In 1976, Michel Foucault closes a depressing interview about prisons in the USSR with his diagnosis that actually existing socialism had never invented its own governmental rationality (and neither had Marxism as a whole). Instead, it would govern through a totalitarian bureaucracy, and hence Foucault concluded that it would be urgent to invent new ways of governing which should be neither liberal nor totalitarian: “[T]o invent a way in which power can be exercised without instilling fear. That would be a true innovation.” The liberal answer to that question is well-known; in a simplified Habermasian version it is the combination of public and private autonomy in a democracy under the rule of law. In the seminar, we will examine arguments to the effect that this combination of self-government in legal form is not as free of fear as it pretends to be. We will also look at alternative answers to the liberal question from heterodox traditions like anarchism and assessment whether they do indeed instill less fear.
Preparatory Reading
Brunkhorst, Hauke (2014): Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions. Evolutionary perspectives. New York/London/New Delhi/Sydney: Bloomsbury.
Loick, Daniel (2012): Kritik der Souveränität. Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus.
Menke, Christoph (2015): Kritik der Rechte. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Neumann, Franz L. (1986): Angst und Politik. In: ders., Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat. Studien zur politischen Theorie. Hrsg. von Herbert Marcuse und Helge Pross. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 261–291.