Michael J. Thompson Stephen Eric Bronner Wadood Hamad - Logos

Michael J. Thompson 

Stephen Eric Bronner 

Wadood Hamad 

Richard Couto 

Henry Pachter 

Abbas Amanat 

Stanley Aronowitz 

Ali Hossaini 

summer 2003 

volume two - issue three 

Taxing Democracy: Politics and the 

Bush Tax Cut 

Lies and the Distortion of Democracy 

Wither Iraq: From Despotism to Occupation 

The Incidental Liberation of Iraq 

Who Are the Palestinians? 

Iran’s Social Revolution 

Rethinking C. Wright Mills 

Vision of the Gods 

Photography by Ira Cohen 

Fiction by Thomas de Zengotita 

Poetry by Andy Clausen 

REVIEWS: 

Terror and Liberalism, by Paul Berman 

reviewed by Kurt Jacobsen 

The History of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik 

reviewed by Jason Schulman 

Why George Orwell?, by Christopher Hitchens 

reviewed by Desmond MacNamara 

Straw Dogs by John Gray 

reviewed by Diana Judd 

The Specter of Democracy, by Dick Howard 

reviewed by Robert Antonio 

© Logos 2003

F 


Taxing Democracy: 

Politics and the Bush Tax Cut 

by 


Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003 

The science of economics is a political science. 

—Max Weber 

ew domestic political issues have been debated with more passion than 

the tax cut that was proposed by the Bush administration and recently 

passed by Congress. The tax cuts have been characterized as everything from 

a giveaway to the rich to a stimulus package for an ailing economy. Political 

rhetoric frequently coalesces with “social science,” statistics and economic 

argumentation, but—interestingly enough—the political character of 

decision-making on tax policy has tended to disappear from the public 

debate. What I think is happening, however, is not simply a rethinking of tax 

codes or a move away from the redistributional character of the post-war 

American welfare state. Rather, there is a reformation of American democracy 

through the policy prescriptions of the Bush administration where the acute 

separation of economics from politics may very well lead to an erosion of the 

democratic character of the United States. What characterizes the political 

rhetoric of the Bush administration and neoconservatives? 

Without question, linking taxes and democracy has been a consistent theme 

in American politics. From the birth of the republic, through the massive 

inequities of the Gilded Age and the great redistributive policies of the New 

Deal, the War On Poverty and the Great Society, there has always existed a 

consistent link between the emergence of the state as a participant in the 

public sphere and the expansion of democracy, especially in economic terms. 

But recently, the view has emerged that the expansion of the state and the 

services it provides, its public goods—what we commonly call the welfare 

state—stands in sharp contradiction to the values of liberty, freedom and 

democracy. The more the state encroaches on me, the citizen, the less free I 

am; the less money I am able to keep from what I earn, the more the 

government is interfering with my liberty. This is the essential rhetoric of 

anti-tax conservatives like Grover Norquist, one of George W. Bush’s top 

political advisors:


Look, the center right coalition in American politics today is 

best understood as a coalition of groups and individuals [and] 

the issue that brings them to politics [is that] what they want 

from the government is to be left alone. Taxpayers, don’t raise 

my taxes. Property owners, don’t restrict or limit my property. 

Home-schoolers, let me educate my own kids. Gun owners, 

don’t restrict my Second Amendment rights. All communities 

of faith, Evangelical Christians, conservative Catholics, 

Mormons, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, people want to practice 

their own religion and be left alone to raise their own kids. 1 

Known as the “leave us alone” coalition, such is the ideological context that 

includes the politics of the most recent tax cuts; an ideology grounded in a 

much broader conception of society, politics and culture; one premised on a 

curious mix of libertarian individualism with a provincial, parochial 

communitarianism. But this is merely a surface phenomenon. It appeals only 

to the conservative sentiments of a public that has been ideologically dragged 

to the right over the past two and a half decades. But the material impact of 

the tax cuts are typically felt at the local levels. This is, in part, a result of tax 

cutting policies which begin at the federal level and have trickled down over 

the years into the policies of states. 

