Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power

IN THE United States a first impression would imply that the ethical turn has crystallized around a particular discourse of catastrophe that emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century. With a fin de siècle mindset, various cultural and literary historians argued for the centrality of catastrophe, as a historical experience, concept, or narrative trope, in understanding the era that had just come to an end. In the early 1990s, cultural critic Cathy Caruth already referred to it as “our own catastrophic era.”¹ About a decade later, the editors of a collection of essays on mourning and loss echoed a similar sentiment: “At the dawn of the twenty-first century, mourning remains.”² Alongside loss and mourning, responsibility also became a prevalent theme in reference to the century coming to an end, its seemingly unprecedented violence, and the question of how properly to mourn it and respond responsibly to its afterlives. Yet politically this moment was defined by epochal closure and political neutralization, for which mourning and loss became symptomatic expressions. The mournful gaze of left-liberal critics mostly found articulation in theoretical forms that tacitly acquiesced with the political neutralizations defining the decade. More to the point, these mournful politics not only misrecognized the recent past by conferring it “a wholeness that never did exist” but frequently converged with the rejection of forms of collective agency, and the enmity lines these symbolize, while hypostatizing suffering and loss in terms of a “renewed privatization” of experience that reproduced “the reduction to the present” so characteristic of contemporary capitalism’s dislodging of political historicity and the forms of depoliticized politics sustaining it and promoted by it.³

Undeniably, out of this elevation of mourning, powerful theorizations emerged, but they were ultimately bereft of an adequate mapping of contemporary predicaments of power. Theoretical heavy lifting resulted in a rather faint political minimalism. Thus the ensuing affective, psychoanalytic, and ethical turns all converged in mostly depoliticizing political gestures and disaffiliated conceptions of collective life that were given antinomian expression in ethical discourses of responsibility whose disavowal of the robustly collective connotations of the practice of responsibility mirrored the political disaffiliation so characteristic of depoliticized politics.⁴ But, however hypostatized, the centrality of loss in these discussions unwittingly betrays something else. For these could be interpreted as distorted expressions of the sense of defeat that the onset of a new world order and the stabilization of the neoliberal regime of accumulation in the North Atlantic world brought with it. But, to fully register this historical dimension and its sediments, loss needs to be recast politically.

The turn of the century predicament was described as one of loss: the loss of the idea of reason as a privileged standpoint; the loss of an alternative system to capitalism, namely, the loss of the socialist dream; the loss of humanity in wars and genocides and from atomic weapons; for American liberals, the loss of innocence from the sixties on; and, more recently, the loss of human life, along with a sense of security and invulnerability in the aftermath of 9/11 and the wars it triggered.⁵ Of course, many of these are not really losses. Psychically, as Sigmund Freud notoriously argued, one can actually lose what one never had and thus mourn something that has never existed. But losses, real or imagined, frequently lead to a condition of grief, especially the loss of human life at the hands of catastrophes such as terrorism (statist and nonstatist) and genocide. Or, as the editors of Loss put it, given how the past century “resounds with catastrophic losses of bodies, spaces, and ideals, psychic and material practices of loss and its remains are productive for history and for politics.”⁶ Yet, while this invocation of politics and history is promising, in the volume in question these are labile, mostly perfunctory gestures toward the historical and the political. Indeed, what is striking in most reflections on loss is that the recognition of loss has not led to a careful reckoning with its historicity; neither has it led to a nuanced understanding of the political configurations in which losses became such, nor to a theorization of the possibility and desirability of substantive political action in their aftermath. Oftentimes, the language of loss has been transplanted from the psychoanalytic connotations, better suited for individuals, to the collective, with little sustained reflection on the ways the challenges and demands of the collective are occluded by the solipsistic connotations built into individual categories. Politically, asymmetrical relations of race, class, gender, and status mediate the ways an individual experiences loss, and these are historically entrenched in political, cultural, and economic contexts. But none of these mediations can be discerned on the basis of psychoanalytic accounts of loss and mourning, however much else these accounts may contribute and enlighten. Critically examining the historical and structural variables that hinder one’s capacity to act politically in the face of loss is primarily a critical-epistemological task with different obligations than those defining individual losses.

Overall, political losses are the outcome of struggles for power, which sometimes lead to predicaments of suffering and deprivation. In some cases these are the product of struggles about the identity of a collectivity—whether it is bound by a democracy, oligarchy, or military dictatorship—or of technological and economic developments that have led to the loss of democratic values and aspirations.⁷ Accordingly, rather than speaking of loss, which in its psychoanalytical connotations tends to turn the political subject inward, in a political context one may prefer to speak of defeat or at least cast loss from this perspective. Although not every loss is the outcome of defeat, political losses are oftentimes entangled with the defeat of a specific project or vision. In terms of political losses defining the nineties, one can count political visions of genuine democracy and socialism. In contrast to psychoanalytic loss, loss as defeat suggests a projection outward that demands a reconsideration of the historical and political trajectories, as well as the travails, of one’s commitments in the spirit of soberly confronting one’s fate for the sake of a realignment of forces, of a redrawing of the lines of enmity, so to speak, in the hope of securing a future for one’s animating ideals. Defeats thus unfold as part of political history outside of which the complexities and political valences of loss and losing cannot be made sense of. All this demands a projection outward and critical reckoning with historical predicaments of power. It also suggests a reassessment that is anchored in a reflective yet persistent commitment to action in a predicament of power where one may have already lost, a situation in which responsive action avoids reifying enmity without erasing its demarcating lines or removing their role in the constitution of one’s political identity and ensuing political forms. Political life unavoidably entails drawing enmity lines, even if these vary and fluctuate. And these fluctuations are largely conditioned by the collectivity’s political form and the political identity it enables and fixes.⁸

Yet the oscillations in the intensification of political enmity mostly stem from the structuring of the political field as a space of contestation in which intensification is not just a function of radicalism, but of the relative power and balance of forces of the collective agencies in play. Conflicts and forms of enmity must be assessed not by recourse to moralizing categories, or other extra-political supplements, but by reference to the internal criteria of the political, as an autonomous field of action and judgment with its own codes and references, principles and rules. One of Wolin’s most sobering formulations captures yet another dimension of the question of enmity and its relevance in reckoning with loss as defeat: “power struggles produce losses, and, as a consequence, things of value go out of the world.” One needs to add to this that defeat is therefore central to power struggles, as is victory.⁹ Sometimes even democratic orders are serendipitously won in defeat, as the late León Rozitchener once observed apropos of Argentina’s transition to democracy in 1983, an origin that leaves sediments in the new order that emerges out of it and that explains the pacified and rather labile form of democracy won in defeat.¹⁰ Still, the terms of engagement in power struggles, victories, and defeats and the forms and contents of political orders change over time, sometimes suddenly, even when many a continuity and sediment of past struggles remain. And this leaves openings for yet unforeseen possibilities.

There is, to be sure, a venerable tradition of sharp political and politically minded theorizing from the perspective of defeat. From Thucydides to Machiavelli, from Tocqueville and Marx to Weber and Schmitt, Gramsci and Weil, Benjamin and Adorno, the experience of loss as defeat has imposed a different burden on theoretical reflection, a projection outward, to and for the world, leading to a set of sobering questions that better apprehend the fate of their animating ideas by means of historically grounded reflections.¹¹ Better yet, acknowledging defeat need not lead to bowing in front of the victorious. In Ana María Amar Sánchez’s almost untranslatable formulation, “los derrotados no se dan por vencidos.”¹² Namely, the defeated hardly surrender in the face of defeat; rather than bowing to the victorious, the defeated have decided to persist and prevail, intractably clinging to their sense of fidelity to political convictions and political-ethical principles. From this perspective, loss is thus closely connected with failure and defeat (even if both these connotations have yet to be established in U.S. political discourse, mediated as it is by the American conceit of winners and losers). Losses, in this sense, could sometimes be the outcome of unwitting acts, but that need not always be the case. For defeat, the possibility of loss and failure is precisely what is risked in political actions and interventions: defeat is, then, always a possibility and often the outcome of conscious—but no less tragic—decisions to stake out a political claim at a critical juncture, which could lead to a tragic and/or dramatic finale.¹³ Responding to loss and defeat can lead to either acquiescence to what is or an unyielding resistance to an accommodating consensus, the two poles around which most responses to loss are situated. At these two poles one finds questions of utopia, political sobriety and literacy, and political responsibility all entangled with defeat and memory, as well as with the memory of defeat.

It is at this juncture that the stakes in avoiding the conflation of individual processes of mourning losses with political losses and defeat become clearer and more sharply delineated. Remembrance, the memory of injustice and the political, demands something quite different from, if not the absolute opposite of, moving on in the psychological sense of the expression. For instance, individuals living through dictatorship and misery have to cope with the predicaments of losses (psychic and real) that these experiences inaugurate, and it would be foolish, not to say moralistic, to disavow individual needs in dealing with loss and the forgetting that sheer survival often entails. And yet this hardly needs to be extrapolated at the collective level, even if a political actor is sometimes afflicted by both loss and defeat. Herein resides the crucial difference between loss and defeat, which current invocations of loss tend to dedifferentiate: one mourns the loss of loved ones, but the correlate of defeat is the disappointment of a setback, failure, and dissatisfaction, not mournful loss. Overcoming political setbacks, however, precisely demands mourning the personal losses involved, which is a necessary if insufficient condition to preempt a moralist response to defeat or a politically truncated mournful stance.

Politically speaking, defeat involves neither perpetual melancholia nor mourning understood as moving on, but the acknowledgment that in its aftermath one needs to resist it and its corollaries as the sole alternatives, which for all political purposes lead to acquiescence to an unjust present in which mourning, resignation, and forgetting are presented as the only feasible alternatives, thus cast as the politically and ethically responsible thing to do. Rather than acquiescence, an alternative way of reckoning with these predicaments is to understand defeat not as the ultimate failure of one’s project, but as the situational outcome of a particular struggle. These outcomes demand reflection, resistance, and a sense of hopeful stillness—the last is best conceived as sober anticipation—for a future reckoning with the victor, the imperatives and forms of what the victor has sought to inaugurate and/or perpetuate, and what their overcoming demands.¹⁴ Or, to cast it in terms closer to Gramsci, a staunch theorist of a political ethic: as a political actor, one can experience defeat after an attempt at a “war of maneuver,” but that experience need not lead to estrangement from the political field; instead, what it calls for is continuous wars of position that soberly confront these predicaments and set the stage for future wars of maneuver.¹⁵ Or, in the less militant but no less compelling formulation offered by María Zambrano, a sober reckoning with defeat entails grasping the larger continuum of history, rather than hanging on to the immediacy of the moment of defeat, no matter how much it hurts, envisaging and anticipating a future in which the present moment will be redressed.¹⁶ That a prisoner of Mussolini and an exile from Franco conjured these thoughts in their darkest hour is in and of itself exemplary of political literacy and fidelity, a political literacy that, from the perspective of a political ethic, represents fidelity to ethical and political values, to oneself and to one’s collectivity or the principles binding one’s political vision. Their dignity accentuates the lack of political imagination and nerve so characteristic of those at the receiving end of less arduous defeats in far less dangerous political predicaments, say, those defining the depoliticized politics characteristic of the North Atlantic world.

