FILMER's JUDGEMENT

Everything is somehow already said in this assessment from Filmer. In order to take account of his reading of Hobbes's politics, it is thus necessary to elucidate this paradox that makes him approve the edifice while condemning the foundation, that is to say, retain the doctrine of the rights of sovereignty while rejecting the theory of institution that subtends it. Can the Hobbesian concept of sovereignty preserve the same content when we separate it from the concepts of natural right and social contract in order to replace it within a doctrine that makes of the ‘right of fatherhood’ the foundation for ‘royal authority’? Thus formulated, the question calls for a negative response: the concept of sovereignty is evidently bound to the doctrinal framework within which it is constructed. Sovereignty according to Bodin is not identical to sovereignty according to Filmer, and the latter is not identical to sovereignty according to Hobbes. Certainly, there are numerous and real convergences between Filmer and Hobbes, to which we will return, but there are also some fundamental divergences which affect the content of the concept of sovereignty and explain the incommensurate posterity of their works. This double relation between Filmer and Hobbes can be truly understood only if we perceive the existence of an important differentiation in the work of the second: there are not one but, in a sense, two theories of sovereignty's foundation in Hobbes. Yet these two theories are supposed to agree with an identical definition of sovereignty's rights. It is a question of the distinction between the concepts of regnum patrimoniale and regnum institutivum. The Filmerian critique of Hobbes is going to consist in privileging the first against the second, that is to say, in opposing Hobbes to himself. What is the value of this critique? Is the double foundation of sovereignty in Hobbes internalised in a splitting of the concept of sovereignty?

Yves Charles Zarka is indeed one of the most important philosophers in france, though he has been little recognised in the anglophone world, at least beyond hobbes scholarship. he is currently the chair of political philosophy as well as director of the centre de philosophie, d’épistémologie et de politique at the université paris descartes (sorbonne). he is also the director of several imprints at the presses universitaires de france, is the editor of the journal cités, and has collaborated with jürgen habermas and axel honneth. as to his work on hobbes, he is the director of vrin's oeuvres de hobbes, in addition to several writings – including this book, la décision métaphysique de hobbes and l'autre voie de la subjectivité – as well as a number of edited volumes. thus, while his work on hobbes is what he is primarily known for in english, his research extends to political philosophy broadly, both in its history and its current articulations.

Perhaps the fact that I feel the need to state that Zarka's work covers political philosophy in its historical and contemporary registers explains some of the reasons why he is not as well known to Englishlanguage readers as he could be. It does not seem to be a great stretch to claim that Hobbes scholarship in the English-speaking world has been influenced by the work of Quentin Skinner, whose fundamental philosophical positions lead him to ask ‘why [texts] were written in the form in which we have them’. This question leads to detailed examinations of the surrounding contexts of the material he examines; of other texts of the time that may have influenced by, or been in immediate conversation with, say, Leviathan; and so on. This approach is, in its way, laudable, leading to any number of insights as to how and why a certain text came to be written in the way that it did. However, it is not the only approach to historically grounded philosophy, and I would argue that it is a limiting and limited approach in its way as well.

The limits to Skinner's approach can be seen at the end of the same sentence cited above, where he articulates a problematic approach to the history of political philosophy: ‘what can I hope to learn from this text about politics’.

THE STATE OF NATURE: MISINTERPRETATION OR MODEL?

The specific contribution of Hobbes's philosophy for a thought of war stems from what it creates with the concept of the state of war and, for close to two centuries of political thought, a tradition that is simultaneously distinguished from the theologico-juridical tradition of just war and from the tactical and strategic tradition of the art of war. However, the historical repercussion of a concept cannot single-handedly guarantee semantic value. Better, we can legitimately ask ourselves if the Hobbesian concept of state of war does not cover a misinterpretation, both the specious character – ‘there is no war between men: it is only between states’ – and the function of justification – ‘Who could have imagined without shuddering the insane system of natural war of each against all? What a strange animal this is that would believe its own good depended upon the destruction of its entire species! … Nevertheless, that is where the desire or rather the rage for establishing despotism and passive obedience have led one of the finest geniuses that ever existed’ – of which Rousseau will vehemently denounce. Certainly, Rousseau does not reject the concept of state of war as such, but the form of a war of all against all that Hobbes gives to it. It is thus the pertinence and the originality of the Hobbesian concept that it is a question of re-establishing. For, on the one hand, if it is true that the state of war defines first of all the contentious relations between men in the state of nature, it constitutes above all a model for rendering account of every kind of war, interindividual war as much as international war and subversive war. On the other hand, the state of interindividual war is far from being reduced to a state of pure violence. The act of violence is always temporary, the state of war is permanent, Hobbes says before Rousseau. Yet this distinction can be justified only because the dynamics of human behaviours within the state of nature is a dynamics of signs, and not only of force, or the act of violence: ‘To kill his man’ itself appears as a sign.