As federal tax cuts increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s there was an 

increased pressure states and cities to shoulder the cost of schools and other 

social services. The politics of the tax cut must therefore be seen first and 

foremost as a broad attempt to reorient the way in which American 

democracy was heading since the New Deal which itself was based on the 

realization that the effects of capitalism on society required the intervention 

of the state in order to counteract the effects of what Stephen Eric Bronner 

has called the “whip of the market” from staggering economic inequality and 

poverty reduction and cyclical economic crises. Later, issues ranging from 

pollution to enhanced social services and programs were on the minds of the 

public and began to enter the political agenda of the Democratic Party. It was 

a conception of democracy that realized that unequal economic power 

rendered “equal” political rights practically meaningless and that only 

through the fair distribution of social wealth could political and social rights 

truly be extended and realized. 

Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003


One of the main functions of tax policy is the redistribution of income and it 

is around this issue that the rallying cry for those who seek the reformation of 

the tax code in America is organized. Whatever else taxes may actually do as 

an instrument of public policy, the core argument used for the tax cuts has 

consistently been to link economic productivity (the welfare of everyone) and 

personal income (the welfare of the individual or family). It is, in so many 

ways, a flawless political strategy—one that hits Americans where they feel 

they need it the most, even though the numbers do not work out in their 

benefit. Most taxpayers therefore see their responsibility as restricted to the 

sphere of the local. In this sense, an element of racism often enters the picture 

once largely white and better-off municipalities pay taxes that are 

redistributed to inner city neighborhoods located close by. What is seen by 

the average taxpayer is therefore not a set of goods and services, but a 

complex tax system that is impenetrable and, at the local level, even seen as 

simply unfair where ailing inner city schools require tax revenues collected at 

the state or county level from more affluent, largely white suburbs. 

Redistribution is one of the main targets of the Bush tax cut and its impact 

will be substantial. Recent data show that, even before the current tax cut was 

put into effect, the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers paid less taxes in 2000 than 

in both 1995 and in 1992. In the past nine years, the incomes of the “top 

400 tax payers increased 15 times the rate of the bottom 90 percent of 

Americans.” 2 And it is important to point out in this context that the top 1 

percent of income earners in America have a 26 percent share of the tax 

burden while their share of the Bush tax cuts is over 50 percent. 3 

However we may view the rhetoric of the tax cuts, what is becoming ever 

more apparent is a gradual destruction of the public sector and the expansion 

of the market to more domains of society. In this sense, the Bush tax cuts are 

not merely an expression of fiscal policy. They also fundamentally serve a 

larger project of redirecting the way that American democracy has functioned 

throughout the post-war era. This redirection involves a wholesale 

transformation in the way that government can act to soften the harsh 

impacts of the capitalist economy whether it is in the form of economic 

inequality or environmental degradation. 



Tax Reform and Political Opportunism: Bush in Context 

THE TREND TOWARD TAX REFORM in the 1980s was, it should be admitted, 

the result of many legitimate economic pressures. The problem was not in 

the changing economics of global capitalism but in the way the politics of the 

right in America—as well as other nations—used this economic pressure for 

its own ideological ends. This can be explained in the flowing way. During 

the post-war years, there was a general consensus among policy makers that 

taxes should be progressive and used as tools for economic management. 

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, this Keynesian logic made possible 

spending on large social programs and the investment in infrastructure. 

Business and the wealthy paid large marginal tax rates as opposed to the poor, 

working, and middle classes. This form of redistribution that allowed 

working people and even entire regions of the country to migrate to 

improved living conditions and to enjoy improved social services and public 

goods. 

Arguments were often made about the degree to which these taxes were 

indeed progressive. Political élites—more often than not representatives of 

business interests—made the argument time and again that a reduction of 

taxes would mean an increase in economic growth and productivity (a rise in 

GDP). However, such political arguments had very little support. First, there 

was the problem of politics. Americans overwhelmingly supported progressive 

taxation since the majority of them benefited from it directly. But next, the 

few studies that were made on the link between taxation and economic 

growth showed that there was no relationship at all. 4 Anti-tax political 

rhetoric therefore lacked, through the 1950s and 1960s and well into the 

1970s, any political support from the citizenry of the United States and also 

any empirical support from the social science establishment. 

