Eldon Kerr i
Politics and spirit: a rhetorical analysis of the works of David
Graeber, 1999-2016
Stephen Eldon Kerr, McGill University
Submitted August 2016 ©
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree
of Master of Arts in Political Science
Eldon Kerr ii
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
“Cynicism has replaced ideology”: undercutting the dictatorship of no alternative 15
Part one: Cynicism and ideology 17
What does Graeber think the problem is? 17
How does Graeber try to respond to these sorts of ideological problems? 21
Being prescriptive while trying not to appear so: creating a new common sense 27
The politics of vagueness 31
Part two: Ambiguity and silence, affordances of a rhetorical context 34
Of verticals, pre-formed schemes, and defining reality: Graeber’s enemies on the Left 36
The politics of attaching normative weight 40
The politics of the imagination: blurred conceptual distinctions 43
Of ethos and affordances 48
A very uncommon common sense 51
Conclusion 53
Works Cited 62
Eldon Kerr iii
This thesis offers a reading of David Graeber’s works for a general audience in order to advance two related arguments about political realism, the branch of political theory whose proponents think political theorists should concern themselves less with abstract theorizing about ideals and more with the messy realities of politics in which people actually do things to other people. The main contribution of the thesis is thus to debates about methodology within political theory.
The first argument is that optimistic and vague political writing, of the sort realists might think too abstract and diffuse to be a part of ‘real’ politics, should not necessarily be considered any less political for its optimism and vagueness. In fact, if one believes political horizons must be widened, then a dreamy, optimistic, ambiguity might be one strategy of accomplishing that goal.
The second, more important, argument is that the spirit of a piece of writing matters, and the spirit of a piece of writing will often tend to be both philosophical and political. I argue that the ‘really’ political and the ‘abstractly’ theoretical are not as far apart as some realists seem to think. Theoretical texts are also political interventions, and political texts also carry normative and abstract spirits along with them. Through my reading of obviously diffuse texts like
Graeber’s, I show that understanding ostensibly ‘specific’ texts, such as those written by political theorists, is itself a vague art; the dividing line between hazy political speech and rigorous academic language, like the dividing line between different linguistic or political contexts, is itself porous. The realist’s location of ‘real politics’ as being somehow ‘out-there’, away from the theorists’ world of dusty books, misses the political spirit which animates theoretical language, and the abstract normative concerns which animate real politics. Eldon Kerr iv
Cette thèse propose une interprétation des travaux de David Graeber publiés pour un grand public afin d’avancer deux arguments concernant le réalisme politique. Les défenseurs d’un tel réalisme pensent que les théoriciens politiques devraient avant tout s’occuper non de modèles abstraits et idéaux mais plutôt d’une réalité politique constituée et compliquée par une série d’actions concrète entre individus. La contribution principale de cette thèse s’inscrit donc dans une série de débats méthodologiques en théorie politique.
L’argument premier concerne une écriture politique optimiste et vague, de telle sorte que les réalistes la trouveront trop abstraite et dispersée pour s’inscrire dans le ‘vrai’ politique. Nous suggérons qu’une telle écriture ne devrait pas nécessairement être pensée comme moins politique en vertu de son caractère optimiste et quelque peu vague. Ces qualités, au contraire, permettent un élargissement des horizons politiques.
Le second argument, le plus important, est que l’esprit d’un texte écrit importe, et que celui-ci se dédouble fréquemment comme politique et philosophique. Je suggère que le
‘vraiment’ politique et l’’abstrait’ théorique ne se sépare pas tant que semble le penser certains réalistes. Le texte théorique est aussi intervention politique, et le texte politique se caractérise autant par son poids normatif que par son esprit abstrait. À travers une interprétation de textes clairement éparpillés, comme ceux de Graeber, je montre que la compréhension de textes paraissant plus spécifique est elle même une approximation ; la limite entre le discours politique flou et le langage académique rigoureux, comme la limite entre d’autres contextes politique et linguistique, et elle même en jeu. L’inscription du ‘vrai’ politique comme étant ‘là-bas’,
‘dehors’, loin du monde bibliothécaire des théoriciens, ignore autant l’esprit politique qui anime le langage théorique que l’importance d’abstractions normative au sein du vrai politique.
Eldon Kerr v
Acknowledgements
I’ve often wondered if the thanks given to advisors in thesis acknowledgements isn’t somewhat overblown or even, in the most seemingly-egregious cases, barely-concealed sycophancy. I need wonder no more. Without the tireless efforts of Will Roberts, this thesis would be a pale imitation of barely-passable work. He is a wonderful teacher, a kind man, and I feel blessed to have been given so much of his time.
I’d also like to thank all students I have met in the last two years, too many to list here, who have helped me learn and grow. Your lessons were as good as professionals’! Still, thanks also to Yves Winter, Arash Abizadeh, Víctor Muñiz-Fraticelli, Jacob Levy, Tara Alward, and all the other teachers and staff of McGill University: I wouldn’t have an M.A. without you!
Big shoutout to all who have lived in 1208 the past few years. Thanks for the food, drink, chat, and allowing me to clog up the living room with mounds of papers and books. To Claudia, whose last two years have been so difficult, so heartbreaking, yet who never failed to listen to my quotidian worries with such grace, charity, and charm: A++.
Thanks to the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture without whose generosity this work would not exist, for better or worse. Eldon Kerr 1
Politics and spirit: a rhetorical analysis of the works of David Graeber, 1999-2016
Introduction
In recent years, one of the most prominent questions concerning the status and methodologies of political theory1 has been about the question of realism. A number of theorists have worried that the kind of ideal-theory approach taken by many (and likely the majority of) theorists throughout the later part of the Twentieth century and onward has tended to overlook and even obscure vital parts of political life. Although the critics of ideal theory are drawn from different areas of the discipline and do not often share political commitments, they do share the belief that political theory ought to concern itself less with theorizing about what justice would require in an ideal world and more with the messy non-ideal realities of political life. In the following section, I will lay out what I take to be the principal concerns of the political realists, before explaining how my project hopes to correct some of their oversights. Since the concerns of realists are strongly intertwined – is it possible to really separate an action from the actor? – this breakdown will necessarily be somewhat artificial, but it should help clarify the main elements of the realist charge.
What is realism?
Most obviously, realism is associated with the desire to have political theorists take the
‘real world’ more seriously. It is not the attempt to get political theorists to believe that all politics is simply realpolitik (although realists would no doubt want theorists to recognize that realpolitik is a part of political life), but rather the attempt to get theorists to focus on the
1 For the purposes of this project, the terms political theory and political philosophy will be understood to denote the same thing, although do I recognize that there are often important and predictable educational background and research interests between the two camps. Eldon Kerr 2 concrete historical realities of politics and abandon their retreat into the kind of ideal-theorizing about what justice would require that is associated with post-Rawlsian political philosophy.
In the words of one of political realism’s principal advocates, Raymond Geuss, “political philosophy must recognize that politics is in the first instance about action and the contexts of action, not about mere beliefs or propositions” (Philosophy and Real Politics 11). Realists believe that political theorists need to take seriously the fact that politics is always about attempts to do things. More importantly, they need to take seriously the fact that politics is not just about people doing things, but about people doing things to other people. Geuss thinks that the archetypal political question is that posed by Lenin: “Who? Whom?” (Philosophy and Real
Politics 25). For the realists, politics is about who does what to whom for whose benefit.
Importantly, this doing is not just the frictionless ‘putting into practice’ of principles and theories, but a realm constituted by that process of putting into practice. In the words of Mark
Philp, the idea of a good life in which ethics and politics “are effortlessly linked seems a utopian aspiration…political virtue is not only not rooted in the good life, it is in its nature exposed to demands that may compromise some of our most cherished commitments” (Political Conduct
38-39). To do politics is not simply to apply ethics, but to enter a world in which my doing is always related to other people’s doing, so that what I choose to do is inextricably linked to what other people are doing and plan to do.
Taken together, concern with action and actors lead realists to the following conclusion: political theory should recognize that politics is an autonomous space with concepts and ways of thinking that are particular to it. In the words of Bernard Williams, “political philosophy is not just applied moral philosophy...Nor is it just a branch of legal philosophy…political philosophy must use distinctively political concepts, such as power, and its normative relative, legitimation” Eldon Kerr 3
(In the beginning 77). The belief behind this commitment is that the post-Rawlsian political theory of the late twentieth century represents above all a desire to escape politics, either through law or through ethics. Politics, insist realists like Williams, cannot simply be subsumed into the methodologies of either field without missing or distorting what Jeremy Waldron calls “the circumstances of politics” (102). Political theorists who ignore this, the realists say, wind up with principles and analyses that (a) have no bearing on how politics plays out, because they are unable to tell political actors anything useful about how to go about their day to day political business, and (b) aren’t able to tell fellow scholars anything interesting about how politics does function, because they ignore the central features of what makes politics politics.
Realism’s self-fulfilling prophecy
I will argue, however, that realists run the risk of infecting their object of study (real politics) with their own worries and concerns regarding the conduct of their discipline (political theory). In their haste to move away from what they take to be the utopian fictions of high- liberalism, realists have overlooked the role that utopias and fictions actually play in politics, and in their wish to make political theory focus on the concrete, they have reduced the concrete to anything concerned with immediate practical considerations (Who shall I vote for? Who shall I ally with?), at the expense of those concrete forms of thought and action that are directed towards more ‘immaterial’ ends, such as attempts to change common sense.
The criticisms of the realist position which follow are not intended to be exhaustive of all possible avenues of criticism, nor do I think they in any way fatally undermine realism. I do, however, think that these criticisms are effects of the narrowness of most realists’ understanding of the political sphere, and of what constitutes political action and speech, and thus I think that if realism is to make good on its promise, and if it is to defeat these kinds of criticisms, then realists Eldon Kerr 4 need to take a more holistic view of what constitutes real politics, and remember not to confuse their problems with fellow scholars with the nature of real politics.
Some realists might just be pessimists; some might just confuse their own pessimism for realism. The ‘realistic’ focus on ‘accepting the concrete realities of life’ too often seems to mean accepting that the world out there is basically unchangeable, and that any attempt to change it is probably doomed. But realist pessimism is not simply a belief that the world probably cannot be changed very much; it is the belief that the world cannot be changed because people are quite bad. As much as realists say they want to talk about ‘concrete realities’ (Hall 174), the concrete reality they ultimately focus on is humans, and the intransigence of a flawed human nature. For example, Stephen Elkin writes that the circumstances of politics can be defined as a:
state of affairs in which there is a large aggregation of people who (1) have conflicting purposes that engender more or less serious conflict; (2) are given to attempts to use political power to further their own purposes and those of people with who they identify; (3) are inclined to use political power to subordinate others; and (4) are sometimes given to words and actions that suggest that they value limiting the use of political power by law and harnessing it to public purposes. (254-5)
Here, Elkin’s focus on the negative parts of politics is obvious. Like most realists, Elkin suggests that human conflict and the human temptation to subordinate others are essential, ineradicable parts of politics. That may, of course, be true. But Elkin makes it the primary assumption of his ‘circumstances of politics’, the criterion which conditions all others. While
Elkin can admit that cooperation and compassion are also ineradicably essential parts of political life, since they are instances of people “using political power to further their own purposes,” he can only consider cooperation and compassion against the backdrop of “more or less serious conflict,” so that cooperation and compassion are rendered tactics in a general’s notebook. Now, it may well be true that conflicting purposes necessarily lead to actual conflict, but if it is, then it Eldon Kerr 5 is also true that both are effectively (that is, from our point of view) pre-given features of the world. Elkin needs to make the case as to why we should focus on the conflicting purposes
(which for him are prior) rather than the (for him, resultant) conflict, but he never does.