There are, of course, temptations associated with the perspective of the defeated. One is to find silver linings in the present, to find redeeming qualities and thus facilitate compliance to it; another, closely related, is to retreat to an ethics of conviction in which, rather than being a provisional, if crucial, stage in the political field, resistance becomes its permanent feature. The latter’s tendency to slip into moralism or into what the French call gauchisme is plain enough. Or, better still, to retreat to an ethics of conviction that abandons the political field and tacitly abdicates any sense of fidelity to political forms that embody one’s values and aspirations and thus renders a setback into a permanent defeat. Indeed, there is the temptation of self-satisfied consolation and the misrecognition of the scenes of power either by a backward gaze that leads to melancholy and resentment or by unreflective and disoriented hopefulness. Think of the fate of left liberalism in the United States, for instance. Adolph Reed Jr. has offered a trenchant but accurate characterization of this left as one that “careens from this oppressed group on crisis moment to that one, from one magically or morally pristine constituency or source of political agency…to another;” a left that not only “lacks focus and stability” but also betrays a “dilettantish politics [that] is partly the heritage of a generation of defeat and marginalization, of decades without any possibility of challenging power and influencing policy.”¹⁷

How to effectively curb these temptations and the erratic political strategies these lead to? An avowal of political literacy and sober realism might serve as an entry point to a future realignment of the political field and to structuring it in ways more congenial to one’s political values and aspirations for collective life. Doing so entails, among other things, surrendering the temptations of moralism and confronting defeat soberly and squarely, while learning from intelligent versions of the positions of one’s opponents. This need not mean a suspension of political-ethical judgment on their actions and principles, but rather an attempt to dissect the structural field and grasp what led to their victory and our defeat. At least two positive outcomes can emerge from such a reckoning: first, learning whatever can be learned about the strategies and tactics of the victorious party and emulating what is consistent with one’s own political-ethical principles and values; second, which is a corrective to the first, becoming alert to the extent to which one’s actions and practices may sustain rather than challenge current predicaments of power and, even worse, reproduce practices and principles that one abhors in one’s political enemy.¹⁸

To critically re-cognize loss as defeat calls for a historically infused understanding of the political form that binds the collectivity in question. Recognition needs to become re-cognition. The latter term, as Wolin has theorized it, suggests a “cognitive shift” that enables one to apprehend the forms and discourses of power that are operative in one’s scene of action. As such, this shift demands “a radical revision in the culturally produced representations” of oneself and others from the perspective of the ideals and values that are fostered by one’s binding political identity.¹⁹ If the political identity in question is genuine democracy, re-cognition also implies acknowledging the need for both a culture of commonality and a fidelity to the ideals—equality, shared power, self-governance, and freedom—that are constitutive of this political identity and that need to be sustained by collective agency and constituted political forms. A political identity is constituted by values that set the parameters for collective life and its institutions—its political forms—along with a conception of political action and agency that demands fidelity to it. Fidelity to, say, a democratic-socialist identity, and its corollary political forms, requires steadfast resistance of the impulse to understand responsibility as loyalty to the state and its imperatives. It, rather, stresses both a commitment to the aforementioned principles, which serve as controlling ends, and a strong sense of accountability that privileges participatory values of equality and shared power, while defending the forms of collective agencies and institutions that could reproduce and enable them.²⁰ The latter can hardly be overemphasized, for it entails dispelling myths of abstract inclusiveness and avowing democratic enmity lines, lest one cease to strive for its substantive sense. Re-cognition along these lines invites a sense of political sobriety and literacy that encompasses, among other things, the eradication of categories and euphemisms impairing a clear mapping of the structural imperatives that mediate the predicaments of power one navigates. It is therefore crucial to recast political loss both historically and politically.

Finally, loss, or defeat, cannot lead to the abandonment of critical thinking. On the contrary, the experience of loss in, say, the aftermath of catastrophes demands its re-cognition in the concrete historical junctures in which that loss has taken place, as well as re-cognition of its effects. The passing of utopia, or its defeat, as Susan Buck-Morss has lucidly argued, should not conflate “the loss of the dream with the loss of the dream’s realization.”²¹ More so than the former, the latter has to be re-cognized as thoroughly political. Political loss and defeat, therefore, can be critically re-cognized and their political import reclaimed. When, for instance, the loss in question consists in the loss of power and the capacity to participate politically in meaningful ways, one’s reflection on the conditions leading to these losses has to be accompanied by a political response. Doing so entails re-cognizing the configurations of power in which one’s political identity is anchored. If genuine democracy is the political identity and form at stake, re-cognizing loss involves demanding responsive forms of action that are uncompromising about the preservation of democracy in a meaningful sense—gestures that also require an avowal of “the paradoxes of ‘empowerment’” from which no collectivity can escape.²²

In her magnum opus The Broken Middle, Gillian Rose puts it well when she renders what is at stake in critical efforts as a question of risking what we “know, misknow, and yet grow”; that is, to re-cognize “learning, growth and knowledge as fallible and precarious but risk-able.”²³ In contrast to passivity, doing so involves the “constant risk of positing and failing and positing again ‘activity beyond activity,’ to cover the ethical nature of the description, and to distinguish it from the Levinasian ‘passivity beyond passivity,’ the idea of ethics as the ego-less substitution of one for ‘the other.’”²⁴ This account is crucial to formulating a political ethic of responsibility, one that avoids abstract openness to “the other” and seeks the centrality of political action for its concrete realization. That is, to think of this question politically involves reclaiming the category of “democratic citizen”—one who not only acts collectively but also thinks about both his or her predicament from the perspective of a collective identity and how that identity is either enacted or compromised by the actions done in his or her name—for a political horizon beyond liberal-democratic capitalism. In lieu of the current depoliticized fate of democracy, the more productive questions consist in interrogating the political and ethical implications of compromising one’s political form by actions carried out in one’s name. What demands ensue from this compromise in light of the forms of power a collectivity generates—and its uses and abuses? How are democratic political forms, and one’s fidelity to a socialist vision, transmogrified by actions that betray it rather than promote it? What is lost or betrayed, or inverted, in such compromises? But this interrogation requires a culture of commonality, a “we,” which contemporary theoretical discourse has rendered suspect. In invocations of a “we,” however, a binding political identity is always presupposed: namely, a collectivity that is responsive to the language of solidarity, common purpose, and shared power.

In Mourning Becomes the Law Rose invoked a different tradition to theorize the intersection of questions of power, ethics, and politics. Noble politics, she called it.²⁵ This tradition, however, offers a richer conceptual and historical trajectory than what Rose’s formulation suggests. For instance, in addition to power and ethics, figures in this tradition, especially Machiavelli, placed strong emphasis on the need to “re-cognize” the scenes of power where a would-be political actor acts: to be precise, re-cognition of the continuities and discontinuities, occasions and accidents, sediments and moments of rupture constitutive of the situation to which she responds and the imperative it imposes. Political virtue precisely consists in re-cognizing such a context and acting in it with a constant reference to the political integrity of the actor and the entity or identity at stake, its binding principles and institutions, and the consequences of political actions. “Noble politics” may be a bit of a misnomer, too. This perspective is better characterized as a tradition of “political ethic,” and its overarching concern can be defined as an attempt to re-cognize and dialectically conceptualize the modern diremption of ethical and political imperatives in political action.

The term political ethic is thus speculative, as it dialectically renders not only how the two terms are irreducible to one another but how they mutually mediate their concrete intersections: it at once rejects dampening the political element of collective life and abstractly eschewing ethical considerations from the realm of the political.²⁶ If ethics is the domain of individual life in which an ensemble of practices and values are devised to define, describe, and comprehend the way in which one relates to others qua individuals, politics is the domain in which public authorities and the uses of political power are enacted, sanctioned, and reproduced. A political ethic, accordingly, deals with the ethical moment of collective life as a field with its own internal problems, codes, and principles, and its object is to conceptualize how to order political life, the principles constituting the proper relationship between rulers and ruled, governors and governed, and the forms of actions, fidelity, and collective agencies needed to sustain collective life in its desired political forms. It thus refuses to reduce ethics—the domain of individual conduct and action qua individual, in situation, and thus similarly mediated by institutions, intersubjective and social relations—to politics, as much as it refuses to impose ethical categories and moralizing discourse in political life.

One category that is central to both ethics and politics, properly understood, is the primacy of the situation. This primacy, in each case, forces a reckoning with the intersections between the individual’s practices and her relations with others both in nonpolitical domains and political life as such. Stated differently, whereas the initial locus of both ethical and political practices is individual action and conduct, the aims and goals for each differ, as do the content of each domain of action, its imperatives and principles, which is why the irreducibility of one to the other is frequently experienced as either antinomian or tragic.²⁷ One central tenet of this tradition of political ethic is to precisely focus on the situation itself, as historically constituted and politically legitimated, and to think of action in terms of the imperatives internal to a historically constituted and politically legitimated situation and the need to redress it. Weber’s reflections are emblematic of some of the components that are central for a political ethic: when he identifies passion, a sense of responsibility, and a sense of proportion in the figure of the politician who has a vocation for politics, he lays bare the triad that constitutes his political ethic.²⁸ One can interpret his insistence on the need to have a combination of the two ethics he famously articulated—the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility—in light of this triad: what is preserved of the ethics of conviction is the element of fidelity to a cause, a calling, and the passion that guides it, while the possible excesses that may spring from it are curbed by proportion and responsibility. Regardless of Weber’s counterrevolutionary motives for conjuring this formulation, he lays out the significance of the elements of fidelity and sobriety in a political ethic of responsibility.

Fredric Jameson has offered an incisive formulation that bears on the foregoing question: “Politics is not ethics: a proposition that does not mean that it is amoral and nonethical (rather, it is collective and beyond matters of individual ethics), but is, on the contrary, designed to explain why political extremism can so often be found to be motivated by categories of ethical purity.”²⁹ Jameson’s formulation draws attention to the contrast between an ethical politics and a genuinely political ethic, an ethics of collective life. Contemporary ethical politics, like those discussed in previous chapters, ultimately revert not just to moralizations of political life, but to forms of individualized responsibilization, which are part and parcel of strategies of disaffiliation characteristic of the political rationalities sustaining the current neoliberal regime of capitalist accumulation. Disaffiliations, which in turn enable the abstractions that artificially homogenize and dedifferentiate predicaments of powers and the differentiations and degrees of responsibility constituting them. Indeed, the political and conceptual reductions characterizing ethical politics more than echo a long-standing conservative strategy of depoliticization that Pierre Bourdieu has memorably described as a drive “to reduce the public to the private, the social to the personal, the political to the ethical, and the economic to the psychological. In short, it tends to effect a depoliticization that returns to the domain of the most irreducibly singular ‘actual experience’ all the experiences that politicization aims on the contrary to detach from the ‘person’ in his or her singularity in order to make them appear to be common to a class.”³⁰ In contrast to ethical politics, a political ethic resists moralization and the false imperative to derive normative moral principles that antecede predicaments of power but nevertheless claim to bind the subjects navigating them. Rather than zoning in on questions of character and ethos, subjective intentions and dispositions, a political ethic raises questions about the historically constituted situation in which the political actor finds herself, about how it came into being and how the actor in question came to be situated in it, along with the material processes, practices, and discourses mediating her situated actions.