This situation began to change in the late 1970s. For one thing, as American 

workers began to prosper they also started moving up in income tax brackets 

and getting hit by increasingly higher tax rates. This was part of the system’s 

design, and it also showed the old system was actually working. Tax revenues 

were supposed to grow automatically since “as the economy expanded, 

inflation pushed more and more individuals into higher and higher tax 

brackets as their nominal incomes increased.” 5 The tax system that had been 

devised and implemented in the 1950s and early 1960s began to lose its 

redistributive impact since the classes that, in the past, had benefited from 

the redistribution of wealth were now being taxed at ever higher rates and the 



benefits were no longer as clear as they once were. The result was a sharp 

increase in political pressure toward tax reform which, with the election of 

Ronald Reagan in 1980, led to a wholesale redirection of American 

government and its tax policies from the weakening of government agencies 

such as Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to an expanded federal 

deficit and the start of a widening gap in income and wealth that continues 

to grow today. 

The economic facts were merely an entrée for neoconservatives to argue their 

case for the minimal state and the reduction of taxes on corporations and the 

wealthy. Tax reform was necessary, but not the sort of draconian cuts in 

public services and institutions that served the working poor that were 

inevitably enacted. Instead of a reworking of increasingly complex tax codes 

and regulations, tax cuts were initiated that helped exacerbate inequalities 

that were growing from the impacts of a post-industrial economy. What the 

conservatives of the “Reagan Revolution” did was to focus opportunistically 

on public dissatisfaction about growing tax burdens created by a system that 

was in need of reform and use this public sentiment to trample the welfare 

state. 

On the whole, the statistical data is clear for anyone who has any casual 

acquaintance with the econometric studies and economic data: since 1980, 

there is a statistically significant relationship between the level of taxation and 

economic growth: as taxes increased, economic performance lessened in terms 

of GDP growth. This situation changed from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s 

because there was a reconfiguration of global capitalism. From the 1980s 

onward, there was an increased global mobility of capital and the result was 

that corporations were able to move spatially to avoid costs. Taxes were 

among these costs. By 1990, this was a general theory of business planning 

with Michael Porter’s book, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, serving as 

one of the central texts coaching businesses in how to avoid the costs of 

producing in only one site, especially a site that was not “friendly” to business 

in terms of tax rates and regulatory limitations. Corporations were 

encouraged to move to places where the tax burden—as well as wages and 

other limitations—were less prohibitive to profits. In the United States, this 

meant moving many factory jobs out of the northeastern states, where labor 

unions were strong and businesses taxes were higher at the state and local 

levels, to the south or to other countries (i.e., Mexico). 



As the global economy began to change, the political economy of American 

taxation began to change as well. But this is where the crucial issue arises: 

even though there clearly were economic pressures brought on by this 

restructuring and the American tax system was in need of reform to remain a 

viable method of redistribution, the political reality was something quite 

different. The populist cry for tax reform was translated by the Reagan 

administration into a project of restructuring the state—a project which is 

still ongoing—where the role of the state in providing services was bypassed 

in favor of privatization and the redistributive functioning of taxation was 

rolled back. Legitimate needs for tax reform were therefore twisted by 

conservatives in an attempt to reorganize government and transform 

American democracy. 

Redefining and Restructuring American Democracy 

In 1843, the German economist Wilhelm Roscher wrote that political 

economy is not merely the “art of acquiring wealth; it is a political science 

based on evaluating and governing people.” 6 Economics is therefore a field 

that is fundamentally concerned with the very idea of the public good, it is 

far from being a value-free science. This is something that has been lost in 

recent debates on the politics of the Bush tax cut. The assumption—or even 

the outright belief—remains that there are legitimate economic reasons that 

can justify the various tax cuts which, and this is usually openly admitted, 

explicitly favor the wealthy. Inequalities that are generated from the tax cuts 

are considered “justifiable” first on supposedly economic grounds (i.e., 

promoting growth and employment) and, at times, on ethical grounds, in the 

sense that everyone deserves to keep whatever they “earn.” But neither of 

these contentions actually make sense. No empirical evidence links tax cuts 

on wealthier income earners and employment, nor is there any reliable 

evidence that supports a link between tax cuts on individual income and 

economic growth, even if there is evidence, as was discussed above, that 

corporate tax rates do affect growth rates. Economic policy is being done for 

political ends and the actual content and intention of this politics needs to be 

seen for what it is: a reconfiguration of American democracy. This 

reconfiguration means a retreat from the idea that the state ought to 

meliorate class differences, the acceptance of the idea that political democracy 

is somehow indifferent to economic and social inequality, and toward a 

situation where the market extends to almost every aspect of public life. 



