Telos 198 (Spring 2022): Challenging State Sovereignty: Mutual Aid or Civil War? is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
State sovereignty has a complicated relationship to individual rights. They are clearly in opposition, and both left-wing anarchist and right-wing libertarian critiques of the state have attempted to defend individual freedoms against the power of the state. Yet more traditional liberals and conservatives often see the state as the guarantor of individual rights, the left looking to the state as a provider of welfare services to the disadvantaged, and neoconservatives defending state power as the guarantor of individual rights against foreign aggressors as well as domestic enemies. These four different approaches map out a political landscape that is divided not just into left–right but also into pro- and anti-state tendencies.
In spite of this fragmentation, though, there are two main concerns that are shared. In the first place, there seems to be a general recognition among these different perspectives that the inhabitants of a state are not completely homogeneous and that the internal heterogeneity of a state should be at least in part the basis for domestic order. If libertarians prefer market-based structures and traditional conservatives look to family and religion, liberals seem to have gravitated toward identity-based groupings, and anarchists might prefer mutual aid organizations as independent places of sovereignty within which individuals can define themselves. The disagreements concern the type of heterogeneity that is being called for as well as the precise mechanisms for supporting diverse organizations within the state.
The second point of agreement is that peace and security are the prerequisites for human flourishing. The disagreement lies in the degree to which the state is the correct entity to guarantee this peaceful situation. While it is perhaps only anarchists who imagine a world without state power, most others recognize the need for some form of political sovereignty for maintaining collective security. The difficulty, though, is that the state form of sovereignty exists at a level today that is generally far removed from the more local level of order of groupings within the state. Clearly, the size of a state matters in its ability to provide security in today’s world. Israel would be unable to maintain its sovereignty without U.S. support. Neither could Taiwan. As the situation of Ukraine demonstrates, no country in Europe would be able to maintain its sovereignty without the support of NATO, which in turn depends largely on the United States. Yet this large size of states needed to provide security creates a problem for political identity. Either a large state must enforce a homogeneous political identity for all its inhabitants—the path of China—or the state must establish both a collective state-centered form of identity as well as the possibility of heterogeneous groupings within the state that do not threaten the identity of the state itself. Threading this needle has always been at the heart of the American project. Though it seems to be fraying at the edges, this project still seems to be the most viable one for combining freedom with security. This issue of Telos looks at recent attempts to think through the U.S. balancing act in maintaining the goal of e pluribus unum through state sovereignty.
A key debate that continues to roil American politics is the extent to which the welfare state presents an undue usurping by the state of individual sovereignty, with the right generally seeing such state support for individuals as a form of disenfranchisement. If the right-wing critique of state power has often left the support of people in need to the market, an alternative approach has been to consider forms of mutual aid as a replacement for state support. Catherine Malabou compares anarchism and libertarianism as the left-wing and right-wing versions of the opposition to state power in the provision of services. She identifies mutual aid as the definer of a left-wing anarchism as opposed to the right-wing version, which focuses exclusively on private property. Rather than arguing like Kropotkin for the biological basis for mutual aid, she describes how Peter Singer’s idea of effective altruism offers a form of mutual aid that does not depend on natural inclinations but on rational calculations.
In his analysis of the Catholic Worker movement, Martin Tomszak presents a theological justification for church-based mutual aid. Following John Caputo in focusing on the death of Christ on the cross rather than the resurrection as the defining moment for Christianity, Tomszak describes a theology based in the weakness rather than the sovereignty of God. This theology leads him to a praxis of mutual aid that he sees embodied in Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. Eschewing state welfare because of its bureaucratic and impersonal character, Day engages in a form of charity that links the giver and the receiver in a relationship of care and love.
Mark S. Weiner takes a similar approach in his description of emergency medical services as a form of mutual aid in which volunteers help individuals in times of physical need. EMS workers go beyond families in that they intervene when families are unable to care for one of their members, but, as volunteers, they are also not representatives of the state. The mutual aid that their services embody does not depend on race or class affiliations and can thus provide the basis for a sense of political identity grounded in care for all residents rather than in the designation of external enemies.
Georges Van Den Abbeele describes the ways in which the gig economy has created a new “precariat” of workers who can no longer be organized within structures of mutual aid in the way that this was possible with the proletariat of factory workers. Without a fixed place of business, drivers for ride-hailing apps, for instance, do not have the forms of interaction that would allow for mutual aid networks to develop. Moreover, these drivers come from a variety of social circumstances that prevents them from sharing an identity as a class. Van Den Abbeele suggests that new forms of mutual aid might be possible on the governmental level through universal basic income, on the consumer level through the development of solidarity between drivers and riders, and on the technological level through the use of apps and social networking to develop new forms of mutual aid networks.
