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 by Brian Milstein Presented as my final paper for the seminar, "Memory, Trauma, and Evil," Summer 2002 at the Graduate Institute on Democracy and Diversity, Transregional Center for Democratic Studies Carol Bernstein, Bryn Mawr College, and Richard J. Bernstein, New School for Social Research, Instructors Cite as: Milstein, Brian. "Frontier and Oblivion: On the Idea of 'Crimes against Humanity'." Unpublished paper, New School for Social Research, New York (accessed on [DATE] at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/oblivion.html). (a) To put it briefly, this paper is an exercise in making the concept of "humanity" -- insofar as it permits us to speak of humanitarian intervention or aid, human rights, for the good of all or crimes against -- intelligible from the perspective of critical theory. Since the Second World War, the idea of "humanity" has gained steady currency as a political concept. It, along with the events that inspired it, undergirds many of the major international institutions and organizations that have been founded since then, including the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, as well as an multitude of non-government organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. It has also inspired, directly or indirectly, a host of new schools of political philosophy such as cosmopolitanism, democratic peace, and globalization theory. Of course, there is no definition of the concept that everyone can agree on, and for that reason there are many who are skeptical of its real value as a guide for politics. Among these, the ideas of "humanity" or "human rights" are, at best, an idealistic illusion with no bearing on the way the real world operates, or, at worst, the ideological concoction of powerful states used to exert their will on weaker ones -- the imperialism of universalism. Hannah Arendt has argued that "human rights" as such are unenforceable except for individuals under the protection of a nation-state, and are for that reason merely "citizens' rights," the only rights that are truly binding (1968, 293). While standing trial for "war crimes" at Nuremberg, Hermann Göring scoffed that "The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused" (qtd. in Bass 2000, 8). Yet the influence of these concepts are undeniable, and do in fact have a long history preceding the Second World War. We can in fact identify three major concepts, all of which are interrelated but nevertheless distinct with distinctly traceable histories. The concept of war crimes stems from a tradition in political philosophy that dates back to St. Thomas Aquinas, founder of the "just war" tradition in natural law theory. He specified, among other things, who is permitted to wage war, for what reasons, and to what end, as well as other supplemental rules such as the role Church officials are to play with regard to them (Aquinas [n.d.], 1359-60). Many theorists have elaborated on these rules, often referred to jus ad bellum, the rightfulness of going to war. The highest "war crime" along these lines is the crime of aggression -- waging war without provocation. From jus ad bellum a second category was distinguished, jus in bello, the rightful conduct of war (Walzer 2000, 21f). Of the two, it is the latter that is generally associated with "war crimes" (At Nuremberg, violations of jus ad bellum were referred to as "crimes against peace" [Arendt 1964, 255]). This question of what means and actions are permissible while waging war has become of special concern in the twentieth (and twenty-first) centuries, particularly when the world was introduced to "mass warfare" and so-called "weapons of mass destruction." Responsibility for war crimes generally rest on individuals or a group of individuals involved in the decision-making process of the government that commits them. For every war crime there is a "war criminal." The concept of human rights is most pertinently a product of the European Enlightenment, and is the foundation of the liberalist tradition. It is often considered the crowning achievement of modern political theory, and is closely associated with such names as Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Mill, and others, and it was behind the ideas that sparked the American and French Revolutions. Human rights, also referred to as "basic rights," "inalienable rights," or the "rights of man," are expected to be honored by every government and to be guaranteed to every individual regardless of political status. Since the seventeenth century, the concept of human rights has been expended to include "political rights," "social" or "economic rights," and "women's rights." One of the great debates since the end of colonialism has been over "cultural rights," and what to do when they conflict with traditional understandings of basic rights. Human rights violations are different from war crimes for three reasons. First, they need not be connected to an actual war; this raises a number of complex questions of context and jurisdiction. Second, human rights issues are more closely related to a government's policies of protection and enforcement; in other words, they have a clear legislative aspect that war crimes do not. Third is that while war crimes as such are almost always tied to individuals who may be put on trial, human rights violations do not necessarily have indictable "violators." While one can try an individual for specific acts committed in Apartheid South Africa, it is hard to find someone "guilty" of Apartheid itself. More often, the response to a human rights violation is simply to call on a government to change policy. The concept of crimes against humanity is the most unique of the three. It formally shares features with both war crimes and human rights violations without being reducible to either. Like war crimes, they are usually traceable to individual perpetrators; like human rights violations, they need not be connected to the conduct of a war. The term itself originated in 1915 in reaction to the mass slaughter of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire. "Crimes against humanity" was in a sense a euphemism for what a Russian foreign minister called "crimes against Christianity," with the implication that the issue was ultimately the barbarity of Islam (Bass 2000, 116). From the beginning, what counts as a "crime against humanity" always seemed to be closely bound up with the accuser's reaction to the ideology that was thought to be behind it, which is one of two things that makes this the most enigmatic and interesting of the three categories. Another curious feature about crimes against humanity is that there seems to be only one. While there are numerous acts of unspeakable brutality that governments can inflict on people, only genocide cannot in some way be fit under "war crimes" or "human rights" (there is something absurd in the idea of a government "outlawing" genocide). As a result of this, the victims of crimes against humanity are not individuals as such, but whole peoples. (b) The focus of this paper will be on the idea of crimes against humanity and its origins in the ideological crisis of the 1930s and 40s. As we have noted, the idea did not originate at Nuremberg. It is often overlooked that Jean Bodin, the great champion of the theory of sovereignty, declared it "a most beautiful and magnificent thing for a prince to take up arms in order to avenge an entire people unjustly oppressed by a tyrant's cruelty." Even more surprisingly, he argued that "if a virtuous prince has seized a tyrant, he will obtain more honor by putting him on trial and punishing him as a murderer, parricide, and thief, rather than acting against him by the common law of peoples" (1992, 113). Yet the idea of an unwritten law of humanity that leaders of states can be made criminally accountable for did not take a real hold on world affairs until the International Military Tribunal underwent its proceedings in 1945-6. Even then, there were many among the Allies who believed the charge should not be included at all, and who argued that the atrocities committed by the Nazis, being independent of the conduct of the war itself, were protected by the sovereign rights of the German state (Bass 2000, 173-8). Another important fact when considering ideas such as war crimes, human rights, or crimes against humanity, as