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  • Without Sovereignty or Miracles: Reply to Birmingham
  • J. M. Bernstein

Let me begin with a wisp of political history. According to the Earl of Clarendon, in 1639 the king’s “three kingdoms [were] flourishing in entire peace and universal plenty.”1 Yet by 1642 civil war had broken out, and in 1649 the king was beheaded. What had caused this breakdown of civil and political order, a breakdown that was not localized in England but, in fact, rife throughout Europe—1648 like 1848 was a year of revolutions? Clarendon himself is less than acute on the matter, opting generally for a conspiracy theory in which the traitorous plots of ill men were the cause of the rebellion. In his book Behemoth —whose title stands for the Long Parliament, which sat in session from 1640 until the surviving Rump was finally dissolved by Cromwell in 1653—Hobbes contends that “the immediate cause of the civil wars was the King’s assent in 1641 to an act whereby Parliament could not be dissolved without its own consent.”2 Hobbes thought that the king had made a massive error in this, in effect allowing a rival power to become irremovable: where there was divided power, there could be no peace. Hobbes further believed that it was a series of insurrectionary pressures that had led the king to sign away his sovereignty; these pressures all derived from what he regarded as ideologically generated ideas, including that private men could be judges of good and [End Page 21] evil, that they should not act against their conscience, that conscience may be supernaturally inspired, and, of course, that sovereign power may be limited and divided. Refuting these claims generated the political project of Leviathan ; if it could be demonstrated that peace and political order are the primary political goods, those goods necessary for the enjoyment of all other goods and securable only through political means, then the challenging doctrines about conscience and divided power could be dismissed since they undermine sovereignty and in actuality were the immanent causes of war and disorder. What Hobbes thus wanted to demonstrate was that (i) obedience to an undivided and unrestricted sovereign is a citizen’s overriding duty and (ii) this could be insured if it could be shown that what it is for anything to be a duty is for it to be commanded by a sovereign.

By 1648, even before it was penned, the Hobbesian conception of an undivided and absolutely authoritative sovereign whose laws are commands was already a backward-looking fantasy—making the attempted revival of the sovereign doctrine by Carl Schmitt an anachronistic recall of an already historically eviscerated idea, an anachronism of an anachronism, so to speak. If Hobbes’s presumptive scientific procedure, his naturalism and materialism, and his idea of social contract give his political argument the veneer of rational modernity, its core commitments are emphatically premodern. The moral and political rights of individuals that had motivated the revolutionaries are acknowledged only to be immediately dissolved as a condition for leaving the state of nature, and hence theoretically disabled before they could even arise as claims; while Hobbes’s desperate theoretical plea for undivided sovereignty is mounted at the very moment when the revolutionaries had made its absolutist and hence theological pedigree, its antimodernity, both visible and undeniable.

Whatever presumptive force the Hobbes–Schmitt notion of sovereignty possesses occurs solely through the forgetting of the revolutionary efforts that in fact inaugurated political modernity. Realism in international relations is only the most pernicious form of that forgetting. Realism’s historical forgetting operates through the reduction of the political to the biological: each state possesses an emphatic right to self-defense, the right to violence, as a necessary condition for communal self-preservation. Realist approaches to international relations, where relations among states are modeled after the Hobbesian conception of the state of nature, thereby become the alibi for accounts of sovereignty long shown to be implausible in liberal and democratic political thought. In “On Violence, Politics, and the Law” (this issue), [End Page 22] Peg Birmingham rightly argues that Schmitt’s contention that politics is a borderline concept, a concept in which borders occur as...

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