The particular characteristics the realists choose to focus on are not politically neutral.2
The realists want to make those negative aspects the center of political theorizing because they fear the consequences if we do not (see Newey 2013). The realists champion a kind of modesty that they think should curb the worst excesses of political utopianism, but it is a modesty that is ultimately centered on skepticism regarding human beings’ tendencies and capacities, rather than one related to particular kinds of political projects or world-changing visions (see, for example,
Dunn 2000). Of course, as Lorna Finlayson has recently pointed out, we should be careful not to equate realism with pessimism with conservatism, but it is notable that, for all the realists’ stated desire to introduce a more critical strain of theorizing to the academy of political theorists, one that challenges high-liberalism’s sacred cows of abstract rights and freedoms, realists who stress the inadequacies of human beings end up championing a position that seems like victim-blaming
(“With Radicals like These…” 2, 12).3
As Finlayson argues, because realists see the negative features of human life as being the main barrier to political progress, they end up blaming the dominators and dominated alike for their predicament (12-13):
When political failures are blamed on ‘human’ ones, the implication – at least, the conversational implicature – is very often that it is the ‘human’ failings of the people at large (‘the masses’) that are explanatorily salient, rather than those of ruling elites. The fact that the deficiencies cited are also held to be common to all
2 As some of them might be willing to acknowledge. See Geuss, “Liberalism and Its Discontents.” 3 I think it’s worth quoting Finlayson in full here: “It may be true that if people were all impeccably behaved, or perfectly rational, all of the time, then they wouldn’t have to face the political conditions they actually face – in that case there wouldn’t really be any need for politics at all – but then, it may often be true (albeit irrelevant) that the behaviour of a woman, sometimes including mistakes and errors of judgement that she makes, plays a causal role in bringing about what subsequently happens to her” (12). Eldon Kerr 6
human beings is beside the point: if an instance of rape is put down to the victim’s alleged inebriation and recklessness, then that is still victim-blaming even if it is frankly acknowledged that the rapist was also drunk and reckless (but only the victim’s condition is taken to be relevant); the sole difference this makes is to add a layer of hypocrisy to the evaluation. (13)
I agree with Finlayson that such a realism is highly regrettable, and I also agree that realism need not mean accepting “a de-politicisation of a ‘non-ideal’ world – the shortcomings of which are traced to unalterable historical universals – and thus a muting of calls to change it” (13). But I also think this kind of pessimism is an effect of the realist’s narrow understanding of what constitutes politics.
Most realists4 focus on leaders, states, and institutions as the venues in which ‘real politics’ occurs (Dunn 2000, Waldron 2013, Geuss 2008, Rossi 2010, Bavister-Gould 2013).5
When ordinary citizens enter the picture, it is only to address or to be addressed by leaders.
Galston summarizes the realist position on what real politics is all about: “Theorists, [realists] insist, should spend less time debating the fine points of the Difference Principle and more on the contexts and processes through which leaders engage one another, and the citizenry, to address shared problems” (Galston 394). This point of view simply assumes that the problems of leaders and citizens are, or can be, “shared,” and it also implies that politics happens in or around the corridors of power in a nation-state.
It is not surprising that a focus on the machinations of national politics and political parties would lead one to downplay the role of idealistic thinking and might, just might, give one a dim view of human nature.6 This focus also ignores the fact that institutional change often
4 Though not all, see, for example, Lisa Schwartzman’s “Abstraction, Idealization, and Oppression.” 5 David Runciman even seems to think that the most interesting line of questioning political realists can pursue regarding the Internet, and how the Internet has changed politics, is how it has changed the character of the state and the kinds of legitimation stories the state is able to tell about itself (Runciman). 6 Nor is it surprising that academics, such as Geuss, who believe that their main functional role has been reduced to “training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories and arguments” (“A world without Why”,) might think that all the real action is taking place Eldon Kerr 7 occurs in response to optimistic demands by citizens.7 To say, in the manner of realists like
Williams (3) and Philp (182), that “Preventing the worst is the first duty of political leaders, and striving for far-reaching social improvement makes sense only when doing so does not significantly increase the odds that some previous abated evil will reappear” (Galston 394), is not only to surreptitiously adopt the perspective of those who have more to lose than to gain, nor merely to assume that the returning of some long “abated evil” is equal to or worse than the gains made by some new improvement, but to effectively hold political change accountable to an absurdly high standard: the results of any change must be almost completely predictable.
Here, a realist might say: ‘No, the outcomes of a change do not have to be completely predictable, it just has to be basically clear that the change will not bring about some horrible unintended consequences.’8 True enough, but by making this “the first duty of political leaders,” the realists submit that the avoidance of terrible consequences for some part of the population
(even if a small part) trumps the possible accrual of positive consequences for a (potentially) much greater part of the population. This might be a noble position to take in some cases, but on the realists’ own terms it seems an unreasonable theoretical point to hold to more generally, not least because the realists want us to pay attention to the fact that politics is made up of winners and losers. One person’s credit is another’s debit. And since in politics the rules of the game are themselves up for debate Galston’s move might have anti-political effects, or at the very least a status-quo bias. Most realists agree that permanent disagreement is an intrinsic part of politics.
But if so, then it is disagreement all the way down, including disagreement on whether
elsewhere, and not just elsewhere, but in places that seem to value exactly the opposite of what academia purports to value, namely action over thinking. 7 See Mark Stears’s illuminating account of 20th Century American radicalism, Demanding Democracy. 8 For an interesting angle on this question, see Newey, 2007. Eldon Kerr 8 something like Pareto optimality is the sine qua non of political life. The realists presuppose9 a certain kind of political common sense which, if they were to hold to their methodological positions, they would have to actually find out there in the world of real politics, and not simply ascribe to that world.
More importantly, however, the realists’ focus on political action that takes place within the leading institutions of nation-states saddles them with a wholly inadequate account of political judgment. For leading realists such as Geuss, judgment is about “envisioning the future while acting in the present” (“Political judgment” 1). Theorists, Geuss argues, must pay attention to “the standpoint and the cognitive and political skillset of the political actor – where judgment most definitely does not mean simply the subsumption of individual cases under pre-given concepts or rules” (4). This means, one assumes, that judgment implies figuring out what to do in specific cases that always have unique never-before-seen aspects. If political theorists are going to study politics, Geuss says, then they need to study political actors not as characters in the trolley problem, but as people negotiating the autonomous world of politics. Yet if that world really is autonomous, then importing ‘first duties’ which have a status-quo bias seems to disrespect the reality of that autonomous world, in which actors do not just seek to preserve the status quo.
I do not disagree with Geuss’s emphasis upon judgment. But when he writes that “the study of politics is primarily the study of actions and only secondarily of beliefs” (Philosophy and Real Politics 11), he overlooks much of what actually happens in actual politics and implies that political judgment is merely about deciding what to do. This is quite a damaging failure, because, as Michael Freeden notes, “it is impossible to ignore the patterns of political thinking in
9 One might argue that the realist focus on preventing bad outcomes might actually end up hastening the arrival of bad comes, as an attitude of caution turns to cynicism and a retreat from politics altogether. Eldon Kerr 9 a society if one wishes to say something serious about it” (“Interpretative realism and prescriptive realism” 2-3). Of course, realists might reply that they do acknowledge that thinking is an important part of politics: after all, it seems fairly indisputable that one of the reasons leaders and citizens would interact would be to change one another’s opinions. But because realists are so intent on focusing on the “contexts and processes” through which leaders and citizens engage, realists also seem to assume that this changing of opinions must always be directed at some short term goal of the kind that could be seen to make sense within those contexts and processes. Geuss writes that “one will never know when extracting [a] judgment from its wider action context and formulating it as a ‘mere’ belief will distort it, and in what way it will distort it” (Politics and the Imagination 3) but that also means that one cannot abstract from a particular decision context a definition about political judgment or thinking more generally. The contexts and processes (the institutions, basically) the realists choose to focus on carry their own logic as to what kinds of decisions and judgments participants can be expected to make, but that logic is not the sum total of political logic. If the study of real politics is supposed to be the source of political theory, then the stuff of real politics cannot be defined in advance without reinscribing the theoretical terms into the object of study.
In effect, realists say, ‘let’s focus on the real stuff of politics, and theorize based on that,’ but then end up defining what real politics is (basically as the playing of strategic games by people in positions of power) before they have even turned their attention to it. This not only constitutes a program of research that undermines the realist project itself, since the realists are only going to find what they expect to find, but also buttresses the institutions they choose to focus on from the real criticisms they really face in the real world of real politics. The realist position becomes a program that reinforces the institutional status-quo while defanging any Eldon Kerr 10 criticism of those institutions that does not emerge from those institutions. Effectively, the realists say: if you are not in the corridors of power, your action and thought cannot be really political.
What is most surprising about all this, but therefore quite telling, is that, by Geuss’s own admission, “a political philosophy…is not really an exclusively theoretical construction, but must be seen as an attempt to intervene in the world of politics” (“Neither history nor praxis”
288). Geuss is clear that he thinks the liberalism of Rawls has had a depoliticizing effect on the students who have read it (Gelonesi), and so conceives of his realist project as a necessary political as well as theoretical intervention in response to that sort of liberalism. Indeed, elsewhere Geuss has written that he “would like to think that [his] continuing to tell the story of
19th-20th century German practical philosophy…would have some potentially self-fulfilling effects” (Outside Ethics 65). Which is another way of saying: I hope my reflections on the real world of politics have real (political) effects. And Geuss is no politician.
What blinds Geuss and his fellow realists to the essential role thought and thinking plays in politics, then, is not so much their own personal convictions that thought and thinking has no place in politics, as much as their desire to correct what they take to be the oversights of others in their discipline. This desire has both a methodological and a political wing. Methodologically, realism is constructed as a corrective to contemporary political theory in general. Most theorists, the realists think, “try to silence, circumvent, contain, or ignore the forces that shape politics”
(Rossi “Reality and Imagination…” 504), and this must be stopped. Politically, as Finlayson argues, most realists are attempting to reform and alter the substantive conclusions of contemporary liberalism (or else, as in the case of Geuss, are hostile to liberalism tout court).
The realist project, then, is itself a political project that seeks to function by changing common- Eldon Kerr 11 sensiscal ideas about what the study of politics is really about. Most of the key realist texts do not make this critical attitude to liberalism the focal point of their argument – the arguments are primarily framed as interventions in the methodology literature – but it is still clear that the authors are critical of much of contemporary liberalism. Perhaps the realists practice the kind of politics they do not think actually is political?
The point is: unless the realists can build into their work a recognition of the more diffuse and less obviously (though ultimately not any less) concrete processes that occur in real politics
(things like trying to change people’s common sense), they will themselves only end up circumventing what it is they wish to study. Galston writes that “Realists begin from where a given community is” (Galston 395-6). But sometimes communities are constituted around notions of where it is they would like to go, which means that to understand such communities one would necessarily have to understand the role narratives, stories, and ideas play in shaping that community’s sense of self around a (possibly unattainable) future.10 Moreover, sometimes real politics consists in the self-aware attempt to change common sense (Jones). Since that is exactly what Geuss and other realists hope to do with regards to political theory departments, how strange is it that they would think others might not try and do the same regarding other institutions and spaces? People – the realists included! – are not so pessimistic that they do not think things can change. One might wonder if the optimism of high-liberalism has played an important role in ensuring its dominance within political theory departments.
The contribution of this project
The next section will examine some of the work of David Graeber, a self-described anarchist, who was a founder of Occupy Wall Street, and has seen his writing widely
10 For an example of how communities might become constituted around narrative tropes, see Maurice Charland’s interesting article, “Constitutive rhetoric: The case of the peuple québécois.” Eldon Kerr 12 disseminated in activist circles over the past decade and a half. Since Occupy, Graeber’s public profile has risen considerably, and he now writes regularly for a general audience and is frequently interviewed by broadcasters like the BBC. Graeber is also an academic, an expert in anthropological theory; his work marks an interesting intersection between theory and ‘real politics,’ because the substance of his really political commitments is often influenced by quite arcane theoretical work. That’s not to say that the theoretical work is in any sense prior to the activist commitments, just that Graeber’s is a very clear case of practice and theory intermingling in an overt and interesting way.
Nevertheless, the following section will look at examples of Graeber’s political speech and political thought which are both attempts to generate a certain kind of outcome, yet very vague and imprecise at the same time. Even the ostensible goals of some of these pieces are much more diffuse than the realists might consider ‘part of real politics.’ In doing so, the project will also help buttress the claim that the realists have overlooked the role optimism plays ‘out there in the real world of real politics.’ One might wonder if the realists’ distaste for optimism and utopianism within their own discipline has distracted them from the essential role it plays in politics. Unless political optimism is accorded respectful study, realists risk infecting their object of study with their own point of view.