well as the strategy of putting government officials on trial for them (as opposed to other common suggestions such as show trials or summary executions), is that they are solely product of modern liberalism. This is significant, not simply because it shows that such ideas are particular to a specific paradigm of political thought, but because it was precisely this paradigm of political thought that was so acutely challenged by the advent of the Third Reich (see Hobsbawm 1994, 109-41). While war crimes and human rights have long traditions in Western Civilization, and while the notion of crimes against humanity originated thirty years earlier, all three emerged as salient political concepts only through a direct confrontation of liberalism -- not merely with an other -- but with its other. The second section of this paper will be a philosophical exploration of the liberal perspective on politics and morality, based on the political ontology created by Hobbes, whose Leviathan spelled out a theory of sovereignty that has been paradigmatic for modern politics since the seventeenth century. I will be drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, whose lectures at the Collège de France in 1976 were just recently published, and who used Hobbes to justify a conception of politics as "war by other means." In addition to Foucault, I found Hannah Arendt's interpretation of Hobbes in The Origins of Totalitarianism equally useful. In section III, I attempt an interpretation of Nazi Germany as the very antithesis of the liberal paradigm, once again referring to Hannah Arendt as well as Eric Hobsbawm, Primo Levi, and Giorgio Agamben. Finally, section IV will be a reflection on how the advent of race-based totalitarianism challenged the liberal conception of morality grounded in individual autonomy. | ||
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(a)The paradigm of moral thought that most guided the formation of liberal politics was the deontological theory of right, that is, rules of justice detached from conceptions of "the good." This detachment comes in the wake of the shattering of pre-modern political cosmology brought on by the Reformation and the ensuing wars of religion. Hugo Grotius is credited with the founding of modern international relations by developing a theory of external sovereignty based on the just war tradition of "natural law." Barring the presence of a divine will (etiamsi daremus), written laws as such are meaningless beyond the dominion of any kingdom or principality, with only the "bare law of nature" remaining as a moral compass; even less do such laws passed for one dominion become binding for another. The organization and religious-ethical constitution of sovereignties became a strictly internal affair, leaving only questions of action beyond one's borders to be negotiated between the monarchs. In such a context, it is hardly farfetched to place war on a spectrum with other forms of political negotiation among relatively unrestrained equals; indeed, war seems the only genuinely political action that can take place in such states of lawlessness, and its possibility appears as the only reliable regulator of non-belligerent action. Over the course of the seventeenth century, such postulates would be extended to relations within dominions (internal sovereignty), through the hypothetical scenario of a "state" of nature. This paradigm is embodied no more than in the new concept of international borders or frontiers, set up as permanent lines of contingency; on one hand, frontiers mark the limits of a given body politic, but they do so only by identifying a potentially threatening outside populated by foreigners and lawless beyonds. (b) According to Foucault, modern society can be characterized by a specific organization of power, right, and truth. Relations of right, he argues, which fix formal limits on those of power, cannot exercise beyond the functioning of a discourse of truth: "There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association" (1980, 93). The centralizing discourse, he argues, is of course that of royal power, which he claims remains the foundation of legal or juridical thought in Western civilization, both with regard to the theoretical articulation of the prerogatives of sovereignty and also to the seventeenth-century onward moves to limit these prerogatives (94ff). Foucault's goal as a genealogist is to invert, as it were, the direction of analysis of domination from the perspective of the monolith of the centralized sovereign to the complex reciprocal relations of his subjects. In light of his maxim -- his inversion of Clausewitz -- that "politics is war by other means," Foucault looks to Hobbes, who famously built his theory of the commonwealth on the premise of a state of nature that is a state of war, "the war of every man against every man" (Foucault 2003, 89). For Hobbes, war is the origin of the political. Foucault asks: What, then, is this war, the war that Hobbes describes both as going on before the State is established and as leading to its constitution? Is it a war that is being waged by the strong against the weak, by the violent against the timorous, by the brave against cowards, by the great against the common people, or by arrogant savages against timorous shepherds? Is it a war articulated around unmediated and natural differences? You know that this is not at all the case in Hobbes. The primitive war, the war of every man against every man, is born of equality and takes place in the element of that equality. War is the immediate effect of nondifferences, or at least of insufficient differences. Hobbes in fact says that if there were great differences, if there really were obvious visible disparities between men, it is quite obvious that the war would immediately come to an end. ...If, says Hobbes, marked natural differences did exist, there would therefore be no war because either the relationship of force would be established from the outset by an initial war that precluded the possibility of its continuation; or that relationship of force would remain virtual, precisely because the weak are timorous. If, then, there were a difference, there would be no war. (91)The fundamental equality of the combatants is essential also for the legitimacy of the Leviathan, for otherwise the institution of sovereignty would be result of the strong over the weak, of one party over another in any case, and the state of war that constitutes the political would be defined as the sovereign against his subjects. This fundamental equality therefore assures that sovereignty is grounded in some kind of basic consensus, though such consensus may not accord with present-day understandings of the term. Rather, it is a consensus rooted in a certain will to life and a reverence for what would be known as the "power of life and death" -- in short, a consensus rooted in fear. It is due, he notes, to the sovereign's fundamental power to "take life or let live" that Hobbes classifies parenthood too as a primitive kind of sovereignty (95-6; cf. 1978, 135-6). Foucault notes that, while the immediate occasion for Hobbes' Leviathan may have been the shattering of political ontology brought about by the wars of religion, there also lurks a continuing problem in the legitimacy of the English monarchy dating back to the Norman conquest of 1066. The Hobbesian formula aims to facilitate a transformation of conquest into consent, even if it is consent based in the narrow choice between life and death: "Basically, it does not matter if we have a knife at our throats, or if what we want is explicitly formulated or not. For sovereignty to exist, there must be -- and this is all there must be -- a certain radical will that makes us want to live, even though we cannot do so unless the other is willing to let us live" (96). It is the fear of the subject who wants to live, not the strength of the ruler who can kill, that constitutes sovereignty -- the power comes from below. The conquest, insofar as it refers to the abject domination of man over man, is permanently eliminated from the discourse of sovereignty. (c) Finally, Foucault examines Hobbes' definition of war or, more accurately, a state of war; for Hobbes writes that: "War consisteth not in battle only, or in the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known. And