In this masterful study, David William Bates attempts nothing less than a complete retrieval and recapitulation of the concept of the political within the greater context of Enlightenment political thought. However, Bates's book is not just a history of ideas; rather, Bates's work is situated in conversation with many of the most important contemporary thinkers on political legitimacy. His work presents a fundamentally Rousseauian concept of the political that is an alternative to those found in other contemporary studies, and one through which, he claims, many of the problems faced by present-day political philosophy are solved. Thus, the work is an important contribution both to more general Enlightenment studies and to contemporary political philosophy. Additionally, in light of Bates's final position that Rousseau is the culmination of Enlightenment thinking on the concept of the political, the work will be of great interest to any student of Rousseau's thought.
Bates acknowledges a twofold impetus for his book, the first being the (in)famous work of Carl Schmitt. Bates's book can be seen as a continuous engagement with, and counterposition to, Schmitt's much-discussed “concept of the political.” For Schmitt, the essence of the specifically political element of human life is the possibility of existential annihilation by one's enemies, and, as such, any particular human grouping can become political if pushed to such an extreme (Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political [University of Chicago Press, 1996], 33, 37). Schmitt is commonly considered the first thinker in the history of political thought to define the essence of the political in this way. Further, Schmitt believed that the thought of the Enlightenment, that is, the belief in a stable, transhistorical “human” reason and the inherent political value and rights attached therewith, itself obscured this more originary essence of the political. In contrast, Bates's work, while historical in nature and recognizing the importance of such an approach when studying the history of political thought, has as its goal “to defamiliarize the Enlightenment, the origin of so many of our [sic] constitutional ideas, so as to point the way to a new understanding of the legal state in its global context” (xv). This book therefore attempts to be not only a detailed historical study, but also a philosophical challenge against certain orthodox interpretations of Enlightenment thinkers.
Provocatively, Bates notes in his preface that he wishes “to interpret Enlightenment concepts of legality and legitimacy through the lens of war” (xv). This illuminates Bates's second impetus for his study: the events of September 11, 2001. From this historical moment forward, questions of political legitimacy, sovereign power, and the limits of state action came to the forefront in the discourse of politics, both popular and academic. However, as Bates notes, this is not just a problem present in the contemporary situation: “The intersection of pure political power and constitutional forms of legal limitation needs to be continually reexamined because the clash between legal and political visions of the state has never been fully resolved” (2). Enlightenment thinking about the political can allow us to understand this clash in a fashion both theoretically grounded and practically relevant in the contemporary context, according to Bates's analysis.
A citizen in a particular political regime has particular political qualities granted to him or her by virtue of being a part of that regime, such qualities being encapsulated by the very term “citizen.” At the same time, a person has particular legal attributes granted to him or her by the system of law by which his or her behavior is governed. For Bates, Enlightenment political thinkers were concerned with the problem of the relation between the political and legal approaches to accounting for human beings, namely, “understanding how a historically specific political regime might generate from within its own existential logic a systematic set of norms grounding the legal protection of the citizen” (3–4). Enlightenment thinkers, and modern political thinkers more generally, extol liberty as one of the highest aims of political life, and Bates claims that those thinkers attempted to discover norms by which that liberty could be logically grounded in light of the existential arbitrariness of any given political regime. They did so by further radicalizing the separation of the political and the legal realms, thereby ensuring a particular conceptual sphere of the human separate from the sphere of law. Enlightenment thinkers, above all Rousseau, placed the concept of liberty within the bounds of the political sphere. This was because “it was in the separation of that political sphere from the realities of social and economic existence that individuals would find legal shelter” (9). By virtue of the political liberty inherent in each individual, such liberty being based upon each individual being a member of a particular, historically determined regime, limitations are placed upon the law, constraining how far it may intrude on that liberty. Bates here identifies the Enlightenment concept of the political, one not mentioning friends and enemies and hence wholly different from that of Schmitt.
As was mentioned earlier, Bates strives to conceive of the political specifically in relation to war. For both Enlightenment thinkers and Schmitt, the attempt to determine a concept of the political was conducted in the midst of great interstate and, in the case of Schmitt, intrastate conflict. Schmitt himself indicates that war “discloses the possibility which underlies every political ideal” (Concept of the Political, 35), and Bates follows Schmitt's lead, if not his direction, in holding war to be a key to understanding the political. Specific historical situations are for Bates crucial to take into account in any attempt to outline the concept of the political, as “the supposed theoretical problem of the relation between law and sovereign power must always be understood in relation to the historical specificity of all theorizations of the political” (19). For Schmitt, the emphasis on conflict between friend and enemy as the core of the concept of the political was to expose that conflict as a permanent possibility between political groupings. Bates claims that Schmitt believed it necessary to bring the conflict to light so that “an orderly existence within Europe could be maintained” (27), namely, one founded upon a stable legal order, a “nomos of the Earth.” For Schmitt, without the historical condition of potential conflict between political groupings, the basis of that legal order was threatened.
Enlightenment thinkers of the political, conversely, “did not universalize their historical moment … [but rather] took the historicity of all political and social life as the very starting point for their defense of individual rights and legal order” (28). In other words, through Enlightenment thinkers' development of a concept of the political distinct from the social and economic contexts in which human beings find themselves, they were permitted to discover “the political as a logic independent of history” (29). If this was indeed the case, and Bates argues throughout the book that it is, much of the contemporary anxiety concerning political legitimacy in light of the challenge it faces from radical historicism can be sidestepped. Further, Schmitt's critique that all political groupings contain within themselves a (sometimes violently) exclusionary principle is called into question. For Enlightenment thinkers, all human beings, as individuals, have inherent political qualities. A conception of justice can therefore be universalized in accordance with those political qualities without such a conception's purportedly necessary violent imposition. Thus, Schmitt's critique, repeated by Derrida, Balibar, and Rancière, as Bates notes, not to mention Žižek, Mouffe, and many other contemporary thinkers, is changed from (what is for some) a truism into a question.
The structure of the book follows the historical development of Enlightenment political thought, culminating in Rousseau, and has five main chapters. The first discusses the rise of the state in Europe, leading up to the development of the sort of natural-law theory found in Hobbes and Grotius. The second deals with an in-depth discussion of natural-law theory itself, presenting it as a necessary conceptual precursor for the Enlightenment thought to come. The third through fifth chapters each deal primarily with a single Enlightenment thinker—Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, respectively. Bates understands the historical trajectory described in these five chapters as a progressive arc, culminating in Rousseau's concept of the political, which Bates places in juxtaposition to that of Schmitt. Bates effectively subverts Schmittian logic, specifically, the very necessity of an enemy for any human grouping to take on a political cast. Rather, for Bates's Rousseau, the concept of the political “does not even imply a human enemy for its appearance. As long as human beings feel threatened in their existence, a political community is always possible” (229). It is necessary for a legal order to recognize the inherent political quality of human beings, and this inherent political quality puts logical limits on how far any legal order can become an existential threat.
By undertaking a revival of Rousseauian thought and situating this thought in the conversation of contemporary political philosophy, Bates's work contributes to the overarching project of rethinking politics in a globally fractured world. The Columbia University Press series, of which the Bates book is a part, is intended to “foster and illuminate new political spaces for human action and choice.” By adeptly examining an Enlightenment-based concept of the political as an alternative to the one put forth by Schmitt and those who draw on his logic, Bates accomplishes this task exceptionally.
