The Tilo Schabert Thesis

The Primacy of Persons in Politics: Empiricism & Political Philosophy.  John von Heyking and Thomas Heilke, eds. Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America, 2013.

This book comprises nine essays, the first by Tilo Schabert, followed by eight responses to his work as a whole. Schabert aims to restore focus on the persons who actually engage in politics rather than on ideal types or aggregate statistical categories, in other words the people who exist and act behind these images of them and their doings. He argues that abstract empiricism and abstract political philosophies obscure the real political actors who cannot be reduced to mere instances of processes which purport to underlie and explain independently what is going on.

Politics is an activity which has a character of its own to be understood directly for itself. Schabert is empirical in that he wants to look directly at what is observably going on, and what it tells us about politics; he combines philosophical reflection with sociological observation. As the editors say, “the political world is a human creation, the product of numerous conjunctions, engagements, friendships, enmities, and other relationships among individuals. It is the product of the human mind. The political world is also an order combined with a chaos, a chaosmus, as Schabert (drawing upon James Joyce) calls it. (xiv, italics in original)

Schabert observes that human beings are free and creative and thus able to take responsibility for what they do. A human being is not a product of impersonal processes, but a “person” capable of awareness of other human beings also as persons. Institutional descriptions, Schabert says, are too limited: “Any regime as described institutionally is a fiction. For it is, within the sphere of institutional attributions given to it, in a state of constant movement.”(4)  And:

“A change from one political regime to another is preceded by the movements in the souls of those who have begun to desire another form of regime. . . All forms of political order are phenomena of movements . . . A government is not part of the physical world. It has no life of its own. It is a pure product of political creativity (7).”

“If we focus only on institutions we will float on the surface of reality, seeing only appearances; by looking directly at persons actually conducting politics we will see that “persons are the only stuff of politics (9).”

One might say that Schabert identifies a kind of Vulgar Platonism in the modern social sciences seeking to reduce the endless movements and interactions of persons to a discernible and hypothetically controllable pattern. But if every pattern is a snapshot then it is continually outdated by the endless adjustments of human beings to one another.

Schabert applies his insight to constitutional governments such as in America, France, Germany, or Britain, as well as in local politics as with the mayor of Boston, noting that constitutional forms both give power to those who govern and take it away at the same time. The tension between giving power and taking it away spurs the efforts of political leaders to expand their power to act as far as their circumstances and ingenuity will allow.

The political goal is what Schabert calls “monocracy,” which means surmounting the constitutional limitations while maintaining overt allegiance to them. Schabert sees natural movement to “monocracy” or personal rule, covered over by the holding of official, elected offices. He proposes what might be called an iron law of monocracy. In other words, the most dramatic expression of personal creativity emerges at the top, or at the center, of the life of the modern, bureaucratized, over-regulated social order mesmerized by the abstractions of modern social science.

The effort to reduce social relations to formulaic interactions ultimately depends on someone who is not controlled by the factors of control, who circumvents them to whatever extent possible. There is a contest between external imposition of order and the rebelliousness of the creative individual soul. Constitutional governments preside over a human world at profound odds with itself in the tension between security and inventiveness.

David Tabachnik describes Shabert’s view of modernity as “associated with social fragmentation, relativism, selfishness, consumption, novelty, arrogance and chaos” revealing an “emptiness of soul,”  the desire for novelty as an escape from boredom (26).  An anarchy of tastes tangles with a constructed order that wants to homogenize tastes “rationally.”  As Tabachnik describes it:

“The modern state, then, sets out a project not only to manipulate citizens and populations, but also to manipulate human nature itself through greater scientific understanding of the passions . . . the ancient practice of politics as friendship is replaced by universal rights, laws, and neutral institutions designed to control and limit our natural inclinations toward greater peace and stability” (28).

Individual liberty is promoted provided it expresses itself within the bureaucratized formulas of acceptable behavior. The stick of controlling power is coupled with the carrot of personal satisfaction of idiosyncratic passions. A “rational-scientific” order is overlaid on a chaotic array of self-expressions. Hence “chaosmus.”

The aspiration to moral virtue is supplanted by vulgar conceptions of peace and prosperity. Against this stunting of the passions leading to apathy, Schabert explores the possibility of encouraging creativity. Creativity already shows itself in those who attain positions of real power, but how is it to be directed such that exercise of such power does not merely reinforce bureaucratic control? It is not hard to see how creativity might be exercised in the form of controlling more and more what ordinary people do. Can the expansive, ambitious personality maintain simultaneously respect for the personhood of all others?