Conversely, proponents of a political ethic have demanded the re-cognition of the role of violence in political life, its nature, uses, and representations.³¹ Its central premise is that the realm of politics imposes a different set of imperatives on the political actor, especially in relation to acts of political creation, e.g., revolutionary acts in which a new order is oftentimes the offspring of the shattering of the old, or the reforming of political institutions and mechanisms where the use of power and force are intrinsic. In instances of political creation, the taxing political problem is not merely to create something new, but to reckon with those who insist on the preservation of “the old,” that is, of old normative values and fixed structures of power. Such an insistence is frequently carried on through a combination of preemptive as well as reactive strategies of violence, counterviolence, and fear. Indeed, experiences of creation have historically unleashed cycles of violence and counterviolence, which in the twentieth century became known as the battles between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction. For some, experiences of creation are laudable exercises of political judgment; for others, they are experiences of destruction, loss, and catastrophe.³²

In political theories prior to Machiavelli’s, the centrality of power—and the violence that resides at its core—was often the subject of a variety of euphemisms that sought to disguise power’s coercive nature while lessening its impact via representations that, for instance, assured members of the polity of an objective common good at work behind it.³³ Machiavelli, however, laid bare the violent aspects of political power and some of the modalities of violence binding collective life. The political actor has to negotiate between the demands of private virtue and the pressures of politics, between what the preservation of an established order, or the inauguration of a new one, requires and the reticence of private morality. This realization led Machiavelli to confront the diremption of a private and political ethic and the limitations of the former for a political actor. It demonstrated the need for a political ethic that requires a different conception of responsibility, one suited to the demands of political action. More important, the dividing line between these two sets of commitments has a direct bearing on Machiavelli’s economy of violence.³⁴ But what serves as a controlling end for the use of violence? Machiavelli defines the controlling end in terms of acts of political creativity vis-à-vis acts of destruction. In the formulations found in his Discourses, the principal point of reference is the preservation of the city as a political entity, a commitment to the preservation of a republican order and its political form.

Sure enough, Machiavelli’s political ethic was embedded in the crux of processes and crises that defined the political landscape of Europe at the onset of the sixteenth century; likewise, in The Prince, his account of political action was conceived and remains trapped in the figure of the individualized political actor, the conquering prince, who can descend anywhere across the Italian peninsula, even beyond it. This, in such a way that the content of his political thought proved incapable of adequately conceptualizing the new reality of the emergent absolutist state.³⁵ But the formal aspects of his account of political action, his thought forms, and his conceptualization of the primacy of the situation in any properly political account of the intersections between ethics and politics—that is, the need of a political actor to inhabit predicaments of power at once constrained and fractured, mediated by necessity and accidents, in whose interstices, or, to be more precise, from within whose interstices a mediated novum can emerge—remains one of the most powerful articulations of the demands of political action yet offered. While sedimentations of their context of emergence undoubtedly remain, as well as of the actual content Machiavelli furnished to his formulations, these constrain, but hardly fetter, the critical and political import of Machiavelli’s political-theoretical forms.

The first aspect of the Florentine’s thought forms relevant to understanding his political ethic is a proper appreciation of the way in which his political theory stages the relative autonomy of political life from ethics, an autonomy often misunderstood, and much maligned. This autonomy is best understood along the lines explored in Charles S. Singleton’s still unsurpassed essay, “The Perspective of Art,” where he argues that the autonomy of politics is best cast in terms of granting political life and its rules its own proper domain of action, reflection, and criteria for critical justification. It is not that the political field is immoral or bereft of ethical principles, but, rather, it is morally indifferent—or, more precisely, “extra moral”—in the way that art and literary works are.³⁶ The quality of a modernist artwork or literary text, for instance, is not judged on the basis of whether or not it posits the right political or ethical stance, or if it conforms to the moral codes and ethical sensibilities ruling individual conduct, or ethics, but in terms of criteria immanent to its field. Singleton connects this insight with the idea of action, as doing in opposition to making, and quotes Aquinas to drive the point across: “Art does not require of the craftsman that his act be a good act, but that his work be good.”³⁷ One of Carl Schmitt’s formulations also captures what is genuinely at stake in invoking this moral indifference, “The literary naturalness [of The Prince] is only an expression of an unconcealed interest in the subject with which this man sees political things politically without moralistic but also without immoralistic pathos.”³⁸ In contrast, Machiavelli’s political thought encompasses human capacities of “freedom and the imagination, interpretation and deliberation” in order to re-cognize the effective truths (verità effettuale) of political life and how to navigate politically constituted predicaments of power.³⁹

But this autonomy entails a set of principles and limits internal to it, governing political action, that is called a political ethic. This political ethic has at least two dimensions running across Machiavelli’s principal political writings: first, it prescribes how to understand the relations between rulers and ruled; second, how to conceptualize political change, the creation of new orders.⁴⁰ The latter is in reference to obdurate realities, which often resist the impress of new forms; yet realities not devoid of fissures and accidents, both of which create occasions for a virtuous political actor to seize and capitalize upon. Formally speaking, Machiavelli is the master thinker of the primacy of the situation and the need to respond to it. Conjunctures emerge in predicaments of power, which demand what could be conceptualized as a complex, nonarbitrary dialectic of rules and exceptions. That this is so is already clear in Machiavelli’s Ghiribizzi al Soderino (1506), with his invocation of the need for the political actor to properly re-cognize the situation and adapt to different circumstances, changing times, and patterns of events (tempi e l’ordini delle cose) in order to respond to them.⁴¹ Indeed, it is as a corollary to this conceptualization of the primacy of the situation in political action—and its structures and patterns— that the basic contours of the dialectic of rules and exceptions constituting Machiavelli’s political ethic more clearly appear. The thinker of accidents and equivocations, possibilities and occasions went to great lengths to conceptualize rules on how to reckon with the predicaments of power in which these opportunities may be recognized, grasped, and seized.⁴² Especially but not exclusively in The Prince, Machiavelli’s reflections focus on the interplay between rules and exceptions, in their intersections, and skillfully seek to stage how a virtuous political actor navigates the tensions between the two, while responding to the politically and historically constituted situation he confronts.⁴³

It is in the tension between the rules and the exceptions, which he always makes explicit, where the lineaments of his casuistic political ethic emerges, and for which he ultimately forges it, along with his idea of an economy of violence.⁴⁴ Rules and exceptions are first forged by recourse to the historically particular, and then to the general maxim action. Exceptions, by extension, are invoked in light of Machiavelli’s thematization of contingencies and changing circumstances in the political situation, but are in turn theorized as governed by rules. Hence the need to provide nonarbitrary criteria to conceptualize this dialectical interaction between rules and exceptions: not only are there rules inductively arrived at, or at least presented as such by recourse to historical experience, but there are rules for the exceptions, too. Or, stated differently, exceptions have rules and cannot be invoked arbitrarily. It is in the interstices of the political negotiation of rules and exceptions in violent predicaments of power, also defined by class strife and uneven relations of ruling, the relation between means and ends, and the question of limits, where Machiavelli’s political ethic of responsibility crystallizes.

The subsequent tradition of raison d’état has famously claimed Machiavelli as a theoretical parent. In doing so, it has subsumed the political ethic of responsibility within its immanent logic. In its subsequent developments, reason of state became increasingly associated with absolutist rule and the primacy of statecraft over private ethics, although it also signified a depersonalization of authority that allowed for the emergence of an autonomous political space, the constitution of a properly public domain.⁴⁵ Even so, within this tradition, the imperatives of statecraft eventually took on nationalist and imperial overtones from the nineteenth century on. Meanwhile, the concern for political identity and form, which in Machiavelli’s Discourses takes on a popular dimension, along with the conception of responsibility were increasingly confined to ruling elites. As a result, in the tradition of raison d’état, statist considerations have increasingly overshadowed the concern with political identity. In its absolutist versions, reason of state dictates the ways in which governing elites act according to the imperatives of expansion and power; in its constitutional version, the imperatives of reason of state arise when the preservation and survival of the constitutional order entail actions that violate the primacy of the rule of law.

In the twentieth century Marxist thinkers powerfully inherited this tradition of political ethic. Building on the legacy of Marx and Engels, thinkers ranging from Trotsky and Lukács, Brecht and Gramsci, and subsequent heirs such as Isaac Deutscher and Raymond Williams, or José Carlos Mariátegui and León Rozitchner, all the way to Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton, have soberly reckoned with different aspects of the intersections of ethics and politics beyond the limitations of ethical socialism (say, that of Karl Kautsky and Edward Bernstein or William Morris and E. P. Thompson).⁴⁶ Roughly speaking, one can identify two levels of inquiry here: first, one finds dialectical accounts of this intersection historicizing ethics, but also showing the nonsynchronicity of ethical and moral language in any social formation—namely, how atavistic or aristocratic ethical codes from an early era could stubbornly persist, say, atavistic or aristocratic codes pervading liberal-democratic orders; second, the primacy of the political over the ethical in dealing with political questions, and the corollary need for a political ethic that, while avowing the relative autonomy of the political in capitalist social formations, also encompasses the ethical dimension immanent to it: ethical practices and dispositions outside ethics, but defined by fidelity to genuinely democratic and socialist principles.

