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The Politics of Freedom

Freedom & State Intervention

Audren Layeux follows the doomed quest for state emancipation of the self.

The contemporary world has given birth to a growing feeling of helplessness. Globalisation, once portrayed as promising a great future, is now associated with economic turmoil and the growing subjugation of politics to economics. Democracy is in crisis around the globe, and the number of citizens who feel disenfranchised keeps on growing, as they judge the political systems under which they live to be either corrupt or incapable of addressing new forms of violence, social disintegration, economic depression and other challenges.

Commentators usually blame this situation on an array of ideologies and trends including electronic media, global transportation technologies, and neoliberalism. Here I will take a different tack. I’d like to suggest that our contemporary scourges at least partially trace back to a legitimate and understandable quest for freedom that unfortunately, yet predictably, completely backfired.

Illustration © Jaime Raposo 2024. To see more of his art, please visit jaimeraposo.com

The Two Sides of Modernity

For many centuries European history was characterised by long, bloody wars over religion and power; wars marked by cruelty and hatred. Then, the project of modernity began to establish a link between individual experience and modern institutions. The philosophical founders of the modern world started their work with theories of human emotions. This is perfectly illustrated by Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith (1759). The objective of the state for Hobbes, or of the market for Smith, is to build a rational social order based on a scientific understanding of the inner nature of human beings.

Similarly, the construction of the modern nation-state was, from the start, intertwined with a project of education. This is obvious if one looks at the history of education after the French Revolution. The Revolution was almost immediately followed by projects to transform education, either from the revolutionaries or from their opponents. In both cases, the aim was to win young minds over either to the Revolution or to the Reaction. This is especially blatant in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s extremely influential 1813 book The Doctrine of the State.

Fichte was an idealist philosopher whose metaphysics had great influence on subsequent German philosophy, while his theory of the state had a strong influence on the socialist movement. Considered a founder of modern nationalism, he was also a friend of Johan Pestalozzi, a Swiss educational reformist. In Doctrine of the State Fichte insists that building a nation state must start with education. Individuals must be educated, and if necessary coerced, to embrace the new ideal of national liberty. As shown by the French Revolution, he said, individuals can be enslaved to traditions and irrationality, even fighting for the King against their own liberty. Therefore, proper coercion and education are the first steps to build a liberal nation-state. This coercion can only be lifted when the people have been educated to become citizens willing to solve their conflicts and differences rationally, and solely through legal institutions. In other words, the project of modernity and its transformations can only be understood by looking simultaneously at the transformation of subjectivity through education, and corresponding changes happening in the vision of statehood.

The Trauma of WWI

From Hobbes onwards, and right though the nineteenth century, modernity progressively increased its focus on maximising freedom for the individual. I will leave aside criticisms voiced by socialists and anarchists, since space does not allow me to cover everything. Instead, I want to focus on the profound transformations that followed the First World War.

Understanding the effects of that conflict, I would argue, is decisive for understanding the collapse of modernity from within. The psychological trauma it represented for those involved is perfectly epitomised in a series of literary masterpieces from the years that followed, for example, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932) or the memoir The World of Yesterday by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1942). More importantly for us, 1918 was the start of a journey to transform both statehood and the ideal of education.

The transformation of the education system is especially interesting. From the nineteenth century until 1918, critics of traditional school systems, such as Augustin Freynet or Pestalozzi, were advocating for the application of ‘active methods’ – meaning that the student should be placed at the centre and become an active participant in their learning process. But the global conflict left such an impact that advocates of education reform were no longer satisfied with such modest objectives. Instead, they started to organise themselves into various international organisations to advocate for the creation of a new individual through new educational methods.

One of the most famous of these institutions was the Ligue Internationale pour l’éducation nouvelle. Most of the big names of alternative pedagogies were part of it, including, for example, Maria Montesorri and Augustin Freynet. Writing later about the first congress of the League, one of the reformers of the time, Henri Wallon, said:

“This congress was the result of the pacifist movement that came after the First World War. It seemed back then that, to ensure the world a future of peace, nothing could be more efficient than developing the sense of respect of the person thanks to an appropriate education. Then would flourish the ideals of solidarity and human fraternity, that are at the opposite of war and violence.”
(Henri Wallon, Pour l’Ere Nouvelle, 1952).

