The Political Illusion pt. 2: The Autonomy of Politics
Ellul argues that politics in a world of "necessity," that is, a world where there is sin and evil, runs by its own rules: an "ethical" politics is not really possible or advisable.
The Monopoly of Force
As Ellul opens this section, he accepts Machiavelli’s argument that politics must be understood as its own autonomous category, governed by its own rules. At its most basic, politics is about what is most effective and efficient. You must deal with the political realm as it is, not as we would like it to be.
As a background, we must see that Ellul, as a Christian, understands that the world is fundamentally flawed by human sinfulness, by humanity’s inborn capacity for evil. The reality of evil and humanity’s propensity to do what is evil must be faced head on by Christians. He argues that in a world where there is evil, there are times one must do things that are “necessary” in order to deal with existing evil. Sometimes it is necessary to commit acts of violence. But this necessity does not make these acts “good,” or “moral,” or “Christian.” Ellul argued for a strict separation of the “Christian” from that of “violence.” Even though violence is necessary, it should not, nor can it be, justified by the saving work of Jesus. You commit violence knowing it is an unjustifiable evil act, but one that is necessary. For a fuller understanding, I invite you to read my piece on Ellul’s book “Violence”:
I would argue that Ellul does something similar with the political realm. Politics is part of that which is “necessary.” As we will see later, he argues that a Christian politics will be impossible, hypocritical and disastrous.
Since Machiavelli, Ellul explains, the only criteria by which a state can be judged is its effectiveness. Once this is acknowledged, though, regardless of the form which the state takes, it renders all states essentially the same in practice. Whether a country is a republic, has a parliamentary system with a monarch, or is authoritarian, the only criterion which matters is the efficacy of the state. An effective authoritarian government is “better” than an ineffective system of democratic republicanism. You may feel morally superior living in an ineffective democratic regime, but that superiority is based on an illusion, a false judgement of the autonomous nature of politics. All moral conclusions about the particular form of the state are illusory. Once we recognize that politics is its own autonomous realm governed by its own rules, its own necessity, we can look it properly with unclouded eyes.
If we accept the the autonomy of politics, how do we judge the legitimacy of a state if we cannot do it on moral grounds? Ellul argues that all states are founded by force, by violence. There is no exceptions to this. A state gains legitimacy when it can defend itself from its neighbors.
“In the present world the state is taken seriously only when it threatens or defends itself in a fight to the death against some grave danger to its existence.”
Carl Schmitt would approve.
“We will find that powers which are able to maintain themselves are legitimate”
There are two sources of legitimacy that must work together for a regime to secure and maintain its legitimacy:
Support by the people.
Recognition by other states.
In practice, though, because the first criteria can be, and generally is, manufactured through propaganda, the only actual marker of legitimacy is that the state is recognized as a state by other states. There are no moral criteria. The worst despots, once recognized, are legitimate. North Korea’s state is as legitimate as that of the United States of America. The Taliban are legitimate, because the US, through its actions, has recognized them as legitimate.
Ellul argues that once the autonomy of politics is recognized, there is no longer any normative power to law. It the law collides with the facts on the ground, the law will be changed to conform with political realities. You can see the truth of this necessity when a state applies the use of force, of violence. The law is made to conform to the state’s use of force. With this in mind, we must understand that the police and the military are the same. They are both applications of state force. Any differences are illusory. Both the military and the police apply force on behalf of the state. The law will not restrain the use of force by the government. The idea of “the rule of law” is a fiction, an illusion.
The slightest manifestation of independence, specifically in the use of force, is a challenge to the state’s monopoly on power. Hence, the fixation on taking weapons out of the hands of the citizenry in every state, all the time. Any and all reasons having to do with public safety are illusory. Citizens with weapons are an existential threat to the state. The citizen cannot be allowed to act to limit the power of the violence of the state. From the state’s perspective, he is merely the object of the state’s use of force, of violence. If a citizen challenges the force power of the state to limit its ability to use violence in any way, this immediately makes the citizen a partisan or a militant. Remember, the second amendment is not about hunting, personal safety or preventing crime. It is meant as a restraint to state power, a constant implicit threat by the citizenry against the state’s power to use violence.