It also hopes to show that, if one were to think that a kind of realism plays an ideological role in narrowing political horizons, then a dreamy, optimistic, ambiguity might be one strategy of dealing with it. Since very often realism does not only attempt to win the argument, it attempts to redraw the boundaries of political debate on its terms, so that any proposition, any change, is seen as inherently dangerous, when the same could always actually be said of the status quo. Eldon Kerr 13
Moreover, the project will suggest that political actors and writers – and perhaps, by extension, political audiences – are much more tolerant of ambiguity in politics than the realists might think. I think there are two reasons for this, which feed into each other. The first is strategic: ambiguity can allow writers and thinkers to advance political goals/messages while covering their backs. The second is due to that favorite trope of the realists: flawed human nature. Audiences do not necessarily expect or want political works to clearly and precisely state all their claims bluntly or interrogate all of the assumptions robustly. Often, they like to be able to take sides, and so works that actually permit moments of cognitive dissonance, and that do not call it out, might actually be more productive politically. A savvy author might take advantage of this fact – might try to prescribe without appearing to do so – and not lay everything out on the table.
This is still a project that takes place on the terms set by the realists, since it is studying actual instances of actual political thought. But the main thing I hope to show through my readings of Graeber is that the spirit of a piece of writing matters, and the spirit of a piece of writing will often tend to be both philosophical and really political. The definition of ‘spirit’ is notoriously vague – the word’s etymology reads like a what’s what of diffuse substances: air, breath, wind, odor – but I will understand it to be the collection of qualities and characteristics which form definitive elements of the character of a person or piece of writing. When one says, the spirit of Mary is such and such, one is saying that ‘such and such’ are definitive parts of who
Mary is. Definitive not in the sense of excluding other important parts of Mary’s character, but definitive in the sense that without those features Mary would not be Mary in any meaningful sense. To understand who Mary is means understanding her spirit. I think the same is true of a piece of writing. Eldon Kerr 14
That might strike one as a particularly vague kind of comment. How could one realistically define the spirit of a piece of writing? Wouldn’t one end up assuming the conclusion one was attempting to prove, since one could simply yell ‘spirit’ and claim interpretative victory? Well, yes, if misused. But that’s a risk to any approach. My point is more modest. I want to show that the ‘really’ political and the ‘abstractly’ theoretical are not as far apart as people like Geuss seem to think. Theoretical texts are also political interventions, and political texts also carry normative and abstract spirits along with them. By studying obviously diffuse and vague texts like Graeber’s, I want to show that understanding more ostensibly ‘specific’ texts like those of political theorists is itself a vague art; the dividing line between hazy political speech and rigorous academic language, like the dividing line between different linguistic or political contexts, is itself porous. The realist’s location of ‘real politics’ as being somehow ‘out- there’ misses the political spirit which animates theoretical language, and the abstract normative concerns which animate real politics. (Even when, as with Graeber, the actors in question seem to wish they didn’t have abstract commitments!) Opening the door to the ‘spirit’ of a text does mean opening the door to an interpretative hermeneutics which can never be pinned down one and for all, which might seem defeatist, if not for the fact that it also means opening the door to a recognition that texts which seem ‘obviously’ political or ‘obviously’ theoretical are not usually completely distinct. If that helps political theorists appreciate just how political they already are, that’s no bad thing.
Eldon Kerr 15
“Cynicism has replaced ideology”: undercutting the dictatorship of no
alternative
“This collapsing of the space for serious challenges to major social and political
institutions is arguably one role the language of ‘realism’ played in American politics in
the years following World War II.” (Markell 176)
David Graeber’s writings for a general audience consistently try to make the case that his audience should think more broadly and more optimistically about what kinds of political change can plausibly occur. He thinks that a pervasive cynicism has come to shape people’s outlooks and belief in political change, with the result that many of his readers simply don’t believe significant political change can occur. The problem of cynicism is ideological: it shrinks the political horizon and effectively neutralizes radical (or indeed any significant) alternatives even as mere ideas. In the first part of this section, I want to look at Graeber’s writing for a general audience, especially those published in the Baffler, and show that, if one wants to confront an ideological challenge like cynicism, then adopting a strategy which, by redeploying the tropes of a dominant ideology to another end, focuses on ideas, beliefs, and feelings, might actually be a very practical and very real political strategy. It’s not just that Graeber knows that what people think matters in real politics, but that he identifies thought patterns as a key thing for radicals to challenge and change. As Graeber’s writing on fetishism demonstrates, he thinks that many of today’s political problems are a result of us “creating things and then falling down before our own creations and worshipping them like gods” (“Can’t stop believing”). It is not that Graeber thinks thought is the only thing that matters in politics, more that revolution is always available if only people can learn to believe that it is. As we will see, trying to engender something as vague Eldon Kerr 16 as an optimistic spirit in an audience is at best an imprecise art – to read Graeber’s texts as purely philosophical or purely political interventions is to overlook the haziness of his method and agenda.
Yet, while realists would do well to incorporate thinking into their theories, the ‘lessons’ realists can draw from particular instances of political thought are quite limited. In the second part of this section, I want to show that Graeber’s relatively recent writings for a general audience carry the effects (bear the battle scars) of his writing for Leftist audiences from the early- to mid-2000s. Graeber’s writings for a general audience are less about political maneuvering than his work a decade earlier, which probably explains why he relies less on ethos in the latter period, but many of the rhetorical moves, claims, and ideas Graeber presents in his writings for a general audience were first worked out in relation to the more acutely political audience of those earlier articles. Not only does this mean a full understanding of political thinking in one context requires comprehending the way contexts overlap, (what appears vague in one context can appear specific in another), but it means that political strategies and thought patterns cannot be understood only with reference to what the actors and authors in question think they are trying to do. That a piece of vague political thought seems to function best as a play in a political strategy does not mean that is all it actually is. (Although even admitting that vague optimism is political might be too hard a pill to swallow for some realists.) No account of a political text can be complete without attending to its spirit – that that can only ever be a vague and interpretative practice suggests that any effort to construct a world of ‘real politics’ independent of the concerns of researchers is to approach the question from the wrong angle.
Rather than asking, how do people engage in real politics, and what can theorists learn from that, Eldon Kerr 17 it might be better to expand the horizons of what is considered theoretical and what is considered practical. Political actors, it turns out, often think they do both, at the same time.
Part one: Cynicism and ideology
What does Graeber think the problem is?
David Graeber diagnoses two kinds of reasons people in the audiences he primarily writes for (broadly speaking, the Anglophone North Atlantic) do not believe in the practical possibility of emancipatory social change anymore. The first is an overwhelming cynicism, the second is fetishism. Graeber thinks that both of these things perform an ideological function. As we will see, not only are these diagnoses somewhat vague and in their own way ideological, but the solution Graeber comes up with for trying to overcome problems of cynicism and fetishism are also vague and ideological.
In a January 2016 interview, David Graeber suggested that, nowadays, ideology is “not about convincing people that something is true, but convincing them that everybody else believes it’s true. In a way, cynicism has replaced ideology” (qtd. in De Grave). Graeber understands ideology as that which makes a specific set of contingent social relationships seem necessary.
His understanding is influenced by Marcel Maus insofar as Graeber believes that, “on some minimal level, all social possibilities are available simultaneously, and the main thing ideology does is to highlight a certain form of practice…and propose it as the essence of humanity”
(“Graeber’s Marxism (Thoughts on Debt)”). For Mauss, ideology is understood “principally as a form of the legitimation of social arrangements” (Malasevic 20), and Graeber supplements this line of thinking with the Marxist insight that ideology is not really a false story told by the dominant to trick the dominated, but something that is produced by everyone throughout their quotidian existence: Eldon Kerr 18
even the most workaday, least dramatic forms of social action (tending pigs and whatnot) are…forms of symbolic production: they play the main role in reproducing people’s most basic definitions of what humans are, the difference between men and women, and so on…. [But] this overall process is always something that tends somewhat to escape the actors.” (“The Political Metaphysics of Stupidity” 52)
Graeber does not think ideology equates to some kind of false consciousness – that the process of symbolic reproduction will always to some extent escape the actors only means that there will always be some assumptions that do not strike us as questions, not that some ‘real motive’ behind those assumptions is hidden from the actors. Nor does Graeber does use the term ideology in an exclusively pejorative way; it’s descriptive of everyday symbolic reproduction.
For Graeber, we come to view the world in a certain way, to see certain forms of action as good and others as bad, because we are implicated in a world that expects and facilitates certain kinds of actions from us so much so that we begin to see those actions as natural and even essential. So ideologies present us with an image of our social world, but one which is not an accurate depiction of that reality, and one which serves to legitimize social relationships that otherwise might seem incredibly unjust to those (whether dominant or dominated) who are part of those relationships. In this way, ideologies also act as constraints on the political imagination, by making some kinds of political arguments seem completely untenable or ‘out-there,’ which in turn makes them appear almost unpolitical in their naivety.
In general, dominant ideologies will tend to be anti-revolutionary, since they serve to normalize whatever set of relationships is most stable and defined at a given time. That does not mean revolutionary ideologies cannot become dominant – in fact, Graeber has claimed that the egalitarian, democratic structures found in some Indigenous North American groups might be evidence of the stabilization and normalization of a revolutionary ideology (“Culture is not your friend”) – but it does mean that most revolutionary ideologies are reproduced by a small number Eldon Kerr 19 of people on the fringes of a society. The behavior of anarchists on a rural commune will still serve to produce a set of assumptions about “what human beings are like” and legitimize the set of social relations on the commune, it’s just that those assumptions will have somewhat limited effects in terms of scope. Graeber thinks that the ideological problems he confronts, like cynicism, have a rather more pervasive reach.
What does Graeber mean when he says that nowadays, “cynicism has replaced ideology”? He does not mean that an old ideology (whatever it is) has been replaced with an ideology of cynicism (i.e. an ideology which says that people are always and everywhere cynics), but that the stance of the cynic, the inclination to doubt and distrust, now performs the same kinds of functions that an ideology does. Namely, in a situation in which “all social possibilities are available simultaneously” (which is to say, for Graeber, any situation), cynicism functions to make a whole range of possibilities appear unavailable, untenable, and even unpolitical. Graeber thinks that, while very few people actually believe in things like meritocracy or the free market, many people don’t think that anything else is really possible. “We all know,” he writes, that “you don’t go up the hierarchy thanks to your merits: it’s about being nice to the boss, having a cousin, etc.… But there is a sense of complicity: if you want a promotion…go along with the official line” (qtd. in De Grave). The sense of complicity stems from cynicism, because if one does not believe that important social change can happen, or that one cannot make much of a difference anyway, then going along with the system seems like the best bet. Graeber thinks that cynicism has replaced ideology because, despite knowing all the lies and untruths of the various official ideologies, people go along with them regardless, which, in the end, has the same practical effect as them believing it were true anyway. Eldon Kerr 20
This argument is supplemented by an argument Graeber makes in an article for The Baffler, titled “Can’t Stop Believing.” In it, he claims that “what is really striking about political debate in America today is that both the mainstream (read: extreme) Right and mainstream (read: moderate) Left have gone so far in creating their own realities that meaningful conversation has become impossible.” Graeber thinks that where liberals and conservatives once “debated how to overcome racism,” now it is “common to hear conservatives insist that, just as the only liars are those who accuse them of lying, the only racists are those who accuse others of racism.” In the same vein, “if a Christian conservative wants to discuss the dominance of mainstream U.S. culture by a secular-minded “liberal elite,” or a Rand Paul supporter wishes to talk about the relation of the Federal Reserve and U.S. militarism, they will be met by a similar wall of incredulity.”
Graeber thinks that mainstream liberals and conservatives, as well as many academics
(especially those of the post-modern left), have boxed themselves into worlds of their own making. Taking it as true that these liberals are wrong about cultural dominance and conservatives are wrong about racism, Graeber wants to ask “how self-deception functions as a self-administered belief system.” His answer is fetishism, namely the practice of “creating things and then falling down before our own creations and worshipping them like gods.” He gives the example of the commodity trader who reads that “gold is doing this, oil or pork bellies doing that, or that money is fleeing this market and migrating somewhere else.” Of course the trader knows that gold doesn’t actually do anything, of course he knows that it is just a figure of speech, but for Graeber “in every practical sense, he does believe it, because every day he goes out on the trading floor and acts as if it were true.” That is, much like cynicism, fetishism shores up a particular social system and makes it seem inevitable. What Graeber is diagnosing, in each Eldon Kerr 21 case, are the ideological effects of things that many people might not normally assume to be ideological.