The earlier revolutionary vision of education had a vision echoing Hobbes’ and Fichte’s ideals to create new citizens: kids were seen as wildlings, having passions and urges that needed to be civilised. This was supposed to create ‘sovereign’ adults able to control their worst impulses and become encultured. But because of the trauma of World War I, this ‘reprogramming’ became seen by many as precisely the problem: as a source of frustration and alienation. The goal of education should instead be to free the individual to build himself up, and to enable him to listen to his own inner self. (Naturally, this short account cannot do justice to the theories and principles of the new education. It’s also clear that, even though public education has been repeatedly overhauled since the beginning of the twentieth century, the ideals of this new educational approach were never fully implemented.)

This transformation of the ideal of education did not happen in isolation, but against a backdrop of political turmoil.

The German legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) pointed out that the Treaty of Versailles at end of World War One broke with the European jus gentium.This was a concept of international law which first appeared in the seventeenth century from the pens of classic writers such as Vattel and Grotius. In line with the objectives of modernity, the jus gentium established rules of war to regulate conflicts between the European powers. War and violence could not be avoided, but should at least be regulated, and channelled into conflicts between states – only then could violence be kept from degenerating into complete barbarism. However, the First World War shattered this illusion. Instead of tightly regulated violence, that conflict brought forth atrocities on a scale never seen before. So, the idea that the state could conduct limited rule-bound conflicts was replaced with the observation that nationalism leads to massacre. Moreover, the Versailles peace treaty also broke with the principle of neutrality. Instead, the losers were criminalised and judged, made to accept their guilt for starting the war, and forced to pay massive reparations. Morality and moral judgements had marked their return as ruling principles in international conflicts.

The project of modernity was thus fully discredited as the reconstructed civilised individual came (literally) under fire. The vision of civilising education, so glowingly described by Fichte, was painted by proponents of the new education as repressive and dangerous. Symmetrically, under the influence of both the pacifist and the socialist movements, national borders started to be seen as the cause of wars.

The Euphoria of the Post-War Period

The transformations following the end of the Second World War were complex. The triumph of Keynesian economics in the West and Communism in the East saw the rise of state-controlled economies. Then eventually the tide turned, the Communist bloc collapsed and with the rise of neoliberalism national governments began to progressively dismantle their control over their economies.

Schmitt identifies the post-war period with the progressive demise of the state’s monopoly over politics. With the Cold War and the development of international organisations, the classic jus gentium is further abolished. Instead, wars are presented as police actions against rogue states (either by one of the giants to control its own allies, or against ‘bad’ states), or as moral duties for the sake of humanity (for example, the humanitarian interventions led by the UN). Increasingly, international organisations and other new players enter the scene and take over the role once held by the state in ‘defining the friend and the foe’. This is the definition of politics usually associated with Schmitt. However, it is a caricature. According to Schmitt, politics has no nature; it cannot be given an essence. Therefore, this should instead be seen as a delimiting principle: anything can become politics, but the best way to tell if it has is to check if it has already been structured around antagonistic categories.

Notwithstanding the definition of politics, the state’s loss of monopoly over politics corresponded with the emergence of new actors, including continental organisations like the EU and, later, NAFTA and ASEAN. Symmetrically, once-Keynesian organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF were transformed to implement the neoliberal agenda of dismantling state monopolies over economic rules and establishing freedoms of movement for goods, money and ideas. At the same time, the quest for a new form of subjectivity took another turn.

In Europe, the Sixties is famous (or notorious) for May 68’s diverse movements for the emancipation of the self. As Michel Oris, an anthropologist from the University of Geneva, pointed out, the core objective of these movements was to ‘explode’ the ‘concrete covering’ of bourgeois morality bequeathed from the nineteenth century. This ideal is perfectly epitomised by the work of Wilhelm Reich, whose theories appealed to many involved in May 68 movements, from Gilles Deleuze, to libertarians, to communists.

