsibility.”¹²⁴ Responsibility here connotes, as the French vous chargerez conveys, the notion of taking upon oneself a role or the completion of a task.¹²⁵ Similarly, he also considers the question of the appropriate means for designated ends, something that relates to the idea of a delimited “sphere of responsibility” and, thus, of power.¹²⁶ Comparatively speaking, Tocqueville paid very little attention to political responsibility as such, something curious if not entirely incongruous in light of his conception of democracy: by casting democracy as a social condition, he significantly downplayed institutional questions, the questions that Constant had made his own, along with the duties and political responsibilities of citizenship.¹²⁷

For a robust articulation of any sense of responsibility from below, one has to look at the Giuseppe Mazzini’s formulations. Tocqueville’s contemporary, and witness of the latter’s collusion with the obliteration of the Roman republic, Mazzini’s reflections of responsibility were internationalist in scope. In the best spirit of the Enlightenment, he loudly proclaimed duties to mankind while seeking to anchor these duties—to actualize them, as it were, in the political form of a national republic. But what makes Mazzini’s account more striking is his sensibility to the social and political presuppositions of any genuine sense of political responsibility. He writes not only that “to-day, your masters, by separating you from the other classes, by prohibiting all association, by imposing a double censorship upon the press, endeavor to conceal from you your duties, together with the needs of Humanity,” but he goes on to establish that responsibility entails political literacy and education, which can only be acquired by experiencing freedom: “Be assured that without instruction you cannot know your duties, and that when society does not allow you to be taught, the responsibility for every offense rests not with you, but with it; your responsibility begins on the day when an opportunity of instruction is offered to you and you neglect it; on the day when means are presented to you of transforming a society which condemns you to ignorance, and you do not exert yourselves to use them.”¹²⁸ There are social and material presuppositions for the exercise of political responsibility, and, by extension, political responsibility needs to be constituted in the political space of a national republic. While Mazzini’s overall treatment lacks the systematic rigor of, say, Constant’s, it captured a central element for any sense of responsibility beyond that of ministers, a sense of responsibility that avowed the political and social presuppositions for it to be meaningful.¹²⁹

The foregoing accounts constitute different variations of two main themes: how the actualization of the codependence of rights and responsibilities presupposes a modicum of freedom for it to be meaningful and how it also requires a modicum of power, for without a delimited sphere of power there is no responsibility. Revealingly, at the very moment in which modern republics are born the concept of political responsibility is almost exclusively theorized in terms of elites exercising power, not in terms of citizens having a meaningful share in the forms of power they generate and authorize. The spatial configuration of these modern republics as nation-states debarred any notion of ordinary citizens sharing political power and responsibility. Styles of elite rule embedded in these modern republican forms were buttressed by the spatial dimension of the new republics and how the establishment of large, sometimes semicontinental, republics further contributed to the dilution of political participation by distancing ordinary citizens from shared power, even in those republics born out of popular rebellion and revolution and consolidated by a levée en masse. A development that set the pattern for subsequent revolutions from above characterizing the consolidation of capitalist states during the late nineteenth century.

By the 1860s the banners of nation building from above had replaced the popular mobilizations nourishing forms of patriotic republicanism from below. The industrial revolution and the emergence of a world market in the Europe of the concert of powers were the defining features of the age. With these developments, an interimperialist rivalry outside the Eurasian landmass set in as the great powers vied against each other in the scramble for Africa and fought over the dismembering Ottoman Empire. The United States, for its part, had already dismembered Mexico and was in the midst of its own internal carnage during the Civil War, soon to be followed by a reconstruction in tandem with the incorporation of western territories at once ensuring the integrity of the nation, as a contiguous landmass from Atlantic to Pacific, while clinching capitalist rule in it. Perry Anderson has vividly described the ideological transformation that characterized this period: “Instead of the banners of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the new elites drove conscript masses under the signs of Nationality and Industry.”¹³⁰ In this context, Mazzini’s plea for the duties of mankind, responsibility and freedom, and its commitment to humanity expressed in ideas of equality and liberty, which nevertheless could only find expression through the nation, were a throwback reminder of a more political era and became increasingly out of sync with the sturm und drang of industrialized nationalism. Processes of nation building and industrialization paved the way for the consolidation of capitalist nation-states, which increasingly monopolized political space. From this point on, ruling took place by the orchestrated assent of the masses, not by their political mobilization. Only for war were the masses mobilized.