HISTORICAL INTEREST AND PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST

The work that you are going to read relates to the study of the reorienting, transforming and innovative work in political thought undertaken by Hobbes. A certain number of political modernity's nodal problems will follow from this conceptual work. In order to define the stakes of this work, I will first make an effort to point out the general, simultaneously historiographical and philosophical perspective within which it is inscribed, and I will then indicate the places that will bear on the examination of Hobbes's conceptual intervention.

The general perspective of my research concerns, in this work as in my previous works, the moment where political philosophy, particularly in the seventeenth century, conceptually forges ethical, juridical and theological positions which involve the determination of the foundations of modern politics. The direction of this approach is simultaneously historical and philosophical. Historical, because the texts that it is a question of understanding are texts of the past, the study of which must be subject to historically exact criteria; philosophical, because these texts are not simply the vestiges of a bygone era, but are the bearers of interrogations which raise determinations concerning the nature, value and end of the political to the level of concept, and thus involve our comprehension of the political. In this sense, the historical interest that I bring to past political philosophies cannot be dissociated from a philosophical interest. This position supposes two things concerning the status of, on the one hand, the history of philosophy and, on the other, political philosophy's relationship between the past and the present. On the first point, I will say that the properly philosophical stakes of past political philosophies are retrievable and can be reactivated only from a philosophical point of view. On the second point, I will say that, to the extent that they open up the determinations of the political to the thinkable, the texts of past political philosophy are likely to furnish theoretical resources for the renewal of our own reflection.

This double bond of historical interest and philosophical interest is, however, far from being self-evident.

Introduction

IN THIS CHAPTER I intend to challenge the usual interpretation of the ‘Kun regime’ (Seton-Watson and Seton-Watson 1981: 365) as merely an import of the Leninist model to Hungary, and Kun himself, as, in Robert Seton-Watson's words, ‘Lenin's Magyar lieutenant’ (ibid.: 354). That view neglects the regime's inner social basis, its intellectual foundations and the rather wide social support which undoubtedly existed at the beginning of the Soviet Republic, even though it had diminished and then disappeared by the end. The proletarian dictatorship was not just Béla Kun's regime: its basis and its matter, so to speak, was social democracy, and a handful of Communists tried to give form to this matter. The Bolsheviks themselves regarded the Soviet Republic as an unhappily mixed form of government, Communist and socialist.

The consideration of the 1918 bourgeois revolution, led by Count Mihály Károlyi, and the 1919 proletarian one as two phases of one single revolutionary process may be helpful to the proper evaluation of the role played by the Social Democrats in these events. Afraid as Hungarian intellectuals were of unleashing the unknown forces of revolution, they could not get away from the idea that the events were following (and would follow) the inherent logic of the 1789 French revolution. Károlyi's retrospective account is typical on this point. In a speech delivered to parliament in February 1918, he voiced his growing fear of revolutions in Hungary and around the world (Hajdu 1958: 28). After the so-called ‘chrysanthemum revolution’ at the end of the war, he doubted that the way he had assumed power could be interpreted at all as a revolution. On the other hand, he painted a revolutionary portrait of his peers, describing the Social Democratic leader Zsigmond Kunfi as Danton and the Lower House president and clergyman János Hock as the abbot Sieyes – so that the arrival of Tibor Szamuely as a Bolshevik Saint-Just, accompanied by a terrorist squad, was perfectly in tune with Károlyi's ideas and fears (Károlyi 1982: 153, 170, 186). Social Democrats shared Károlyi's views on the escalating revolutions. On 8 January 1919, during a meeting of the workers’ council, the socialist leader Sándor Garbai proposed the establishment of a pure socialist government.