This kind of diagnosis has an affinity with Markell’s understanding of the role of realism in the epigraph, but it expands upon it because where the kind of realism Markell speaks about is obviously political – since it is the language used by ministers and Presidents to try and accomplish their goals and reach their targets – Graeber tries to bring in psychological and quasi- religious dimensions to the discussion of ideology. In one sense, this is not that surprising: radicals have often bemoaned things like the ‘God of money,’ recognized that hope is a useful revolutionary tool, or attempted to change their audience’s spirit as much as their reasons. What is interesting about Graeber is how he tries to respond to these kinds of maladies.
How does Graeber try to respond to these sorts of ideological problems?
One of Graeber’s favorite strategies is to make a prima-facie ridiculous claim using a widely-known example which is supposed to provoke a kind of generalized, child-like wonder in the reader. Take “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” his very first article for The
Baffler, which exemplifies many of the stylistic and thematic concerns of his writing for the magazine. With its central claim being that technology has not developed as quickly as it might have – “where are the flying cars?” – it is certainly a provocative article. After all, many of us, whatever our attitudes regarding the political and economic regimes within which we live, are probably used to thinking of technology as having progressed reasonably well. We now carry around with us in our pockets computers more powerful than those involved in the moon landings, have grown accustomed to the ease of access to information provided by the Internet, and, probably most telling of all, have replaced previously vital skills like map-reading with technology – we trust technology, technology that seems to be quite modern, to take care of us Eldon Kerr 22 on a daily basis. Yet Graeber does not just suggest that technological progress has stagnated, he begins the article by suggesting, dramatically, that:
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise – given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties – one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with. Where, in short, are the flying cars… force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now?
This is a bold yet awkward way to begin an article, because Graeber bases his argument on a series of claims that are almost impossible to prove: (a) a promise that was never articulated as a promise, (b) directed to apparently everyone who was a child between the 1950s and 1980s, (c) who now feel betrayed at the breaking of this promise, but who (d) are too embarrassed to say anything about it. It is difficult to imagine how even the most robust empirical research could possibly prove points (c) and (d), not only because of the breadth of data set required, but because any attempt to prove such specific points would inevitably involve asking highly leading questions, and yet the claims are also not inferred from existing empirical data. Strong arguments could be made in favour of points (a) and (b), since we do often speak of social expectations or social contracts that are premised on certain expectations (for example the post-war welfare state is often described in terms of a social contract) without needing to see explicit evidence of those expectations’ articulation. Still, the interesting thing about Graeber’s arguments here is the extent to which they rely on and repurpose existing ideological tropes for his own ends. Eldon Kerr 23
The prima-facie ridiculous claim does not attempt to show up the absurdity of one ideological trope by contrasting it with the truth, but by contrasting it with another ideological trope, and one that might even fit quite snugly alongside the one being criticized. The utopian promise of midcentury state-led capitalism is used to try and undermine what Graeber takes to be a felt belief that capitalism has brought us to an already-existing technological wonderland. But the utopian promise of state-led capitalism is itself ideological. The difference is not actually the idea of utopia per se, but rather the substance of that utopia. In this case, Graeber thinks people who believe we’ve already reached the techno-utopia need a better definition of a techno-utopia.
This means that he does not try to overcome ideological-style problems by pointing to the truth they cover up, but by recycling the kinds of stories – the utopian promise of technology in the
1950s – that from another angle might seem to fit with and buttress the claims of those who do believe in things like laissez-faire capitalism. The implication is that, even if people do not really believe in any of the ‘official’ ideologies, one suitable reservoir of images and tropes for someone who wishes to move an audience in a direction orthogonal to those ‘official’ ideologies might actually be those very same ideologies. Obviously, one cannot simultaneously downplay and valorize the same tropes of an ideology, but one can denigrate one (we live in a techno- utopia) while using another (we could be living in a techno-utopia) from the very same ideology.
This is not an obviously self-contradictory move, since much democratic politics consist of people arguing about whether or not things have gone ‘too far’ in one direction (for example, arguing that low tax-rates have privileged one version of freedom too much at the expense of another), without thereby challenging the whole structure within which those directions make sense. If one wishes to overcome cynicism, then it seems, quite reasonably, that one needs a story with a strong emotional pull, but those kinds of stories have often already been spoken for Eldon Kerr 24 and made use of. Perhaps one thing we can learn from Graeber is that to not make use of those stories because they have already been spoken for is to waste an excellent political opportunity.
But such a move is, somewhat ironically, fairly cynical and ideological on Graeber’s own terms, because he does not try to convince his audience that something is true, but that “ everybody else believes it’s true” (qtd. in De Grave). Graeber tries to generate a change in people’s political beliefs in the present – the article ends with an indictment of contemporary capitalism, hence the
“declining rate of profit” part of the title – by saying: ‘look, everyone else already knows the whole thing is a bust.’
There are two worries beyond this that one might have with such a move. First, it seems a little contradictory: if the problem is people’s lack of belief, surely there isn’t enough belief around to be manipulated to new ends? Second, and more importantly, it seems to rely on the emotions generated by an evocative description than solid argumentation. This second point is probably an effect of the first – Graeber thinks that he needs to make things seem vibrant and meaningful if he is to have any hope of communicating new and fresh ideas – but since he has not jettisoned the cynicism or ideological maneuvering, such a move only seems to make things worse, because now he is doing them with the added bonus of emotional manipulation! Take what he writes immediately following the provocative start to “Of flying cars…”, when he presents the image of a child watching the moon landings:
As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them.
The reference to a child’s perception of the moon landing evokes nostalgia not simply for the experience of watching the landings, but for the childlike sense of wonder that even those who Eldon Kerr 25 did not watch the landings as a child would likely assume the experience consisted of. Even those of us who were not children in 1969 will have heard many stories of astronauts or scientists who said the landings inspired them. We might also ‘know’ that the landing was a moment when families and friends gathered around televisions in a kind of unanimous wonder and hope. This is an image with incredibly strong ideological undertones, and not just at the level of economic relations, but at the level of gender and familial ones, too. In fact, the image of children sitting with quintessentially childlike expressions of wonder on their faces while watching the landings are so well-known they have been recreated in recent television series like Mad Men to evoke the very same kinds of emotional states.11
Graeber does not just reference his memory because he thinks many people will share it
(although people of his generation likely do), but because it is evocative of more generalized emotional states like hope, fear, wonder, and nostalgia. Remember, he gives us a memory of watching the landing, not of the landing itself.12 It would be hard for anyone to imagine what actually standing on the moon would be like, but most of us have watched impressive or important events on television, and most of us have done so as children. Still, for such an image to persuade the reader of Graeber’s point, which in this article is about the way neoliberal capitalism hurts technological development, it requires that we do actually believe in the kinds of ideological tropes – about the moon landings, about families, about technological progress – that
Graeber says that he thinks we do not believe in anymore.
But even that is an open question, because when Graeber ostensibly sets up a ‘we’ who share “a sense of disappointment,” it’s an implausible ‘we’ and a sense of disappointment that he
11 Although the show does not completely hide the kind of ominous undertones such a spectacular show of force might also be seen to represent. 12 There are a whole set of interesting questions about the role of mediation in this that I would have liked to touch on here, if only things had gone a little better with the writing of this thesis. Eldon Kerr 26 acknowledges his readers do not actually believe they share, both implicitly, by spending the first five paragraphs trying to convince his readers they do share it, and explicitly, by referencing the deluge of post-millennial articles that so joyously celebrated recent technological achievements. If that is the case, then it would be evidence for the case that he knows just what he is doing with all this ideological maneuvering. But of course that would make the diagnosis of cynicism a public lie. I think the truth is somewhere in middle: Graeber is aware that he is repurposing existing ideological tropes for his own ends, but he also thinks that cynicism probably functions quite a lot like ideology today.
To the first point, we can point to his secretive tone of voice, his observations that appear empirically unverifiable, and his interpretation of cultural malaise that seems evidently mistaken, which all seem designed to provoke the reader into the kind of stereotypical ‘adult’ response one might give to conspiracy theories. He seems aware of the distance between his own views and those of his audience, and so is trying to figure out a way to bridge that gap, perhaps provoking his reader into questioning the smugness of their automatic response.
To the second point, we can suggest that the very attempt to provoke a kind of generalized, child-like wonder in the reader, although depending on at least some of the beliefs that Graeber claims does not exist, is a quite conscious attempt to generate a kind of pro- revolutionary, emotional mental state that might still be able to move beyond those beliefs. That is, if, as Graeber thinks, the creation of a more optimistic audience can have transformative political effects, then the creation of an optimistic audience is a worthy goal, even if to do so requires mobilization of ideological tropes which might be thought to run counter to Graeber’s goals. (Which is why Graeber does not disown the kind of innocence he often portrays in his writing.) Eldon Kerr 27
Graber’s manipulative strategy is a very messy and imprecise practice. It depends as much on the ‘spirit’ of Graeber’s text – as revealed in his tone of voice – as on the ‘spirit’ of his audiences – as secretly disappointed. It is not just ‘optimist persuades pessimist,’ but ‘optimist creates pessimist.’ This means that any conclusive interpretation of Graeber’s writing here will have to reach beyond its apparent meaning to the contexts and sources from which his concerns emerge, because the spirit of his writing is not solely responsive to strategic problems, but emergent from his already-existing philosophical concerns – why else would he need to produce what he claims only to identify? Even when actors think – or explicitly state – that they’re trying to change thought processes in a kind of ideological game, that is not all they are doing. Political actors carry theories and commitments which cannot be reduced to plays in the game of realpolitik without missing at least half of what motivates the game in the first place.
Being prescriptive while trying not to appear so: creating a new common sense
Graeber seems less interested in accurately diagnosing the contemporary situation than in drumming up support for alternative visions.13 The problem is he never actually says what those visions are. He says doesn’t want to. He says that he doesn’t want to prescribe a set of political goals or pathways, but is more interested in creating the conditions for people to make those decisions for themselves (The Democracy Project 1-5). The problem with such a view is that it is itself normative. Graeber thinks that people choosing for themselves how they want their world to look is a good thing. When he says, ‘I want a world in which we all get together and decide what we want’ he is actually telling us what he thinks one part of a good result actually is. Of course, it is not the sum total of what a good result would consist of – he has concerns about the environment, about indigenous politics, and about technology that direct democracy does not
13 That is, unless one thinks he is completely incompetent at social analysis, which I think is a rather unfair characterization of someone with a sizeable history of distinguished academic research. Yes this is an appeal to authority, but so be it. Eldon Kerr 28 itself constitute a solution to – but it is nevertheless the case that direct democracy is one part of his desired outcomes, and one which he thinks would also better address his other substantive concerns regarding environmental policy, indigenous concerns, et cetera. Of course, this put him in a bind, since he wants to encourage political change to move in a specific direction, but at the same time doesn’t want to tell people what to do or what their political ends should be.
This is why I think we can read Graeber’s texts as trying to produce a new ‘common sense.’ Rather than explicitly outline a set of goals or a particular structural analysis, Graeber attempts to piece together a way of looking at the world and lead his reader to it. The idea is that if one ‘squints’ at the world in a different way, things that once seemed non-political will seem deeply political, and problems that may once have seemed insurmountable might now seem relatively easy to overcome (Scott xii).
In fact, Graeber explicitly states that he thinks revolutions are about changes in common sense. In the third article he wrote for The Baffler, “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming
Collapse,” he begins by asking “What is a revolution?” Drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein,
Graeber argues that, “for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.” Revolutions are not primarily about the seizure of some important institutional apparatus, although that may be a part of it, but
“planetary phenomena [that] transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about.
In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate.” For example, prior to the French revolution, “ideas that change is good, that government policy is the proper way to manage it, and that governments derive their authority from an entity called ‘the people’ were considered the sorts of things one might hear from crackpots and demagogues, or at best a handful of freethinking intellectuals.” Eldon Kerr 29
But just one generation later, “even the stuffiest magistrates, priests, and headmasters had to at least pay lip service to these ideas.” The ideas became common sense, “the very grounds of political discussion.”
The kinds of common sense Graeber is interested in generating, then, are based around the notion that anything is possible, that important change can occur quickly and spontaneously and that theories or analyses which purport to deny that fail because they ultimately only explain a part of reality. This is a common sense which gives pride of place to the imagination and creativity, and which aims to make it seem like the seeds of social change lie all around us, ready to be taken up, if only we could give them a chance.