This is all the more pressing a question if the principal location of creativity is in executive power–executives can and do operate through extra-bureaucratic networks of friends and allies, seeking for themselves something akin to the ancient classical arena in which personal creativity can operate. Tabachnik points out, however, that this can produce a cult of personality protected by the lack of transparency and accountability which increasing bureaucratic regulation, in the name of subduing “overreaching” leadership, paradoxically encourages.

Among the issues needing further investigation is what Schabert means by “creativity,” and what the standards may be by which to judge desirable and undesirable acts of creativity. Schabert’s distinction reminds one of the classical one between the “few” and the “many,” which could mean that the few are free and creative and the many are controlled and passive. Bureaucratized modernity, in the name of “democracy,” tries to abolish the distinction between the few and the many, but cannot.

Toivo Koivukoski summarizes this nicely:

“A conception of politics grounded in the power of creation risks diminishing law to formality, to an outward product of an underlying flux. Doing so restricts full political personhood to the very few, those whom Hegel called world historical individuals, while ordinary citizens are reduced to the status of mere masses of humanity” (50).

There is then a strong Nietzschean/Heideggerian element in Schabert’s diagnosis of modernity as chaotic, vulgarly democratic, and lacking in excellence–a world that has kaleidoscopic patterns but no genuine order. Schabert argues that “modernity” is an experiment which cannot succeed.  But it is not clear what this means. After all, the world we have now has come into being over a long period, persists, and powerfully influences everything on the globe. It is obviously successful in some sense of the word, and one imagines that many at least in the west would find this accusation unintelligible or only a partial truth.

John von Heyking and Thomas Heilke advance the discussion by exploring in depth what Schabert means by “creativity.” Heyking points out that if creativity is related to friendship then there must be tension between the “neutral” rule of law state and the partisanship which creativity requires. Heyking, using Aristotelian categories, asks if political friendship, which inevitably involves utility, is true friendship, or is political friendship a category of its own to be measured according to the hierarchy of friendships Aristotle described? If it is a “faction” in Madison’s sense, is it properly described as “friendship,” or is it an alliance of convenience?

Clearly governing requires affinities among those who carry out governing activities, and so acquiring and keeping friends (allies?) is a focal point of politics which, when successful, enables whatever creative vision is at hand to be pursued more or less successfully. But if the human world is a “chaosmos”–an ineluctable combination of order and disorder–the activity of gaining and keeping “friends” is as central as any actual accomplishments which cannot, in view of the endless flux, be permanent.

Heyking concludes that friendship and politics cannot be equated because friendship, at its peak, is a free association of individuals which looks beyond satisfying the desire for mere pleasure or power, whereas politics must always involve the pursuit of power and securing survival. Friendship in the highest sense must transcend politics; politics can never operate on the basis of pure friendship. But politics is necessary to provide the wherewithal for creative persons to actualize their visions. Creativity in politics depends on freedom to act, but we are still not clear on what creativity is.

Heilke thus asks, “Can power be creative?” I think he means to ask what the relationship is between gaining power and acting creatively (is gaining power itself the focal feature of creativity?), or how do we know when the use of power is creative. He observes of politics (in this instance referring to Schabert’s treatment of France and Boston):

“This is the realm of arguments and debates about public policy, political structures, outcomes, resource distributions, and so on. What exactly creativity might mean in this context is open to skeptical consideration. After all, it seems that the structural processes and bureaucratic procedures of decision-making within institutional arrangements toward the end of allocating scarce resources . . . is hardly a venue of creativity” (110-11).

Heilke argues that creativity means to have a model or an idea and to find the means to realize it in the world. In this sense, politics is a positive activity which brings possibilities into being for us that might otherwise never come to sight. This could include deeper self-understanding of our way of life as well as the more obvious meaning of material achievements. He then refers to that strain of political philosophy in the West which has emphasized transcending politics, demoting the value of politics as “a necessary evil” which keeps us alive but does not do much more:

“Schabert’s emphasis on creativity suggests a more positive evaluation of politics. Heilke invokes Machiavelli as one who emphasized that the astute prince can devise and impose new modes and orders, thus constraining the natural tendency to chaos and dissolution. Is this what Schabert had in mind?  We do not know for sure because what he means by creativity “is not systematically spelled out in any one place . . .” (119).