Yet the nineteenth century witnessed three other momentous developments that ought to be registered in any account of the modern eventuation and transmogrification of responsibility. First, imperialist expansion during the second half of the nineteenth century not only bred conceptions of responsibility associated with fidelity to civilizing missions and other imperial ideologies, but changed the spatial presuppositions of the concept in yet another way. Transnational capitalist relations also played a significant role. Cuba, for instance, in the late nineteenth century—precisely after 1882—witnessed a transformation of spatial relations brought about by capitalism as part of that process known in the Caribbean as absentism—namely, the exploitation and extraction of agriculture-based wealth from a long distance, and the absence of owners that shared no spatial contiguity, let alone a community of fate with the populations and regions they exploited. Fernando Ortiz offered a succinct formulation of this process: “And so the sugar industry became increasingly foreign and passed into anonymous, corporate, distant, dehumanized and prepotent hands, with a very slippery sense of responsibility.”¹³¹ This dilution of responsibility, which had its political correlate at home in the emergence and crystallization of the corporation as a political entity and actor, entailed the autonomization of a managerial class not only from the political order in which the corporation operated but also from its own shareholders, thus posing questions of responsibility increasingly at variance with a more properly political sense of responsibility.¹³²

Second, in the context of nineteenth-century political struggles, where workers and ordinary people pressed from below, and ruling elites tacitly compromised by forging revolutions from above, variations of moral and individual responsibility emerged in the context of the “ethology” associated with the philosophical radicalism of John Stuart Mill and Victorian ideas of “character.”¹³³ Stated differently, in Victorian ideas of personal responsibility, or self-responsibility of the person with herself, notions of character found throughout the period became central. These are memorably articulated in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, where character becomes intertwined with an idea of “duty” that, in opposition to “sublime conceptions of existence,” sought to restore individual responsibility while simultaneously opposing accounts like those found in Zola’s novels that place emphasis on how moral character is deeply mediated by socially constituted and politically sanctioned situations.¹³⁴ Character is a notion that signified a heightened sense of personal responsibility. Cultivating one’s character became an eminently individual responsibility, which remained nonetheless socially precious for bourgeois culture, especially as it pertained to sociability with strangers in the context of ever expanding webs of social and economic interactions.

Last, the French Third Republic inaugurated a no less momentous notion of social responsibility that openly contrasts with the individualism at work in ideas of character. Even if already tacitly avowed in Bismarck’s so-called inauguration of welfare policies, social responsibility became clearly articulated in the French context. Drawing on a long tradition that posits responsibilities and obligations dating back to the civil code of 1804, whose articles contained many references to obligations and responsibility (say, articles 1383–84, 1386), under the auspices of the Third Republic emerged the idea of the “social state” and with it a “new regime of responsibility” that entailed two main vectors: on the one hand, responsibility as liability for harmful consequences of one’s acts in the context of industrial accidents; on the other, responsibility as an obligation to prevent such harms and thus being readily accountable for their occurrences.¹³⁵ The consolidation of industrial capitalism had transformed the modes and conditions of human labor power to an extent that laissez-faire conceptions of responsibility as individual liability, and/or imputability, were undermined by increasingly complex patterns of instrumental rationalities and strategies of political neutralization. Accordingly, the advent of the social state and its regime of social solidarity and shared responsibility entailed the inauguration of modalities of regulation that became increasingly cast in terms of the humanization of technology. This represented a crystallization of a fin de siècle sense of solidarity that was underpinned by the attempt to bring individual autonomy in closer relationship to ideas of social obligation. Equally built into the emergent social state were notions of “collective self-determination,” which challenged the individualism of earlier notions of responsibility.