ATTEMPTS TO DECLARE an end to the era of revolutions have proved as futile as the efforts to develop a consensual model for their study. Unexpected turns of history have brought revolutionary phenomena back to attention and, at the same time, have raised fundamental questions about definitions and demarcations in the field. That applies, in very different ways, to the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the collapse of Eastern European Communist regimes a decade later. In both cases, aspects indicative of a properly revolutionary dynamic (such as the exceptionally high level of popular mobilisation in Iran, or the liquidation of an entire ideological, political and economic order in Eastern Europe) seemed to combine with more disconcerting features (hierocratic politics in Iran, proposed adaptation to an older and globally dominant order in Eastern Europe). More recent developments have also underlined how far the mythologisation of revolution can outrun real history. The changes brought about by the ‘Arab Spring’, at first grossly exaggerated by Western liberals and radicals alike, now appear very insignificant. Only two cases can at all be claimed as evidence. In Tunisia, a fragile parliamentary regime still faces unsettled questions about the place of Islam in political life; as for the upheaval in Egypt, where the military state seems to have survived and given its main rivals just enough time to stalemate themselves, the only question is whether we want to describe the whole process as abortive or illusory. Another example is the imagery of ‘colour revolutions’ in post-Soviet states. The events in question did not amount to more than skirmishes within the ranks of unstable power elites, and the main reason for mythologising them is that it helps to justify a revival of cold war politics. But such vicissitudes may also serve to remind us of further sides to the problematic of revolutions. The revolutionary imaginary is a significant part of the story, and not only because of its impact on revolutionary processes; its disembodied offshoots include sectarian subcultures and quixotic adventures as well as geopolitical masquerades of the kind just mentioned.

The following discussion does not aim at a broad overview of current debates. Its main purpose is to highlight some basic points of dispute in the historical and sociological research on revolutions;…

PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL Revolutions and/or transformations belong to the classical agenda of social inquiry, as well as to the most prominent real and potential challenges encountered by contemporary societies. Among revolutionary events of the last decades, particular attention has been drawn to the changes that unfolded at the turn of the 1990s and brought the supposedly bipolar (in fact incipiently multipolar) world to an end. The downfall of East Central European Communist regimes in 1989 and of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of a new era, originally characterised on the one hand by the relaxation of international tensions and on the other by the ascendancy of Western unilateralism.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet collapse prompts the authors of this book to reflect on revolutions and transformations, both from a long-term historical perspective and with regard to the post-Communist scene. The social changes unfolding in Eastern and Central Europe are not only epoch-making historical turns; their economic, social and political aspects, often confusing and unexpected, have also raised new questions and triggered debates about fundamental theoretical issues. Moreover, they have had a significant impact on developments elsewhere in the world, in both Western and developing countries.

In another context, military actions of the United States after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 have also had a major and controversial impact on the global arena. More recently, the economic crisis that began in 2007–8 can be seen as a historical watershed; it caused a series of breakdowns and provoked demands for social and political transformation, so far unfulfilled. The wave of protests and mostly abortive revolutions, known to optimists as the Arab Spring, is certainly not unconnected to crisis dynamics in the centres of the world economy, but it also reflects regional trends of a specific kind. Finally, internal and external transformations linked to the rise of new powers (such as the BRICS group, to which we could add Turkey, Indonesia and Mexico, and possibly others) are altering the patterns of international and global relations.

All these processes have unfolded within the framework of unchallenged global capitalism, whose reproduction on an expanding scale involved multiple economic, political, ecological and civilisational transformations.

KELLER: WERE REVOLUTIONS only a passing fad? Prior to the beginning of modernity, it was impossible to speak of revolutions in the true sense of the word. What if modernity has changed so much that the concept of revolution is again becoming meaningless?