Perhaps the best example of this is Graeber’s article, “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have
Fun?” He begins the article by telling us of a time he spent half an hour with a friend watching an inchworm “dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible direction, and then leap to the next stalk and do the same thing.” His friend, June Thunderstorm, was an experienced gardener, who had once told him that “all animals play.” This is very similar to the kind of provocative statement he begins “Of Flying Cars…” with: it’s the kind of naïve statement that invites condescension from a serious, ‘adult’ perspective. But this time, Graeber acknowledges the reaction such a statement is likely to provoke: “Most of us, hearing this story, would insist on proof…Perhaps the invisible circles it traced in the air were really just a search for some unknown sort of prey. Or a mating ritual.” Given the title of the article, and the rhetorical deployment of the phrase “most of us,” it is obvious that Graeber does not think the issue is so simple. Thus he provokes skepticism, even a sense of superiority, from his reader, by appearing to endorse a sentiment – all animals play – that would strike many as verging on the childish in its naivety, especially because it lacks any evidence (adults love evidence) and does Eldon Kerr 30 not seem to tell us anything interesting about the world. It is the kind of observation we would expect from someone without any real experience of the world, someone who has not yet learnt about the way things actually work, someone like a child.
Though he outlines a couple of alternative arguments drawn from the sciences which might allow for and explain animal play, his main point is not to show that in actual fact animals do play – he admits that he does not know either way what the answer is. His main point is to show that ethologists
have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behavior in rational terms – which in turn means describing an animal as if it were a calculating economic actor trying to maximize some sort of self-interest – whatever their theory of animal psychology, or motivation, might be. [Because], generally speaking, an analysis of animal behavior is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions.
Remember, these are articles written for a general audience: while Graeber is talking about
“professional ethologists,” it’s clear that the above is directed to his (more or less) skeptical readers. The question he asks is: why are you so sure? “Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?” Much like with “Of flying cars…,” the provocative start is designed so the reader feels like they’ve trapped themselves under the weight of their own assumptions, which is exactly what Graeber thinks they have done. Graeber wants to encourage the sense that things can actually change, that nothing is so certain as to be impossible, and the idea that utopian dreams might really be just a few historical accidents away. A common sense that is less fixed and rigid (not to mention more tolerant of playful ideas and of thinking about play), the wager goes, is a common sense that is more open to new and revolutionary ideas. Eldon Kerr 31
But note that, again, Graeber is attempting to create his audience’s emotions as much as playing off them. It is not obvious which should be considered politically prior – Graeber’s diagnosis of the problem, which will necessarily be bound up with this normative and theoretical views, or his response to the problem, which must, on some level, be considered a piece of political gamesmanship. This complicates any assumption of what constitutes real politics, especially the assumption of realists like Geuss, who say real politics is quite distinct from academic theorizing, meaning we should judge politics with norms endogenous to its practice. If the practice of real politics includes theoretical assessments and normative judgments, even by actors trying to play clever and manipulative games with ideology, then it is not obvious why normative and theoretical judgments ought not be considered a part of real politics, and a useful tool with which to understand it. What motivates Graeber’s writing, is it the immediate practical problems, or his commitment to principles like horizontality? And how can the two be meaningfully separated when much of his writing seems to be trying to make interventions in both areas at the same time? The next section should offer us some clues.
The politics of vagueness
One interesting thing to note about all this, for our purposes, is that Graeber tries to generate an optimistic emotional state conducive to pro-revolutionary thought while at the same time obfuscating the fact that the optimism he tries to generate is political at all.14 In part, this is just because he can be very vague. It is not always clear what Graeber actually thinks; after all, the use of ideologically-charged and hopeful images seems to contradict Graeber’s own diagnosis of cynicism.15 It is certainly the case that Graeber’s vagueness is also an effect of the
14 Which is, ironically, exactly what some of the ‘realist’ theorists would like to do! But this optimism is very political. 15 At least if Graeber means to say that cynicism has entirely replaced all other ideologies in generating support for contemporary social systems. Eldon Kerr 32 kinds of arguments he tries to make – arguments that operate at the level of common sense and emotion – but it is still the case that his writings for a general audience are also a political dance, a game of strategy. Everything from the careful way Graeber makes his arguments so as to prescribe options while seeming to be non-prescriptive, to the way he seems to just want his readers to think about technology with the optimism and wonder of an eight-year-old child child while also pushing those utopian tendencies in a certain direction suggests Graeber is trying hard not to alienate his readers because he wants them to agree with him. This is strategic vagueness, political vagueness; at the same time, as an intervention into a political problem, it is not obvious whether Graeber is responding to a crisis, or creating one out of his existing normative commitments.
Graeber cannot escape the fact that these are political messages that make use of existing ideological tropes to try and persuade the reader. By drawing so heavily on the ideological context, Graeber is playing a very political (and quite manipulative) game (though that is not all he is trying to do), just at the level of ideas. He tries to show that his readers already agree with him, or that if they were only honest with themselves they would be, while at the same time pressuring them into agreement by making them choose between his pejorative characterization of cynicism and his chartable depiction of optimism. At times he comes across like a consubstantiation of the anarchist good cop and anarchist bad cop.
However, Graeber’s political maneuvering in his Baffler articles cannot be understood solely with reference to the ideological context he tries to manipulate in those articles, because the particular points Graeber raises are continuations of those he first raised in his writings for a much more explicitly Leftist audience. It is not an accident that he picks on rational choice theory or neoliberal economics, nor is it an accident that he uses the image of a child watching Eldon Kerr 33 the moon landings, which is a kind of archetypal image of human potential because it links actual human achievement, the landing, with the seeds of all possible future human achievement, a child’s sense of wonder and attendant aspiration. These are similar to the issues Graeber raised when trying to valorize anarchist models of political revolution in opposition what the
“preformed utopian schemes” of (what he takes to be) many Marxists (“Revolution in Reverse”).
In the next section, we will see how Graeber’s writings for a Leftist audience, though more specific and more explicitly political (by virtue of being interventions into specific political debates), share and precede some of the characteristics of his later writings for a more general audience. Although Graeber’s writing for a general audience engages in the kind of political maneuvering which suggests that it is the general ideological milieu (the one he characterizes as cynical) which is the relevant interpretative context for understanding his claims, those claims in part emerge from a different context, and one in which Graeber played a slightly different rhetorical game.
Eldon Kerr 34
Part two: Ambiguity and silence, affordances of a rhetorical context
Revolutions in Reverse brings together a series of essays that Graeber did not originally intended to hang together. Yet, by his own admission, the essays, all written between 2004 and
2010, fit together by virtue of the context they originate from and the kind of message they seek to communicate: the product of “a confused interregnum,” Graeber thinks that the essays “all start out from some aspect of the period that seems particularly bleak, depressing, what appeared to be some failure, stumbling block, countervailing force, foolishness of the global anticapitalist movement, and to try to recuperate something, some hidden aspect we usually don’t notice, some angle from which the same apparently desolate landscape might look entirely different” (4).
The essays are also addressed to a much more explicitly activist audience than Graeber’s pieces for the Baffler (the collection is published by Minor Compositions, an imprint of
Autonomedia, which draws explicitly on autonomous politics), and they are much more explicitly concerned with activist problems, debates, and issues.
Still, the same illusiveness and imprecision present in his work for a general audience is present in these pieces. When writing for a general audience, that imprecision might just be an understandable part of trying to communicate with as many people as possible without alienating them with the arcane details of value theory. But the same excuse doesn’t hold water regarding the Leftist audience: Graeber’s vagueness cannot simply be explained with reference to the specialized interests of his audience. In the set of work we will consider in this section, Graeber has to be quite careful with how he makes use of and deploys his own authority as a member of the Left. On the one hand, his vagueness can be considered an affordance of writing for a group of people who are likely to already share certain commitments (he probably doesn’t need to explain what makes capitalism a problematic system per se); on the other, it is a way of creating Eldon Kerr 35 distance between himself and others on the Left without explaining in detail the substance of those disagreements. Because of the latter point, Graeber winds up making his criticism in a much more careful way, and he ends up spending lots of time establishing his ethos as a Leftist.
In the end, Graeber’s play of attaching normative weight to concepts (rather than, for example, simply stating outright that a certain form of social organization is superior) fails to tread the non-prescriptive line Graeber needs it to if his substantive disagreements with those on the Left are to hold up, meaning his imprecision is at once a politically savvy attempt to appeal to a wider audience, an attempt to establish his own authority as an author, and the crutch which undermines the intellectual points he seems to want to make, however vague the latter sometimes are. Of the three, it is only the attempt to establish his own authority which is peculiar to the
Leftist writings, which suggests that the more politically salient (or perhaps controversial) an intellectual argument is, the more important the spirit of the source from which the argument springs.
In the analysis which follows, Graeber’s increased appeal to ethos will be read as hinting that these arguments are more about positioning than are the writings for a general audience.
Still, the analysis in this section should caution us about the possibility of simply teasing out the principle from the politics in any ‘real’ political situation. In Graeber’s case, it’s not always obvious if his political maneuvers let his intellectual arguments down, or if those intellectual arguments would be best construed as political maneuvers in the first place. The spirit of an argument is not simply a function of context or intent (even if one could define explicitly what each of those were, which is a not-inconsiderable challenge).
Eldon Kerr 36
Of verticals, pre-formed schemes, and defining reality: Graeber’s enemies on the Left
Graeber wants to distinguish himself from three kinds of Leftists: (1) ‘verticals,’ (2) those who think revolutionary change is about all about realising ‘pre-formed’ utopian schemes, and
(3) those who start by trying to define reality. Verticals are members of organizations that run on hierarchical principles, with some kind of leadership. Verticals, Graeber says, are “the sort of people who actually like marching around with pre-issued signs and listening to spokesmen for somebody’s central committee” (The Democracy Project 27). It will be obvious from the disparaging tone of that remark that Graeber aligns himself with horizontals, and does so for conceptual reasons, reasons of principle. He associates with “people more sympathetic with anarchist principles of organization, nonhierarchical forms of direct democracy” (The
Democracy Project 27). This will be important to remember when we consider the way Graeber often tries to avoid stating normative principles outright.
Graeber also tries to distinguish himself from thinkers who have “preformed utopian schemes” (“Revolution in Reverse”). These are the kinds of thinkers who construct an idea of what a good outcome is all about, and then try to work towards it. Graeber thinks this is a bad idea for two reasons. First, because he aligns himself with the immanent conception of the imagination, Graeber thinks the imagination emerges from projects of action. To define a good outcome ahead of those projects is, Graeber suggests, to fail to understand what the imagination is all about: ‘what you think you want now and what you will want after a year or two of organizing are two different things – do not let the former hold you hostage.’ The second is that
Graeber thinks this mode of thinking requires one to start by defining reality. This requires that one is able to say definitively what makes the present the present, since without that there is no Eldon Kerr 37 way to say what makes the utopian future anything better. One would need a conception of the present’s failings which would render those failings something that can be overcome.
The second of these justifications is born from a desire to distance himself from theorists who presuppose the existence of total systems. In “The Sadness of Post-workerism,” an essay republished in the collected volume Revolutions in Reverse, we get an explicit account of the kinds of people and arguments Graeber wishes to distinguish himself from. In the essay, Graeber recounts a 2007 panel discussion between Toni Negri, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Maurizio
Lazzarato, and Judith Revel held at the Tate Modern in London. After summarizing the papers presented by the panelists, all well-known and esteemed Italian theorists of post-workerism,
Graeber makes four initial observations of the event. First, there was almost no discussion of contemporary art; barring a mention of Banksy, all the references were to pieces from the avant- garde tradition of the early Twentieth Century. Second, “while all of the speakers could be considered Italian autonomists…surprisingly few concepts specific to that tradition were deployed” (85). Instead, the theoretical language drew heavily on the heroes of French ’68 thought, like Foucault and Baudrillard. Third, and most importantly for our immediate purposes,
“in each case the presenters used those French thinkers as tools to create a theory about historical stages…For each, the key question was: What is the right term with which to characterize the present? What makes our time unique? Is it that we have passed from a society of discipline, to one of security, or control? Or is it that regimes of conjunction have been replaced by regimes of connection?” et cetera (85). Fourth, and finally, Graeber observes that everyone was remarkably polite, which “is worthy of note since no one can seriously deny the speaker’s radical credentials” (85). Eldon Kerr 38
With these initial observations on the table, Graeber notes a correspondence between the avant-garde art tradition and post 1968 philosophical thought, and uses the correspondence to point out how each tradition rapidly became fairly conservative:
Each [tradition] corresponded to a moment of revolution to adopt Immanuel Wallerstein’s terminology, the world revolution of 1917 in one case, and the world revolution of 1968 in the other. Each witnessed an explosion of creativity in which a longstanding European artistic or intellectual Grand Tradition effectively reached the limits of its radical possibilities. That is to say, they marked the last moment at which it was possible to plausibly claim that breaking all the rules – whether violating artistic conventions, or shattering philosophical assumptions – was itself, necessarily, a subversive political act as well. (86).