But the regulations of the social state, it goes without saying, also contributed to increased exploitation of labor power. Exploitation thus became economically and politically more durable, along with political neutralization, in a dialectical reversal that was characteristic of many of the reformist projects and practices of the age. Even if this robust sense of social responsibility had many afterlives throughout the twentieth century, coeval with it was an equally momentous development that contributed to its eventual erosion. Coterminous with ideas of social responsibility were notions of limited liability in the face of increased risk. This, to the extent that “a philosophy of risk” trumping any sense of social and political responsibilities for accidents at work was born during this period, thus upending ideas of responsibility, qua liability, accountability, and imputability in the workplace.¹³⁶ Under the mantle of social solidarity and the provision of insurance, legally, the responsibility of structural beneficiaries was forsworn by an abstract sense of shared fate between employers and employees on the basis of an undifferentiated sense of professional risk.¹³⁷ Legally speaking, “professional risk” trumped responsibility, thus absolving from social and political responsibility those who are direct and structural beneficiaries.¹³⁸ The upshot: the depoliticization of the main site of struggle in which capital had confronted its enemy throughout the nineteenth century, as workers provided the social base that rendered the critique of capital politically meaningful. Undoubtedly, in an important way, insurance and limited liability signified an improvement from nineteenth-century individualization of responsibilities—frequently folded into laissez-faire ideologies of individual freedom and freedom of contract—that increased vulnerabilities and diminished responsibility, even if the vulnerabilities in question had direct structural beneficiaries and were systematically constituted and politically sanctioned. And yet, under the guises of insurance, professional risk, and limited liability, the political and social vulnerability of workers became depoliticized, and the political responsibilities of beneficiaries within capitalist nation-states disavowed.

Eventually, capitalist orders came under the pressures of a socialist and communist credo that sought to anchor a sense of responsibility outside the constitutional bounds of the nation-state, portending an international sense of responsibility whose end was to seize power in the name of emancipated humanity. With the idea of the proletariat, Marx not only attempted to reclaim the idea of a politically active demos to wrest power from the bourgeoisie and inaugurate a more egalitarian order, an order actualizing real humanism, but also sought to trenchantly anchor it in an internationalist cast and orientation, an internationalism that recognized the ineluctability of political space as the locus of responsible action.¹³⁹ Yet internationalist socialism, for all its eloquence, is not what dented liberal civilization and precipitated its collapse. Rather, interimperial competition abroad found a homology at home, as forms of national chauvinism gained actual political traction within nationalist discourses for the first time and various atavisms, social Darwinism, along with idealizations of violence and war, gripped the imaginations of ruling elites. By now, mottos about the duty and responsibilities of mankind like Mazzini’s rang hollow. In the late nineteenth century, many embattled elites saw with great apprehension the rise of mass politics and sought to countervail popular challenges to their rule from below with the conservative and sometimes counterrevolutionary mobilization of the “composite lower-middle class, both urban and rural” often fueling jingoist nationalism.¹⁴⁰ All this became part of the political and historical constellation of the run-up to the European Great War and its implosion of the spatial coordinates that defined international and domestic politics in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁴¹ With the outbreak of the Great War, all kinds of rabid nationalism, including fascism, with its biologization of community, its irredentism, resentment, and revanchist compensation, would cast the actual practice of responsibility as unconditional fidelity to the preservation of the integrity of the nation and the imperatives for its defense.¹⁴²