It is interesting to note that the Bush administration openly admits that its 

tax cuts favor the wealthy. This is a marked change from even twenty years 

ago when the political theorist Philip Green could write that “[s]pecial 

advantages for economic élites, as in the United States tax code, are 

introduced sub rosa, never proclaimed out loud. No one defends legislation 

by suggesting that the better class should be rewarded more and the inferior 

class less.” 7 Today, there has been a shift in the political sensitivity to social 

inequality and class division. 

It is a specific political philosophy, or ideology, that essentially defines the 

Bush tax cuts. The Bush administration’s economic argument that the tax 

cuts will somehow stimulate a dragging economy and increase employment 

has little support in theory and no support empirically. The tax cuts are 

proposed as part of a stimulus package, one that will promote economic 

growth. But, as James K. Galbraith has recently pointed out, these cuts are 

not a growth policy for two crucial reasons: “They are targeted to the 

wealthy, and they are back-loaded so as to conceal their true long-term 

impact on budget deficits.” 8 The extent of the tax cuts is therefore structured 

so that the real effects on the budget will not show up for another ten years or 

so since tax cuts on the wealthy will continue to diminish tax revenues and 

therefore increasingly bankrupt the state. Of course, this is not obvious when 

one examines the tax plan since such easily perceived hardship would cause at 

least a small degree of backlash. 

It is well-known economic logic that growth could be stimulated by new and 

increased government spending, something that has not even been publicly 

debated by the Bush administration’s economic policy advisors. This is 

because it would put the United States back in a Keynesian policy state of 

mind; and this means that there would be legitimacy in refunding the state 

and this would give some weight to political interests that want to expand the 

welfare state, government programs, regulatory agencies and other things 

which would be antithetical to the pro-business mentality and interests of the 

neoconservative agenda. In other words, once the state becomes more active 

in the economy, there is more likelihood that that state will also be used for 

expanding social programs. This runs directly counter to the current trend of 

shrinking the state and its influence in both economy and society. 

There is also the question of economic growth and job creation. This issue 

has been at the core of the Bush administration’s arguments for the tax cuts 



as well as a broad conservative wave of support. Heritage Foundation 

economist Mark Wilson claimed in a recent study that if the tax cuts were 

made retroactive to the beginning of 2003, 1.6 million jobs would be added 

to the economy by 2011 and expand economic output by another $248 

billion. 9 But there have been no academic economists who have been able to 

verify these findings in a single peer reviewed professional journal, and it is 

little surprise why. The rationale is classic “supply-side” economic thinking: 

the more money that is poured into the economy by letting people keep what 

they earn—so the supply-siders argue, in theory of course—the more society 

as a whole will benefit since people—especially the wealthy—will be more 

likely to invest in the economy and start new enterprises. A “free” market 

liberated from any type of restraint, regulation and public accountability is 

therefore the optimal arrangement for liberty and democracy. 10 This is the 

essential view that informs neoconservative political and social thought, but it 

is not a fact of economic science. Recall 1993 when there was an increase in 

the top income tax rate from 33 percent to 39.6 percent and still there was an 

increase in capital investment and a flourishing economy throughout the 

remainder of the 1990s. From the point of view of empirical evidence, the 

conservative argument quite simply makes no sense. 

It is more correct to say, then, that there is a political imperative behind this 

shift in economic policy, and its agenda is the fundamental transformation of 

American democracy as we have known it throughout the post-war period. 

The primary motivation is the ideological view that the state needs to be 

reduced, to be minimized. The conservative economist Robert Barro of 

Harvard University and the Hoover Institution put it most bluntly: 

One attraction of tax cuts and deficits is that they starve the 

government of revenue and thereby promote spending 

restraint. This worked particularly well in the 1980s. The 

Reagan tax reductions were a proclamation that the growth 

in government had to stop—and, with something of a lag, 

that happened from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. . . . 

[M]ost people’s income comes from their skill and effort 

(or, through inheritance, from the skill and effort of their 

parents). People deserve to keep most of what they have 

produced and earned, after sharing reasonably in the tax 

burden for financing a limited government. 11 



In many ways, Barro’s comment outlines in brief the basic ideology behind 

the politics of the tax cuts. The starving of the state is part and parcel of a 

political philosophy that sees an increase in the extent to which the market— 

and therefore not public, but private interests—control many, if not most, of 

the production and supply of public goods and services (school vouchers are 

one example of this). But the reality of the implications of a social policy 

driven by low taxes is never highlighted by any of these thinkers or writers. 

