[lit-ideas] Re: Philosophers of Empire
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 2 May 2014 13:39:01 +0200
Well, Ferguson is an interesting author but one with a pretty obvious
ideological agenda (just to think that he married Hirsi Ali says volumes).
He oscillates between saying that the US is an empire at present and saying
that it currently isn't but should be one. For example:
Unlike most European critics of the United States…I believe the world needs
an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best
candidate for the job.…The United States has good reasons to play the role
of liberal empire, both from the point of view of its own security and out
of straightforward altruism. In many ways too it is uniquely well equipped
to play it. Yet for all its colossal economic, military and cultural power,
the United States still looks unlikely to be an effective liberal empire
without some profound changes in its economic structure, its social makeup
and its political culture.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2007/05/the-global-empire-of-nia.html
He also discusses the term 'hegemony' but comes out in favour of 'empire':
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/59200/niall-ferguson/hegemony-or-empire
On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 11:58 AM, Redacted sender Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx for
DMARC <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> What is a philosophical analysis of the concept of 'empire'?
>
> L. Helm's position seems to agree with that of Hanson, as cited in
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism
>
> "Classics professor and war historian Victor Davis Hanson dismisses the
> notion of an American empire altogether, mockingly comparing it to other
> empires: "We do not send out proconsuls to reside over client states,
> which in
> turn impose taxes on coerced subjects to pay for the legions. Instead,
> American bases are predicated on contractual obligations — costly to us
> and
> profitable to their hosts. We do not see any profits in Korea, but instead
> accept the risk of losing almost 40,000 of our youth to ensure that Kias
> can
> flood our shores and that shaggy students can protest outside our embassy
> in
> Seoul.""
>
> Philosophy of Empire.
>
> L. Helm raises an interesting topic or point -- how to define 'empire' and
> how to make sense of allegations such as "The United States of America
> is/was an Empire'.
>
> What interests me about L. Helm's stance on the topic is methodological,
> and McEvoy should feel free to add his view on 'stipulative definitions'.
> Rather, I should take a 'Griceian' account. After all, Grice repeatedly
> said
> that philosophers are into 'conceptual analysis' -- never mind the concept
> of what. And what they do is to provide definitions which display
> necessary
> and sufficient conditions for the analysis of the concept chosen for
> philosophical inquiry.
>
> Here they keyword is indeed POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, but the addition of
> "United States of America" brings historicity into an otherwise
> theoretical or
> abstract question. So let's revise.
>
> In a message dated 5/1/2014 4:22:37 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> Various “assertions” have been made alleging that the U.S. is an empire,
> but I’ve seen no “arguments” in the sense that you produce evidence and
> then draw a conclusion from the evidence that comprises the end point of
> an
> argument; ergo the U.S. is an empire. I think of Niall Ferguson
> asserting
> that the U.S. is an empire, just not a very good one since it doesn't do
> any of the things that earlier empires did allows him to get away with a
> very
> soft definition, something along the lines of “the U.S. is the most
> powerful nation in the world therefore it is an empire.”"
>
> I like the idea of some definitions of 'empire' being soft. This has
> various sides to it. For one, 'empire' WAS the keyword in mainstream
> political
> philosophy. I read from
>
> "Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism"
>
> in the Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 13: 211-235 -- available
> online:
>
> "The study of empire," the author writes, is
>
> "a theme in the history of political thought" and was
>
> "pioneered by a few scholars working with a broadly Cambridge-school
> approach, most prominently Anthony Pagden, James Tully, J.G.A. Pocock,
> Richard
> Tuck, and more recently David Armitage."
>
> "Pagden's early, seminal studies explored debates over the legitimation of
> Spanish rule in the New World, debates conducted in language borrowed from
> Aristotelian psychology (natural slave and child) and Roman legal and
> political thought (imperium, dominium, orbis terrarum)."
>
> "In illustrating how empires generated new states and political forms, and
> shaped modern political ideologies such as democratic republicanism, Pagden
> made a powerful case for the centrality of empire to political theory. His
> most recent books, written for more popular audiences, stress the possibly
> “insuperable future dilemmas” facing the polities created in the wake of
> formal empires (Pagden 2001, p. 160) and, controversially, the “perpetual
> enmity” between Europe and Asia (Pagden 2008)."