“To say that the state should not employ force is to simply state that there should not be a state.”
The state, to be a state, must use violence. Against other countries. Against its citizens. This is the necessity of statehood. A state cannot avoid war. We must understand that there are no rules to war. Such rules only prevent victory. The rules of war are only a valid thing during peace time. The sole rule of war is to win. This is the same whether the enemy is external or internal. There are no rules. Laws are re-written as necessary to justify the autonomous actions of the state.
He also makes the point that democracies are the easiest states to defeat in war because they are the states which are most likely to let scruples undermine the goal of winning. The sole rule of war is to win.
Even when the bullets are not flying and citizens are not being put in their place with physical violence, Ellul argues that this does not mean that the state is not maintaining its power through violence. Propaganda is a form of violence. It is psychological and spiritual warfare against the people to manufacture consent.
The state operates in this autonomous realm of necessity in its use of force and violence. We judge this not in terms of morality, but rather in terms of its effectiveness.
With this in mind, we have to understand that the bureaucracy, the technical administrative state, operates within this realm of autonomy. The only criterion that can be applied to it is that of effectiveness. The administrative state does not adhere to any morality.
“From the moment the state is bureaucratized, what norms of validity or legitimacy can impose themselves from the outside?”
Ellul argues, that once we accept the autonomy of politics, we know that the bureaucracy is not and cannot be governed by moral or spiritual values. In fact, any state which organizes itself around material standards such as economics, that is, applying the criteria of state effectiveness to the economy, accepts that spiritual and moral realities must be subordinated to the economic and the political. You are no longer free to pursue spiritual autonomy. Your choice is illusory.
There can be no moral objections to the autonomy of the state. It is bound by nothing but its own necessity.
“We can establish as a basic principle that the more power grows, the more values disintegrate.”
For those that have read more widely in Ellul, this idea of “effectiveness” is the same criterion at the heart of the rise of technique in the modern period. There is this conjunction between technology, the market, and politics, pointing away from all other values, settling on the single value of “effectiveness.” We are just simply “doing what works.” This is the singular value of the autonomy of politics, enfolding within itself both technique and economics. Ellul argues that all other values that we might wish to apply to this autonomous system are meaningless. Whether they are pre-modern Christian values and hierarchies or they are modern enlightenment values, they are all illusory when applied to the autonomous realm of politics which runs by its own necessity.
“It is illusory to think that means of applying power must be increased so that justice, liberty and the truth can be attained and realized.”
There is no situation where “our people” are going to seize power and wield the instruments of the state to restore freedom and justice to society. As power increases, so too does its own necessity and its own autonomy.
“When the state has all power, no boundary remains between what is just and unjust, true and false, good and bad.”
This is why Ellul argues that all modern states since Machiavelli are essentially the same. Whatever veneers are placed over the state are simply illusions to cover over the reality that they are autonomous and judged only by their effectiveness. There is only one limit to the state:
“The effective boundary is then between what can and can’t be done.”
Bringing this opening argument about the autonomy of the state to a close, Ellul makes the observation that rising standards of living in fact do not bring about greater political freedom. This is illusory. Remember that the material prosperity of the market is tied to the rise of the technical, the rise of the machine and machine thinking. This approach to technical thinking, that is, scientific management is applied universally across society in both the private and public sectors, growing bureaucracies everywhere. And with the increase of economic power came also the increase in technical power. As the ability to wield power increases in the economic realm, it also increases state power against the citizenry. With economic prosperity always comes a loss of power in the citizenry relative to the state.
“All theories to the effect that a rising standard of living will end in democratization and the limitation of the state are illusory, for there has never been any case of an effect diminution of the use of power.”