Take California, a state that passed Proposition 13 in 1978 which says that 

property taxes cannot be greater than 1 percent of the actual sales price on 

real estate with a limited increase of 2 percent per year. Although the tax was 

clearly something that most homeowners supported—and still do, it still has 

a support rating of 60 percent in the state—the benefits flowed to 

corporations whose property taxes on land and buildings are under-assessed 

and therefore drain the state, and its municipalities, of essential tax dollars. 12 

California now faces a $38 billion deficit and its public services have 

suffered—its schools are consistently ranked in the bottom half of the nation 

when it comes to spending per-student. 

Why people accept this situation is a crucial question that needs to be asked. 

For one thing, there is an ideological explanation. Taxes themselves are not 

seen as public goods and services, but as redistributive mechanisms to those 

that do not deserve it—i.e., the poor—or as funding an ever-expanding state 

and government waste. This is, in part, the product of the rhetoric of the 

Reagan administration and its attack on welfare. But there has also been a 

general consensus in the media—one that has become almost universally 

accepted—that government programs are inherently inefficient and never 

benefit those that they intent to help. This negative view of government 

programs is partly due to a certain ideology that has been nurtured by 

conservative think tanks, writers and politicians for more than three decades. 

In this sense, the middle class in America sees fewer of its interests in 

common with the lower class, even though this is clearly not the case. 13 

As this divide has increased—especially as the racialization of this divide also 

has increased—the largely white middle class sees the social cost of promoting 

more equality through taxation as increasingly unfair since it sees itself as 

shouldering much of this burden, never mind the fact that the middle class, 

too, has been affected by falling incomes and will increasingly see a slide in 

their own quality of life and the public institutions around them. This 

ideological explanation translates into a political reality where the lower 

classes are largely disenfranchised and the middle and upper classes would 



prefer to keep their incomes safe from taxation and have little interest in an 

increase in social equality and do not see the deteriorating quality of their 

public services as being connected with dwindling tax revenues. Either way, 

this cleavage between the lower and middle classes is politically debilitating 

since the Democratic Party sees its traditional constituency of the working 

poor and middle class workers with divergent political interests even though 

they have more in common with each other than either of them do with the 

wealthy. The fact is that fighting for improved public services and worker 

protections of all kinds are things that both the working poor and the middle 

class share as common interests. The problem remains articulating a political 

message that bridges this divide. 

This reorientation of American democracy puts markets and private interest 

over that of the public interest. Indeed, this has been the mainstay of 

American public life, but the new phase of this trend threatens to make it a 

more permanent reality. The reality of this situation can be seen most 

explicitly in the rise in economic inequality in the United States. The income 

tax was started in 1914 as a “class tax,” one that took from the wealthy and 

redistributed to the rest of society. This turned into a “mass tax” during the 

Second World War to accrue monies for the war effort. However, it is 

precisely the notion of class that has been allowed to drop out of the 

discussion. Class is at the center of the tax cut debate because, as Barro 

incorrectly states, it is not the case that wealthy people are the ones that 

“produce” and therefore “earn” what they receive in terms of income. 

Capitalism is an economic system that produces profits from social labor; the 

fact that corporate CEOs make more than 400 times the income of the 

workers that actually produce the products and services can hardly be 

justified through an argument based along the lines of earning one’s pay. 

This may be an extreme example, but all one needs to do is look at any 

corporation that develops, say, new technologies. Most, if not all, new 

technologies are developed in labs and research departments by Ph.D.s or 

other highly-skilled researchers earning middle income salaries whereas 

owners earn profits and income that are exponentially higher. 

What this discussion points to is that the very meaning of democracy in 

America is being transformed, perhaps transmogrified is a better term. In 

place of public concerns and the public interest, it is private interest that has 

now become paramount in social policy. Whereas the general character of the 

American welfare state in the post-war period implicitly recognized that 

political democracy and political equality are practically meaningless without 



some degree of economic equality and that capitalism as an economic system 

had serious deleterious effects on society, we now see an institutional 

transformation where the welfare state is being rolled back to allow the 

market once again—as in the 19th century—to operate freely irrespective of 

its social costs. The peculiar caste of American liberalism has typically been 

seen as strongly Lockean: private property and the ability to accumulate 

property indefinitely and, therefore, wealth, has always been its backbone. 