Out of this political tradition, Brecht and Gramsci most forcefully articulated these dimensions amidst the wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions conforming the catastrophic era of the European civil war. In Brecht’s case, these found expression as part of his trenchant critique of the ruses of ethics, a critique he staged not only in his plays and poems but also in his prose.⁴⁷ Simply put, Brecht’s political ethic consists of a relentless materialist critique of ethics, uncovering the ruses of ethical maxims dirempted from the material conditions in which ordinary people live, as well as the individualist conceits on which these revolve. To that end, Brecht brought to bear not only his considerable literary talent but also his remarkable ability to break down social and political relations to their fundamental relations of power. This ability was frequently characterized as Brecht’s plumpes denken, or crude thinking, which is how political reasoning finds expression in his works as “the ultimate situationality of thought.”⁴⁸ Brecht’s works enact a form of “complex seeing,” to borrow Raymond Williams’s formulation, that stages the manner in which humans are always engaged “in the process of producing themselves and their situation,” and they thus focus on what individuals are doing in a situation and “what is this doing to them.”⁴⁹

Entries culled from his Arbeitsjournal neatly sum up the gist of Brecht’s position. There, while recalling a conversation with a proponent of ethical Marxism, he notices how “the ethical needs of these social strata need not be satisfied ethically. The satisfaction of their material needs is ethical enough,” which is precisely what the ethical standpoint subtly disavows: or, as he more precisely articulates the thought, “In social terms things look like this; without satisfaction of material needs, no ethics, and that is acceptable. But: ethics for the satisfaction of these needs is not acceptable. Material needs as ethical, ethical ones as material, this is not grasped.”⁵⁰ Echoing his critique of the lofty ethics imposed on the lower orders, or expected from them, memorably staged in St. Joan of the Stockyards, Brecht self-effacingly writes: “poets like to entrust the worker with a lofty mission. This fills him with justified suspicion, since he has no desire to serve as cannon-fodder on ethical missions. His goal is not morality even if it is moral. He need promise no one anything except himself.”⁵¹ Brecht thus juxtaposed ethics or morality with genuinely ethical or moral practices, something that he also expressed apropos of Mother Courage: “Its point of view is not a moral one: that is to say, it is ethical, but without being derived from the currently prevailing morality.”⁵² In this way, Brecht debunks the conceits of Ethics, especially how it disavows the historical processes constituting and sanctioning the situations in which individuals act ethically and politically. Still, this debunking is articulated in the name of a new ethic: a collective, more robustly political and socialist ethic. But an ethic that, while informing political action, does not abstractly subsume it.

Plays like St. Joan of the Stockyards, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Life of Galileo, and The Days of the Commune stage the primacy of the situation in any locus of action and how it entails an economy of violence in order to do good beyond the conceits of subjective goodness, in predicaments of power in which the ethical categories become nothing short of swindles. Respectively: the consequences of unreflective goodness in which subjective dispositions are radically at odds with an objectively unjust condition; the harmful, even fatal consequences of bourgeois ethics for the poor classes living under bourgeois orders and the necessary split of the self that surviving these predicaments demand; the vexatious relations between property, justice, and injustice, along with the possibility of a new communist ethic of activity; and the clashes and complexities in the intersections between science, ethics, and social orders, which also includes a mordant critique of the idea of heroism deepened in his Dialogues of Refugees.⁵³ In the last, Brecht articulates a caustic critique of superhuman sacrifices demanded in the name of heroic virtues for inhuman ends.⁵⁴ Or the demand of heroic sacrifices for lofty causes and hypostatized words: heretically, to the workers Brecht recommends promising nothing to anyone, for they are responsible only to themselves. This is all part of Brecht’s critique of moralizing discourse and the intellectual posturing that mostly defines it. For no one is as exploited as the poor whose living conditions rigorously instruct in the ethical virtues—diligence, obedience, endurance, gratitude—from early on, which, however, serve the presiding political and social order. Or, as Brecht sardonically asserts, “Even their virtues are extorted.”⁵⁵

Correspondingly, in the face of the depoliticizing ploys of ethical invocation, honesty is paramount, something succinctly articulated in his “Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth” (1934–35). One of his most sober lessons stands out: “To say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak, requires courage.”⁵⁶ This is the courage of a sober re-cognizing of defeat, its causes and aftermaths, without reverting to moralizing consolations. A corollary to the re-cognition of defeat is the need for a political realism for the masses of ordinary people. This is lucidly illustrated in The Downfall of the Egoist Johann Fatzer and “Socrates Wounded.” Interpreting the first text, Walter Benjamin perceptively noted Brecht’s insistence on getting “to the bottom of things,” which includes re-cognizing both victory and defeat: “The victor must not allow the defeated the experience of defeat. He must snatch this, too; he must share defeat with the defeated. Then he will become master of the situation.”⁵⁷ Similarly, in “Socrates Wounded” Brecht trenchantly articulates his dialectical understanding of victory and defeat and the ruses of pacifism and war.⁵⁸ That these lessons are didactically articulated with the goal of a popular realism is clear in The Downfall of the Egoist Johann Fatzer where the participatory commitments informing this political realism are articulated: “You are finished, statesman / The State is not finished. / Allow us to change it / According to the circumstances / Allow us, statesman, to be statesmen / Beneath your laws stands your name. / Forget the name / Observe your laws, legislator. / Submit to order, man of order / The State no longer needs you / Hand it over to us.”⁵⁹

These claims make good on the primacy Brecht grants to the collective situation over individualist morality; his recasting of honesty is situational and thus devoid of Kantian pieties about “lying,” and more truthful for all that. The Life of Galileo gives memorable expression to Brecht’s sobering realism:

“Better stained than empty”: a fitting motto for a political ethic that avows the political literacy necessary to navigate deceitful and violent predicaments.⁶¹ Or, in the more overtly political formulation found in The Days of the Commune, “GENEVIÉVE: But we weren’t we anxious not to stain our hands with blood? / LANGEVIN: We were. But in this struggle the hands not bloodstained are the hands chopped off.”⁶² The Days of the Commune has been described as “a conscientious exercise in thinking beyond defeat”; in Brecht’s own words it conveys both “the errors of the commune and its greatness.”⁶³ Consonant with the political literacy invoked in Galileo, here Brecht reflects on the perplexities of formulating an economy of violence in revolutionary situations that involves a popular rule and the imperatives the enemy imposes upon those who want to inaugurate a new and more humane order. While the people genuinely claim that “the Commune rejects civil war” and “socialism marches without bayonets,” they have to face the reality that “bayonets confront it.”⁶⁴ Yet Brecht is far from hypostatizing violence or the pristine innocence of the people. Rather, he stages the conflict that the individuals in the situation at once produce and are subject to in its complexity; or, stated differently, he lends voice to the dilemmas involved as part of his commitment to re-cognize the question of violence:

There is, in short, a constitutive moment of the tragedy of revolution, which, as Raymond Williams’s memorably put it, “is not at all insurrection or the use of force against its enemies…The real tragedy occurs at those dreadful moments when the revolutionary impetus is so nearly lost, or so heavily threatened, that the revolutionary movement has to impose the harshest discipline on itself and over relatively innocent people in order not to be broken or defeated.”⁶⁶ Impositions that put pressure on the political actor, whose political ethic is committed to the amelioration of superfluous suffering.⁶⁷

Echoes of these formulations conform to a corollary of Brecht’s political ethic: the strain that ethics places not only on those living in violent predicaments of power but, more pressingly so, on those who want to change this and inaugurate a new order. It is perhaps nowhere best expressed than in “To Those Born Later”:

But there is another side to it: the impossible, and ultimately unethical, demands that ethics places on those called upon to elevate themselves to lofty moral standards or the lack of the necessary enabling social conditions that could concretely actualize ethical practices. St Joan of the Stockyards famously staged a mordant critique of this ethical swindle. A passage from “Life Story of the Boxer Samson-Körner” bluntly encapsulates Brecht’s critique: “What I say about immorality is this: if only one didn’t freeze when it gets cold and didn’t stop feeling hungry when one has had a slice of bread, moral standards would be a lot higher.”⁶⁹

Ultimately, what Brecht called “crude thinking” bears a strong realist disposition that is not incompatible with conceptual precision. On the contrary, it finds expression in the carefully conceptual interventions defining Brecht’s literary works. Ineluctable in the political field, crude thinking ultimately entails simplifying a situation, breaking it down to the fundamental political relations—Lenin’s “who, whom” is apposite here—as part of the literacy constitutive of a political ethic. Such literacy, which is central for any politically robust and enabling account of a situation and the responses it requires and affords, in turn demands subtle thinking at the level of the cognitive categories that enable the crystallization of crude thinking. It is actually the opposite of dumbing down; rather, it requires that once the highest standards of reflection enter fields of action and power, these yield concrete knowledge or let it be interrogated by obdurate realities. It is thus possible to interpret the political realism and literacy of Brecht’s plumpes denken in dialectical terms evocative of Machiavelli’s dedication to The Prince: for a rigorous critical theory to be politically effective, it has not only to comprehend but articulate elevated reflection in politically meaningful terms; conversely, reflecting upon political life—both its most consistently ordinary phenomena and its occasional extraordinary moments—in the most refined, rigorous, conceptual terms demands theoretical forms whose autonomy consists of distanced nearness from its object and loci of reflection.

Gramsci, a contemporary of Brecht and an active member of the Italian Communist Party, explicitly reckoned with analogous dilemmas in terms of what he called the etico-politico and its role in Marxism, the philosophy of praxis, and formulated hitherto understated aspects of a socialist political ethic.⁷⁰ While primarily concerned with the future of socialist strategy in the West after the crushing defeats of revolutionary movements in western Europe—where defeat coincided with the rise and consolidation of European fascism and Hitlerism—he reflected deeply on the role of a political ethic in securing a socialist order and in sustaining a future socialist democracy.⁷¹ Gramsci’s political ethic could thus be best described in terms of his recasting of communism as an “ethics of the collective,” to borrow Fernández Buey’s formulation. Consistent with the tradition of political ethic as a whole, no treatise on ethics is found in Gramsci’s writings. Instead, one finds situational and localized formulations, frequently worked through in terms of engagement with Croce, or sometimes in direct reference to the philosophy of praxis, and in his jottings on Kant. Succinctly put, Gramsci’s political ethic pivots on three fundamental themes: his passionate, yet realist, defense of truth in political life; the relationships and intersections between Marxism, the philosophy of praxis, and Machiavelli to recast the idea of the autonomy of the political and the corollary idea of the primacy of the situation; and the already mentioned critique of Kantian ethics among ethical socialists.⁷² But in Gramsci the political-ethical takes a historicist connotation that not only historicizes ethical practices, along with ethics, but also relates them to the concreteness of political practice.⁷³ Similarly, he offered critical commentaries about Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative to offer a historicized rendering of Kant’s idea and to critically dissect its sociological and cultural presuppositions, something that he elsewhere carried on apropos of hypostatized ideas of “creativity.”⁷⁴ On the whole, he aimed to forge a Marxist political ethic—to think through the ethical-political (etico-politico) dimension of collective life from a Marxist perspective.⁷⁵

An important aspect of Gramsci’s political ethic is the defense of truthfulness. He argued for politically enabling forms of re-cognition, and reworked the classic Socratic motto “Know thy self.” But, like Brecht, the emphasis on honesty and self-knowledge is irreducible to conceits about individual character. Once politically cast, self-knowledge is collective and consists of re-cognizing equality and knowing that ordinary people can only usher in a self-governing political order through their own efforts, discipline, and responsibility.⁷⁶ Truthfulness thus stems from a sober realism that separates the spheres of ethical and political life and argues for the centrality of honesty and sobriety in political life as part of a political ethic of responsibility bound by fidelity to political-ethical principles of equality and freedom, fraternity and emancipation.⁷⁷ Fidelity to these principles and ends must be unflinching, even if there is a casuistic logic in the choice of means and the actualization of these ends and their actual concrete content. Yet here is the critical, binding proviso: these means must never overwhelm the prescribed ends.⁷⁸ Here Gramsci independently expresses an insight famously articulated by Trotsky about the dialectical interdependence of means and ends, their historical immanence. As Raymond Geuss has lucidly explained, “Appeal to such a dialectic [of means and ends]…is one way to try to save the deepest intuition behind Marxism, which is that humanity should be capable of collectively self-organizing activity, which instantiates appropriate self-control, self-direction, and even, when necessary, self-limitation, without needing to appeal to any external principle.”⁷⁹