In both examples, Graeber suggests, the long-term effects were depoliticizing (87). In the case of post ‘68ist Continental philosophy, for example, not only did it quickly become “increasingly difficult to maintain the premise that heroic acts of epistemological subversion were revolutionary or even particularly subversive in any other sense,” but the philosophy quickly proved to be perfect “for self-satisfied liberal academics with no political engagement at all,” in much the same way “purely formal avant garde experiment proved perfectly well suited to grace the homes of conservative bankers” (87).
The ‘self-satisfied liberal academic’ is not only a frequent target of Graeber’s ire, but is almost always paired with a damning comment regarding said academic’s relationship with the
French philosopher Michel Foucault. Indeed it only take only a couple more paragraphs of “The
Sadness of Post-workerism” before Graeber implicates Foucault in his analysis of the panel, when discussing the problem with the kinds of arguments presented by the Italian autonomists gathered at the Tate Modern (in this case, arguments concerning the concept of ‘immaterial labour’). The problem, as Graeber sees it, is the same as that which besets post-modernist arguments. The arguments: Eldon Kerr 39
1) begin with an extremely narrow version of what things used to be like, usually derived by taking some classic text and treating it as a precise and comprehensive treatment of how reality actually worked at that time. For instance (this is a particularly common one), assume that all capitalism up until the ‘60s or ‘70s really did operate exactly as described in the first two or three chapters of volume I of Marx’s Capital. 2) compare this to the complexities of how things actually work in the present (or even how just one thing works in the present: like a call center, a web designer, the architecture of a research lab). 3) declare that we can now see that lo!, sometime around 1968 or maybe 1975, the world changed completely. None of the old rules apply. Now everything is different. (Revolutions 89)
The problem with this form of argument, says Graeber, is that “the trick only works if you do not, under any circumstances, reinterpret the past in the light of the present” (Revolutions 89).
Moreover, this kind of analysis produces an account of history as a series of clean conceptual breaks between totalizing systems, and it is this sort of analysis, and what Graeber sees as
Foucault’s role in popularizing it through his notion of epistemes (the idea that “the very conception of truth changes completely from one historical period to the next” (Revolutions
102)), that I think is the main target of Graeber’s ire. In fact, in a Tweet, Graeber said that he wrote Debt “to get over the tiresome assumption that everything is always completely different now” (Graeber). Graeber wants to distinguish himself from the idea that “each historical period forms such a total system that it is impossible to imagine one gradually transforming into another; instead, we have a series of conceptual revolutions, of total breaks or ruptures”
(Revolutions 102). He does not think total systems really exist.16
16 He gives the example of an artistic enclave, say one which exists in a country such as the UK, today. The enclave is full of people experimenting with alternative ways of life, who perhaps, in their own idiosyncratic way, try to challenge what they see as the injustices of British politics, and who finance their actions by selling their artworks to wealthy financiers. Graeber is clear that the fact that their activities are “made possible by money percolating downwards from finance capital does not make such spaces ‘ultimately’ a product of capitalism any more than the fact a privately owned factory uses state-supplied and regulated utilities and postal services…makes the cars they turn out ‘ultimately’ products of socialism” (Revolutions 98). Eldon Kerr 40
The politics of attaching normative weight
The common thread that binds the three kinds of Leftists Graeber wants to distance himself from is that each try to explain social life, or some important feature of social life, with reference to a single principle or a single set of purportedly incontrovertible facts or principles.
Verticals obviously either believe in or assume the inevitability of hierarchy to social life. Those with pre-formed utopian schemes will either build their scheme or the route to their scheme upon some similarly narrow principles, and those who start by trying to define reality will end up with an artificially narrow account of social life, because not all features of social life are amenable to theoretical description.
We’ve seen Graeber raise concerns with these kinds of positions before, in his writings for a general audience. Graeber thinks that the problem with arguments that explain things like the existence of play in purely evolutionary terms, or that explain the functioning of an economic system only with reference to the idea of humans as rational ends-maximizing actors, is that the theories necessarily end up offering totalizing accounts of the things they seek to explain, since they cannot understand (or be productively put into conversation with) systems that do not start from the same principle or set of principles. To have a discussion with an ethologist about animal behavior, Graeber implies, is to accept that the reason animals do things is because of the principle of survival of the fittest. It might be accepted that the principle is not fully worked out, and it will almost certainly be acknowledged that the specificities of its manifestation in every case are not fully understood, but if one denies the principle, then the ethologist believes there are not talking biology with you anymore, but physics or philosophy.
The fact that Graeber’s concerns in his writings for a more general audience and his more intra-Left writings are similar suggests that he has some core principles, theories, or values that Eldon Kerr 41 undergird his philosophy and politics. The problem is that Graeber is unable to say what those principles are without succumbing to his own criticism, since he will at some point be forced to say something like, ‘yes, I think we should live according to the principle of horizontality.’
Graeber tries to avoid this problem by attaching normative weight to existing tendencies and ideas, but, as we will see, his inability to draw a clear conceptual distinction between himself and those he criticizes ultimately undermines those efforts.
I use the phrase “attaching normative weight” when describing the way Graeber deems certain aspects of the world more valuable or more deserving of preservation than others because it captures something about both the way Graeber assigns value to concepts – he doesn’t start in the abstract, from first principles, but prefers to point to things which exist or have existed (even if it’s only a worm dangling from a leaf) – and his substantive beliefs about the nature of those things. Graeber assigns normative weight to things – such as horizontalism, or democracy, or play – that he thinks have existed as long as humans have been around. For example, in The
Democracy Project, he writes that “Democracy was never invented at all” (183), and that
“Democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself” (184). Which is to say that democracy, understood broadly as self-government by the people, is and has always been a possible way of organizing human life.
Indeed, Graeber thinks that in any given social setting, “on some minimal level, all social possibilities are available simultaneously” (qtd. in “Graeber’s Marxism (Thoughts on Debt)”).
Thus, when discussing the moral grounds of economic relations in Debt, Graeber claims that
“there are three main moral principles on which economic relations can be founded, all of which occur in any human society, and which [he calls] communism, hierarchy, and exchange” (94).
Graeber underlines that he is “not talking about different types of society here…but moral Eldon Kerr 42 principles that always coexist everywhere. We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where people wouldn’t be both” (113-114).
And yet Graeber does not think that just any kind balance of forces between the three moral principles is as good as any other. In fact, he has a particular problem with (a) the way the principle of exchange is taken to say everything important there is to say about economic relations (this is an example of him being worried when a single principle is taken to explain everything important about a feature of social life), and (b) what happens when the principle of exchange actually does come to dominate the way economic relations are practiced. Graeber thinks this is what has happened to much of the world: he identifies the insistence of framing every human relationship in terms of exchange as “the quintessence of middle-class morality”
(123). Whenever we repeat those stock phrases of middle-class morality (“I owe you one”) we are engaging in a “tacit calculus” of exchange, one which “is the language of bureaus, shops, and offices” and which is one token of “a set of assumptions of what humans are and what they owe one another, that have by now become so deeply ingrained that we cannot see them” (124).
Graeber finds those assumptions worrying, first, because of their totalizing overtones (“if we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts” (126)), and second, because he thinks that the world of middle-class morality, a world dominated by exchange-relationships, is a world that lacks the solidarity of communistic relations.17 He not only has a problem with
17 “There is a reason why the ultimate bourgeois virtue is thrift, and the ultimate working-class virtue is solidarity,” Graeber writes (“Caring too much…”). Because the working classes do most of the kind of caring work (nursing, nannying, et cetera) that does not fit neatly into the categories of an exchange relationship. If one is brought up by a nanny for 18-years, can one really sum up the relationship between nanny and child or nanny and guardian (assuming the guardian pays for the nanny) in terms of simply exchange? “Human beings are projects of mutual creation. Most of the work we do is on each other. The working classes just do a disproportionate share” (“Caring too much…”). Eldon Kerr 43 singular principles, but with the domination of a particular principle: he does not much like some of the things that exchange relationships bring along.
As one might have realized by now, the problem Graeber gets himself into is that this method still requires him to define the content of what he is attaching normative weight to, which in turn requires some substantive argumentation: it is not the case that all good things come together, and Graeber has to say something about what is included in the bundle of ‘good’ things he wants to attach normative weight to. Yet whenever Graeber offers such a definition, any conceptual distinctions between him and the other Leftists seem to break down. The easiest way to see this is by looking at Graeber’s discussion of the imagination, and especially its relationship to violence. For Graeber, the distinctively bad thing about violence is that it “may well be the only way in which it is possible for one human being to have relatively predictable effects on the actions of another without understanding anything about them” (“Revolution in
Reverse”). This is why violence and the imagination are so closely intertwined, for Graeber: in any non-violent case, one has to imaginatively identify with the other person, on some minimal level, to get them to do something which you would like them to do. Unless you know a little something about the person you are trying to manipulate, unless you can imagine what their experience of the world is like, you’re going to find it hard to get them to do what you want.
Violence changes that. If you point a gun at someone, you can usually get them to do what you want, without knowing anything about their particular experiences of the world.
The politics of the imagination: blurred conceptual distinctions
The concept of the imagination is the key to Graeber’s attempt to differentiate himself from others on the Left. He uses the concept in two different ways, ostensibly in order to make two different kinds of points. One use of the concept of the imagination concerns the imagination Eldon Kerr 44 as a creative force, as that which heralds the creation of something new, and Graeber uses the imagination in this way in order to draw a distinction between his views and those of others on the left. The second use of the imagination concerns the sympathetic imagination, or the kind of imagination involved in trying to get inside someone else’s head. This latter use is ostensibly just a part of Graeber’s social analysis, rather than a part of any obvious political dispute. Yet in both cases the political and intellectual dimensions of Graeber’s argument are not obviously distinguishable. In the first case, because Graeber’s desire to differentiate himself from others on the left means he ends up trespassing over the very conceptual distinction he draws up in order to show that he is different from those he criticizes. In the second case, because Graeber’s attempt to make intellectual arguments is not clearly distinguishable from his own attempts to establish his political authority amongst those on the left. In fact, at times it seems as though Graeber’s preoccupation with establishing authority is in part due to his failure to establish any clear theoretical or conceptual distinction between his position and those he wishes to distinguish himself.
The first way Graeber uses the concept of the imagination concerns the imagination as a creative force, and he suggests there are two ways of thinking about the imagination as a creative force: as transcendent and as immanent. In “Revolution in Reverse,” Graeber argues that the idea of the transcendent imagination is the one which probably accords with the way most people tend to think of the imagination, as denoting something which is not real, or at least not real yet.
Fairies are imaginary, because they are not real; or, Leyton Orient could only ever win the
Premiership in my imagination, because it is not a real thing that can happen. The immanent imagination, says Graeber, refers to an older understanding, in which the imagination was thought to be a mediating zone of passage between reality and reason. “Perceptions from the Eldon Kerr 45 material world had to pass through the imagination, becoming emotionally charged in the process…before the rational mind could grasp their significance.” On this view, the imagination is “entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the material world,” and is not about creating unreal images in one’s mind, but in helping to determine the kinds of actions one will take (“Revolution in Reverse”). The idea is that one cannot separate the imagination as a source of creativity from the actions and world that the imagination is involved in: what one imagines depends upon what one experiences, and what one imagines is not strictly unreal, since it is so bound up with the materiality of life.
