Re-Reading the Imagery of the Body Politic Wade Roberts

Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 2007 Life of the People, Body of the People: Re-reading the Imagery of the Body Politic Wade Roberts Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Roberts, W. (2007). Life of the People, Body of the People: Re-reading the Imagery of the Body Politic (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1113 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LIFE OF THE PEOPLE, BODY OF THE PEOPLE: RE-READING THE IMAGERY OF THE BODY POLITIC A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty Of the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Wade Roberts ii “…we know today that the life of the people is only secured if the racial traits and hereditary health of the body of the people are preserved.”—Ottmar von Versucher, Nazi ‘racial hygiene’ specialist “Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects, the whole somber thing called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been bought! How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all ‘good things’!”—Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is impossible to acknowledge everyone who helped me along the way; nevertheless, I’d like to recognize the following individuals, who helped me to formulate the problems and/or arguments of the dissertation more clearly. My director, Diane Perpich, offered invaluable advice which helped me to clarify the focus of the essay. My readers were also insightful; Fred Evans consistently pressed me to think about the normative implications of my argument, Daniel Selcer helped me to see the importance of Hobbes’s ontology for understanding his political theory, and Charles Mills gave me instructive criticisms regarding the importance of thinking about different kinds of liberalism. Steven Hendley has been my mentor for years, and I can’t begin to express my thanks for all his guidance. I’d also like to thank my colleagues at the McAnulty College of Liberal Arts, and most of all, thanks to my family and especially my wife Kristen, who has been extremely supportive throughout the project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Liberalism and the Fundamental Ideological Fantasy—1 Chapter 1: Life and Death of the Macro-Body in Contemporary Liberalism—30 Chapter 2: The Present-Absence of the Body in Contemporary Liberalism—100 Chapter 3: Security, Liberalism and the Governance of Micro-Bodies—163 Chapter 4: Antagonizing Liberalism, or Power and the Dialectic of Inclusion/Exclusion—215 Bibliography—274 1 INTRODUCTION: LIBERALISM AND THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEOLOGICAL FANTASY When Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man was published in 1992, it was greeted with fanfare in the American press. This reception came as no surprise to political observers who were familiar with the book’s thesis; it was an exercise in triumphalism which celebrated the virtues (and global hegemony) of liberalism and ‘free- market economics’. 1 Likewise, it was hardly shocking to discover that his homage to a dominant political theory (which happened to coincide with the state ideology of American empire) was written by a deputy director in the State Department of George H.W. Bush. At any rate, Fukuyama’s essay captured the essentials of a quasi-official narrative which had been circulating in the American media since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. According to Fukuyama, the grand Hegelian metanarrative of History had reached its inevitable termination with the defeat of liberal democracy’s only significant theoretical competitor, Soviet-style communism. He wrote that Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind [sic] had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an “end of history”: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all the really big questions had been settled. 2 Fukuyama, needless to say, accepts the Hegelian rather than the Marxist conception of historical progress; and while he acknowledges that liberal societies have encountered a 1 Fukuyama prefers the term ‘free-market’ economies to ‘capitalism’ because the latter “has acquired so many pejorative connotations over the years.” See The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 44. 2 Ibid, xii. 2 variety of social problems, such as “drugs, homelessness, and crime {as well as] environmental damage and the frivolity of consumption” he nevertheless insists that “these problems are not obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles.” 3 Indeed, liberalism provides the ideal basis for recognizing the fundamental dignity of human beings; he suggests that “[n]o other arrangement of human social institutions is better able to satisfy this longing, and hence no further progressive historical change is possible.” 4 In other words, liberal social and economic institutions (as well, it goes without saying, as liberal political theory) represent the highest conceivable political achievement for humanity, and even though liberal democracies carry on an internecine struggle with certain social problems we can also recognize that the improvement of living conditions and social welfare is merely a question of referring to the solutions available to us within the parameters of liberalism itself.5 This constitutes, at any rate, the basic premises of a consensus in the West regarding the inherent superiority of liberal institutions and free-market economics. It is clear that, over a decade after the publication of Fukuyama’s essay, liberalism’s hegemony is no longer uncontested; there are challenges both from retrograde fundamentalisms and populisms (on the right) as well as anti-globalization and pro- democracy movements (on the left). Despite the emergence of alternatives at the level of practice, however, liberalism remains the dominant theory in contemporary political 3 Ibid, xix. 4 Ibid, xviii. 5 As Jacques Derrida has noted, however, there is an important equivocation in Fukuyama’s work: when he (Fukuyama) wants to highlight the triumph of liberal democracy, he points to empirical evidence that liberalism is on the march, emerging across the globe as communist regimes are transformed into open, free-market societies; when he admits that liberal governments continue to grapple with socioeconomic problems, however, he shifts to the level of normativity. There is, then, a problematic vacillation between different two levels of argumentation. Cf. Specters of Marx , trans. Peggy Kamuf ( New York: Routledge, 1994), especially pp. 56-75. 3 philosophy (at least among Western intellectuals). In an essay from 2005, for example, Chantal Mouffe offers a summary of the Western intelligentsia’s beliefs concerning the efficacy of liberal values, and her report on the current state of affairs (which it is difficult to argue against) is disconcertingly similar to Fukuyama’s analysis (although Mouffe is highly critical of modern liberalism); she outlines the key assumptions in the following passage: The ‘free world’ has triumphed over communism and, with the weakening of collective identities, a world ‘without enemies’ is now possible. Partisan conflicts are a thing of the past and consensus can now be obtained through dialogue. Thanks to globalization and the universalization of liberal democracy, we can expect a cosmopolitan future bringing peace, prosperity and the implementation of human rights worldwide. 6 Mouffe, of course, rejects the premises of neoliberal orthodoxy, and I will return to her arguments in the final two chapters. At this point, however, I have simply cited her assessment in order to indicate the basic continuity and hegemony of a position that fails to recognize the profound, indeed structural, contradictions which haunt the formulation of liberalism’s theoretical program. This essay, or at least the idea for the essay, originated in part as a reaction to the celebratory and hyper-optimistic discourses of contemporary liberals. It has changed in numerous ways; the central arguments and guiding narrative threads have evolved over time. Yet there is still, as Mouffe’s observations emphasize, an unwarranted confidence in the ability of liberal theory and institutions to grapple with fundamental socioeconomic problems, such as gaps in opportunity between the rich and poor in the so-called ‘First World’, and the intolerable chasm of inequality which separates even poorer Americans or Europeans from the overwhelming majority of people who live in the developing world. 6 Cf. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1. 4 While I think the so-called ‘contingent difficulties’ of free-market institutions and parliamentary

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