1. Arbitrary Power

In this chapter I will continue to develop the distinction between forced and authentic narratives, or what I will also call free narratives. To provide a context that will enable us to clarify this distinction, and then connect the discussion to politics, we will begin by focusing on classical republicanism. With the emphasis it places on doing what is necessary to avoid arbitrary power, or situations where one is at the unpredictable mercy of another, classical republican thought has focused heavily on determining how to resist such arbitrary forms of power, such as through an institutionalised system of checks and balances. In what may seem to be a surprising connection, we will find important parallels between these concerns and efforts of classical republicans and those of Deleuze and the existentialists. Exploring these parallels, and then discussing arguments from recent work on Marxism and the history of capitalism, will provide us with further tools to be deployed in the next two chapters as we develop a critical existentialism.

a) Forced narratives

In his classic book, Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss sets forth an important analysis of the difference between classical and modern natural right. In relation to the former, Strauss claims that ‘[i]t is the hierarchic order of man’s natural constitution which supplies the basis for natural right as the classics understood it’ (Strauss 1953, 127). In other words, human beings possess a higher faculty which is capable of accessing a reality that is irreducible to the everyday reality of experience – the Forms or Ideas for Plato – but this can only be achieved as humans come to realise the perfection that is essential to their nature, and, according to the classical tradition, this perfection occurs only when individuals subordinate their individuality to the identity of the polis, or to civil society. Strauss is clear on this point: ‘Man cannot reach his perfection except in society or, more precisely, in civil society … or the city as the classics conceived of it … a closed society’ (127). The city or polis thus functions as nothing less than the condition for the full realisation of the individual, and the moral obligations and duties of the individual are inseparable from what is good for the city as a whole, or for the common good: ‘The city has therefore ultimately no other end than the individual.