therefore, the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, ...so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is Peace" (Hobbes 1994, 76). Foucault maintains that the war to which Hobbes is referring to is not merely an anarchy characterized by endless acts of violence but "a certain state of the interplay of representations"; that is, Hobbes' war is not about fighting but about posturing, the exchange of signs, a paradigm of human disposition that remains in the background even after the establishment of the body politic (Foucault 2003, 92-3). We could even impute that there are no actual casualties in this war, and indeed Hobbes is not so concerned with violent death than with "continual fear and danger of violent death." The war itself, being a war of equals, is an absolute stalemate; nobody can actually kill anyone. Rather, it is once again the fear that incapacitates industry, culture, building, knowledge, accounting of time, arts, letters, or society, leaving "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Hobbes 1994, 76). Man's existence is ultimately endangered not by violence but by paralysis. We can also deduce that the "life of man" that is at stake is not merely biological life but life insofar as it can be characterized by action and productivity -- what we now call the moral life. It can only be by a spontaneous act of consensus that such a deadlock can be broken and such a fear rerouted in a way that allows the continuance of such life. The interesting thing about the Hobbesian formulation -- insofar as it is representative of many such Enlightenment formulations -- is in the way it binds together moral theory and the theory of political society. Obedience to law and respect for right are important for the good of all, which is defined in terms of maintaining a stable order. Even more potentially democratic formulations work on the same assumption, such as Kant's categorical imperative; what is morally permissible are those principles that everyone can live by and still maintain the maximum amount of freedom in a society governed by order; what is not are those that would reduce society to chaos or paralysis, which would eliminate freedom entirely. Chaos, the state of war, the degenerate society, the lack of civilization as understood in the West -- such represent the lower boundary of the moral domain, as they also inform the modern conception of the moral individual. (d) Hannah Arendt refers to Hobbes as "the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim" (Arendt 1968, 139). While Foucault looks to Hobbes to trace the investment of power in the king by his subject -- which occurs in the triangulation of will, sovereignty, and fear -- Arendt looks to his to retrace the social economy of man. While this is not her term, what she finds in Hobbes is the formalistic individualism of bourgeois ideology. The political is ostensibly about the atomic individual in pursuit of his and only his interests, which rests upon a specific conjecture about the selfish and power-hungry nature of man, a nature that is at once antithetical to the idea of a body politic; if the anthropology of the Leviathan were to be taken at face value, concepts such as responsibility, solidarity, loyalty, and recognition would have no meaning. Of course, Hobbes' naturalistic description of man is in no way meant to be taken literally, and it is Arendt's contention the relation of man to sovereign is, if anything, the reversal of his state-of-nature formula. That is, the significance of Leviathan's anthropology is not so much the basis of sovereign power as the character of juridical discourses -- and of the juridical person bound up with them -- that it prescribes: "This new body politic was conceived for the benefit of the new bourgeois society as it emerged in the seventeenth century and this picture of man is a sketch for the new type of Man who would fit into it" (141). Both the word and concept of the state are traceable to their identification with concepts of status and also estate; prior to the fifteenth century, the three concepts were virtually inseparable, and they established much of the basis for pre-modern systems of honor and rank. "State" could refer simultaneously or alternately to the king's dominion, his rank, his estate, and his person; the status of a man in society was fixed in relation to these properties, which emanated directly from the state of the king. The important implication of such an arrangement is that these essential properties accorded every man his political or "public" persona from above: "magistrates judge private persons; princes, magistrates; and God, princes" (Bodin 1992, 31). Hobbes is among the first to work out the implications of a political order not structured from the top-down, as was the case with pre-Westphalian theories of political legitimacy based on divine right (the easiest comparison is made between Hobbes and Bodin, both of whom espoused an absolutist definition of sovereignty). With a ground-up construction of the power apparatus, all human relations that are not the sovereign power itself are severed in their necessary connection to the state: "he that carrieth this person is said to be called Sovereign...; and every one besides, his Subject" (Hobbes 1994, 109). The leveling of the old systems of honor and patronage accompanies a stripping of the political stature of king's subjects -- the man of the Commonwealth is fully privatized. Subjects can no longer identify themselves in relation to the king, only to each other. For Arendt, this shift is the takeoff point for the competitive individualism that defines bourgeois society. Even philosophers after Hobbes who acknowledge his basic demarcation of sovereignty continue to connect status and property, only now reshaped in terms of the "depoliticized" economy of private persons who are no longer judged so much by the king's magistrates as by each other -- that is, in the context of what would come to be known as civil society. Hobbes himself likened the dignity of an individual to his "worth" or "price"; Pufendorf likewise considered "esteem" to be the human equivalent of "price"; Locke referred to "life, liberty, and estate" as the fundamental "property" of man; and even Kant grounded political autonomy, the "estate of the citizen," in the nature of his material affairs (Milstein 2002a, §I). Arendt locates the bourgeois man in Hobbes' linkage of power, dignity, and worth, put into play by the war of all against all. Stripped of his secure place in social hierarchies linked up directly with the king, individuals fend against each other for competitive shares of dignity interpreted in terms of material wealth (cf. Taylor 1994, 26ff). The bourgeois man encapsulates the norm of a society marked by a perpetual struggle -- a sublimated war -- for status. It is at this point that we can complete the picture with arguments regarding the Protestant ethic, relations of production, the significance of class, and of course, power-knowledge relations leading to the production of the reprobate or "delinquent." The bourgeois norm becomes an extremely powerful instrument of inclusion and exclusion: "According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of society. ...The difference between pauper and criminal disappears -- both stand outside society" (Arendt 1968, 141-2). Yet while Foucault emphasizes the forms of domination that result from such discourses on morality and criminality, Arendt notes that their marginalization is not without a certain moment of liberation, as they are freed from any debt of obedience to the state that no longer protects them: "Hobbes foresees and justifies the social outcasts' organization into a gang of murderers as a logical outcome of the bourgeoisie's moral philosophy" (142). (e) What we have, then, are two interpretations of Hobbes. On the one hand, we can uncover through Foucault an ontology of sovereign right anchored in the individualized yet universal will to life and fear of death. Sovereignty is marked by its fluency in a certain discourse of life and death, one specific to its emergence from an original state of war of every man against every man. "Life" is determined to be that which is guarded against the dangers particular to a war. This "state of war," while not necessarily a literal battle to the death, is existential nonetheless because, once the idea of conquest is ruled out, it is