The Founding of Modern States Chapter Two the Founding of Non
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1 The Founding of Modern States Chapter Two The Founding of Non-Democratic States Richard Bensel Gary S. Davis Professor Department of Government Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14850 Abstract: All modern states claim that they rule by popular consent and that this consent arises out of the state’s commitment to a transcendent social purpose demanded by their citizens. They also claim that both popular consent and the state’s transcendent social purpose emerged from a founding moment when the state’s right to rule was created. In this manuscript, I ask: How does the founding meld the metaphysical belief in the “will of the people,” the granting of sovereignty, and the recognition of a transcendent social purpose into a symbolic act that then enables the state to secure political and social order? Although this melding is more complex than commonly acknowledged for traditional democracies, it is even more complicated for otherwise authoritarian regimes. In those foundings that produce non-democratic states, the justification of the new sovereignty originates in a transcendent social purpose that is both clearly articulated in political doctrine and susceptible to misrecognition if subjected to conventional democratic politics. At the founding, the political party that led the revolution utilizes the form of a legislative assembly to craft a constitution but it is the party itself that manifests the popular will and thus melds sovereignty, social purpose, and the will of the people into the creation of a new state. Note to the Reader The text is obviously much too long. The best way to condense the reading to a manageable size is to treat the three middle sections (this version: on the Russian-pp. 7-24, Iranian-pp. 25-69, and Nazi-pp. 70-121 revolutions, respectively) as extended footnotes on the 2 material in the introduction (pp. 1-5) and conclusion (pp. 92-108). Only the latter sections should be considered the “core” reading. Introduction In all modern foundings, the new state has been dedicated to a clearly articulated transcendent social purpose. In most cases, the announcement of this purpose prominently appears in the text of a new constitution. In democratic foundings, this purpose is understood to be something that the people can fully comprehend in the sense that they both fully understand what it is and how it can be collectively realized. As a result, the will of the people is considered to fundamentally determine the translation of the transcendent social purpose into the design of state institutions and principles. The founding elite, such as they are, does no more than record and translate the popular will that is revealed in a free and open democratic process. In non- democratic foundings, however, the transcendent social purpose is viewed as vulnerable to misrecognition if it is legislated in what is conventionally regarded as free and open democratic politics. For that reason, the revolutionary elite directs a complex process in which the people are viewed as generally aware of what it is that they should (and do) will as the purpose to which the state must be dedicated but they are not, for whatever reason, competent to carry out the founding without the intervention of the revolutionary elite. While the revolutionary elite still utilizes the form of a legislative assembly to craft a constitution, the elite itself claims to manifest the popular will and thus, as political agent, oversees the melding of sovereignty, social purpose, and the will of the people when the new state is founded. Three non-democratic foundings are examined in this chapter: the instantiation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Russian revolution; the creation of an Islamic theocracy in the Iranian revolution; and the emergence of the Third Reich as the enabler of the historical destiny of the German people. In modern foundings, misrecognition of the transcendent social purpose is possible for at least two different reasons: (a) the will of the people may be not be evidenced because either (i) the identity of the people is not correctly specified or (ii) social relations within the political community somehow distort the people’s apprehension of what they must do; or (b) the will of the people must be refined and shaped after state is created.1 The possibility of misrecognition in the first sense is the primary justification for political regulations in democratic states. In the United States, for example, the federal and state governments regulate campaign contributions, require registration of voters at the polls, guarantee minority representation through the 1 The popular will is always imperfect in that something invariably impairs its natural expression in majority rule. This imperfection means that there is always a disjunction between the conception of the people (a) as imbricated in the social purpose to which a state’s sovereignty is dedicated and (b) as revealed in unregulated majority voting. For that reason, both democratic and non-democratic states “refine” the popular will. This refinement assumes that the people could not accurately identify or effectively realize that transcendent social purpose--even after its recognition at the founding--in the absence of state intervention. 3 construction of district boundaries, certify candidates who may stand for election, set age and residency requirements for suffrage, and so forth. These regulations operate on the popular will by either regulating its formation (e.g., campaign contributions), policing its expression (e.g., imposing suffrage requirements), restricting the alternatives from which the people may choose (e.g., outlawing party organizations, disqualifying individuals as candidates, or determining which issues might be the subject of a referendum), or compensating for deep-seated but improper opinions (e.g., racial and ethnic bias). While there is no question that these things have a substantive impact on what is evidenced as the will of the people (e.g., in the outcome of elections), the declared purpose is to purify the popular will from contaminating influence without otherwise influencing what the popular will might express. In this case, the concept of misrecognition thus presumes the existence of a pristine popular will that can be revealed if the political community eliminates or compensates for factors that would otherwise distort its manifestation. In theory, the will of the people is left undisturbed by these eliminations and adjustments; the content (what the people would will) is merely made available to the community. The transcendent social purpose in such states is thus dedicated to the identification and realization of the purified will of the people, along with those values and guarantees (e.g., freedom of the press) that facilitate the democratic process and make its reproduction through time possible.2 In non-democratic states, misrecognition of the transcendent social purpose occurs when the people have a broad but imperfect understanding of what it is they should (and thus do) will. Here the problem directly concerns content and only indirectly involves process. The content of what should be (and thus is) the will of the people can be (and is) revealed to those (in practice, the revolutionary elite) who are either particularly trained, skilled, or gifted in its comprehension. This revolutionary elite utilizes the people’s largely instinctual understanding of what they should (and thus do) will to mobilize them against the ancien regime which both views the will of the people and the people themselves as hostile forces. The grounding for the revolutionary elite’s privileged understanding of the will of the people is primarily historical, arising from comprehension of an unfolding pattern in which the people as both object and participant play a central role. It is this role that the people can misrecognize even as they are instinctually summoned to realize their destiny. The primary task of the revolutionary elite is thus, in the first instance, to mobilize the people’s instinctual understanding of their historical destiny in order to found the new state and then to ensure that this destiny is forcefully and efficiently realized. Part of that realization is the education and refinement of the people’s understanding of their 2 The primary transcendent social purpose of democratic foundings is the dedication of the state to the continued and (largely) unfiltered control of the will of the people. Thus the regulations described in the text apply to both the founding (when the popular will creates the state) and politics after the founding (when the popular will directs state policy). Misrecognition of the will of the people originates, for the most part, in the same potentially distorting influences both before and after the founding. The major difference is that, after the founding the state itself can become a self-interested (and thus potentially distorting) influence. 4 historical destiny in a process that is not consultative (in the manner of democratic states) but, instead, involves doctrinal instruction. For example, in the Russian Revolution, Bolsheviks held that politically conscious workers could broadly recognize the historical role that their class must play but were nonetheless imperfectly aware of the proper political strategies and tactics that would realize their historical destiny. The actual content of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was thus the responsibility of the vanguard party which acted not as representatives of or in the name of the workers but as their correctly-informed political consciousness. The Bolsheviks thus knew what it was that the workers should (and thus did) will even if the workers themselves might misrecognize the transcendent social purpose of the revolution (i.e., the historical destiny imbricated in the state in the founding). At the founding of the Soviet state, this transcendent social purpose (the realization of the communist revolution as the next and final historical stage) was thus a technical matter whose theoretical preconditions and practical actualization were perfectly known only to the vanguard party.