But there have also been other aspects of liberalism: those that stood up for 

the unpropertied and those whose interests were not served by the free 

activities of those who owned private property. Indeed, the expansion of 

American liberalism came not—as neoconservatives have been arguing in 

recent years—from the ability of individuals to own property and pursue an 

“American dream,” but rather from labor unions and working people that 

pushed for democratic reforms in the economy, the state and society. 14 

Democracy is now being translated into a laissez-faire libertarian reality: as 

the organization of the entirety of society around the pivot of self-interest 

subject to minor legal restraints by a minimal state. 

Bankrupting the state is therefore a primary aim of the conservative 

revolution. The very core of any substantive democracy, the public sphere, 

has slowly eroded through the further separation between state, society and 

economy, a separation made initially by Locke and then intensified by 

revolutionary thinkers like Thomas Paine. But American democracy was not 

initially grounded in Lockean notions of liberalism as writers such as Louis 

Hartz have insisted. Rather, it was the tradition of republicanism that 

informed the American Revolution and the early vision of the kind of 

democracy and society that it would usher in. In this sense, American 

democracy was initially concerned with the preservation of the public good 

through political institutions that were publicly accountable; it was not selfinterest 

and the accumulation of private property that initially informed 

broad sections of the American citizenry. But throughout American political 

history, there has been a real tension between this tradition of republicanism 

and its emphasis on the public good and Lockean liberalism that places 

emphasis on private property and a liberal political order insisting on the 

separation the political and economic spheres. Thinkers like William Graham 

Sumner in the 19th century and, more recently, Milton Friedman, have 

interpreted American democracy through the lens of individual liberty and, 

therefore, as economic and political liberalism, a position grounded in the 

individual and not in a conception of the public. 



Progressive alternatives to the tax cuts need to be articulated. A tax system 

that is as indecipherable and impenetrable as that in the United States 

requires serious reform. However, this does not mean eliminating tax 

revenues through tax cuts. Taxes on wealth would be much more effective 

than taxes on income since inequality has risen most in terms of wealth and 

not in terms of income. 15 In this way, the place where social inequality is 

most intense—in the unequal distribution of wealth—would be the place 

where redistribution would be concentrated. Wealth inequality between 

households means a disparity in the ability to buy a home, is more “likely to 

be better able to provide for its children’s educational and health needs, live 

in a neighborhood characterized by more amenities and lower levels of crime, 

have greater resources that can be called upon in times of economic hardship, 

and have more influence in political life.” 16 

But even more, the central problem—and one that would no doubt capture 

the attention of much of the electorate—would be to advocate job growth 

through government stimulus. What the Democrats in Washington should 

be pushing for in place of simply smaller tax cuts is an expansion in 

government programs that provide both public services and employment. 

Education, health care as well as transportation infrastructure are specific 

examples. Aside from being excellent opportunities for the state to create 

useful and dearly needed public services, they would also create well-paying 

jobs for large segments of the population. These are programs that have 

actually worked in the past and today require more serious attention in part 

because they are in stark opposition to the supply-side policies that the Bush 

administration has been pushing. Indeed, the empirical evidence for job 

growth resulting from increased consumer spending is extremely weak 

compared to that of state and federal programs. 17 

A responsible left program needs to counter the ideology that currently 

hampers economic policy and move toward policies that will capture the 

interests of working people and connect their concerns with broader public 

programs at the state and federal level. This has not happened for a variety of 

reasons, one of which can be located in the general ideological view of the 

contemporary left and its attitude toward the state. In many ways, this is a 

product of the 1960s and the New Left which was overtly hostile toward the 

state. From anarchist-inspired movements to the Arendtians and the 

emphasis on communitarianism over what was generally seen as the 

coerciveness of the state—all of which were quite respectable positions on the 

left in the 1960s—the New Left promulgated a general political view that 



was in opposition to the state, not merely in practice, but in theory as well. 18 

The New Left’s attack on the state left liberal Democrats with few allies when 

conservatives took power in 1980 with their own anti-state agenda. The state 

programs of the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations seem utopian now in 

the present context and the left has itself to blame in part for the lack of 

political and ideological support for the state and it has no practical 

institutional alternatives to the neoconservative vision that is emerging as 

present reality. 

