Necessity and Unexceptional Sovereignty

• In Event: Capitalism and Self-Determination: Past, Present and Future

Abstract

Arendt once wrote that “all rulership has its original and its most legitimate source in man’s wish to emancipate himself from life’s necessity, and men achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them.” This paper argues that an effort to understand the nature of sovereignty in contemporary capitalism might best be pursued not through Schmitt’s influential characterization of sovereignty as inaugurated in the decision on the exception, but by concentrating on necessity. In the “permanent state of emergency”, the exception loses its critical grip. Necessity points to a conception of sovereignty—the determination of the distribution of the burdens of life—able to help us grapple with crucial challenges to the modern state. The crises of accelerating climate change and inequality, for example, are today so unexceptional they are paradigmatic of global political economy. For the contemporary capitalist state, the problem is not (if it ever was) the decisive act in the declaration of political-economic or ecological emergency. Instead, unfolding calamity demands necessary, almost mundane answers to the question of the distribution of life’s burden. This gives new meaning to the “tragic” nature of politics in liberalism. If liberal order presumes, as Arendt put it, the “terrible truth that only violence and rule over others could make some men free”, we are perhaps witness to the generalization of a foundational violence liberalism has previously visited largely upon those excluded from the community of the free.

Author

• Geoff Mann, Simon Fraser University