Dvořáková: I have often asked myself the same question. Revolution introduces radical change and dismantles certain barriers blocking the way forward, and yet the system is always newly institutionalised in one form or another (and sometimes completely contrary to the goal and values of the change that has been heralded). The question is whether there is still room for ‘reform’ within the framework of a particular system. I would say that there is. The liberal democracy and social market economy we have created are, if anything, a caricature. Root-and-branch change is essential, if only so that further (revolutionary?) changes in society are not based on caricature, but are derived from the pursuit of fundamental values and goals.

Hrubec: Classic modernity can definitely claim a monopoly on the concept of revolution in the strict sense. Ever since Copernicus, we have had a modern notion of substantial change, which has come to be characterised by the word ‘revolution’. Socially and politically, this change needs to involve a mass movement or a popular or civic insurrection in the way we associate with the French, American or Russian revolutions. One of the preconditions, then, is mass society, but in the West – not least in our own peripherally Western country – this has become fragmented and splintered in recent decades. We can add to that the institutionalisation of crises, resulting in frequently less dramatic, but bureaucratically more regulated and longer-term propensities for crisis than in the past. In this sense, it is true that, in some societies, this precondition for modern social and political revolutions to be feasible has faded somewhat.

Nevertheless, the pre-modern stages of human history had their own functional equivalent of revolution in a broader sense, in practice and in theory, in Western societies at least from the time of ancient Greece. The point is that revolution is associated with radical change which, as a rule, is not only quick, but also often violent and unconstitutional.

STRONG PERCEPTIONS OF crises have been in the making since the 1970s. The plurality of crises results from dynamic transformations of politico-economic, societal and environmental conditions. Numerous highly problematical consequences of the transformations are produced and reproduced. The crisis of industrial civilisation, related to both social and environmental limits, can be illustrated by a critical analysis of empirical phenomena reflecting the ‘creative destruction’ brought about by the ‘capitalist perestroika’ over the last forty or so years. Policies adapting to these crises decisively shaped the ‘neoliberal turn’ of Western societies, responding to economic, social and technological changes in ambiguous ways: they combine deregulation with new modes of control and certain civilising efforts. In this context, the global expansion of ostensibly free-market capitalism, accompanied by relocations of industries and new directions of technological innovation, has played a key role; to put it another way, the present configuration of capitalism is both conducive to crises of social and environmental reproduction and able to frame responses to them. This configuration affects global civilisational dynamics, now headed either towards further degradation of humanity and the planet or to the generation of something new. To radicalise the issue, the question is whether a revolutionary transformation of both capitalism and civilisation could be on the horizon.

Transformations and risks in global civilisation

It is necessary not only to address the growing problems linked to social changes, but to do so with due regard to their increasingly global dimensions and repercussions. In the late 1960s, the Czech philosopher and sociologist Radovan Richta and his research team formulated an analysis of social and human aspects of the technological and scientific revolution with particular emphasis on its social and human dimensions. Their famous book Civilisation at the Crossroads (the most widely translated Czech publication in the social sciences) was an exemplary case of civilisational analysis, in some ways anticipating the crisis atmosphere in the 1970s (Richta 1967). They were writing about ‘civilisation at the crossroads’ in light of a new transformation of productive forces, based on scientific discoveries and leading, as they argued, to a scientification of society. Almost half a century later, we can still link up with their attempt to locate social transformations and possible alternatives within a global civilisational context, and to grasp the cognitive and technological basis of the latter.

Problems of economic and political transition

CHINA'S SOCIALIST ECONOMIC reform began in 1978. Its history can be divided into three stages. The first lasted from 1978 to 1992, and was mainly characterised by the introduction of a system of contract responsibility system, as well as the use of monetary incentives. The second can be dated from 1992 to 2001; its chief characteristic was the introduction of a market system, regulating the productive activity of enterprises through market information. The third stage began in 2001, and is still in progress; its defining feature was the joining of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and a more general linking up with the trends of globalisation. The logic of China's socialist economic reform necessitated the move from the first to the second stage, that is the replacement of hierarchic central planning by central planning combined with the market. At the same time the principle of allocation has been changed from allocation according to contribution to a combination of this rule with allocation on the basis of inputs to production (including capital). In connection with these two changes, the problem of social security has become more acute.