doomed to perpetual stalemate. On the other hand, we find in Arendt the hidden logic of bourgeois individualism already inscribed in the Commonwealth. More importantly, we begin to see the internal link between civil society, the sovereign state, and international politics (on the model of war), all of which stem from a common image of Man. We can then entertain that concepts such as politics, right, law, state, and citizen exist reciprocally with a specific constitution of man and a concept of a population that inhabits civil society. The politics of sovereignty removes the element of existential crisis from moments of confrontation by creating a standard terrain of action that internally specifies the limits of confrontation. Within states, this means the realm of competition in the economic and social spheres, with recourse to judicial mediation when necessary. Between states, this means a more-or-less standardized array of negotiable issues, such as trade, territory, or the "balance of power," that are kept in controlled play by a rational anarchic order -- what Bismarck would standardize as "realpolitik." This is why Clausewitz can refer to war as "politics by other means"; war is constrained by its objectives, to which it is structurally limited and, if you will, "civilized." War ends when the two sides come to an agreement that permits politics to return to its less volatile means. The essential right of a sovereign state to exist and act on its behalf is generally respected. Wars that seek conquest or to put an end to states are an aberration, and the consistent recognition of this principle is evidenced by the relatively stable roster of European nations from 1648 to the early twentieth century -- Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany (and Prussia), Italy, Russia, Sweden, Denmark -- the exceptions being famous precisely for being exceptions.* | ||
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(a) Jürgen Habermas writes that the idea of nationality "was from the very beginning linked in a conspicuous way with the negative demarcation of foreigners from one's own people" (1998, 110). Prior to and in the early modern period, "the nation" acquired its first political connotation in reference to the landed nobility, i.e., the ruling estates -- nation is from the outset coextensive and coeval with state. Gradually, in several complexes of processes that reached their height in the nineteenth century, national consciousness spread as a popular phenomenon -- "the nation of the people" -- which connected the people to their state and their territory precisely by permitting them to refer to these things as their state and their territory; subjects became citizens (110-1). Arendt judges the nation to be a necessary counterbalance, reinforced by the state, to the social atomization and class struggle that accompanies liberal (bourgeois) individualism: To be equal to this task, the state had to enforce all earlier tendencies toward centralization; only a strongly centralized administration which monopolized all instruments of violence and power-possibilities could counterbalance the centrifugal forces constantly produced in a class-ridden. Nationalism, then, became the precious cement for binding together a centralized state and an atomized society, and it actually proved to be the only working, live connection between individuals of the nation-state. (Arendt 1968, 231, my emphasis)It is only logical this possessive mode of social identification was reinforced most strongly by its negative demarcations. The linkage of the state with a national identity -- often defined by common hegemonic characteristics such as language, religion, or history -- sharpened the precarious status of foreigners and resident minorities, notably, Jews. The frontier secures closure between self-protective civil societies, and as such it gives substance to the political field that exists between them. The nation provides civil society with a form of self-awareness with a vis-à-vis orientation, and a civil society only acquires the capacity of a "nation" in relation to the presence of other similar enclosures. The nation is essentially outward-looking, and must be one of several (In contrast, the totalitarian regime in essentially inward-looking, securing its identity precisely through an obliviousness to any outside). Race is a very different concept from nation. To be sure, Arendt traces a variety of notions akin to race in the class-struggles between nobility and commoner in the early stages of French national consciousness; Foucault also links nationality and race struggle. These uses of race often contain an understanding of blood relation and nobility in the sense of old feudal systems of honor and status, often confined in locale and context. In the age of the nation-state, race took on a more specialized meaning and purpose. The moral concept of race originated in relation to those peoples beyond the pale of Western civilization that appeared to lack civil society -- mainly, the black and brown peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Both Hobbes and Locke famously referred to the Americas as a place where the state of nature (or of war) is preserved; Rousseau, too. The laws of sovereignty and right, of course, did not apply to them -- neither did "conquest" in the sense Foucault attributes to Hobbes. Race takes on a mode of classifying peoples that fundamentally differs from that of nationality, such that the world is divided between these vast domains of races, on one hand, and the central comity of nations, on the other. Race is a qualifier of nationality; it precedes and nullifies right. To classify a person or group along the lines of race imputes a judgment on their ability to belong to a nation and have rights. The races that exist beyond and without civil society cannot participate in the material relations of sovereignty -- no property, no law. Finally, we must note that judgments of race are necessarily global judgments, that is, judgments regarding the human species as a whole. The spin Nazi Germany brings to these discourses is in how it brings the classification of races to bear upon white people, among those who participate in the networks of sovereignty and nationality. This ideological move precludes the equal footing of both the equality of nation-states and the bourgeois man that inhabits them, and ultimately very basis of post-Hobbesian politics. In short, the race-based totalitarian regime obliviates the order by which modern Western civilization operates. (b) The sequence of events that led to the fall of civil society in Germany are well-known: the Versailles Treaty essentially made Germany entirely responsible for the Great War; the Great Depression hit the country much harder than elsewhere, largely because the Treaty deprived the state of all means to take social policy measures such as in Britain, France, and the United States; the deterioration of the value of currency to zero and the spike of employment to over 40 percent rendered the economic infrastructure all but inoperative; the state organization lost all relevance and functionality in relation to society (Hobsbawm 1994, 93, 98-9, 127). Germany became a defunct ex-nation whose citizens could no longer -- and were in some senses prohibited from -- maintain the tangible bases for civil society, bourgeois status-identity, or political standing or legitimacy. The advantage German Naziism held over both liberalism and socialism is that it relied on none of these material bases to operate coherently. Arendt refers to the Boers of South Africa as an earlier example of a society that "can function on principles other than economic": South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics. (Arendt 1968, 206)We have already seen above how the Hobbesian state of war is in fact entirely unrelated to violence but is instead tied to a fear of violence in balance with a radical will to life. Foucault clarifies that the phenomenon of absolute conquest -- of one group claiming violent domination over another -- is eliminated in Hobbes' formulation; it is not condemned as immoral (a Commonwealth can still be acquired in battle), but erased from the matrix of possibilities. The scenario described here by Arendt requires the reintroduction of conquest and of violence; such a move necessitates the elimination of the