Aiming to fight fascism, Reich married psychoanalysis with Marxism to link sexual repression with the structure of state power. He criticised the Marxist inability to explain why the masses would follow a leader going against their own interests in a flagrant way as, for example, in fascism. According to Reich, individuals support fascism not because of its ideas or its program, but because it enables them to release their internal tensions by projecting them externally. Fascism exploits the irrationality and repressed sexuality of its followers by appealing to nonconscious instincts. In other words: the popularity of fascism grows with sexual frustration. In his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Reich invokes what he calls ‘the inaptitude to liberty’. Trained by society and its archaic institutions such as the traditional family, individuals became incapable of managing their own emotions, and in particular, their sexuality. This results in a tension between the aspiration to freedom and the fear of freedom.

Reich provides a clear expression of the paradigm at the basis of all the social movement that spread out from the Sixties onwards. This includes the vision of sexual minorities, which were then at the edge of the emancipation movement. Radical feminists linked sexual repression of women with fascism and other forms of authoritarianism, such as patriarchy. Reich uncovers the logic at play behind all these radical movements: the idea that, to create an emancipated and peaceful world, all traditional institutions such as the family and the state must be dismantled to free the individual. This new radical subjectivity as the sole legitimate source of ethics and laws becomes an end in itself, as well as the only answer to war, barbarism, and fascism.

Globalisation

Arjun Appadurai, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, provides an interesting account of the end of the Cold War and the rise of globalisation. Two of his books, Modernity At Large (1996) and Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006) are especially important here, as they aim to provide a theory of the cultural and individual consequences of a globalised world. The new globalised world, after the Cold War, is characterised by a series of disjunctions: between the state and finance, territory and national identities, and so on. Even the ‘local’ has lost its status, and is now embedded in a series of flows that profoundly challenge the ability of traditional and local institutions to transmit identity and values, and shape behaviours.

In Modernity At Large, Appadurai closely links the emerging globalised self with the issue of international borders. According to Appadurai, electronic media and migration are the major driving forces turning the world into an interconnected web; and their main cultural impact is to increase the role of imagination in building our identities. In the globalised world, individuals are constantly exposed to flows of images, ideas, and identities. This leads to an increased freedom for individuals to define themselves, even if this generates tensions with their immediate surroundings. The family unit becomes less an institution transmitting a perception of the world, than an arena where individuals develop their own identities, sometimes based on conflicting sources of inspiration. Individuals are thus now more likely to be at odds with their relatives or community. Meanwhile, local communities increasingly take the shape of minorities embedded in a global network of diasporas.

This somewhat optimistic vision of globalisation, with its emphasis on individual freedom, was often criticised. Appadurai reacted with Fear of Small Numbers, focused on answering his biggest self-confessed weakness: “my own interpretative paralysis when it comes to the sanguinary violence of today’s ethnic wars” (Modernity At Large, p.224).

Appadurai refers to the Nineties as a ‘decade of violence’, when ethnic violence changed in nature. Less focused on erasing the ‘Other’ the new forms of violence are centred on humiliating and degrading them. According to the anthropologist, globalisation is responsible for this change, as it increases uncertainties and threaten the state’s objective of achieving stability within its borders. The fear of the majority of becoming a minority, the uncertainties and lack of control over global phenomena, and the threat that (actual) minorities represent for national control, are the cause of violence in a globalised world. This is because, in this new world, the enemy is no longer a member of another nation, but a neighbour, suspected of being a traitor.

Appadurai is extremely vehement in his attacks against the nation-state, which he considers the main cause of violence here: “Minorities are just ‘scapegoats’… minorities, in one word, are metaphors and reminders of the betrayal of the classic national project” (Fear of Small Numbers, p.68). But Appadurai makes a classic mistake in attributing the responsibility for violence to the nation-state. The nation-state is indeed, from the start, associated with violence, because, as Max Weber pointed out, the definition of the state is that it has ‘the monopoly of legitimate violence’ – but more importantly, and as Schmitt highlights, because the nation-state is a system invented to frame violence with rules to limit its outbursts but not to stop them. In other words, Appadurai unwittingly confirms the analysis made by Schmitt, as in this new world order that’s moving away from state control, violence takes the shape of fundamentalism, xenophobia, and populist outbursts which seek to humiliate the opponent.

As analysed by Appadurai, the double movement initiated by modernity – the creation of a new civilised, delimited self, and a system of strictly separated national borders – has been abolished. Far from its objective of maximising freedom, though, this caused the emergence of a society where violence has become a ‘permanent order’, to use Appadurai’s own words. In this new world order, “it is no longer possible to simply oppose nature and war on one side, social life and peace on the other… a more scary landscape [appears], where order… is organised around the fact or in the perspective of violence” (Fear of Small Numbers, p.53).