Communist internationalism was the historical antipode of imperialism, even if it betrays a despatialization of its own. The emergence of a historical novum, the USSR, a communist state of semicontinental size, heralded the advent of a pure political order whose identity bore the aspiration of spatial limitlessness. Perry Anderson has offered a penetrating formulation of the latter: “In 1917, workers and soldiers led by the Bolshevik Party carried out a socialist revolution in Russia. The regime that emerged from this upheaval was the first and only state in history to include no national or territorial reference in its name—it would simply be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, without designated place or people.”¹⁴³ A political order whose identity was purely political and thus bereft of ethnic or national determinations. Sure enough, this designation—USSR—embodied the best traditions of socialist internationalism. But it indirectly attested to the collapse of a spatial political ordering and the difficulty of forging an alternative sense of bounded political space, beyond the coordinates of the leading capitalist-imperial powers. But communism’s global projections could no more dispense of internal differentiations than capitalism’s. The appeal to republican forms, defined by a commitment to socialism that nonetheless formed a federative entity, eloquently voiced such differentiations and the enabling borders these tacitly presuppose. Yet, all differences notwithstanding, in both communist and capitalist camps spatial disorientation eventually led to a dilution of the political life of ordinary people and a diminished sense of political responsibilities; in the case of the USSR, not least because of the consequences of civil war and counterrevolution, aided by expeditions to drown the revolution: American, British, Canadian, Finnish, French, Greek, Japanese, Romanian, Serb, Turkish. By the middle of the twentieth century, political rule effectively became centralized and hierarchical under the guise of organizational imperatives—bureaucratic, modernizing, managerial—presiding over both blocs and their otherwise divergent war economies. Though governed by different rationalities, the business corporation and the bureaucratic state converged in further diminishing and depleting any meaningful sense of political responsibility within a politically bounded space. Political responsibility became secluded to elites only accountable either to the party or the shareholder, not to a shared collective life or the general well-being of the collectivity. Moreover, with the onset of the cold war both communist internationalism and its capitalist counterpart converged on imperial forms of rule that further extricated any community of fate between these empires and those it effectively ruled.

Writing at the onset of this period of high politicization, Georg Simmel articulated a view that ran parallel to Weber’s depiction of the heroic politician and its sense of responsibility. In it, however, both the main contours of the turn-of-the-century preoccupation (and obsession) with the fate of individual responsibility and the advent of the masses of ordinary people as political actors are more keenly articulated. What Weber’s discussion of Caesarism and the politician tacitly assumed, Simmel rendered explicit: the collective, which, following the conventions of the social sciences of the time, Simmel dubs the mass, “lacks consciousness of responsibility.”¹⁴⁴ This formulation is found within the context of a discussion of “mass crimes” and how “moral inhibitions are easily suspended” when individuals act with others: “This suspension alone explains mass crimes, of which, afterwards, the individual participant declares himself innocent. He does so with good subjective conscience, and not even without some objective justification: the overpowering predominance of feeling destroyed the psychological forces that customarily sustain the consistency and stability of the person, and hence, his responsibility.”¹⁴⁵ In this view, individual responsibility is undermined, if not entirely obliterated, when individuals act together in concert. Amidst generalized irresponsibility, mass crimes ensue. In this reckoning, the sovereign individual with a personal sense of responsibility is besieged in an age of mass politics and collective action.

Naturally, these were commonplaces about collective action by the masses in Simmel’s political and intellectual milieu: its artistic and intellectual landmarks range from Émile Zola’s Germinal (1885) to Sigmund Freud’s Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the I (1921), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Fury (1936), along with Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1931–32), with José Ortega y Gasset’s La rebelión de las masas as the most cogent political theoretical achievement in this genre.¹⁴⁶ What is significant about Simmel’s account is how he zoned in on the question of responsibility and explicitly formulated what other theorizations tacitly stated; namely, how in an era of high politicization critics of the masses as political actors rejected any collective sense of responsibility, let alone conceived the possibility of politics emerging as an ethics of collective life. The crowds lacked individuality, which in elite responses to mass political organization functioned as the other pole of an entrenched binary (or, in less theoretically charged terms, a dyad) that foregrounded lettered responses in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. In Stefan Jonsson’s perceptive formulation, “By affirming that members of a crowd lacked individuality—reason, identity, character, culture—crowd psychology usually served to dispute the lower classes’ ability to function as responsible political agents.”¹⁴⁷

But not only a rejection of the possibility of responsible collective action, of political responsibility on the part of ordinary people engaged in collective action with others, is at stake here. The corollary of this rejection is an articulation of how collective action impairs individual responsibility within the framework of increasingly politicized nation-states. Even when there is a delegation of responsibility, such delegation turned out to be nugatory, as the ultimate upshot is not so much delegation to a leader but the shattering of the individual and its capacity for individual responsibility. Even as Simmel avowed how sometimes an individual shares “a co-responsibility for all collective action,” the overall tenor is clear enough: in collective action, there is a “delegation of duties and responsibilities” both horizontal and vertical: “the group interest (true or ostensible) entitles, or even obliges, the individual to commit acts for which, as an individual, he does not care to be responsible.”¹⁴⁸ Ultimately, individuals seek a higher power in order to be “relieved of responsibility.”¹⁴⁹