Power may shift from one group to another due to money, but power never decreases as wealth and prosperity increases. This highlights the stupidity of American foreign policy with regards to China from the outset. The growth in China’s prosperity has only strengthened its state. It also shows the grave danger of globalization and the growing power of the globally wealthy.
Objections
There are those who will immediately object that politics needs a moral foundation. They might argue that all law is an expression of morality. Shouldn’t we strive for a Christian politics? Ellul argues that in the entire history of the so-called Christian state that it has practiced nothing of what it preached. Successful rulers operated from reality and engaged in the use of force and power. Christendom wore a hypocritical mask over the politics of necessity.
We remind the reader that Ellul’s Christian faith deeply shapes his thinking in both the area of politics and the use of violence, both of which he argues, have been clouded over with Christian justifications for violence that undermine the strength of the gospel message itself. His solution was to separate the world of the gospel, the world of grace, from the world of violence and necessity. As Christians await the return of Christ, we live in two eras, two modes of existence overlaid upon each other in the same place. There is the world of sin, the world of violence. There is the world of grace, of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He argues that as long as these two realities share the same space we as Christians will not be able to escape the world of necessity. Our hope in Christ is that this world can be left behind, but we know that until Christ returns, there can be no utopia. So we must accept that sometimes we must do what is necessary. We accept that it is evil. We accept that it corrupts us and ruins our souls. We do not try to justify it in terms of the gospel and try to convince ourselves that we are doing something redemptive or good.
Ellul argues that this idea of the Christian state completely ignores the reality that the early church, the early Christians did not possess power, that is political power, of their own. They did not seek to participate in the power of the state that did exist. They maintained the more comfortable stance of refusal, criticism and accusation. All idealists, whether Christian or otherwise, follow the same pattern from criticism of the abuses of the state to the hypocritical use of power. Because of the autonomy and necessity of politics, idealism cannot be maintained and will always become hypocritical.
The more that we look at politics closely, the more we realize that ideals have little affect on real decisions. Most political decisions are made by the demands of the circumstances, the demands of power, of gaining it, keeping it and extending it.
“The idealist’s misconception of the autonomous course of political affairs is not only fallacious but dangerous. The gravest political errors which have caused the most bloodshed and disorders in the last half-century [i.e. the first half of the 20th century], were committed by those who, denying the regrettable, detestable, yet immutable fact that politics in our day is autonomous acted as though it were not, as though it was subject to definite rules and values.”
Because politics is its own realm with its own necessity, this is why idealists are dominated by men like Hitler and Stalin who understand the autonomous nature of political power. The invocation of values are of only the slightest use in politics. This, argues Ellul, is why Christians are often so ineffective in politics. Christians desire to approach politics from the perspective of moral ideas, to impose the spiritual onto the necessary. In this world of necessity, politics will require you to do what would be judged morally evil because it is the most effective. If you cannot bring yourself to do this thing, you will be ineffective and weak.
For example, all war is evil and unjust. There can be no moral justification for it, especially from the perspective of the Christian faith. No state can, in good conscience, wage war. But in a world where there is evil and human beings have an inborn capacity and predisposition towards evil, war is often a necessity. This necessity does not diminish its evil. But sometimes we must simply do what is necessary. In a world where politics is autonomous, those who engage in politics must know that war or the threat of war is a normal political means and to deny this is to deny reality. To deny this reality as a lover of virtue or idealism is to make political affairs ruinous for the society.
There are no good guys or bad guys in politics, only winner and losers. This is as true for a dictatorship as it is for a democracy.
Ellul does argue that in theory a moral, Christian state is technically possible, but:
“A political order based on non-political values is a fragile thing. It would be an astonishing human achievement, one requiring great will-power, self-sacrifice and constant renewal.”
It is a kind of utopian ideal that might be achievable if everything comes together and the people work very hard at it, but is not likely and nor is it likely to be sustainable over the long term in this world where evil exists in all of us.