The problem with this distinction is that it is not immediately clear what it is supposed to tell us. Is it a substantive distinction between theoretical definitions of the imagination, and thus an intervention into debates about the nature of the imagination, or simply a note that the average person’s perception of what the imagination is generally off base? Is the distinction between the transcendent and immanent conceptions an ontological one – meaning transcendentalists have simply failed to grasp the true nature of what the imagination is actually made up of (stuff that exists), and thus that the transcendental imagination could never actually exist, according to
Graeber – or is the argument really with those who want to denigrate the importance of the imagination because they see it as being about fairies and not as an essential feature of human life? One might also ask (a) how much is transcendent imagination simply born from practice even though people mistakenly think it is not, and (b) how much is the imagination actually always about something that to some extent does not exist yet?
I think one reason this argument is vague is because its purpose is not just intellectual but political. It’s an argument which plays a strategic role in Graeber’s political positioning. Its strategic purpose is to denigrate those Leftists Graeber disagrees with (like the utopians and the Eldon Kerr 46 verticals) by showing that their understanding of the imagination doesn’t make any sense to begin with. Graeber hopes to show that they want human beings to be something other than what they are, such as more organized, or more amenable to organization and rational persuasion. He wants to show that an open-ended model of revolutionary change – the only kind horizontals can endorse, after all – is really the only kind that makes sense because it is the one which accords with the way the imagination actually works. In fact, utopians, who would construct transcendent blueprints, and verticals, who would at least order others around according to some kind of blueprint, are obstacles to the unleashing of the human imagination. Except Graeber has not clearly explained what the difference between the immanent and transcendent imaginations is, and thus how it could be that the things he dislikes are a product of the latter but not the former.
Can’t one’s vision of a pre-formed utopian future be born from struggle, and where exactly is the line between theory and action, for Graeber? Isn’t it a distinction his conception of the imagination wants to deny can even exist?
The second way Graeber uses the concept of the imagination is to denote the kind of imagination involved in getting inside someone else’s head, in feeling what they are feeling. Call this the sympathetic imagination. Graeber thinks this kind of imagination is a central part of human life, because human relationships “require a continual and often subtle work of interpretation” that makes full use of our imaginative capacities. Again, Graeber has political reasons for making this point: he does not think that the kind of imaginative thinking required to identify with someone else is always present in all relationships to all parties involved. Often, some people are unfairly asked to do more of the imagining than other people. Women, for instance, “are always imagining what things look like from a male point of view. Men almost never do the same for women” (“Revolution in Reverse”). Graeber calls such relationships Eldon Kerr 47
“lopsided structures of imaginative identification” and says they are the product of structural violence because the power of men over women is “ultimately backed up, if often in indirect and hidden ways, by all sorts of coercive force” (“Revolution in Reverse”). Following Adam Smith,
Graeber goes on to note that such relationships produce an additional complexity: since
“imagination tends to bring with it sympathy, the victims of structural violence tend to care about its beneficiaries, or at least, to care far more about them than those beneficiaries care about them.” This means that this lopsided structures of the imagination are exactly the kind of thing that tend to preserve unfair relationships, since those at a disadvantage actually care, to some degree, about those who are advantaged.
It also means that oppressed people, or victims of structural violence, might also be those who best understand the various perspectives at play in a political society. It seems to follow from Graeber’s argument that those who suffer the most also perform the most imaginative labour, and so are most used to getting inside other people’s minds. But again, this argument does not allow Graeber to propose the nurturing of a more sympathetic imagination – the imaginative perspective of the oppressed – because he would have to say something about how such perspectives can be can be fostered prior to a change in the institutional structures which produce the imbalance in imaginative labour in the first place. As an attempt to distance himself from utopians and verticals it is more successful. First, because utopians and verticals assume that one privileged group will be tasked with arranging the path to revolution, and therefore that some people’s viewpoints will be excluded (and probably those, like women, who are already most excluded). Second, because it allows Graeber to signal his support for a variety of different oppressed peoples, and to champion their perspectives and insights, which is (a) politically useful to someone who wants to show that, say, Marxists and social democrats are out of touch Eldon Kerr 48 with contemporary political currents, and (b), given his argument about the way oppressed peoples tend to be better at getting inside other people’s minds, strategically sensible. Who wouldn’t want those best at imagining other’s viewpoints to take the lead in political strategizing?
Of ethos and affordances
The appeal to ethos is an attempt to make an argument more persuasive because of who is making the argument. When Graeber writes for a Leftist audience, he continually re-establishes his credibility not just as an intellectual, but as an activist. He takes care to remind his readers that he’s been there and done that, and so knows what he’s talking about, and isn’t just some fancy academic with a few decent ideas. This is true even when, as in the introduction to
Revolutions in Reverse, he spends lots of time berating his fellow activists for being too hard on themselves, insufficiently ambitious, too prone to endless self-criticism in the face of global institutions like the IMF and World Bank, and useless when in the ascendency (4). When
Graeber makes these criticisms, he uses the word “we.” He wants his readers to know that he’s not excluding himself from criticism, while simultaneously reaffirming just how involved and committed he is and has been:
All of these essays were composed between 2004 and 2010. This was not an easy time for someone, like myself, actively engaged in social movements. Between roughly 1998 and 2002, the advent of the global justice movement had given all of us a sudden sense of almost endless possibility. The wake of 9/11 threw everything into disarray. For many it was impossible to maintain the sense of enthusiasm that had kept us so alive in the years before; many burned out, gave up, emigrated, bickered, killed themselves, applied to graduate school, or withdrew into various other sorts of morbid desperation. For me, the point where I came closest to despair was in the immediate wake of the 2004 US elections, when the originally stolen presidency of George W. Bush was actually given what seemed like a genuine popular mandate. (1-2)
Eldon Kerr 49
This passage beings with an appeal to ethos that also tells us something about the kind of audience Graeber is addressing, since it is the kind of audience who is expected to be somewhat familiar with what the “global justice movement” was all about. Not necessarily an audience of activists in the global justice movement, but an audience of people who might well have known activists in the movement, and who are in any case likely to be broadly sympathetic with the aims of that movement (the publishing house suggests much the same thing about the audience).
Graeber’s statement begins primarily as appeal to ethos, because it sets him up as someone committed enough to the movement to have been an active participant, but faithful enough to have only come “close” to despair. He’s a true believer! At the same time, Graeber identifies, in the Burkean sense, with his audience. He tries to show how he is consubstantial with them: ‘I am one of you.’
Graeber extends his appeals to ethos and attempts at identification by continually aligning himself with feminists. His insights, he often says, are really just articulations of ideas that feminists first developed in the 1970. These ideas include the various technical developments
(such as spokes-councils and vibes-watchers) of direct democracy (Revolutions in Reverse 14), as well as the idea of ‘lopsided structures of the imagination,’ which we discussed earlier
(Revolutions in Reverse 49). It’s no surprise that both sets of ideas play key roles in Graeber’s own understanding of his normative commitments – the technical developments of direct democracy align with his commitment to horizontalism and the idea of lopsided structures of the imagination is one way he justifies his belief in pre-figurative, anti-utopian revolutionary politics. Since in both these cases Graeber is unable to clearly state how his positions differ from those he wants to criticize, the identification of those arguments as coming from feminists lends them an authenticity that they might otherwise not have. Feminism, Graeber writes, is “surely a Eldon Kerr 50 revolutionary force: what could be more radical than reversing thousands of years of gender oppressing lying at the very heart of what we think we are and can be and should be as human beings?” (30). And it is precisely that view of feminism which Graeber wants to align himself with. He bets that others on the Left, especially those interested in books published by
Autonomedia, will have a similar view of feminism and feminists, and so by suggesting that his arguments are really just extensions of feminist commitments, he implies that his audience should really view them as according with their existing principles already.
This is strikingly similar to the strategy Graeber uses when writing for a general audience, where, as we saw earlier, he tries to show that his readers already agree with him, or that if they were only honest with themselves they would. The difference is that this time the agreement is generated through appeals to ethos and identification, which suggests a couple of things. First, that Graeber is less confident of being able to generate agreement simply through ideological manipulation and optimistic generalizations. Second, that the kinds of articles he writes for a Leftist audience are more overtly political. By ‘more overtly political,’ I mean they are arguments which (a) engage politically with specific people or kinds of people, (b) are in a very important sense about positioning the author in relation to other people, and (c) about generating support or condemnation of positions by virtue of political association. The latter point also provides certain affordances to Graeber; for example, he does not need to clearly define who or what the “bigwigs assembling at their various summits” actually are (3). The guess is that his audience already assume that anyone attending a summit on international trade agreements is already not to be trusted. And it is because Graeber leans so heavily on such affordances that these earlier articles come across as much more overtly political. To be sure, he still makes the same vague and optimistic claims as in his articles for a general audience, but he Eldon Kerr 51 seems to think that without careful positioning, those arguments will not get a fair hearing. The
Baffler articles, by contrast, are much more confident and brazen in the way they interact with their audience.
A very uncommon common sense
It is not possible to get a complete sense of Graeber’s writings for a general audience without understanding his normative commitments, which first emerged publically in an earlier and quite different context. One can, of course, get a sense of the man independent of his normative concerns, which is handy when the content of his arguments seem to point in another direction to the emotion and tone of them. But it is not true that one way of looking at the texts is less about real politics than the other. The ‘out-thereness’ of real politics, the idea that it is something engaged in independent of normative thinking, as people like Geuss portray it, is a falsehood. Real politics is not something that happens away from the kinds of thinking Geuss and his fellow realists engage in, but very much a part of it. They, like Graeber, are always doing both at the same time. This is, to be sure, a messy business all around – contexts are like leaky frames, with causes and influences bleeding into one another – and one that demands a certain amount of self-reflexivity on the part of anyone who wants to study politics. For they (we) are also already engaged in really political struggles, in different venues and toward different ends from Graeber, but political nonetheless. Rather than try and tease out the normative or purely intellectual from the political, my reading of Graeber suggests that one would be better off starting from the assumption that the abstract and the real are all really in a big melting pot already, and one that can at best only be partially interpreted. Given the near-hegemonic standing of post-Rawslian theory in the academy over the last thirty years, perhaps the ‘idealist’ Eldon Kerr 52
Rawlsians are just playing the game much more effectively than the activists of Geuss and
Graeber?
Eldon Kerr 53
Conclusion
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your
philosophy.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene 5, lines 166-167)18
A recent essay by Lorna Finlayson considers some observations made by the philosopher
Margaret MacDonald on the language of political theory. In a manner presaging the work of contemporary realists, MacDonald saw that:
The contribution of political theorists – and it can be a genuinely useful and important one – is to highlight particular aspects of the world, to make possible (through the use of a kind of poetic imagery) particular ways of looking at the world at particular times. What [they] cannot do is lay down a theory of ‘political obligation’ which captures, once and for all, the truth about where our political obligations come from and what they are – so that we ‘can accept them all happily and go to sleep’. (Finlayson “Never go to sleep…” 5)
Political theories are “practical interventions in response to practical situations” – without the practical problem, there is no need for a political theory in the first place (5). This means that statements in political theory are “never in the business of capturing or failing to capture truths about the world” in the way that the problems to which solipsism are offered as a response are not (generally) practical problems (4-5). Finlayson and MacDonald make these observations to highlight just how strange political theory which insists on returning to devices like
‘hypothetical contracts’ or ‘conceptions of the good’ really is.19 Their claim is not that abstraction is good or bad, useful or useless (it all depends on the kind of abstraction). Nor is it that most people “will deny that in political affairs philosophical nonsense may have serious effects” (MacDonald 95). Rather, they want to draw attention to the fact that:
18 This epigraph comes courtesy of Will Roberts. 19 “Nor is your depression at the Labour Exchange likely to be much relieved by being told that you ‘really’ willed your unemployment (you would never have thought so, unaided) or that the State is a very superior moral person, only even more anonymous and inaccessible than the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Labour” (MacDonald 92). Eldon Kerr 54
The philosophical “point” of a remark (or the “point” of a remark which is of philosophical interest) is, at least partly, connected with the cause or reason which induces people to go on making it, though it can neither be supported nor refuted by any empirical evidence. It may be false, it may, if taken literally, be meaningless, but they feel that it has some use. (MacDonald 94)
Here, MacDonald has in mind the ‘point’ of philosophical inquiry: even if a philosopher’s statement is actually meaningless they might have reasons to go on speaking it that are not connected to the meaning of the statement taken literally. One might, for example, choose to make a philosophical point about injustice because one sees a great injustice and feels it should be corrected, or because one wants to climb the career ladder. Even if that statement about justice did not really mean anything, because it could not be supported or refuted by empirical evidence, it might still have a point, “not in any proposition conveyed but in the source and function of what is said” (Finlayson “Never go to sleep…” 4):
What MacDonald is doing is asking us to reflect on the asymmetry between the way we respond to different kinds of claim: claims with the same kind of structure or status (e.g. nonsensical, or apparently analysable only as linguistic recommendations), but dealing with different areas of life and arising from different kinds of problem. Why are we often inclined to see metaethical claims as having a bearing on the way we act, when we do not react the same way to claims about evil demons? (Finlayson 5)
A philosopher knows that a philosophical statement about justice carries a certain weight and a certain meaning that an amateur proclamation from the rooftops does not. To strip the context away from the philosophical statement is to strip the statement of what gives it meaning in the first place.