The foregoing hinges upon Gramsci’s defense of the autonomy of the political, which stems from one of his noblest impulses: the primacy of politics in his ethic of collective life responds to the genuinely democratic and socialist convictions that, in a new political order, honest individuals would actively share power as part of a collective life that could be genuinely understood as shared fate. Moreover, it goes beyond the elitist conceit built into Weber’s heroic politician by emphasizing the need for mass political education, with corollary emphases on realism and political literacy. By and large, this moves in tandem with an original account of the interplay of force and consent in the advent and preservation of political orders, all of which Gramsci conceived in terms of his reworking of Machiavelli’s intellectual legacy from the perspective of Marxism. In Gramsci’s remarkable formulation, if Machiavelli proposed educating the people on how only a realist politics could achieve genuinely political ends, Gramsci contends that Machiavelli’s position is, in a sense, close to the theory and practice of Marxism: “the philosophy of praxis has tried to create and disseminate a mass, popular ‘realism’”; and this popular realism, a realism of the people, would be “consonant with different times.”⁸⁰ In these times, the predicaments of power demanding action would require a different economy of violence and a stronger sense of shared power and responsibility. For the Florentine understood the centrality of enmity lines in political life, not in the hypostatized sense usually attributed to Schmitt, but in the changing configurations of political ruling, rulers, and ruled.⁸¹

Yet, for all their acuity, Brecht and Gramsci did not emphasize the spatial conditions for the actualization of their formulations of a political ethic or the formal contours of its corollary practice of political responsibility. It is Max Weber and Simone Weil, two contrasting exponents of political ethic during the age of catastrophes, who more explicitly articulated these notions. Weber offers a commanding formal account of an ethic of responsibility that is central for a political ethic forged along the lines pursued by Gramsci and Brecht, and Weil’s emphasis on the city lends expression to the need for such bounded space to concretize political responsibility. That would be the socialist-democratic idea of a community of fate bound by a political ethic of collective life with a sense of fidelity toward the principles of equality, freedom, and solidarity and the political forms and institutions actualizing them.

While Weber perceptively theorized the unprecedented and daunting nature of “modern power” and the obstacles for meaningful political action in “modernity,” he also sought a way to reclaim the vocation of politics within this predicament. His answer oscillated between differing balances of political education and political leadership, with varying degrees of emphasis placed on each choice at different times.⁸³ In “Politics as a Vocation” the tension between these two choices appears with blistering force: while he was still clinging to his professed hope of 1895, of “a colossal programme of political education” for the nation, this hope was largely overshadowed by an epic longing for a kind of political hero.⁸⁴ Even though his goal of political education might require an ethos of responsibility for the members of the nation, Weber’s lecture suggests that political action is laid out in reference to an ideal-typical form of a leader, a charismatic hero whose actions will bestow meaning to an otherwise disenchanted world. This is a political actor who steadfastly confronts the daunting task of facing up to the rationalization process of modern power. In so doing, he “contracts with violent means” and “is exposed to its specific consequences.”⁸⁵ In other words, this is a political actor that heroically responds to the calling of politics, notwithstanding the conglomeration of imperatives—capitalist, scientific, organizational, managerial, and bureaucratic—that the rationalization of life enacts.⁸⁶ The charismatic hero, as political actor, relies on the masses, especially on mass-oriented institutions such as parliaments. The masses, however, are hardly constitutive of political action. The masses are not actors, but instruments of action.⁸⁷ Political action is thus cast in terms of demotic leadership. What is the fate of political responsibility in this situation? Weber claims that in this predicament the leader is endowed with a new sense of responsibility. But the responsibility of the leader cannot be simply understood in terms of accountability or as an imperative to give an account of his positions and actions, with action, in “Science as a Vocation,” cast as a nonpolitical “sense of responsibility” and one of the contributions that educators, not politicians, make to the “‘ethical’ forces.”⁸⁸ Echoing Nietzschean themes Weber argues that political responsibility resides, instead, in the need to soberly recognize, and without self-deception respond to, a certain predicament, face the burdens of political action, and assume the obligations involved in being the leader of a collectivity.⁸⁹

Expounding on the concerns of political ethic in nationalist terms, Weber further suggests that even if the ethic of responsibility is more appropriate for the demands of politics, it is a combination of both ethics that constitutes the temper of a “man who can have the ‘calling for politics.’”⁹⁰ Yet principled conviction is not what sets the limits to an ethic of responsibility, even though considerations of “ultimate ends” are important here. For Weber, it is the well-being of the nation that constitutes the binding end achieved by violent means. It is an end that is infused with meaning, when the actor, driven by his vocation, fuses the two ethics in the moment of action: “By the same token, I find it incommensurably moving when a mature human being…who feels the responsibility he bears for the consequences of his own actions with his entire soul and who acts in harmony with an ethics of responsibility reaches the point where he says, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’”⁹¹ In this passage the moment of conviction brings about a sense of necessity, of fidelity, to political acts that is bound by the ethic of responsibility, a fidelity to the ideal animating the act, which in turn constitutes its legitimating end. This imperative of fidelity to a cause is yet another element that enhances the tragic quality of political action, of the unfolding of acts in a reality that is constituted by freedom, but whose exercise acquires an element of necessity.⁹² However, the ethic of responsibility does not resolve in advance the dilemma involved in justifying certain means to reach an end. Political ethic is contextual. And in a context of loss and defeat, as will be clear momentarily, especially when loss is experienced as defeat, this question emerges with particular urgency.

Although somewhat troubled by a combination of pessimistic and nationalist feelings at the beginning of the Great War, a war he nevertheless embraced, Weber never envisioned the nature and extent of Germany’s defeat. He experienced its aftermath as a catastrophe for Germany, an experience so disturbing it even shook Weber’s sense of his own vocation.⁹³ The war shattered the illusion that by the “‘natural’ process of class ascension” a political class would emerge with the necessary maturity to rise to the task of leading the interest of the nation.⁹⁴ Weber’s tone was severe: “By its reaction the German nation will then demonstrate whether it has attained political maturity.”⁹⁵ But the years immediately following Germany’s defeat and the Armistice were pregnant with uncertainty and provided the sternest test for both the masses and the bourgeoisie. The latter had been historically afraid of the “emotional radicalism” of the former. And the prospects for a new, stable regime of power depended on the fragile relationship between these two. Weber, however, was not content with leaving the outcome of this latent conflict to chance. Instead, he openly endorsed counterrevolutionary violence, as he had earlier supported a national imperialism, for the sake of stability. Violence provided the means for the end of national renewal. Reason of state, therefore, emerges as an important corollary of his political ethic. This time, however, it is part of an attempt to find a compromise that would include the masses, albeit in tamed form, and retrieve the vocation of politics as the sole prerogative of a ruling elite bound by the imperatives of national renewal. Ultimately, Weber’s political ethic remains entangled with the imperatives of reason of state and never-recanted ideas about Germany’s “responsibility before history” as a master people.⁹⁶ But his plea for a political actor with a vocation for politics could be read as an attempt to repersonalize it, to add that element of personality that was available to Machiavelli but no longer in place in an increasingly rationalized world. Even so, his reflections had the effect of candidly laying bare something about which many fellow liberals have been historically disingenuous: the centrality of violence for the construction and preservation of a liberal-democratic order, the state’s monopoly not only of its legitimate uses but also of its representations, the centrality of strategies of preemptive counterviolence to assure such monopoly, and the restriction of the ethic of responsibility to governing elites.

Still, if one juxtaposes Weber’s formalist account of political responsibility with one of his most imaginative, if sometimes vilified, notions, that of a “community of fate” (Schicksalsgemeinschaft), an unexpected constellation emerges. Out of it, aspects of Weber’s formulations could be reclaimed without committing oneself to his use of them, let alone carrying the sediments accumulated in his thought forms. For even if often interpreted as unavoidably nationalist, Weber deploys “community of fate” in terms of non-nationalist communities. In Economy and Society, for instance, he relates it to prenational communities, as part of his account of the nature and origin of patriarchal domination.⁹⁷ But one need not explore all of Weber’s usages to grasp its formal contours. Formally speaking, the concept highlights not only the mutual dependence between the members of a common household, or the bonds, “external and spiritual,” formed between them. Bonds that are, sure enough, forged by demarcations, boundaries between interior and exterior, and enmity lines on the basis of threats, existential or otherwise, all of which bears on a more political interpretation of this notion. Once understood politically, however, this notion also embodies the idea of a bounded space in which the political actor—the bearer of political responsibility—acts. What is more, it tacitly asserts a central aspect of political accountability: how in a binding political order both rulers and ruled are bound in a determinate space, their fates thus deeply intertwined. And if the political order in question accommodates a modicum of popular sovereignty, the consequences of the actions of the ruler on the ruled would, in turn, be felt by ruling elites. The latter would have yet another reason to embrace a political ethic of responsibility beyond any nationalist conceits.

In 1915 Weber praised the fortitude of civilized man and was confident in his ability “to rise to the horrors of war” without compromising his humanity. “People who live in a civilized milieu,” he proclaimed, “and are nevertheless able to rise to the horrors of war (no achievement for a black man from Senegal!) and to return as honorably as most of our people do—that is real humanity.”⁹⁸ But by 1918 he had adopted a more cautious stance: “Whosoever contracts with violent means for whatever ends—and every politician does—is exposed to its specific consequences.”⁹⁹ The catastrophe of the Great War was the watershed. In its aftermath, some things transpired much more clearly: one can compromise with violence only so much without being swayed by its destructive logic. Weil delivered the most famous version of this warning. In her formulations, however, she set the stage for a democratically conceived ethic of responsibility that, while still situated within the tradition of political ethic, sought to resist the imperatives of raison d’état. If the experience of the Great War and the Bolshevik threat left an imprint in Weber’s theoretical reflections, for Weil it was living in the aftermath of these events, coupled with the subsequent brutality of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, that led her to a vigorous reckoning with catastrophic violence.

