Abstract
Tamsin Shaw has suggested that Nietzsche's concerns included the ideological capacity of the state. I show that some support for this interpretation can be drawn from Nietzsche's own views about the threat to moral and intellectual independence posed by modern forms of political authority. If taken seriously, his insights allow us to appreciate how independent political judgment, and hence individual autonomy, can be systematically imperiled by the operation of the modern state apparatus. In light of this discovery, I begin to construct a genealogical theory of legitimate authority that citizens can deploy in order to check state power. I argue that genealogical narratives have the power to impugn the normative authority of purportedly binding decisions and orders. Such narratives do so when they reveal a fault in the justificatory reasoning offered by state representatives in defense of their actions. At the heart of this theory there lies an account of the ways in which officers of the state can, and cannot, permissibly offer reasons in the course of justifying their decisions to citizens.
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Notes
For British and American perspectives on the subject, see Conor Gearty, Can Human Rights Survive?: The Hamlyn Lectures 2005 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and David Cole and James X. Demspey, Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security (New York: New Press, 2006), respectively.
Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 207. In the passage cited, Williams calls this the “anti-tyranny” argument for truthfulness in politics.
Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith, “Children of the Revolution,” The Observer Magazine, 22 February 2009.
Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 76.
See Williams, Truth and Truthfulness and Tamsin Shaw, Nietzsche's Political Skepticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Brian Leiter has argued that while Shaw's argument is as impressive as it is inventive, there is little explicit evidence that Nietzsche was directly concerned with the question of normative political authority. See Brian Leiter, “Review of Tamsin Shaw's Nietzsche's Political Skepticism,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2009), on-line at http://ndpr.nd.edu. There is certainly something to Leiter's criticism, though in this essay I hope to show that Nietzsche's thought remains suggestive of a set of problems relating to the ideological capacity of the state, or of sources of authority more generally, even if Nietzsche himself was not quite as interested in the question as Shaw makes out.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 521.
Ibid., 453.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 82; Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 456.
Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 591.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 264.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 201.
Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 464.
Raymond Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” in his Morality, Culture, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 20.
Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 581.
Ibid., 581-82.
Michael Rosen, “The History of Philosophy as Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 148-49.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 146.
Such an idea is certainly reminiscent of Nietzsche's remarks in the Genealogy, particularly where he writes that: “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed and re-directed by some power superior to it.” See Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 513.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 104.
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 164.
Thomas McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School,” Political Theory 18 (1990): 440.
Tyler Krupp, “Genealogy as Critique?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 2 (2008): 333.
Raymond Geuss, “Genealogy as Critique,” European Journal of Philosophy 10 (2002): 212, emphasis added.
Ibid., 213.
This is not, of course, to say that all genealogies must be critical. Locke presumably thought that in order to justify the institution of private property one could tell a story about the origins of that institution that would ultimately serve to vindicate it, to place it on a rationally compelling footing. And this is just what he set out to do in The Second Treatise, by combining the argument for self-ownership with the labor theory of value. Here I take no stand on the question of whether hypothetical genealogies like this, based on the just-so story of the state of nature, can be successfully vindicatory in this way. I will just raise the suggestion that perhaps all political theories may ultimately find a home in one of three categories: a utopian vision of the ideal state of affairs, a vindicatory genealogy which defends existing practices, or a critical genealogy that impugns them.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 79.
Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 231.
Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 555.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 104.
Ibid., 150.
Ibid., 156.
Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 480.
Ibid., 495.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 93.
Ibid., 94.
Ibid., 195.
Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 17.
Ibid.
Shaw, Nietzsche's Political Skepticism.
Ibid., 130.
Ibid., 135.
Dana Villa, Socratic Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 157.
Brian Leiter, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche and Freud,” in The Future for Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 104.
Ibid.