Conversely, a veritable multiplication of its meanings began to crystallize at this juncture. Ideas of social and religious responsibility coexisted side by side with the idea of political responsibility, which became associated increasingly with citizens and their representatives in the ever expanding electorates of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But even if a proliferation of contents—social, religious, political, individual—hardly altered the formal contours of the idea of responsibility, its scope and spatial presuppositions were significantly impacted by this expansion of meanings. Formally, responsibility still entailed assuming a task vis-à-vis an object that imposes imperatives to which the subject needs to respond, and the responses are guided by fidelity to certain ideas, principles, or political forms. A corollary of this dissemination of connotations was the idea that a responsible actor, a bearer of a strong sense of responsibility, should be capable and able to foresee the potential and likely effects of her actions and behaviors. Not only that, a responsible actor should factor her political praxis either by preemptively curbing these effects or calibrating her actions in light of them. Consequentialism thus became an important corollary in the historical and theoretical eventuation of the idea of responsibility. And so did attention to historical and political contexts, or to the situation that thoroughly mediates the actualization or enactment of ethical and political responsibility, which is what renders it mute or actual, abstract or concrete. Even so, the locus of action for the exercise of political responsibility increasingly became unstable, not to say muddled. This muddling eventually led to an overt disavowal with the onset of neoliberalism in the North Atlantic world during last two decades of the twentieth century.

In contemporary invocations of neoliberal responsibility these formal attributes are essentially reproduced. Although frequently cast as the undoing of liberal democratic ideas of autonomy, what neoliberal responsibility actually encompasses is the displacement of the locus of autonomy and responsibility into the economic domain, along with the valorization of human capital and its imperatives of marketization, self-entrepreneurship, and branding, not its depletion.¹⁵⁰ What Friedrich von Hayek called “the burden of choice” still abides, as does the commitment to autonomous individualization and individual responsibility.¹⁵¹ But, with the springs of political action that conquered a modicum of political autonomy against the background of the postwar economic boom gone, the modicum of autonomy hypostatized in liberal democratic theory is displaced and transformed. With the deepening of neoliberal consolidation, its reproduction has entailed the expansion of its governing rationalities to a domain hitherto governed by traditional political considerations. Fidelity to the rule of law, a cornerstone of liberal-democratic ideas of justice, is thereby undermined by fidelity to the rules of the market economy and the imperatives of corporatized ideas of freedom.¹⁵² Autonomy, always compromised and diminished within liberal-democratic capitalist states, is further depoliticized and recast to neoliberal specifications. With it, political responsibility is even more comprehensively disavowed and ultimately extricated by neoliberal strategies of responsibilization.

Responsibility is, accordingly, no longer moral or political, but recast in terms of human capitalization and thus further despatialized as the responsible self- investor and provider is embedded in a world economy, an economy that supervenes the interstate system upon which its coordination fragilely depends. Thus processes of social and political “disaffiliation,” long under underway, are exacerbated in an age in which neoliberal responsibility praises individual self-reliance while in practice making social and economic independence increasingly porous by dismantling the social and political fabric that would sustain it.¹⁵³ The political depleting of citizenship in spaces devoid of affiliation, fraternity, and civility fosters a misplaced sense of fidelity in which it is impossible to cultivate the sense of political responsibility needed to sustain a genuinely democratic political life. Fear, powerlessness, and aggression all coalesce in the depoliticized yet ethically responsible citizen. But if there is one lesson that the foregoing historical account of the practice of political responsibility delivers, it is that it could only be actualized in a meaningful way in a context of shared political space where a politically constituted community of fate is forged, a context in which what is political, general, and thus common is not diluted in ways that render already difficult practices of shared power and self-rule nugatory.