Theoria

Radical politics and neo-liberalism most fully interpenetrate one another in the figures of Ernesto Laclau and Margaret Thatcher. (One shudders at the thought of their bastard offspring — and rightly so, do we not find that figure in Tony Blair’s ideologue, Anthony Giddens?) Making parallel but inverse claims, both Laclau and Thatcher assert the death of the social in their aphoristic philosophy. On the one hand, Laclau proudly informs us that “society is impossible” and, on the other hand, Thatcher smugly proclaims “there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families”. While their politics, presumably, do not coincide, the basis of their politics do. According to Laclau, “‘Society’ is not a valid object of discourse”. This is to say that the referrent of ‘society’ cannot be ‘fixed’ and any attempt to ‘fix’ the meaning of ‘society’ is an instance of ‘hegemony’ — the imposition of a false universal. For Laclau to claim that society is impossible is to claim that demands cannot be made in the name of society or against society. Thatcher fully agrees with this analysis. Asserting that there are, on one hand, individuals and, on the other hand, families, Thatcher is arguing for a stringent division between the public and the private. Thus, publically, people interact as individuals on the market and, privately, people interact intimately in morality. Morality, ‘Victorian values’, and ‘family values’ are equivalent: moral demands can only be made against intimates. All other demands — those that occur in public — take on a market form and are thus most fully resolved through tort law. Either way, society as a moral domain, one able to make demands on individuals and groups and one subject to demands by individuals and groups does not exist; indeed, it cannot.

Consequently, making demands in the name of the social; that is, asserting the priority of the social over other forms of organization, especially the economy, is, from this perspective, both the most criminal and the most naive thing one could say. To assert the social is to destroy neo-liberalism.

We can then properly understand, on the one hand, recent interest in solidarity and, on the other hand, the politics of recent unrest and protest. The moment of unity, that which ties all of the recent uprisings together, is solidarity; that is, a claim made in the name of the social against the social, a claim that asserts the priority of the social over the economic. Whether the particular issue is pensions (England), a fair contract (New York), precarity (France), immigration (United States), or race (New Orleans and the banlieues), the common political expression is that society is, ultimately, a public sphere of morality that asserts its priority over the economy.

When asked during the 1968 riots about what radicals should do, Alexendre Kojeve flippantly suggested that the students learn to ‘read Greek’. He never finished that thought or explained himself; the reader was and is free to draw conclusions. Presently, the most radical thing one could do is become a sociologist and read Durkheim. That is, reclaim the centrality of solidarity and the social.

(Cross-posted to Long Sunday)