state of war and the principle of equality that founds it, and it of course eliminates the fear and also the will. This formulation is different and incompatible with sovereignty. Moreover, the Western understanding of morality vanishes; chaos and social disorder are no longer operative negative standards insofar as the conventional understanding of society no longer applies. In short, the entire range of what is "permissible" or "necessary" changes. The extent to which the very nature of "morality" can be warped by such an ontological shift can be shown in an episode during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when the defendant cites Kant's Critique of Practical Reason to justify his participation in the Final Solution: This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, ...but Judge Raveh, either out of curiosity or out of indignation at Eichmann's having dared to invoke Kant's name in connection with his crimes, decided to question the accused. And, to the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative: "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws" (Arendt 1964, 136)An interpretation of Kant can be made compatible with the Final Solution so long as the principle of equality that undergirds modern philosophy is negated. The basic equality of individuals is a necessary precondition of autonomy as generally understood. Autonomy as such becomes a relative principle in two respects. The first is the relativity of autonomy to a "higher" being, i.e., the Führer, who is a superior bearer of the faculty of judgment, and in fact replaces it for "the little man"; moral judgment translates to "Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it" (Die Technik des Staates as qtd. in Arendt 1964, 136). The second is the division of people into groups of "absolute" difference, such as races. So long as all people are members of a common human species, the killing of another cannot be justified, as even the perpetrator would not wish to universalize the act as it would mean other could rightfully kill him. Only in a world where absolute differences can be attributed to human beings can a maxim such as "It is permissible to kill these people" be deemed "universal." (c) Hitler came to power on the shoulders of Germany's "traditional" Right. There was widespread support from the middle classes, whose social status was being lost as the socio-economic framework collapsed. It also had appeal to the underclass, as it not only eliminated social distinctions that kept them at the periphery but introduced new ones which elevated them (Hobsbawm 1994, 122-3). German fascism -- crudely put -- combined a nationalism fueled with seething reaction to the Versailles Treaty with a radical rejection of civil society. Race and violence become the new moral constants of the Volksgemeinschaft (117). Yet the implementation of this rejection of modernity in favor of a mythical pre- or anti-modern concept of community relied, paradoxically, on the deployment of administrative networks developed precisely from the vantage point of modern society. Nazi Germany was thus reactionary in the purest sense of the word. It uses the technologies of modernity to become its opposite. Arendt describes the movement as an ideologically motivated organization of the masses. A movement in her sense is devoid of politics in the sense we have been using; in fact, the very terms "movement" and "masses" are meant to connote an absence (or at least problematization) of such things as laws, borders, statuses, or any other socially situated differentiations or categories. The sole organizational function of the movement is to preserve and to drive the motivating ideology; a totalitarian movement becomes so by virtue of a boundless and totalizing ideology, such as the one we are considering that looks to replace the entire social order. It is the movement, she writes, that takes over the apparatuses of the state when totalitarianism comes to power: When a movement, international in organization, all-comprehensive in its ideological scope, and global in its political aspiration, seizes power in one country, it obviously puts itself in a paradoxical situation. ...At the time it seized power the danger to the movement lay in the fact that, on one hand, it might become "ossified" by taking over the state machine and frozen into a form of absolute government, and that, on the other hand, its freedom of movement might be limited by the borders of the territory in which it came to power. (Arendt 1968, 389)To Arendt's two "dangers" to the movement in power I would add a third specific to Nazi Germany, or perhaps a corollary to the second, and that is the problem of its co-existence within the world of nation-states. Still viewed from the outside as a "sovereign" member of the international community, the Reich must somehow preserve its mythical little world of racial superiority (which means a kind of global superiority) while contending with neighbors who clearly behave and see themselves as equals. To all three dangers the solution consists in the aggressive denial of its semblance to statehood; the elimination of the political, already tacitly implied in the ideology itself, must become an active strategy for the totalitarian regime. To maintain its global character, must deny its confinement to international borders as well as the existence of "equal" political units on the other side of them. These aims are also essential for its preventing itself from "ossifying" into a government. The dynamics of the totalitarian regime can thus be characterized by an intense inwardness, and this is evidenced by the fact that, while the sovereign's power is closely associated with his military, the führer's is tied to his police (Arendt 1968, 405). Accordingly, just as the sovereign state is anchored by the threat of war, manifested most clearly in the concept of the external enemy or the foreigner, the Reich's power is connected directly to an internal enemy, marked by absolute difference -- what Arendt calls the "objective enemy" (422ff). (d) The defining feature of the totalitarian regime is the elimination of the political. Domination was the objective, and the means used to achieve such domination had nothing to do with politics; Arendt observes that the violence of the regime did not dissipate but in fact increased with the elimination of dissent: "It looked as though political opposition had not been the pretext of terror...but the last impediment to its full fury" (393). Law, right, justice -- these are terms that must have no meaning in the regime (thus the description of Carl Schmitt as the "jurist" of the Third Reich becomes an ironic misnomer). The juridical person likewise ceases to exist, and while the Jews were stripped of their citizenship in the most overt and egregious manner, it was a mere point of departure to the disappearance of right altogether. It is the "radical will" to moral life that we discussed earlier, and which is at the root of the concept of the state (as we have interpreted it) that becomes the target of this project. It is only a matter of course that, if such will is to be extracted from the German people to reconstitute them as race, it can be done only following the violent extraction of will from the Jew. Obviously, the master race cannot shed the confines of right and will if the Jews in their midst continue to lay claim to them, and in this respect one can say that the Jews (and with them the Gypsies, Slavs, etc.) really are by their very existence the enemies of this project of anti-modernity. Simply by having a claim to unique identity or to difference, one maintains a prelude to autonomy. In a regime based on racial domination, the elimination of moral life from the lowest races upwards is the prime focus of power. It is here that we can locate the central importance of the concentration camp. Thus the first stage in the project of domination of the lower races is the production of the lower races that are to be dominated. Hitler "knew how to use the hierarchical principle of racism, how to exploit the anti-Semitic assertion of the existence of a 'worst' people in order properly to organize the 'best' and all the conquered and oppressed in between" (241). There is an internal logic in the fact that the SS -- the precursors of the "master race" Hitler was creating -- occupied the central pillar