The transformation of productive ownership

The problem of public ownership was already apparent at the first stage of the reform, and as soon as the new system of contract responsibility was set up, the problem of property rights arose both in rural and urban areas. After the beginning of the second stage, that is from 1992 onwards, China's economic development was faster than in the first stage due to the activation of markets; however, the market system caused serious difficulties for public property (that is, the state-owned and collective-owned enterprises); simple monetary incentives, which could serve as lubricants for the first stage of reform, did not work, or even thwarted their original purpose in the second stage. Monetary incentive motivation, combined with contract responsibility, is limited by unclear property rights.

In rural areas, where property rights to land belong to collectives, family contract responsibility has – in some contexts and in different areas – been slowly replaced by sub-contract procedures and concentrated in the hands of a few families. This is one way for peasants to deal with collective property rights and the limits they impose on contract.

Introduction

THE YEAR 2014 was an especially turbulent one on the Indian political scene. From the Aam Aadmi Party's forty-nine-day rule in the Delhi State Assembly to the landslide victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the general elections in May, routines of the political system have been broken and its patterns overturned. By capturing the public imagination and creating a new voting bloc, the Hindu nationalist BJP managed to become the first political party since 1984 to secure a clear parliamentary majority with 31 per cent of the vote and 282 out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. Ideologically, the success of the BJP is even more important: it marks the end of Nehruvian secularism and socialism as the founding principles of an independent democratic India, and their replacement with the more exclusive concepts of cultural nationalism and economic neoliberalism.

The aim of this chapter is not to analyse the immediate causes of the BJP's electoral success, but rather to explore the conditions which enabled Narendra Modi to grab power in such a triumphant way. Can we interpret his achievement not only as a victory of a well-elaborated political campaign but also as a result of deeper transformational processes in Indian society which have taken place during the last two decades? In this chapter we shall explore the mutually reinforcing processes of economic neoliberalisation, cultural nationalism and low-caste assertion which occurred in Indian politics in the early 1990s. Although none of them has brought a true revolutionary change in organisational structures, could we consider them as a trigger of the rearrangement of Indian polity and society, crowned by the recent electoral successes of Narendra Modi's BJP? Is it even possible to perceive these processes through the lens of the Gramscian concept of passive revolution, declared inapplicable by Sudipta Kaviraj in his classic essay almost thirty years ago?

Multiple revolutions

Since independence, India has gone through several transformational processes which have altered the social order in truly revolutionary ways and have been described in various terms in Indian historiography. Green revolution is the first of these, referring to the changes that took place in Indian agriculture during the 1960s.

Brazil: a recent and weak democracy

IN BRAZIL, POLITICAL participation is a recent phenomenon, overcoming a long tradition of apathy among the population with regard to politics. Although a National Health Council was created in 1930 and some national conferences on specific issues, in which citizens participated directly, had been held since 1941, these were local experiences, with sporadic activities and few people involved. In the late 1970s, still under the military dictatorship (1964–85), social movements and some organisations like churches and professional bodies began to demand what they called a ‘right to participate’ in the control of the state and the decision-making processes of public policy. Although their demand was unsuccessful at that time, popular councils were created in some cities. These experiences of voluntary participation were generally parallel, external and opposed to state agencies. In many segments of society, however, there was a growing desire to have more voice and influence in public affairs, even if the concepts were very different about how this right would be implemented.

A landmark for these aspirations was a national health conference that took place in 1986, soon after the return to democracy. It emphatically recommended the creation of a national health assistance system, with the direct participation of government agents, health care professionals and users of the new system. The implementation of this recommendation was the embryo of a new participation space called the public policy council. The Federal Constitution from 1988 created many different instruments to involve stakeholders directly in the formulation and management of specific policies by foreseeing direct participation in them. It paved the way for claims of power-sharing in many different areas, totalling around thirty articles that encouraged experiments in participatory public management. In addition to these policy councils, conferences continued to be held, and in 2001 mandatory participation in the masterplans of cities, expanding the formal channels of participation, was introduced.

Probably the best known mode of participation is participatory budgeting. It was first implemented in Porto Alegre in 1990 and quickly expanded to involve around 170 cities in Brazil (Ribeiro Torres and Grazia 2003). Although it is often associated with the Workers’ Party, participatory budgeting was implemented by local governments from various political currents.