>
> "Tully placed questions connected to empire at the heart of both LOCKE's
> thought and modern constitutionalism, as I discuss further below. Pocock
> (2005, ch. 2 [1973]) insisted, from a professedly “antipodean”
> perspective,
> that British history and political thought must be understood in imperial
> and
> global terms. More recently, his magisterial volumes exploring
> Enlightenment thought by way of a study of the contexts of Gibbon's
> Decline and Fall
> of the Roman Empire have emphasized the global orientation of the
> enlightened histories that were so prominent a feature of the
> intellectual landscape
> (Pocock 1999–2005). Pocock explores the wide range of meanings of “empire”
> at the time, as well as what he calls the era's “crisis of the seaborne
> empires” (Pocock 1999, Vol. 4, p. 227) and the anxieties on the part of so
> many political and social thinkers of the time about the disorders of the
> global commerce that was supposed to succeed the age of conquests. As Tuck
> (1999) has argued, early-modern theorists of subjective rights conceived
> the
> sovereign individual in terms of the sovereign state and vice versa. They
> worked out their theories, with “often brutal implications” for indigenous
> and non-European peoples, partly in response to two key practical problems
> arising from European commercial and imperial expansion: struggles over
> freedom and control of trade and navigation in Asia, and states' efforts
> to
> legitimate their settlement colonies in the New World (Tuck 1999, p.
> 108)."
>
> It seems that after Locke, Mill figured large in justifying empire. We are
> then talking about mainstream political philosophers concerned with a
> crucial concept, and no doubt struggling with a conceptual definition of
> it.
>
> It should be granted that Locke and Mill are notably British rather than
> American, even if the study, within political philosophy, or analysis of
> the
> concept of 'empire' may have been practiced by American political
> philosophers as well.
>
> The centrality of the task DEFINING 'empire' I also found, especifically,
> at
>
> http://www.protevi.com/john/Empire.pdf
>
> who cares to refer to this set of 'necessary and sufficient conditions'
> which may relate to L. Helm's idea of some definitions of 'empire' being
> 'soft', while what we need is a 'hard' one that does rely on some sort of
> 'reductive' if not 'reductionist' analysis of 'empire' to its basics.
>
> The author writes:
>
> "Is the United States on the verge of becoming an empire?"
>
> "There is no finite set of characteristics for, say, “empire” that serve
> as necessary
> and sufficient conditions for membership in that category."
>
> What we need is what Grice would call a "CONCEPTUAL" analysis (vide his
> "Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy", in "Studies in the
> Way
> of Words" -- this essay is particularly apt, since Grice sees the role of
> the philosopher as that of providing conceptual analysis not necessarily
> for
> his own clarification. A philosopher can engage in philosophical analysis
> for the sake of helping others. He grants that his main motivation has to
> do
> with questions of defining concepts HE finds troubles with).
>
> The author of the above link goes on:
>
> "To start, the concept of empire belongs to a group of other concepts for
> ancient systems of geo-sociopolitical order, including nomadic warrior
> bands
> (with a leader who is first among equals -- primus inter
> pares -- and who divvies up the booty they plunder from other groups);
> central place cities (with large
> scale slave-based agriculture and tending to mixed regimes w/ monarchial
> elements); and gateway cities
> (tending to commercial republic; expansionist democracy; forming leagues
> and allies)."
>
> "These cities tended to have interludes of tyranny – one-man absolute rule
> – on their way from aristocracy to
> democracy or mixed regimes."
>
> "Finally, there is an important concept, developed in the ancient world,
> for inter-state relations,
> “hegemony”, which is leadership by one unit of other units formally equal
> in “rights” but materially
> unequal in power."
>
> "When we talk about the concept of "empire" we must at first distinguish
> the geopolitical and civic political
> senses of the term."
>
> "Geopolitically, empire is the domination by one group of a large number
> of other
> groups spread over a large territory. In civic political terms, we talk
> about imperial rule as absolute
> monarchy, large bureaucracy, elaborate regulatory codes: “big gummit” in
> other words. On the side of
> the people, an empire tends to be composed of a few influential rich
> families and a mass of isolated and
> relatively powerless “citizens.”"
>
> The author is concerned with what after Locke we may term 'nominal' versus
> 'real' definitions. A real definition, however, has the risk of relying on
> an obscure idea of 'essence'. But it seems that any reference to a
> condition being both NECESSARY and sufficient may always be criticised as
> 'essentialist' if not 'stipulative'.
>
> The author goes on:
>
> "(Now if you insist that I answer the essentialist question at this point,
> I would have to say the US for the
> most part works hegemonically rather than imperially – the threats are
> enough to so constrain other
> states’ options in both domestic and foreign policy that we exert
> effective control over large parts of the
> world – but to show we mean business, an invasion is sometimes necessary,
> in which case we shift to
> imperial action. The long history of our control of Central and South
> America shows this: was
> fomenting the Pinochet takeover in Chile – that other September 11 – an
> imperial or hegemonic act?
> What about the IMF’s role in Argentina in past years?)"