of the regime (as the police) and also were the group charged with running the camps and carrying out the "Final Solution" (cf. 411-2). The master race becomes master through it domination of the lower race. The Jews that were the targets of Hitler's agenda were not identified in the same way that Jews identified themselves, and indeed many of those classified as Jews did not even consider themselves as such. Rather, the "Jewish race" is a complete fabrication of the Nazi world view. The "Jew" that was the nemesis of the Aryan race had to be manufactured before it could be destroyed. Arendt famously referred to the function of the camps as sites for the "mass production of corpses," but it first had to function as a site for the mass production of Jews. It is only through the calculated image of the Jew that one can arrive at the desired calculated image of the Aryan. The most important feature of these fabrications is the construction of identities aligned in comparison to each other, and we can see this in processes not unlike the strategies of "normalization" described by Foucault. In order for the distinction between "Aryan" and "Jew" to be useful, both must lie on the same continuum, and this continuum must be internalized by those involved. The Jew in particular must recognize the new reality and his role in it; he must acknowledge his own wretchedness, and he must participate in his own destruction. Primo Levi recalls the beginning of techniques used on the Germans that seemed designed to inure them to life without right, in the form of the military drill: "[T]he barracks code and etiquette replace those which were traditional and 'bourgeois': the insipid violence of the 'drill' had already in 1934 begun to invade the field of education and had been turned against the German people themselves" (1988, 118). If the master race was to be produced in terms of military discipline, the inferior races were to be "trained" in kind: The army of prisoners in the Lagers had to be an inglorious copy of the army proper -- or, more accurately, its caricature. An army has a uniform: the soldier's uniform clean, honored, and covered with insignia, while that of the Häftling is filthy, dull, and gray -- but both must have five buttons, or else there was trouble. An army marches in military step, in close order, to the sound of a band; so too there must be a band in the Lager, and the march-past must be a march-past by the book, with "eyes left" before the reviewing stand and before the sound of music. (116)All levels of race must be disciplined as bizarre mirrors of each other, at different levels of domination reflecting their position in the racial hierarchy. The "useless labor" of the inmates likewise mimicked the self-sacrificing labor of the Volksgemeinschaft, and Levi commented that even the German used in the camp was but a caricature of traditional German or even the new Lingua Tertii Imperii, the "purified" German of the Reich (97-8). The roles of the various peoples under the Reich were organized by the usefulness (and uselessness) they were deemed to have, with lower races having more menial or base tasks than higher ones -- often under conditions that had a proportionate resemblance to those in the camps or in greater proximity to the camps themselves. The camp functioned as the regime's drain for moral dignity, where the elimination of any pretense to autonomy or identity is accomplished. The formations of peoples organized into races revolved around the camp, which lay at the center of a continuous ontological terrain that would establish the ethical composition of the Reich. It was, paradoxically, the place where Jews, Aryans, and all the peoples in between interacted. The identities and moral persons that were to be comprehended in the regime emanated from this central point at which all identity is nullified. What was known in the camps as the Muselmänner were perhaps the paragon of the new ontology. In the Muselmann the will to life is entirely extinguished, as is all capacity for human agency or even awareness of one's environment (Agamben 1999, 43). In Arendt's words, man is reduced "to a bundle of reactions" (1968, 441). According to Giorgio Agamben, it becomes difficult even to recognize him as a human being. The camp itself was organized such that the poles of absolute oppressor and absolute victim gave way to a gamut of hybrids (Levi's "gray zone"). Many of the actual acts of killing were carried out by inmates. Even the SS who operated the camp were as much the "object" of its strategy as the victim, while not being victims themselves. Giorgio Agamben described Auschwitz as "the site where it is not decent to remain decent, in which those who believed themselves to preserve their dignity and self-respect experience shame with respect to those who did not" (Agamben 1999, 60). The Muselmann is the point of intersection for all involved in the camp system, for whatever it may have been that the inmate or the guard saw upon encountering him, both could not but look upon him in the same way. One's race, status, or individuality is no longer relevant before "it" which has no identity and no recognizable sign of life. The Muselmann symbolizes that which joins the perpetrator and the victim in the new order: death becomes equally meaningless for both. From this point, it is no longer a system that removes identity but which manufactures it, based on where one stands in a system where life and death have no value ("For what purpose, may I ask, do the gas chambers exist?" -- "For what purpose where you born?" [qtd. in Arendt 1968, 449]). (e) We have discussed how the totalitarian regime is antithetical to the modern nation-state, and elements of one are an immediate danger to the other. The failure of the Reich to recognize itself as part of an international order is evident in the way it dealt with -- and conquered -- its neighbors. For if war and politics were of the same kind, and if war were equally detrimental to the reality the regime was trying to maintain, then the regime motivated by its aspiration to world conquest faces an obvious problem. Hobbes' objective was to eliminate the Conquest; now it is that of the Nazis was to eliminate War. This is consistent with Germany's pattern in the years before the outbreak of war of not so much attacking countries as absorbing them. Lines of battle suggest the political in the form of the frontier, a border of inside and outside that they could not afford to acknowledge. The Blitzkrieg was itself a useful tool in minimizing the effects of a state of war in instances where armed resistance was inevitable. The Reich could only cross a frontier by denying it was ever there to begin with, for to do so would be to recognize an alter : "Nazi law treated the whole world as falling potentially under its jurisdiction, so that the occupying army was no longer an instrument of conquest that carried with it the new law of the conqueror, but an executive organ which enforced a law which already supposedly existed for everyone" (Arendt 1968, 416). The antagonism of Nazi ideology to the political was so extreme that they had to do all but walk backwards into foreign territory to keep themselves blinded from reality and to keep their gaze inward to uphold the reality they were fabricating. Thus the Third Reich was already in serious jeopardy the moment it became clear that it would have to withstand a genuine war -- one defined both by battle and by a tract of time, and moreover by confrontation with equals. It is not a war that the Germans had to fight; it was rather a war to be waged against war itself -- to wage war without falling into the trap of recognition, of coming face-to-face with the Briton, or Frenchman, or Russian no longer as the übermensch but as a mere national -- not one of the great Reich but just a German. It was therefore not possible to conduct a war in a way we would consider most practical; the Nazis must cling to an entirely different logic, or else even a victory would come at the cost of "grounding" the regime in the comity of nations. The inward focus of the regime must be intensified at all costs to counter the outward draw of the war. What is generally viewed by historians as the insanity and impracticality of the Nazis after 1942 thus has its own eerie logic. The radicalization of tactics of domination with an eye toward the camp holds the ideology of the Reich in place in the face of the politics advancing by other means. It is as if the camp would win the war by centrifuge. | ||