Courtney Hodrick describes the way in which far-right political movements have been split based on their approach to state power. She compares the neoreactionary libertarian ideas of Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) with the alt-right Richard Spencer in order to argue that they outline two different approaches to the Schmittian distinction between liberalism and democracy. By imagining governments as corporations within a free market in which citizens are understood as consumers of government services, Moldbug denies the importance of political differences in the same way that liberalism in Schmitt’s view attempts to avoid the decisions of political conflict. Because Moldbug’s neoreactionary libertarianism treats all political conflicts as grounded in economics, his approach is in fact opposed to the alt-right populist emphasis on political identity as a counter to economic globalization. Reenacting Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, Moldbug surreptitiously reintroduces political differences by affirming a universalizing global economic order that attempts to eradicate alternative understandings of political conflict. Hodrick’s analysis points to divisions within far-right discourse, but she also suggests that whatever one’s politics, sovereignty and political identity still lie at the basis of human order.
Michael Marder’s reflection on the situation of refugees highlights the problem of statelessness, which is arguably the most precarious situation of all. In focusing on climate change, globalization, closed borders, and the passive status of refugees, Marder downplays the political causes for refugee flows, preferring to refer to a more generalized crisis of humanity on earth. But if refugees have become equated with the stateless, one of the clear causes is the breakdown of state sovereignty. To become stateless is to lose the organizational basis for collective identity, and this loss constitutes the fundamental precarity of refugee existence. Their situation underlines the importance of state structures, which are both the organizational forms toward which refugees are fleeing and the only ones capable of developing long-term solutions to their predicament.
The civil wars and failed states that spawn refugees indicate how state sovereignty is necessary to guarantee individual security. The anarchist and libertarian versions of the critique of the state often discount the importance of state sovereignty for maintaining a secure space within which individual sovereignty can develop. But if the decline of state structures is one of the most tragic events of human existence, state sovereignty is also not neutral. With order comes orientation, a specific understanding of order and the rules upon which order is based. Is it better to die than to live within a state system that one finds repugnant? This is the question that leads to civil war, and its existential character cannot be dismissed as a warmongering manufacture of enemies.
The advent of civil war results when differing notions of the proper basis of order lead to violence—to cries of “liberty or death!”—and our section on civil war considers the extent to which the United States might again have reached this point. Paul Kahn argues that the United States is in the midst of a civil war between the “Red” and the “Blue,” in which political decisions are no longer possible because the losing side does not accept such decisions as legitimate. He argues that the underlying reason for this lack of unity is the decline of a unified political identity that would prevent conflicts from becoming a basis for violence. In making his argument, Kahn redefines civil war as a condition that does not necessarily equate to violence but in which there is a continual antagonism that could become violent. Echoing Kahn’s analysis, Tim Luke sees recent examples of domestic violence during the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots as the signs of an ongoing civil war that has emerged not just since the election of Donald Trump as president but already in earlier violence by right-wing extremist groups going back to the 1990s with the Oklahoma City bombing. In imagining a solution to this situation of civil war, Kahn does not see reconciliation as a possibility but instead proposes a form of secession, in which the unity of the nation is fragmented into smaller sovereign units within a more federalized system. In this way, he is perhaps looking toward an antebellum model of federalism in which differing political and moral understandings of collective identity could exist side by side within a not yet fully nation-state.
In his response, Mark G. E. Kelly argues that Kahn mischaracterizes the affective signs of conflict in the United States as a state of civil war. Kelly insists that while party politics has led to denunciations of election results and opponents, sovereign decisions are still carried out. Both Kahn and Kelly invoke Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction to support their arguments. They differ in that for Kahn enmity is itself sufficient for the existence of a state of war, while Kelly understands such enmity as a characteristic of all politics. He recognizes that the intensity of political conflict has increased in the United States but maintains that it still falls far short of the real violence that would characterize civil war.
Greg Melleuish considers how civil wars fit into longer-term trajectories of a political order’s history. Comparing the Roman Republic’s transformation into an empire, England’s conflicts between Whigs and Tories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the French Revolution, Melleuish suggests that civil wars in the first two cases are part of the “growing pains” of a rising political power while the French Revolution hastened France’s decline as a world power. In looking to the United States, Melleuish does not dispute the civil war character of American politics but suggests that Kahn’s vision of “Europeanization” discounts the importance of nation-state sovereignty for maintaining the independence of a political space. Rather than a fragmentation of sovereignty into smaller units, Melleuish sees the opposite—the establishment of unity based on a new leader’s ability to combine rhetoric with power politics.
My response to the civil war question argues that in spite of the heated rhetoric, there is still an underlying unity of the American people in terms of fundamental values and goals, even if that unity has been obscured by preconceptions on both sides concerning the political divide between Democrats and Republicans. This unity precludes the possibility of a descent into civil war and in fact offers possibilities for the development of a new consensus.
The issue concludes with Paul Linden-Retek’s nuanced review of Paul Kahn’s Testimony, which lays out how this memoir extends the themes of love, justice, and sacrifice from Kahn’s political writings to a personal level in his recounting of a family tragedy.