Leiter seems to believe that if Nietzsche is properly thought of as a naturalist, then this excludes the possibility that he should be understood as a perfectionist. Indeed he seeks to reclaim “Nietzsche the naturalist” from the moralizing misappropriation by perfectionist philosophers. For reasons that I cannot set out at length here, I am not sure that I agree, and in fact I do not see why a perfectionist account cannot be embedded within a naturalist one: indeed, that is the purpose of reorienting the Nietzschean question to “what are the necessary conditions (naturalism) for the exercise of autonomy (perfectionism) in late modernity?”
Stephen Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 20.
I’d like to thank Colin Bird for pushing me in this direction.
Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint, 16.
Ibid.
This example is fanciful because in reality coercive orders are rarely accompanied by such careful articulation of their grounds.
The thought of recruiting this example to the argument of the paper occurred to me after a conversation about Operation Cast Lead with Tamar Meisels. I’d like to thank her for helping me to think through these issues.
In a report sketching out its reasons for rejecting the ACMD's advice, the Home Office has stated that “In reaching our decision, we have taken into account wider issues such as public perceptions and the needs and consequences for policing priorities. Reclassifying cannabis to Class B will reinforce our national message that cannabis is harmful and illegal, and will help to drive the enforcement priorities to reverse the massive growth in commercial cultivation.” See “Government Response to the Recommendations Made by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in Its Report Cannabis: Classification and Public Health” (United Kingdom: HM Home Office, 2008), 2. Available at http://drugs.homeoffice.gov.uk/publication-search/cannabis/acmd-cannabisreclassification2835.pdf?view=Binary. Accessed 4/6/2010. Since this report also gestures towards the harm to the user as a motivating reason for the decision, perhaps I have been uncharitable in claiming that this was a case in which one reason was proffered in public while another was used in private. I leave open the possibility that this is better described as another case of a mixture of bad and good reasons for a decision, like the Israeli example.
“B’tselem's Investigation of Fatalities in Operation Cast Lead” (Jersualem: B’Tselem, 2009). Available at http://www.btselem.org/Download/20090909_Cast_Lead_Fatalities_Eng.pdf. Accessed 4/7/2010.
Williams, Truth and Truthfulness.
Ibid., 227.
It is impossible to quote Williams directly without butchering the original text, so I have done my best to paraphrase his argument here. See Ibid., 227–30.
Shaw, Nietzsche's Political Skepticism, 8.
Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 230.
I’d like to thank Gareth Davies for reminding me of the affinities between the view I am describing here and the principles of judicial review in English law.
Harry Woolf, Jeffrey Jowell, and Stanley de Smith, Judicial Review of Administrative Action, 5th ed. (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1995), 549.
Ibid., 551.
Ibid., 554.
De Smith, Woolf, and Jowell cite, as an example, a case in which “a local authority acquired property for the ostensible purpose of widening a street or redeveloping an urban area but in reality for the purpose of reselling it at a profit.” Gard v. Commissioners of Sewers for the City of London (1885) 28 Ch.D. Judicial Review, 486.
de Smith, Woolf, and Jowell point out that “there is authority for the proposition that failure to give reasons, or to give adequate reasons, is not in itself an error of law entitling the court to set the decision aside, and that if good and bad reasons for a decision are given, the decision should stand provided that the reasons are independent and severable or if the dominant reason is lawful.” Judicial Review, 469, citing Re Allen and Matthews’ Arbitration (1971) 2 QB 518 and Paultons Square Properties Ltd. v. L.C.C. (1965) 63L.G.R. 158.
Ibid., 457. However, exceptions to this historic, general rule have proliferated—fairness and natural justice now effectively require reasons to be given in a wide number of cases.
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The author thanks Gerald M. Mara, Colin Bird, and the two anonymous reviewers for Polity for their invaluable advice and comments on this piece. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 2008 meeting of the Northeastern Political Science Association in Boston, MA. I’d like to thank the audience and my fellow panel members for their criticism, questions, and comments.