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(a) It was realized soon after the outbreak of the Second World War that it would not be a "normal" kind of war. The list of "war aims" generally associated with realpolitik -- control of trade, protection of territory or resources, commitments to alliances, balance of power -- played roles that initially were secondary at best; as the war progressed, they became irrelevant. It was quite overtly a war over the fate of modernity, and it was for this reason that all ideologies from Liberalism to Bolshevism could stand on the same side. Eric Hobsbawm described it as an "international ideological civil war," as its allegiances were defined by ideological divisions that ran both between and through countries (for example, in France and in Russia [1994, 144-5]). Both the conservative and revolutionary traditions of post-Enlightenment civilization were in equal danger, and this leads to the fundamental difference between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. To be sure, both were dominated by ideologies that were by their very nature global and expansionist, but the communist movement can still acknowledge or recognize the liberal nation-state and its accompanying class system -- these are places where the revolution has not happened "yet." Communism can operate within the modern framework; historical materialism incorporates modernity and liberalism as part of its internal logic -- communism offers itself up as the hyperbolic completion of modernity. The communist movement, if anything, requires the liberal state as its inspiration and nemesis, and Stalin in fact took moves to prevent the spread of the Revolution to some other countries (168). But if the Russian (and the French) revolutions were the supernovae of modernity, German fascism was a cave-in to oblivion; it was not the end of history -- history no longer existed. Racial totalitarianism cannot sustain any kind of balance with the world around it, and it must continuously and ferociously attempt to negate it. The common understanding of the time was "fascism means war," but even then it was clear that Hitler's Germany was different from other fascist states (145, 155-6). Yet it was clear to the Allies from the outset that this was no ordinary war. One might call this a war that could not be reduced to an extension of politics; better yet, this war, being a very different kind of war, signaled the coming of a very different kind of politics. Prior to the Second World War, the demand for unconditional surrender would never have been considered a legitimate war aim with respect to jus ad bellum; during the war, it became the only one possible. There was no peace treaty setting the terms of the war's end, at least not between the Allies and the defeated Axis powers (30). The latter were entirely overrun, reconstructed and, in Germany's case, "rehabilitated." In the wake of such a fiasco, the call for a rethinking of the basis of international politics becomes inevitable. Modernity survived, but very far from unscathed, and the institution that would pay the highest toll would be that of sovereignty, at least insofar as political philosophy is concerned. Schools of "realism" continue to be influential -- particularly in the United States -- and there are those who believe the interjection of idealism into the "natural" course of world events will ultimately do more harm than good. But the damage, as it were, was done. (b) It has been suggested that there simply are no moral categories that can adequately describe the "event" known as Auschwitz. We examined above that the paradigm of modern morality and politics is grounded on a "state of war," a degenerate situation in which moral action is infinitely restrained. It assumes a paralysis so complete that all interpersonal relationships become impossible. Every individual is entirely isolated. It is this isolated individual that is the starting point for the formula, and it is the potential industry of the lone individual that becomes the concern of Hobbes' solution. The solution, of course, is the establishment of society, but the nature of such a society is predicated on the fundamental autonomy of individuals, each of which is capable of contributing to its success or its deterioration. Kant's categorical imperative exemplifies this principle. What is "right" is what maintains the most "rightful condition" for society as a whole, defined as the maximum freedom for each individual. There is an inadequacy in the concept of "autonomy," but this inadequacy is not directly related to any charge that it is illusory or a cover for some insidious form of domination. The problem is that it can only account for a limited range of moral actions, namely, those that can be decided upon and committed by a single person -- a person with a definite range of wants and goals, defined in terms of an ability to act that would be defeated without the protection of society. Arendt astutely makes the observation that our moral categories are effective "so long as the worst that man could inflict upon man was murder" (1968, 442). Yet a moral catastrophe on the order of the Holocaust is the product of something much larger than a man. The choice to commit genocide -- by which I mean the full process that extends from initial decision to physical execution -- simply cannot be captured in a lone individual. For this reason, the most an individual can really be accused of and stand trial for is "participation in genocide," and we are left with the absurd conclusion that genocide itself cannot be considered a crime. But even the fact that genocide requires an organization of collaborators is not sufficient. Liberalist moral theory can capture crimes committed by groups of individuals -- such as mafias or even "normal" tyrannies -- by reducing them to the benefits that someone involved, if not each participant, would reap; we can comprehend the ends if not the means. The problem we face lies in understanding why a mass of individuals would organize to embark on a grand-scale project in brutality that -- on the face of it -- serves no utilitarian purpose whatsoever. This is why crimes against humanity always seem to be bound up with ideology. Ideology problematizes the moral issue because it seems to interfere with the concept of autonomy. Ideology is associated with interpretations of truth, and can at some level be imputed to virtually all social environments, that is, in any situation where one can make a claim to truth. It dictates how a concept such as autonomy is to be interpreted, and we have already seen how ideology permitted Eichmann to offer an interpretation of the categorical imperative that justifies his own involvement with the Final Solution. Ideology establishes a set of "true" propositions that lend themselves to common interpretations of moral action, and thus coordinates human behavior. As we have also seen, both Foucault and Arendt locate a specific ideology influencing our own liberalist conceptions of man and morality. The moral evaluation of crimes against humanity thus seems to depend on our capacity to evaluate ideologies, which forces us to walk a tight rope between moral relativism, on one hand, and moral imperialism, on the other. The most frustrating thing about Foucault is that he restricts himself almost entirely to the methodology of the study of power, never coming around to recommending what one who lives and interacts in such a world of power relations is to do. It would seem that the question that has traditionally defined the moral domain -- "What ought I to do?" -- becomes useless. We might, however, consider a reversal of the question from "What ought I to do?" to "What is permitted to happen to me?" as a crude guide to relocate issue of right action in the domain of critique. This subject-object inversion accounts for many of the moral phenomena that cannot be accounted for under the concept of individual autonomy without disregarding the concept itself. "What is it that is permissible to happen?" does not itself dictate right or wrong actions, but rather conditions that demand the investigation of causes in human action or social systems -- a moral guide for the conduct of a critical