Weil’s powerful reflections on these themes are synthesized in her rather inscrutable, and often neglected, essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force.”¹⁰⁰ Out of an extraordinary interpretation of Homer’s Iliad, Weil offers sobering reflections on the intersection between violence and action. She proclaims not Achilles as the hero of the epic poem but force, to which is attributed a capacity to enslave those that come in contact with it, “force before which man’s flesh shrinks away.”¹⁰¹ Force is also capable of converting a human being into a thing.¹⁰² In this succinct rendering, Weil makes a strong critique of the dehumanizing effect of the imperatives of violence. These imperatives effectively blur the realm of action and responsibility, as violence increasingly claims sovereignty over life and death. It is “force that kills” and converts those whom it holds under its sway into things, corpses. “Violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch,” and in so doing it is represented “as external to its employer as to its victim.”¹⁰³ In this way, Weil portrays a mystification of its uses, which oftentimes finds expression under the guise of necessity in times of war.¹⁰⁴ Or, as she puts it in a stark formulation found in her Gravity and Grace, “Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.”¹⁰⁵ And such mystifications are intrinsic to the forms of violence that characterize times of war. But all parties involved in the cycle of violence suffer a mutual fate: dehumanization. Both perpetrator and victim, oftentimes shifting roles, are equally degraded in a violent cycle of warfare. Weil thus couples the violence of action with the no less violent reaction and locates that violence within the same logic of war. Even so, she is hardly arguing for a categorical or principled rejection of the use of violence and force.¹⁰⁶ In an essay originally published in 1933, “Reflections of War,” she unequivocally writes: “This fascism, which is spreading in all directions, can only be crushed by force.”¹⁰⁷ Likewise, as part of her political practice, Weil herself joined the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, acknowledged the inevitability of fighting Hitler, and until her death was an active member of the French Resistance in London.¹⁰⁸

In the essay on the Iliad Weil suggests a way out of this seemingly paradoxical scenario. “A moderate use of force,” she argues, “which alone would enable man to escape being enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness.”¹⁰⁹ For all its inherent dynamics of dehumanization, violence’s hold over individuals is not total. Between the impulse to act and the action itself, there is what Weil calls “the tiny interval that shelters reflection.”¹¹⁰ That, accordingly, is where the possibility for justice and responsibility resides, which is why Weil, in her writings, sought to spatially institutionalize this rather temporal moment—an “interval”—to break with the idolatry fostered by the modern state. But when force and power become ends in themselves, what is an already constrained space of reflection is further shrunken. In this predicament, something akin to Machiavelli’s economy of violence based on a reflective response is called for. Yet Weil is not ready to endorse either the politics of deception that accompanies Machiavelli’s practice of politics or his protoconsequentialist ethics and willingness to endorse commissarial dictators or Weber’s ethic of responsibility, for that matter. These formulations remain too entangled with the constitutive principles of doctrines including reason of state, which represent the quintessential form of power as an end in itself, for Weil to endorse. Against this, Weil invokes the rather elusive idea of “superhuman virtue.”

Although by invoking “superhuman” virtue Weil seems to rehearse the early modern view of the necessity of a virtuous or prudent individual to responsibly exercise power, in her case this superhuman virtue actually consists of a plea for a generalized ethos that is anchored in a fierce passion and commitment to justice. Much like “impersonality” and the capacity for grace—which, like reflexivity, are also constitutive of her idea of justice—this type of virtue is superhuman because it is one of those rare things that requires attention and re-cognition for an ensuing reflection to be achieved.¹¹¹ Although this type of virtue may not curb the indifference that accompanies violence, it might allow for the tiny space of reflection that is needed to resist its dominion.¹¹² It also anchors a strong sense of political responsibility.

Subsequently, in The Needs for Roots, Weil casts political responsibility as a need of the soul. “For this need to be satisfied it is necessary that a man should often have to take decisions in matters great or small affecting interests that are distinct from his own, but in regards to which he feels a personal concern…. Finally, he requires to be able to encompass in thought the entire range of activity of the social organism to which he belongs.”¹¹³ Enlarged thinking and shared power are thus constitutive of a sense of political responsibility. Indeed, shared power is defining of a political ethic of responsibility and of its immediate locus, “the city”—here understood as polity, as the political entity that provides the locus of action, the space in which these commitments are rooted and actualized. And both the enlarged thinking and the sense of fidelity that shared power brings with it have important implications for the question of violence and the possibility of moderately contracting with it. The latter can become an excruciating imperative in order to defend the space of the political, the spatial dimension of responsibility that mediates its temporal dimension, which is what Weil refers to as the moment of reflection before a response.

Weil sorts out the implications of this economy of violence (“a moderate use of force”) in an insightful formulation: “moderation itself is not without perils, since prestige, from which force derives at least three-quarters of its strength, rests principally upon that marvelous indifference that the strong feel for the weak, an indifference so contagious that it infects the very people who are the objects of it.”¹¹⁴ Once a cycle of violence is unleashed, and a spiral of violent acts follows, violence’s effects become less and less shocking. What emerges are forms of violence that perpetuate the cycle of vengeance and reaction, forms of violence that are often cushioned both aesthetically and anesthetically so as to normalize and routinize their pervasiveness.¹¹⁵ Indifference, then, becomes the order of the day, especially toward those subjected to the crudest forms of violence in distant zones of exception that are constitutive aspects of reason of state’s lebensraum and toward those who are victims of the violence of market imperatives.¹¹⁶ Stated differently, the moderate use of force is a difficult aspiration, one that demands breaking the yoke of indifference to superfluous suffering and the immanent logic of war.

Weil learned this important political-ethical lesson primarily from the experience of the Spanish Civil War. In this particular case, as she observed, “the necessities and the atmosphere of civil war are sweeping away the aspirations that we are seeking to defend by means of civil war.”¹¹⁷ The imperatives of war constrain and structure the choices of those who partake in it, hence Weil’s avowal of the necessity for a different kind of virtue to resist them. Still, the Spanish Civil War taught her the possibility of something even more vexatious: “In the agony of civil war, every common measure between principles and realities is lost, every sort of criterion by which one could judge acts and institutions disappears, and the transformation of society is given over to chance.”¹¹⁸ Ironically, the necessities of war lead to a paradoxical predicament: while war constrains one’s actions and increasingly compromises one’s principles, it also instills a strong sense of the contingent and boundless element of action, thus impairing foresight. If this logic is to be avoided, a sober and reflective response must be a precondition to any reaction to war and catastrophe, loss and defeat. Thus the tiny space for reflection resides before an escalating reaction is initiated. Once the logic of violence that defines war is in place, a process of defactualization stems from it and thus blurs the possibility of separating contingencies from necessities. When the war is treated as a force with its own autonomous will, it equally instills a sense of powerlessness. Apropos of the Spanish Civil War, the very same war that provided a formative experience for Weil, George Orwell offered a vivid formulation that acutely encompasses some of the foregoing concerns: “Everyone was rushing around and trying to buy food. And on every side you heard the same anxious questions: ‘Do you think it’s stopped? Do you think it’s going to start again?’ ‘It’—the fighting—was now thought of as some kind of natural calamity, like a hurricane or an earthquake, which was happening to us all alike and which we had no power of stopping.”¹¹⁹

This logic, however, is better understood in a larger context: the emergence of a distinctively modern notion of power. Weil’s analysis of modern power was deeply concerned with the effects that the spread of technology and bureaucracy was having on social relations. Both developments led to a new kind of oppression that was exercised under the guise of management and was irreducible to the political regime presuming to contain it.¹²⁰ These sentiments are echoed in her Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression. She writes: “The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who co-ordinate; and on such a basis one can only organize perfect oppression, not lighten it. Far from capitalist society having developed within itself the material conditions for a régime of liberty and equality, the establishment of such a regime presupposes a previous transformation in the realm of production and that of culture.”¹²¹ But Weil’s concern was as much about this form of modern oppression as it was about its legitimizing mystifications. Against the naive conceptions of pacifisms and power that her writings are often assimilated to, Weil asserts power’s ubiquitous nature. “The necessity of power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order,” she writes.¹²² Its “allocation,” however, “is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly.”¹²³ In other words, it is in the hierarchical and unequal distribution of power, under the aegis of administration and managerial conceptions of politics, that equality is undermined: hence the centrality of a cognitive shift in relation to some of our basic concepts and categories, even of the term hierarchy, a concept that along with many others—such as respect, responsibility, and order—is purposely transmogrified in The Need for Roots.

Weil also recognizes that power relies on representations for its legitimacy, on the prestige it bestows to its holders. The latter is the “very essence of power.” In a formulation reminiscent of Weber’s analysis of power and prestige she further suggests: “All power is based, in fact, upon the interrelation of human activities; but in order to be stable it must appear as something absolute and sacrosanct, both to those who wield and those who submit to it and also to other external powers.”¹²⁴ Power thus relies on the mystifications that come out of its ability to disguise the arbitrary nature of its allocations. Here, to be sure, Weil is struggling with a question that has plagued Western political thought since Machiavelli: “The fundamental principle of power and any political activity is that there should never be any appearance of weakness. A force makes itself not only feared but also at the same time a little loved even by those whom it disgusts with violence…. This force whose empire extends into people’s minds is in large part imaginary.”¹²⁵ Critical reflection needs to dispel some of these appearances, re-cognize the situation, and respond, not merely react, to it politically. The latter entails an economy of violence where force is always a means that is uncompromisingly subjected to a democratic (qua regime of liberty and equality) city. Fidelity to this political identity of the collectivity and a commitment to humane principles of equality and solidarity serve as controlling ends.

Perhaps the most crucial element in Weil’s critique of modern power is what she sees as its inversion of means and ends, an inversion that leads to positing its own perpetuation as the ultimate end. Such an inversion is constitutive of the blindness of force. Accordingly, one of the primary tasks of Weil’s reworked conception of political ethic is a restitution of this relationship. In Oppression and Liberty she refers to the Iliad in ways that illuminate this point: “in this ancient and wonderful poem there already appears the essential evil besetting humanity, the substitution of means for ends.”¹²⁶ Power, and the forms of violence that are its surrogates, are means that have increasingly become ends in themselves, especially the forms of power crystallized in the capitalist nation-state. In this formulation Weil captures a distinctive aspect of a distinctively modern conception of power whose master theoreticians are Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, and Leibniz.¹²⁷ Once rationalized, this form of power disguises itself as objective, as something that is above the fray of interests and politics; it becomes its own justificatory myth. It thus becomes its own end. Modern power thus dehistoricizes: it relies on abstraction and calculation, and its despotic element is better characterized as one that erases meaningful differences and translates them into diversities. Weil further explored these attributes of modern power in her somber consideration of the catastrophes that it has brought about. “Power, by definition, is only a means; or to put it better, to possess power is simply to possess means of action which exceed the very limited force that a single individual has at his disposal. But power-seeking, owing to its essential incapacity to seize hold of its object, rules out all consideration of an end, and finally comes, through an inevitable reversal, to take the place of all ends.”¹²⁸ Modern power is driven by its own monopolistic imperatives; consequently, “for abolishing oppression itself, that would first mean abolishing the sources of it, abolishing all the monopolies.”¹²⁹ Hence, she makes a tacit plea for decentralized forms of power that are publicly accountable.