To my mind, MacDonald’s observations illuminate much of what is peculiar and awkward about political theorizing, and the political realists would no doubt approve of her sentiments.
Yet those same observations carry their own peculiar awkwardness, so that they are at once a boon to realists seeking to justify their focus on context, and a hindrance to anyone who thinks a conceptually distinct sphere of ‘real politics’ can simply be pointed to and examined, because the Eldon Kerr 55 very vagueness of the terms “source” and “spirit” can at best encourage careful readings.
MacDonald’s claims are themselves embedded within a particular linguistic and socio-political context, and there is no simple key with which to decode the inter-contextuality of her claims about claims. How much political theory is, in spirit, ultimately about academic politics, and how much real politics is, in spirit, actually about an attempt to discover and encourage abstract
‘truths’? The source and spirit of an utterance matters, true, but identifying and conceptualizing sources and spirits is itself an imprecise art, conducted from within intellectual and political contexts that may not always be simply what they think they are. And this is true whether that utterance is practical or philosophical.
Think about Graeber. Which is the appropriate context for an analysis of his work? Is it the ideological framework he manipulates when writing for a wider audience, where his vague and optimistic writing style seems tailor-made to combat the problem of cynicism, or is it the earlier writings, where his vagueness signals support for and allegiance with political groups like radical feminists? The similarities in Graeber’s writing style and the shared normative concerns between the two sets of work suggests that an interpretation of one is not complete without the other (after all, it is only in the more overtly political accounts that we find his fullest account of concepts like the imagination) and yet in each case one might find a different kind of spirit lurking. The different audiences in each case cannot entirely delineate his work’s appropriate interpretative context, nor the spirit of it, but neither can the intention of the man himself, because in each case he is responding to something as complicated as a political context, a set of practical and intellectual problems that are not self-contained worlds primed for linguistic manipulation but leaky frames which deny the possibility of any neat and tidy answers. Graeber’s political moves are also intellectual arguments, and his intellectual arguments can often be plausibly read as Eldon Kerr 56 political moves. Reducing it all to so much politics risks stripping him of any philosophical or normative beliefs, which cannot account for a full interpretation of the ‘spirit’ of Graeber’s work without leaving a vital question unanswered: why would he bother in the first place? And if the realists answer with a quintessentially realist response – it’s all about power – then they’re only ever going to find what they want to find. Optimism, like moralism, can be a political move, but if that were all it was we would likely notice no differences of spirit between optimists and pessimists. There exist both optimistic and pessimistic people who want to gain power, but there is a noticeable difference of temperament between the two kinds of people, which make their desires for power either more or less dangerous (depending on your own particular view).
Stripping the optimism or pessimism away might result in one failing to understand the complexities of what kind of politics that person is engaged in. The spirit of each kind of person tells us something extra about their political projects and normative views.
So whatever the ‘spirit’ of an author’s work is, it cannot be understood without reference to what she thinks she is trying to do, unless one is content to find only what one looks for. But this is not only a technical and empirical problem, it is one that leaves political theorists who attempt to heed the realists’ call in something of a bind. On the one hand, the drive to ground one’s theorizing in ‘real politics’ is clearly understandable and likely felt as laudable and even empowering,20 but that same drive threatens to strip the theorist of one of her most reliable weapons: the use of normative standards to hold political actors to account and assess different arguments. Without standards of justice and fairness, the theorist might worry about becoming merely a conduit for their own political commitments, or else a summarizer and synthesizer of others’ empirical research.
20 Especially by those in the wing of Political Science so often marginalized for being impractical and unrealistic. Eldon Kerr 57
To this, the realists will respond that what they seek is not the absence of normative standards, but normative standards that are endogenous to the world of politics. The idea is that the moral normative standards we might use to regulate relationships between our friends or family – such as, for example, the injunction to treat everyone as an end in themselves – are not useful when applied to the political realm, because if moral reasoning could solve all our problems, then we wouldn’t need politics. As we have just seen, delineating a space of ‘real politics’ is not an easy task, but nonetheless realists have proposed roughly three alternative sources of normativity that they think are more appropriate to the political world. The first is the
Hobbesian21 strategy, which can be connected to Bernard Williams’ idea of a ‘basic legitimation demand’ (Williams 4). The claim is that order (which is conceptually distinct from domination) must be provided before we can even begin to outline other political goals or standards, because if people are left alone they will eventually come into conflict, producing highly undesirable results and making ethical judgment somewhat futile (Rossi “Being realistic…” 2-3).
The second is the Machiavellian strategy, which says that normativity must derive from an interpretation of the point and purpose of particular political institutions, and more precisely,
“whether the point and purpose of a particular set of institutions is genuinely political” (Rossi
“Being Realistic…” 3). The Machiavellian strategy is a response to the thought that there are real tensions between political and personal morality, because, for example, following morality in one’s private life can bring one to political ruin (Rossi “Being Realistic…” 2). Finally, there is the approach of the critical theorist. The critical theorist thinks that “ethics is usually dead politics; the hand of a victor in a past conflict reaching out to extend its grip to the present and the future” (Geuss Politics and the Imagination 42), and so is basically wary of all legitimation
21 The names Hobbesian and Machiavellian here do not signify coherent, specific, or even accurate readings of these authors, but are rather ways of grouping the various kinds of realist arguments according to family resemblance. Whether or not the ‘Machiavellian’ strategy here has much in common with Machiavelli’s work is not important. Eldon Kerr 58 stories or moral advocacy for political positions. For the critical theorist, normativity is to be found not within the moral realm, but the epistemological (Rossi “Being Realistic…” 3). For example, by showing that the distinction between raw domination and political order can be manipulated by ideology, the critical theorist can reveal the domination inherent to an apparently moral political order.
There are problems with these approaches. The problem with the first category is that its vulnerability to the challenge of the critical theorists is acute: the critical theorist can say to the
Hobbesian, ‘You can’t tell the difference between coercion and domination, and are willing to accept the eternity of the latter in the name of recognizing the ineliminability of the former.’22
The other two categories run the risk of reducing the space for serious or radical challenges to existing institutions because they derive sources of normativity from interpretations or critiques of existing institutions, thereby legitimizing only that radicalism which is a response to the limitations or contradictions of existing political institutions. This is not an absolute or watertight criticism of the two positions, more one of probability and tendency. I think it is likely that a strategy which depends on criticism of existing institutions in some particular place is more likely to see solutions and propositions that emerge from other geographical or temporal locations as being somehow irrelevant until proven otherwise. There is an undeniable conservative tendency to such strategies,23 which might not only narrow the political imagination by licensing dismissal of radical challenges on the grounds that they are not strictly responsive to the failings of ‘the here and now’ institutions, but also artificially limit the sphere of ‘the political’ to whatever politics is understood to mean now. Sometimes ideas ‘that were thought up out of nowhere,’ at least as far as theorists and political actors are concerned, might actually be
22 This particular way of phrasing the critical theorists’ challenge was suggested to me by my advisor, Will Roberts. 23 Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Eldon Kerr 59 ideas worth taking seriously. Moreover, since one kind of radical challenge is the challenge to redefine our notions of what actually is political (a variety of feminisms have waged this very struggle, from the ‘the personal is political’ to ‘wages for housework’), the Machiavellian or critical theorist might end up actually legitimizing a politics of the status-quo24 and silencing the claims of those people most excluded from the political realm. The command to be realistic is not without its own ideological effects.
To recap: if actors understand themselves as engaging in vague, optimistic, or normative claims, that’s a real part of the spirit of their work, and something which cannot automatically be discounted by anyone who seeks to study ‘real politics.’ This spirit is reducible neither to context nor to intent, but can still be subject to interpretation and explication, for to withhold critical interpretation, categorization, abstraction, and judgment would be to ignore the reason theorists look to examples of real politics in the first place – it would amount to a disavowal of the spirit of political theory!
If a position along these lines starts to look a lot like the critical theorist’s position, that’s fine, but I think it is a moderated critical theory. My reading of Graeber suggests that normativity, even the idealistic, abstract normativity the realists most detest, cannot be counted as ‘mere’ real politics without (a) ignoring what the actors (the normative theorists) themselves think they are doing, and (b) excusing the would-be realist’s own normative commitments, which are either disavowed (for example, through appeals to objectivity – “I’m just studying what’s important” – or with the almost wilfully facetious claim that “criticism per se need not imply anything positive”) or smuggled silently into their criticism – something which the choice of topic, tone of voice, or spirit of the criticism usually gives away. No method is neutral; the three methodological strategies outlined above are actually responses to a misdiagnosis on the part of
24 Or, at the very least, delegitimizing challengers Eldon Kerr 60 realists: there is no such thing as ideal or non-ideal theory.25 All theory is one and the other. As
Jacob Levy writes, “political life is about friction; no friction, no politics or justice” (1):
ideal normative political theory is not like microeconomic models with their assumptions of perfect competition and perfect information, radically simplifying assumptions that can be useful in important ways. It is rather like microeconomics with added assumptions of superabundance and the impossibility of scarcity: a confused muddle, because microeconomic choice is a way of thinking about choice among limited goods.” (1)
Because of this, Levy notes, “Plausible ideal theories necessarily smuggle in non-ideal premises in order to justify the need for politics and justice altogether” (2). There’s a flip-side to this, if we bear in mind the notion of a theorist’s ‘spirit’: plausible realist theories are always motived, at least in part, by concerns that do not only emerge out of the ‘real’ politics under theoretical investigation. A realist theory might be motivated by academic politics, for example by wanting to upstage one’s normative rival, or by personal emotions, like the faded hopes and dreams of a researcher whose concerns do not fit the fashions.26
Political theorists, like political actors, move back and forth between the prescriptive and the diagnostic. But their abstract, moral commitments can be just as much a part of real politics, and function as political speech acts. This means they can be assessed as such. In more simplistic terms, one could also point out that most theorists will already normative commitments long before they begin a research project, commitments which will almost always affect that theorist’s research agenda. One could demonstrate this argument in philosophical, sociological, or psychological terms. But perhaps one wants to give theorists the benefit of the doubt, and not paint them as irredeemably partisan. In that case, I’ll merely suggest that to be the kind of person
25 I’m not sure if there is an interesting sociological explanation for this, but the “There is no such thing as…” genre seems increasingly popular in academic circles (something a brief Google search supports). 26 Geuss himself talks nostalgically (i.e. in an emotionally-charged manner) about the world of political theory before Rawls. He notes in an interview that “those of us who were at that time politically active” [before the book’s release] saw the release of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice as “a monument to depoliticisation” (Geuss qtd. in Gelonesi). Perhaps his realism is also a longing for his youth. Eldon Kerr 61 motivated to think about politics in a theoretical manner is already to incorporate a certain kind of attitude and posture (a certain kind of spirit) towards the world, one which makes certain kinds of questions and answers seem more important than others. Realists may bemoan that too often that posture is one which finds solace in the answers of contracts and obligations, but amongst all the possible ways one could respond to a world full of friction, the realists’ is not a million miles away from the ideal normativists – there’s a reason both are often found just across the corridor from one another. Many contemporary realists seem content to ask others to listen to the world a little better (which might explain why the meta-discussion of realism as a method seems to attract more interest than actual theory conducted in a realist vein), but they do not always seem very good at listening to the world, or themselves.27 At least the most prescriptive, idealizing moralists say what it is they want. And that, however vague, can be really quite political.28
27 To be fair, attack is often the best form of defense, as any strategist of ‘real’ politics worth their salt could tell you… 28 Both in terms of academic politics, and politics more generally. Eldon Kerr 62
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