Even in a democracy, the autonomy of politics is at work. The gaining, keeping and extending of power follows its own rules. As a result, we should approach politics without values, morality or virtue, to be honest about it and so avoid being cynical. This is Ellul, as a Christian, speaking to other Christians about the hard realities of politics. In fact, he tells his fellow believers that to view politics through a spiritual or moral lens is to approach politics in a way that is facile or superficial. Only the political effect of political actions should be considered. It is pure romantic fantasy to think that politics will be better or more moral or just if there are Christian men in power. They will not be more humane. They will not be more moral. We don’t want them to be if we want them to be effective. We must deal with political realities as they are, not as we want them to be.
If we argue that an action is the will of God, we must know that we are no longer making political decisions, but are in fact subordinating the political to the religious. It may be good religion, but is likely terrible politics. This is just as true for enlightenment values as it is for Christian values. Political decisions should not be made on the basis of liberty, justice or the rights of persons to self-determination. Trying to justify decisions based on these grounds is mostly propaganda meant to induce acceptance and social conformity. They are rationalizations for political decisions. Or, they will be terrible political decisions made in the name of ideals.
By making this argument the ways he does, it does give me hope in regards to the rule of the current regime. As the state has become omnipotent, as it has begun to replace the role of the church in society, increasingly the supporters of the regime are making demands which clearly subordinate the political to the moral. This is the essence of the culture war from the left’s perspective. Its most strident activists want the state to impose a morality onto society. This desire is leading to increasingly ineffective and ruinous policies. The left rose to power by following the dictates of the autonomy of power and they maintain their power this way, but they are increasingly governing according to moral dictates and this is rendering the regime ineffective and unstable. As the moral demands increase, and they will because their ideology has taken a distinctly religious cast to it, expect them to make decisions less and less dictated by the necessity of power and more by their moral vision.
Two related notes to conclude this portion of the book. The first is that while Ellul seems to want to maintain a commitment to the democratic participation in society, the conclusions he ends up coming to throughout the book seem to undermine this. He says this:
“If we believe—and we firmly believe it—that the individual has a spiritual life, a value, that man cannot realize except by the accomplishment of moral acts, then it is evident—and necessary—that there be distance between political affairs and the individual.”
I find this statement to be deeply profound. I agree wholeheartedly. I also wonder if Ellul sees the full import of what he has said and what it means for the very idea of democracy. When citizens can vote, the state needs to secure those votes in order to garner and maintain their democratic legitimacy. This means that the state must address the felt needs of the people. This also means that the state must involve itself in the lives of the people and increasingly the people in the life of the state. But, if, as Ellul says, people need space from the political to develop a healthy moral and spiritual life, is it spiritually and morally desirous in a flourishing society for people to be voting and involving themselves in the morally corrupting autonomous realm of politics and power. This view lends itself to the older metaphysical structure that some are put in a position of power so that they can corrupt themselves for the good the general population. They place their souls at risk for the rewards that power and politics can bring, but they do so knowing that by putting their eternal future at risk they allow everyone else the space to pursue a spiritually and morally rich life free from the necessity of politics. There are rewards for being among the political elite. But the cost is that you will likely lose your soul. Democracy, on the other hand, asks the whole population to bear that burden, especially as the size and scope of the state grows to address all of the felt needs of the people.
“An individual can participate in political affairs, but cannot claim that in doing so he is expressing or realizing himself to his fullest extent. The opposite actually takes place: the autonomy of the political machinery not only does not permit individual acts to influence its operation, but individual acts and motives become completely submerged within it with the result that the individual as such, simply ceases to be.”
This is what happens to a society as it becomes increasingly politicized. As a population we lose our souls, our very existence, to that of the political. Human flourishing, especially in the spiritual and moral aspect of our lives, requires a detachment from politics, a grounding in those values which matter most, free from the corrupting necessity of the political.
Next: Politics and the necessity of propaganda, politics in the world of images.