Carl Schmitt’s Curse

Carl Schmitt’s curse: the pendulum swings back and forth, but the world cannot fully escape violence, only manage it.

Carl Schmitt was a monster. A supporter of the Nazi regime, he did everything he could to become the official lawyer of the Third Reich. Unfortunately, he remains a classic legal theorist, and his key concepts and predictions are essential in analysing the postmodern world. The new person wished for by postmodernism and described by Appadurai is supposedly freer, with greater liberty given to his imagination to develop his self. However, one could question this. A major limitation of postmodern and postcolonial thinkers is that they lack an understanding of the legal order – a mistake Schmitt himself certainly did not commit. To be implemented, this new type of individual freedom requires an extremely intrusive state. Appadurai rejects Weber’s vision of the ‘iron cage’ of instrumental rationality, where interpersonal relationships are progressively replaced by legal rules and principles. Instead, Appadurai insists on the new importance of imagination in building one’s identity. What he misses is that this new free self requires new rules and other new forms of state intervention to protect its freedom. A typical example would be the new, intrusive, and often outrageous corporate rules being implemented to manage diversity. These rules, labelled as ‘politically correct’, have, since their beginning in the Sixties, increasing taken over Western society – as analysed and critiqued by French left-wing sociologists such as Frédéric Lordon, Vincent de Gaulejac, and Nicolas Aubert.

The spread of these new norms means that interpersonal relationships are based on principles stemming from the realm of laws. One must constantly and carefully assess whether one’s actions and beliefs will impinge on someone else’s liberty or emancipation, and new rules, laws, and norms are implemented to ensure that we respect this principle of ‘enforced liberty’. This has led, for example, to the creation in many countries of ministers for gender equality. Education systems and laws were overhauled to enforce and protect this emancipation of the modern self. In order to regulate interpersonal relationships, language, sex, and gender identities, laws and teachings must become ever more intrusive.

The state architecture established to control violence did not disappear. Rather, since violence is no longer projected outside national borders, but exploding from within, in forms ranging from terrorism to organised crime to mass protest and repression, the system of control has been redirected within national borders. France, for example, has changed its laws to incorporate most of the provisions of a ‘state of emergency’ into its regular legislation – a system of control that had already been established in the US with the Patriot Act.

The system of projecting violence beyond the borders never managed to abolish crime; but neither will the system of internal control. As the French criminologist Alain Bauer wrote, mass control and surveillance can prevent some planned attacks, but it will never fully stop terrorism itself.

Political modernity was a double movement: religion and morality were to be removed from the internal order to be replaced by a system of laws and citizenship managing interpersonal relationships. At the same time, the state would create strictly controlled borders and channel violence into state conflicts – not to abolish violence, but to pacify the society within its borders, and perhaps to prevent the worst acts of barbarism in wars. Yet following the First World War, we’ve identified the nation-state as the cause of brutal wars outside its borders and oppression within them. To emancipate the self and achieve peace, then, we have dismantled the dual mechanism on which the nation-state and modernity relied; reeducation, and the state control of individuals. Unsurprisingly, this led to the return of the scourges these techniques of social engineering were designed to control. Thus we have abolished modernity in the name of freedom and world peace, and have obtained neither peace nor freedom.

To conclude, the dismantlement of political modernity was done in the name of a lot of good causes. However, the consequences brought by such changes are in line with what Schmitt predicted: the return of premodern forms of violence. This is because many critics forgot that the state and political modernity were already a tool to pacify societies and international relations. And this is what Carl Schmitt’s curse means: violence cannot be erased or tamed, but only managed through political and social engineering.

The evolution of our political systems takes the shape of a pendulum: we went to the extreme forms of violence of religious warfare, went to the other forms of extreme violence caused by modernity during the First World War, and we are now going back to premodern forms of violence. And it does not matter if we decide to call them ‘postmodern’ forms of violence, as Appadurai does. They are the same thing.

That’s the curse: the pendulum swing brings us back from one extreme to the other, with no visible solution to escape or stop this tragedy.

Audren Layeux is a consultant and researcher who has published several papers and articles, mostly in the domain of the digital economy and new social movements.