Heilke, however, profoundly influenced by Hannah Arendt, thinks he can identify six features of creativity:

First, founding a regime; second, implementing and sustaining the foundation; third, continually renewing the founding act through time; fourth, effectively employing the regime’s institutions to revise or reaffirm existing practices; fifth, creating coalitions to exploit the possibilities of the institutional structures; sixth, the managers of the system must also be leaders who mobilize human resources.

In short, creativity seems to mean making and remaking a political community so as to sustain its life in world history through a combination of veneration for past deeds and an openness to reinterpreting their implications for us in times to come. But does this not also mean that the forms or institutions have a profound shaping effect on the creative expression, apart perhaps from the original pre-institutional founding, that they are more than mere surface?

How do we know power is being used creatively? We lack a conclusive answer. This is an arguable matter open to repeated dispute. One might then think that the Machiavelli of the Discourses and Madison were right to say that ambition must be made to counter ambition if the urge to creative politics is not to end in tyranny.

Dan Avnon continues in this vein:

“The creative person in politics is not solely a founder of a new regime. He can also be a leader of political communities that existed prior to his birth. The merit of both persons lies in their exceptional ability to create and continually recreate political power” (140-1).

It is difficult then to avoid the thought that creativity is nearly identical to getting and keeping power in pursuit of whatever goals or as an end in itself.  Schabert’s term “monocracy,” along with his positive use of the word “autocracy,” to describe the true wielders of power in democracies suggests this. Inside the democratic form is the autocratic practice.

This description of a prime personal mover behind the democratic form might be applied to American presidents at least since Lincoln: “Schabert assumes that the more innovative and creative the ruler is in his ability to create an informal structure of power based on the formal constitution, the more inspiring and impressive his achievement” (149).

Creativity means then getting and keeping the power to do what you want to do. The “goals” of politics appear to be the rhetorical devices which offer a semblance of legitimacy to what is really an activity which becomes an end in itself (this is compatible with creators believing in what they are doing). Avnon concludes:

“Schabert does not accord to the art of domestic rule any goal other than aggregation of power for the benefit of the ruler’s creative needs . . . Schabert approaches the accumulation of political power in an amoral or a-normative manner . . . deliberately disregarding the political goals of the autocrat’s progress” (162-63).

Avnon tries to rescue Schabert from this indictment by insisting that for him creativity is more important than power. This is not very convincing since creativity and power are so intimately tied in the analysis that it is hard to see how one takes priority over the other, or how creativity could reliably control the lust for power. A needed standard is missing. Schabert’s analysis may be realistic about what is required for success in politics, but it also shows us how excess is the nemesis of success. There is a Shakespearean dimension to the tragic implications of this analysis.

Alexander Thumfart emphasizes the importance of limitations on the use of power: “The ability for politics is necessarily tied to legal, institutional permission in politics. Without this ability, politics remains futile; without this permission, it becomes tyrannical.”(206) Pursuing power requires pursuing “permission.” Does this suggest that “tyranny” is in the eye of the beholder?

Andras Lanczi, speaks about lack of trust in human beings’ capacity for self-government in the post-Communist world. He makes a most interesting connection between the universality of democratic ideology and gnostic utopianism which marginalizes the realist approach to politics. To borrow terms from Michael Oakeshott, he is saying that the “politics of skepticism” is displaced by utopian “politics of faith.”

The skeptical disposition would seek limits to the use of power precisely because it recognizes the urge to gain and keep power and, furthermore, the extreme danger of that urge, in itself natural, when tied to utopian aspirations to remake the world. This surely means that “creativity” cannot be the only consideration. Some standard of judgment of the use of power, coupled with the thought that creativity, like the current and vulgar devotion to “change,” can be for the worse as well as for the better.

Erik Neveu, the sociologist, compliments Schabert as a political philosopher who does field work. He sees that Schabert’s emphasis on “persons” allows for free creative action but, at the same time, he does not neglect the constraints of context and thus, presumably, Schabert would never be subject to gnostic utopianism. There is a skeptical, Voegelinian side to Schabert’s emphasis on creativity–facts matter to him whether they are convenient or not–which might protect him, and possibly political actors, from the worst temptations of power.

But are those who seek power to fulfill their visions so likely to be restrained in this way? Can they be so restrained and also successful “creators?” These are questions which modern democratic regimes cannot ignore. Nor can we neglect or demote the importance of institutions. In their persistence, institutions remind us that there is need of formality as well as creativity.

Also available are “The German Question is a European Question,” “How the World is Made: France and the Reunification of Germany,” and “Tilo Schabert’s Lecture on Germany and France”; also see Thierry Gontier’s review available here and Lee Trepanier’s here.

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