Once cast in this light, modern power emerges as an offspring of instrumental reason. Its correlate is an intellectualization of violence within the context of what Sheldon S. Wolin has referred to as the modern “culture of despotism”: a simplified political culture composed of mostly privatized citizens whose politicalness resides in their obedience to “rational” laws in a highly legalistic culture. Power not only operates unhindered in such a culture, but it appears decentralized, and acquires legitimacy by means of the mantle of legality bestowed by liberal-democratic institutions.¹³⁰ And yet, the claim to decentralization notwithstanding, modern forms of power cling to the monotheistic ambitions of the theism that the abstract language of scientific rationality came to replace. It is thus ubiquitous, and its violence is legitimized and routinized under the rubric of technological precision, scientific advancement, and market rationality. Its political correlates, however, are found in the ideal of dynamically stable liberal institutions that legitimize state violence as well as the violence that market imperatives inflict.

Yet the epitome of her critique of modern power is found in Weil’s reflections in the essay “The Power of Words.” Here she alludes to the senselessness of war by once again using the example of Helen of Troy. Besides Paris, she writes, no one “cared two straws about her”: she was just an excuse to unleash the violence and hubris of conquest. Helen’s equivalent in Weil’s present is “the role…played by words with capital letters.” Words that acquire meaning only by being impregnated by war: “If we grasp one of these words, all swollen with blood and tears, and squeeze it, we find it is empty.” Here Weil indicts the incidence of abstractions in our received political language (say, nation, national interest, democracy, capitalism, communism, freedom, fascism, reason of state). For Weil, however, the problem is not the words themselves but their abstract use as means to justify the self-perpetuating practices of power. As soon as these words are defined concretely, they can help “us to grasp some concrete reality, or concrete objective, or method of activity”; once concretely rendered, these words “might be a way of saving human lives.”¹³¹ However, a more concrete rendering calls for a reckoning with the historical continuities and discontinuities in the uses of these terms, as well as with their role in instilling a certain conception of political identity. It also requires, as already discussed, a re-cognition of the dual meanings of these terms and calls for the resignification of terms at the service of emancipatory ideals of justice, love, and equality. In this vein one can see her critique of democracy as a word in the essay “Human Personality,” where she places it in the region of “ordinary institutions.”¹³² But such critique is tempered by the democratic import of her reflections and the ideals of justice that animate it.

On the whole, force is not something that can be expunged from the human condition, but its configurations and purposes are changeable. As Weil puts it, “Force is not a machine for automatically creating justice. It is a blind mechanism which produces indiscriminately and impartially just and unjust results, but, by all laws of probability unjust ones.”¹³³ Herein lies the centrality of her discussion of the distinction between “means” and “ends,” and its inversion in modern conceptions of power, to understanding her critique of violence: force is constitutive of the human condition, and it can be organized on a humane and just basis if the right ends are kept in place and if it is kept in check as a last resort. The problem, then, is not force as such but those forms and modalities of force that enslave, from factory work to the brutality of war. Force needs to be re-cognized in its uses and abuses and reined in by a legitimate end. Its arbitrary nature might end up sabotaging one’s political identity and the ideals it stands for. That is the warning of the sober and tragic sensibility that Weil brings to bear in her reflections.

There is yet another important aspect to the modality of re-cognition at work in Weil’s political thought: “The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this.”¹³⁴ This is an awareness that may break with the reifying pieties of the language of “loss,” as well as with the temptations of consolation found in “defeat.” The logic of force conceals this simple truth from its victims as it also disables the possibility for both parties to acknowledge a shared humanity—an insight that only sober reflection can yield. The violence of war ravages human lives and reduces human bodies to a momentary shared vulnerability, although the frailty of the body is nevertheless culturally and politically mediated.¹³⁵ These moments of shared vulnerability hint at a shared humanity whose pain hardly elicits an abstract ethical commandment, but demands an addressing of the political conditions and actions that brought it into being. This is the element of tragedy mediating Weil’s political thought: it allows for these moments to be re-cognized in the temporal and spatial determinations that constitute their politicalness. “In the catastrophe of our time,” Weil severely writes, “the executioners and their victims are, both together, before anything else, the involuntary bearers of a testimony against the appalling wretchedness in which we wallow.”¹³⁶ Correspondingly, the blindness of force is manifested as an incapacity for reflection. This is particularly evident when, in a cycle of violence, the subject implicated in the use of force eventually becomes its object. Weil neatly captures this feature in one of her most memorable formulations: “These men, wielding power, have no suspicion of the fact that the consequences of their deeds will at length come home to them—they too will bow the neck in their turn.”¹³⁷ Largely due to the blindness of violence in war, those who are in power sometimes fail to consider this possibility, the possibility that in the contemporary world has been fittingly called blowback.¹³⁸

Weil thus sums up the hubris often found in unyielding Homeric figures and brings it to bear on her meditations in the aftermath of catastrophe. Cruel acts that are the offspring of power often unleash cycles of violence whose implications the actors cannot fully control. In its blindness, violence neglects unintended effects and defactualizes. This neglect is neatly captured in the ephemeral moments of invincibility that characterize the victors of the different battles; in such instances, the victorious party “forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing.”¹³⁹ Caught up in the euphoria of victory, the victorious—in ways that are analogous to their refusal of a shared humanity with the defeated—are incapable of conceiving the possibility of self-destruction, let alone the possibility that the cycle of violence is not over yet and that the defeated, like dormant furies, sometimes patiently await a future moment of reckoning that will perpetuate the cycle to no end.¹⁴⁰ Homer’s Iliad is thus not just a poem about force that speaks to its dynamics and its impact on the human condition. It is also a deeply political work, not only because of its considerations of collectively shared force but perhaps more so because it deals with “the destruction of a city,” which for Weil is “the greatest calamity the human race can experience.”¹⁴¹ A city offers the space for political participation and for being rooted in a milieu of shared power, which instills a strong sense of political responsibility. Hence the poem’s political and critical import, which also resides in its capacity to instill a sense of “regret that men are capable of being so transformed” by violence and hubris.¹⁴² Weil’s reading also instills another very important lesson: in her predicament, as in ours, violence is not something that one either embraces or condemns tout court. Rather, it is something to be re-cognized in its multifarious forms, in its self-perpetuating mystifications, in order to open up an interval of reflection leading to a politically bounded response rather than to an equally violent reaction. Stated differently, the pervasiveness of violence in political life demands a sober re-cognition of its uses and representations.

At this point, however, an obvious question emerges: what is the binding political mechanism that restrains the use of violence? As Weil’s interpretation of the Iliad illustrates, it is first the refusal to compromise one’s political identity—the identity embodied in the city, in the hands of the hubris of power—and second an awareness of a shared humanity that serves as a controlling end. Implicit in her reflections is a strong concern with defending a specific political identity to avoid compromising it. The latter is a concern when a collectivity is at war. In one of her later texts, “Reflections on War,” she states this point rather clearly: “And, no matter what name it bears—fascism, democracy, dictatorship of the proletariat—the principal enemy remains the administrative, police, and military apparatus; not the apparatus across the border from us…but one that calls itself our defender and makes us its slaves.”¹⁴³ That is, the imperatives of reason of state, of national security, which are consonant with the logic of violence—as described in the essay on the Iliad—threaten to eclipse the substantive democratic values the state claims to defend by effectively subordinating them to the imperatives of warfare.

In The Need for Roots this concern is elaborated on in relation to imperialism. In this text Weil offers a severe critique of French imperialism from the perspective of its betrayal of the principles of justice that inform French political identity. “Every other nation,” she argues, “might possibly have had the right to carve out an empire for itself, but not France…. When one takes upon oneself, as France did in 1789, the function of thinking on behalf of the world, of defining justice for the world, one may not become an owner of human flesh and blood.”¹⁴⁴ It has been argued that, precisely in this messianic gesture of universalizing justice, France was already embarking on an imperial path.¹⁴⁵ But the political import of this passage, in light of Weil’s concern with preserving a democratic political identity—its corollary form and politically constituted space—as allegorized in her references to “the city,” suggests a different interpretation. In its imperial venture, France was compromising itself, both in the particular and the universal moment, by its proclamation of ideals of justice. But this compromise of the ideal of justice was already present in the way the revolution was anchored in the idea of the nation as a homogeneous entity constituting the source of political sovereignty. Weil is certainly aware of this paradox, as it can be inferred from her alternative constitution for postwar France, a document she drafted as part of the Resistance in London. In it she sought to replace “nation” with “consenting people” as the source of political power and legitimacy, thus instituting a binding identity that was both political—as opposed to national—and democratic, as an unyielding end. In so doing, she sought to give institutional form to the moments of reflection that her reading of the Iliad calls for, and she also proposed a referendum every twenty years to institutionalize a space for reflection on and discussion about public life.¹⁴⁶

Experiences of defeat, first in the Spanish Civil War and subsequently in World War II, led Weil to ponder the question of violence in its ethical and political dimensions. Her distinctive perspective offers a plethora of insights on our own predicament, one in which the dreams and catastrophes that were then nascent have already unfolded. Among these insights are the constitutive nature of violence in the capitalist modern nation-state, the blindness of violence in its military modality, and a conception of political action based on a sense of political responsibility within a broad tradition of political ethic. One of Hannah Arendt’s most compelling formulations of what is at stake in thinking about political responsibility is apposite here: “political responsibility…exists quite apart from what the individual member of the group has done and therefore can neither be judged in moral terms nor be brought before a criminal court.”¹⁴⁷ Rather, it is collective and, more importantly, inscribed in a historical sense and identification with the political principles binding the collectivity in question and fidelity to a political project that however internationalist always has a particular, concrete point of departure. What makes it political, though, is not just its collective connotation, however important that dimension is. Political responsibility, as the foregoing discussion has sought to delineate, entails fidelity to a political identity as well as identification with the historical travails of the unfolding political principles and forms binding collective life, from which no politicizing political project seeking a horizon beyond liberal-democratic capitalism is exempted. Inaugurating a new political order, reproducing and sustaining it, demands an even more complex, pressing, and ineluctable practice of political responsibility. Fidelity to forms of shared power that are coextensive with the collectivity in question becomes the binding controlling end that is constitutive of the concrete dialectic of means and ends that is the sine qua non of the tradition of political ethic.

Yet to reclaim the tradition of political ethic is not enough. In order to bring out the critical import of this tradition, it is necessary to recast it in genuinely democratic ways, anchored on a political commitment to a socialist project of shared power. And an attempt at a democratic, reflective response needs to pit the two preeminent legacies of political ethic—reason of state and an ethic of responsibility—against one another. Weil’s rejection of the logic of reason of state is crucial in this effort, as she formulated an approach to thinking politically about power without binding it to the logic of reason of state. Even if, at some points, Weil was inclined toward pessimistic assessments of the prospects of action—e.g., “Present-day society is like an immense machine that continually snatches up and devours men and that no one knows how to control”—she never relinquished the possibility of meaningful collective action, let alone reified powerlessness.¹⁴⁸ Instead, she sought to re-cognize it. Correspondingly, in one of her last pieces she issued a warning: “But one could still not say that the atmosphere in our country is really impregnated and charged with the ideal in whose name we are fighting. In order to fight well it is not enough to defend an absence of tyranny. We must be rooted in a milieu in which every activity is really oriented in the opposite direction of tyranny. Our domestic propaganda cannot be made of words; to be effective, it must consist of dazzling realities.”¹⁴⁹ To actualize these “realities,” it is necessary to become politically responsible and rooted in a democratic collectivity that effectively enacts democratic values of participation and shared power, freedom and equality.

