From Order to Organizing: Rethinking Political Realism & Radical Democracy

• In Event: Organizing Struggles from Below

Abstract

Bernard Williams kicked off the realist turn in political theory when he famously argued that the first problem of politics is “the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation.” Since then, realists have generally held that order should be the guiding concept of political theory. In William Galston’s words, political theorists must recognize that “civil order is the sine qua non for every other political good.” And though realism has flourished as an academic research program in the last decade and half, its fixation on the idea of order could hardly come at worse time in the real world of democratic politics.

When he accepted the Republican nomination for President in 2016, Donald Trump also insisted on the primacy of order. Channeling the rhetoric of “law and order” that has been a staple of conservative politics in the United States since at least the civil rights movement, he proclaimed, “There can be no prosperity without law and order.” A half century earlier, when Richard Nixon debuted the rhetoric of law and order at the 1968 Republican National Convention, his language was even more uncomfortably like that of contemporary realism. “The American Revolution was and is dedicated to progress,” Nixon told the assembled delegates “but our founders recognized that the first requisite of progress is order.” In contrast, the democratic movements that emerged to challenge Trump and his ilk have downplayed the significance of order in favor of an emphasis on the idea of organizing. “For me,” says Black Lives Matter co-founder Opel Tometi, “the solution is always organizing.”

In this paper, I trace a path for realist thought from the problem of order to the problem of popular organizing. Broadly speaking, organizing is simply the creation, direction, and maintenance of collective forms of political agency. More specifically, the kind of insurgent democratic organizing practiced by movements like Black Lives Matter, which I call popular organizing, creates political power by way of strategically limited form of disorder within an existing political order. Rather than starting with the question of who the people are, how they are represented by the state, or how claims to peoplehood are made, popular organizing begins with the question of how existing opportunities for political action can be used to constitute the people as a political subject. Around what sorts of institutions can collective identities be forged, and what possibilities for popular agency do different institutions give rise to? How do different kinds of organizing help people learn to exercise power in a democratic way? These are traditionally realist questions insofar as they are questions about the status of political action and the role of institutions in shaping both actions and the identities of the agents who inhabit them. At the same time, organizing goes beyond realism’s concern with states, statesman, and the legitimation of sovereign power to understand the emergent forms of popular agency that vivify democratic life. In short, studying popular organizing means studying the ideas, institutions, and practices through which disempowered groups can be create new and empowering forms of collective political agency.

The paper begins with an examination of realist political theory is, what its intellectual commitments are, and what the strengths and limitations of its research program have been. Then, in what I see as a friendly amendment, I suggest how some of realism’s core concerns, particularly the relationship between political order and political action, might be better grasped through the category of organizing. I argue that realism’s tendency of turn order into a static condition created and maintained by the state, rather than a description of an ongoing and sometimes contradictory set of political actions, limits its understanding of democratic politics. Finally, I turn to the question of how realism’s commitment to historical specificity and its emphasis on strategic concepts like power and interest, rather than juridical concepts like right and justice, makes it ideal for studying the role popular organizing has played in the history of political thought. The advantage of thinking in terms of organizing, I argue, is that it does not force us to choose between order and disorder so much as it helps us think about how political change is brought about by the dynamic interaction between them.

Author

• Vijay Phulwani, Cornell University