>
> "As soon as we talk history, these conceptual distinctions are
> problematized."
>
> "Rome forms an interesting case where these ideal distinctions are
> finessed on the ground.
> Most of the geopolitical expanse of what we call the Roman Empire was
> gained when its civic
> political structure was that of a republic."
>
> Back to Helm's post. He goes on:
>
> "To assert as some do that “empires operate differently nowadays” is an
> assertion in search of an argument.
> To put it another way, if Rome, Britain, Spain, France and the Netherlands
> were at one time empires but the U.S. is “a different sort of empire,”
> then where do we find in this a definition of what an empire is? And if
> you
> reply that the new definition is merely whatever the U.S. happens to be,
> then how is that a definition of “empire”?"
>
> Well, indeed, definitions can be intensional (the ones I prefer) or
> EXtensional, as per by enumeration. I would think in terms of set-theory,
> the
> idea would be. Let "E" be the class we call "Empire" (as per a Venn
> diagram,
> say). We then define "E" extensionally:
>
> E = {Rome, Britain, USA}
>
> I'm sure there is an extensional way to proceed to represent the fact that
> Rome, Britain and USA, while they HELP to define, extensionally, the
> 'set', "Empire", do not yet provide the set's full extension. Extensional
> definitions avoid dealing with INTENSIONS. IntenSionally, one could define
> "Empire" without reference to members of the set. This leads us to
> _analyse_
> "Empire" in terms of more basic characteristics which, jointly, should
> provide
> _necessary and sufficient_ conditions for the appropriate use of "Empire"
> in utterances like, "... is an Empire". E.g.: "Rome is an Empire",
> "Britain
> is an Empire". And so on.
>
> Helm goes on:
>
> "For the above reasons and many others, those who think about the modern
> era in mega-terms, especially Fukuyama and Huntington do not apply the
> term “
> empire” to the U.S. Fukuyama doesn’t see the U.S. as being unique,
> merely the best example of a Liberal Democracy. He sees all nations
> becoming
> Liberal Democracies in the future. A state needs to become on if it is to
> succeed economically. In fact, the most successful nations already are,
> either wholly or partly. Think of the nations which aren’t successful
> today
> and the common explanation for why they are not is that they are not
> Liberal
> Democracies and do not have modern economies that participate in the “world
> economy.” Huntington, without addressing economies, as I recall, argued
> that wars will continue between Civilizations (using the common definition
> of “civilization” which he references in Clash of Civilizations) occurring
> along “fault lines,” those being the borders where a nation of one
> civilization is up against that of another, as in the case of Pakistan
> and India
> for example. He also uses the term “core state.” Within most
> civilizations there is a “core state.” The U.S. is the “core state” in
> the “West”
> civilization. Russia is the “core state” within the Eastern Orthodox
> civilization. In Huntington’s terms, the U.S. is the most powerful nation
> in “
> the West.” Things have indeed changed, and there are no more empires in
> the sense that Britain, Spain, France and the Netherlands were empires up
> until WWII the end of WWII. Now you have “core states” and spheres of
> influence. The problem with the Middle East isn’t that their states
> aren’t in
> the world economy as Liberal Democracies; it is that they don’t have a “
> core state.”"
>
> Interesting. If one disallows extensional definitions, which tend,
> granted, to look pretty 'unclarifying', we should look for those basic
> characteristics, in geopolitical terms, which will help us define
> 'empire'. Helm is
> right that other notions play an interesting role, such as 'state', and
> 'liberal democracy', and these ideas are developed in the second link
> provided
> above.
>
> On top of all that, a rather side issue, which seems to have some sort of
> 'lingustic effect'. The phrase 'American empire' IS used, when it comes to
> architecture! So one has to be careful!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Speranza
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Empire_(style) informs us that
> "American Empire" is a classical style of American arts and architecture"
>
> "It gained its greatest popularity in the U.S. after 1810 and is
> considered a robust phase of the classical style."
>
> "As an early-19th-century design movement in the United States, it
> encompassed architecture, furniture and other decorative arts, as well as
> the
> visual arts."
>
> "The Red Room at the White House is a fine example of American Empire
> style."
>
> I guess Jacqueline Kennedy knew all about it!
>
> "A simplified version of American Empire furniture, often referred to as
> the Grecian style,"
>
> not to be confused with the Griceian style,
>
> "generally displayed plainer surfaces in curved forms, highly figured
> mahogany veneers, and sometimes gilt-stencilled decorations."
>
> "This Americanized interpretation of the Empire style continued in
> popularity in conservative regions outside the major metropolitan centers
> well
> past the mid-nineteenth century."
>
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