If in the opposition between knowledge and action resides Weber’s ethic of political responsibility—the true bearer of the vocation for politics has a blend of the two—it is in Weil’s emphasis on reflection and her concern for the materiality of what she refers to as the “needs of the soul” that the possibility to recast political responsibility democratically is found. From this perspective, and contra Nietzsche, there is a third moment, which is missing in the binary reaction/reflection: neither just reaction, nor just reflection, but a sober response. Political responsibility thus rests on a response based on a fidelity to a political identity, its enabling institutions and forms; in this case, the preservation of a democratic-socialist identity is what becomes a controlling end. By way of her concern with political identity, as embodied in the city, Weil sought to subdue the imperatives of reason of state and set the basis upon which one can democratize the conception of responsibility this notion has carried historically. This may well be the only way to responsibly mobilize for action without compromising one’s fidelity to political ethical principles and the political forms actualizing them. In Weil’s times, the challenge was that of waging a war against fascism without compromising one’s ideals in the process; in our times the challenge seems to be that of reconceiving and reclaiming political responsibility from its already compromised form. To do so entails, among other things, displacing questions of leadership and envisioning responsibility in terms of the struggle for political orders in which the demos participates in power and publicly reflects on the actions done in its name from the perspective of a substantive democratic identity outside liberal-democratic capitalism and its regimes of accumulation. In other words, Weil’s reflections open up the possibility of a consideration of the question of responsibility politically, from the perspective of a democratic public ethic that demands the active participation of citizens in sharing political power and seeks meaningful public accountability for the representations of violence and the ends it legitimizes, by means of action and fidelity to an idea of democratic justice, not fidelity to the liberal-capitalist imperatives or the imperatives of its state form and practices of idolatry.

But such a conception of democracy seems out of sync in the age of depoliticized politics. For it to be possible, the zealous present-day emphasis on the politics of difference and particularity has to be recast to make it serve as one pole of a politics that also involves the language of universalism, solidarity, and collectivity. The universalism, solidarity, and sense of a democratic political identity that claims on behalf of difference and particularity often presuppose, but never theorize, need to be avowed. These are two irreducible dialectical poles that democratic politics needs to re-cognize and speculatively render without an abstract mending; in an Adornian rendering these are two poles constituting integral moments of justice and freedom that never add up. Any politics worthy of the name has to have a place for both as much as it has to dialectically conjoin moments of radical attack with a defensive politics.

Enacting a political ethic and its corollary sense of political responsibility requires a politicizing critical discourse and practice. More precisely: a pressing question is how to, once again, learn to think politically. Such learning, however, requires, even demands, at the very least a modicum of shared power. Shared power brings a sense of proximity without any illusions of immediacy—shared power is thoroughly mediated—that fosters a different sense of responsibility. Political responsibility could thus be conceived as a practice of immanent transcendence that consists of ordinary people actively sharing power and gaining hard-earned political knowledge and the responsibilities that come with it. Reclaiming political literacy, a political return in the ways we think about the intersection between ethics and politics in struggles of power, requires redrawing enmity lines from the perspective of fidelity to socialist principles and their actualizing in robustly democratic political forms.¹⁵⁰ It also means retrieving the category of the citizen and the necessary spatial conditions that make the category politically meaningful.¹⁵¹ If today, as in one of Wolin’s acerbic formulations, “the citizen has become marginal and democracy more manageable,” it is the idea of citizenship that needs to be reclaimed, as it entails assuming “responsibility for taking care of political and social arrangements, not only operating institutions but ‘cultivating’ them, caring for them, improving them, and, ultimately, defending them.”¹⁵² Political responsibility is the responsibility of citizens. And to think politically means to think about the politics of the active citizen, not the theoretical subject, as well as to think about citizenship in current political orders and new possibilities of citizenship in future political orders that, at the very least, need to be more democratic and humane. Herein resides the centrality for critical theory to re-cognize democratic practices and political forms, avow a sober realism and an acute sense of political literacy as constitutive of citizenship, and re-cognize the political nature of lines of enmity. The latter point moves in tandem with the first two: enmity lines demand the re-cognition of the predicaments of power we navigate and the roles of elites, yesterdays, and todays in impairing access to a politics of shared power and commonality. In these predicaments it is imperative to think politically, namely, to think about the concrete dialectical mediations of power, structural imperatives, interests, and agents.

One step in the avowal of political literacy consists in resisting the prevailing logic where, under the mantle of terror and terrorism, everything is folded, to the point that distinctions between an act of sabotage and an act of terror are blurred. A politically literate political ethic refuses to surrender to the temptation of finding a pristine ethical anchoring for politics that antecedes the scenes of power one navigates and thus bypasses the need to contextually reckon with predicaments of power that defy any apodictic ethics or pristine ethical disposition.¹⁵³ This is nowhere more evident than in the current representations of violence. Subsuming violence as such, with no reference to content or context, let alone to the violent constitution of the predicaments of power and agents to what and to whom a violent response emerges, further compromises the political literacy necessary for thinking politically about the present. In his memoirs Régis Debray has retrieved a political distinction from a more robustly political age: the difference between revolutionary violence, or political radicalism, and terrorism.¹⁵⁴ Even when it is a strain to endorse his French republicanism and virtual collusion with neoimperial ventures in Haiti, one finds this veteran of Latin American guerrilla warfare, and former minister under Mitterrand, making the distinction sharply:

That there needs to be a strict economy of violence in any political situation ought to be clear enough, as should the futility of adventurism in moments of epochal or political closure. But it is precisely this important difference Debray adduces that gets obliterated in our current depoliticized age. Re-cognizing this difference, however, cannot demand disavowing the moment of shared responsibility in a violent predicament. Rather, as Daniel Bensaïd has forcefully argued, it points to how in situations of “savage hyper-violence,” which necessarily includes the “hyper-violence of armed globalization,” “the dialectic of violence involves (at least) two parties, and that the relationship is as asymmetrical as that kind of warfare.”¹⁵⁶ Even so, no political ethic, no matter how asymmetrical the conflict is, can dispense with the economy of violence—or “restrained violence,” as Bensaïd called it—without undoing itself.

Of course, not every instantiation of a political ethic is formulated in the violent contexts out of which Debray draws these crucial distinctions. In an altogether different context, say, one in which the interplay of violence and civility is to the advantage of the latter, one needs to avow a sense of political literacy that entails re-cognition and critical mapping of these situations and the imperatives produced and reproduced by one’s actions and inactions.¹⁵⁷ In civic times, that is, a staunch realist disposition entails assuming responsibility and democratic citizenship in addition to drawing critical mappings and enmity lines in one’s collectivity and the forms of power it generates. These are the means: an unrelenting, if sober, fidelity to democratic political forms serves as the controlling end. Obviously, there is a humanism tacitly assumed in these formulations, a minima humana, as it were, but there is also an equally tacit avowal of the quest for political forms that can house it and make it concrete. And the dialectical mediation between the two is constitutive of a political ethic along the lines herein defended. For a political ethic that hinges on how a dialectical critical theory maps out the predicaments of power citizens navigate in the intersections between economic, cultural, and political fields of power, a sober sense of political realism and literacy is paramount.

There are, accordingly, two senses of political responsibility in the tradition of political ethic the foregoing discussion invokes: that of ruling, and thus sustaining an existing political order, and that of bringing about a new political order. Yet there is a third connotation of political responsibility, one that closely relates to the idea of responsible critical thinking formulated by Adorno and to the responsibilities of educators and intellectuals in the realm of representation, which becomes a preferred locus of action in epochs of political closure. This links to the idea of offering sober representations that attest to the foregoing sense of fidelity not only by contributing to enhance the political literacy of fellow citizens but also by forging the necessary mappings that would be conducive to political action, while instilling the sobriety and realism that is necessary for responsible political action. Ernst Bloch offered a keen formulation of the dialectic of realism and utopia, sobriety and enthusiasm that is constitutive of the political literacy intrinsic to a political ethic:

And even if hope merely rises above the horizon, whereas only knowledge of the Real shifts it in solid fashion by means of practice, it is still hope alone which allows us to gain the inspiring and consoling understanding of the world to which it leads, both as the most solid, the most tendency-based and concrete understanding…. But the anticipatory of course must blossom, it still has its function, especially when this takes place in sobriety instead of in effusiveness and clouds. Likewise, enthusiasm assists sobriety, so that it does not abstractly-immediately foreshorten the perspective instead of keeping it on the globe of the concrete possibility. Enthusiasm is imagination in action, and the acid of sobriety must here become the most precious rather than the generally cheapest ingredient…. Therefore, it is equally alien and unwise…to reach under reality with nothing but sobriety, as it is to overreach it with nothing but enthusiasm; the Real, precisely as that of tendency, is attained only by the constant oscillation of both aspects, united in trained perspective.¹⁵⁸

This dialectic is indispensable for responsible political action in all its modalities, as is dialectical critical theory for achieving a “trained perspective.” Responsible need not mean tamed, let alone subdued, modalities of critical criticism, forms of moralizing inaction, or acquiescence with depoliticized politics. Rather, in this context it means instilling a sober and realistic sense of collective identity and action, which refuses to compromise the ends, but soberly reckons with a realist political disposition as one of its means. This dialectical articulation of means and ends—similarly that of realism and utopia, sobriety and enthusiasm—is central for a political ethic and, by extension, for any genuinely political sense of responsibility that is necessarily limited and thus a genuinely particular articulation of a universal.¹⁵⁹

What exactly does the appeal to sober realism involve? Within the tradition of political ethic, realism is the antipode of wishful thinking and ideological conceits, not of utopia.¹⁶⁰ At least since Machiavelli, realism entails imagination not in order to idealize the present or abstractly posit an ideal situation but to rationally inquire why things are what they are and how they could be otherwise.¹⁶¹ It consists of an uncompromising reckoning with political realities that requires not only dispensing with pieties and euphemisms when taking sober measure of a political situation, but the need to cognitively map it and accurately discern the realities of power the situation imposes in the name of the ideal that animates the need to rectify it. At its most uncompromising, political realism is concerned with limits, including pain and suffering. It is similarly concerned with history as a way of understanding the historicity of the present, how it came into being and what, if any, lines of flight can be conceived from it. Precisely because it refuses to relinquish utopia, it resists any accommodation to the ruling powers, as it relentlessly debunks the quest for silver linings. Instead, it highlights power differentials and dispenses with consolations about them. Of course, in the absence of meaningful alternatives, struggles that improve the lot of the many are never to be discounted, however inconsequential these are ultimately in altering the structures that perpetuate their predicaments. A sober and uncompromising realism thereby re-cognizes predicaments of power: how political power is exercised, produced, and reproduced in a given situation. Realism and political literacy are thus essential for a political ethic of responsibility.