theory. Precisely how this question would be answered is left open here; it could be based on a formula similar to a categorical imperative ("Only those human conditions are morally acceptable that you would have spread worldwide"), on a more discourse-ethical approach, or on a politics of recognition. (d) In his article On Perpetual Peace and later in The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant introduces a concept of cosmopolitan right grounded in a distinction between two concepts of "community." Communio refers to a standing or a spatial community. It refers to something shared in mutual participation, but it also connotes something that is fortified or closed off. For Kant, communio is the paradigm of sovereign political communities established by autonomous individuals who choose to enter with each other into a "rightful condition," and it is only in this context that laws regarding property and justice can be established. But communio is not possible unless human beings are in a position where they can establish relations of interaction, and this is likewise guaranteed by the fact that the earth itself is a sphere with determinate limits. The perpetual and necessary "commerce" of peoples of the world is what Kant refers to as commercium, and it is this idea that humanity is bound to share the world through interaction and exchange that is his basis for cosmopolitan right (Kant 1996, 489-90). Commercium is a regulative principle pointing to the artificiality of closed communities. For so long as the comity of states exist without themselves having a "rightful condition" between them, all laws and agreements understood within states are merely "provisional" (487). It is only through a world-wide community of interaction (Kant recommends a "federation" of free states) that we can establish a semblance of a rightful condition. His principle of cosmopolitan right is based on the assertion that, even with the establishment of closed political communities, human beings are still entitled to share the world's surface through "thoroughgoing interaction" and the "right to visit," and nations are thus obligated to maintain the conditions conducive to "universal hospitality" (328-9). Kant's notion of cosmopolitanism is different and -- on the face of it -- more limited than many current theories which equate cosmopolitanism with a world state. Yet the notion that we are bound to share the world in common through continuous interaction offers interesting prospects for creating standards of global right, for it provides us with a different starting point. Like traditional liberalist theories, what is "right" is what best promotes a "rightful condition" in the community. Only in this case we are referring not to the way individuals choose to act upon each other, but to how political communities interact as parts of a necessary whole. When Arendt, in the epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem, gave her own version of the grounds on which Eichmann should be condemned, she did so in terms compatible with this basic idea: "Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations -- as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and should not inhabit the world -- we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you" (1964, 279). The principle of commercium sets a potential framework for a critical approach to world morality and politics, as it calls into focus all institutions that affect, facilitate, or interrupt worldwide interaction -- borders, ideologies, languages, technologies, migrations, and so on. Basic tenets of liberalism are left intact, such as the equality of all human beings and the entitlement to live. But, being a critical theory, it falls short of making positive recommendations for moral action. We can still, however, verify genocide -- the removal of a people from the face of the earth -- to be the crime against humanity par excellence, being antithetical to the idea of world interaction, subjecting human beings to a condition wholly unacceptable, and calling for nothing short of unconditional surrender. It would thus become the common capacity to communicate with each other, to share in the earth's resources, and to identify oneself as a part of an interactive whole that provides us with a political ideal of "humanity"; crimes are measured by the degree of its interruption, right by its continuous improvement. | ||
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* The main site of exceptions to this rule is the "belt of small nations" from the Baltic Sea to the Balkan Peninsula, and this was the only region where borders could still be said to shift frequently. Outside of this area, most European nations maintain roughly the same frontiers in the seventeenth century that they do today. Even before Germany and Italy became officially "unified," their territories were pretty well marked out and their politics recognized as "internal." The other major exception is Poland, which disappeared from the map for the entire nineteenth century. Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press. -- (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Zone Books. Aquinas, St. Thomas (n.d.) Summa Theologica, volume 2, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, New York: Benziger Brothers. Arendt, Hannah (1964) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books. -- (1968) The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, Inc. Bass, Gary (2000) Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals. Princeton University Press. Bodin, Jean (1992) On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from The Six Books of the Commonwealth, translated and edited by Julian H. Franklin. Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel (1967) "Of Other Spaces," translated by Jay Miskowiec (acquired online at http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html). -- (1977a) "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Interviews and Essays, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Cornell University Press. -- (1977b) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books. -- (1978) The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley. Vintage Books. -- (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon. Pantheon Books. -- (1984) "Space, Knowledge, and Power" in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. Pantheon Books. -- (2003) "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, translated by David Macey and edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Picador. Habermas, Jürgen (1971) Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Beacon Press. -- (1998) The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, edited by Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff. MIT Press. -- (2001) The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, translated and edited by Max Pensky. MIT Press. Hobbes, Thomas (1994) Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, edited by Edwin Curley. Hackett Publishing Company. Hobsbawm, Eric (1995) The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. Vintage Books. Kant, Immanuel (1996) Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Michael, editor (1994) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. MIT Press. LaCapra, Dominick (1998) History and Memory after Auschwitz. Cornell University Press. Levi, Primo (1989) The Drowned and the Saved. Vintage Books. Milstein, Brian (2001) "On Reading Discipline and Punish," unpublished paper (available online at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/foucault.html) -- (2002a) "Beyond the King's Right: An Exegesis on World Political Ontology," unpublished paper (available online at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/kingsright.html) -- (2002b) "Critique and Vision in the Body Cosmopolitic," unpublished paper (available online at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/cosmopol.html) Nietzsche, Friedrich (1989) On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Vintage Books. Schneewind, J.B. (1998) The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles (1994) "The Politics of Recognition" in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton University Press. Walzer, Michael (2000) Just and Unjust Wars, third edition. Basic Books.
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