Even more, there was also—beginning in the early 1970s—an effort by big 

business to clamp down on labor unions and also begin a campaign of 

political activism themselves to help stem the tide of anti-business sentiment 

whipped up during the 1960s. This is where institutions such as the 

American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and the Heritage 

Foundation got started and by the end of the decade, they had succeeded in 

electing a president with their own ideological perspective. 

As a result of these different political trends, the Bush tax cuts will be able to 

push further a liberalized economic order that at the same time promotes 

economic inequality and the concentration of power in the hands of the few 

at the expense of the many, whether it be through wealth, property, or media 

control. This agenda goes against the grain of much of Western political 

thought which constantly repeats the injunction against extreme inequalities 

in property and wealth. From Plato and Aristotle through Locke, Smith, 

Hegel, Tocqueville and Dewey, among so many others, gross social 

inequalities have been seen as a major threat to the common good and a 

democratic polity. More and more, the republican strain in American politics 

is being eroded and the move toward a democracy based on the foundation 

of private interest is being increasingly privileged. Such a reconfigured 

democracy will see the roll back of the institutions and policies that have 

helped those disadvantaged by the economy; it will increase economic 

inequalities as well as inequalities in quality of life; and, in the end, it will 

affect the way that political power is distributed in the United States. The 

Bush tax cuts are therefore more complex and even more dangerous than 

initially meets the eye, and it is the very structure of American democratic 

culture and governance that hangs in the balance. 



Notes 

1 Grover Norquist on NOW in conversation with Bill Moyers, transcript at: 

http://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transcript_norquist_print.html. It must 

be said that there is also a bit of hysteria mixed in with this rhetoric. Norquist 

again: “Guys with guns will show up if you don’t pay your taxes and take 

that money from you. And I think that we want in order to have a free 

society to have as little as possible done coercively.” (Ibid.) 

2 David Cay Johnston, “Very Richest’s Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, 

Data Show,” The New York Times, June 26, 2003. 

3 See Laura D’Andrea Tyson, “Tax Cuts for the Rich Are Even More Wrong 

Today,” Business Week Online at: 

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_27/b3790053.htm. 

4 See Claudio Katz, Vincent Mahler and Michael Franz, “The Impact of 

Growth and Distribution in Capitalist Countries: A Cross National Study,” 

American Political Science Review, vol. 77, no. 4, 1983. 

5 Sven Steimo, “Why Tax Reform? Understanding Tax Reform in its Political 

and Economic Context,” 

http://stripe.colorado.edu/%7Esteinmo/reform.html. 

6 Grundrisse zu Vorlesungen über die Staatswirtschaft quoted in George E. 

McCarthy, Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece 

(Albany: SUNY Press, 2003). 

7 The Pursuit of Inequality, p. 3 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). 

8 “Socking It to the States,” p. 12 The Nation, June 9, 2003. 

9 See David Francis, “Bush Tax Cuts Widen US Income Gap,” The Christian 

Science Monitor and Common Dreams at: 

www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0523-02.htm. 

10 Of course, there really is no such thing as a truly free market since there is 

always some form of corporate welfare or tariffs that benefit corporations. 

The key issue that should be emphasized is that any regulation that 

potentially helps working people is attacked whereas those regulatory bodies 

and policies that help capital are promoted or maintained. 

11 “There’s A Lot to Like About Bush’s Tax Plan,” p. 28, Business Week, 

February 24, 2003. 

12 See Mark Baldassare, “How the West Is Taxed,” Op-Ed Section The New 

York Times, June 27, 2003. 

13 See William Julius Wilson, The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising 

Inequality and Coalition Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 

1999). 



14 For an excellent statement of this position, see Karen Orren, Belated 

Feudalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 

15 See Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in 

America and What Can Be Done About It (New York: The New Press, 2002). 

16 Edward N. Wolff, “Racial Wealth Disparities,” p. 7 Jerome Levy Institute of 

Economics Public Policy Brief, no. 66, 2001. 

17 See Jeff Madrick “Economic Scene,” The New York Times, July 10, 2003. 

18 Sadly, this is still a thriving view among leftist thinkers. See the recent 

“Rosa Luxemburg Debate” concerning the state in New Politics, vol. VIII, 

2002 no. 4; vol. IX, 2002, no. 1 and no. 2. 

Michael J. Thompson is the founder and editor of Logos and teaches Political 

Science at Hunter College, CUNY. His new book, Islam and the West: Critical 

Perspectives on Modernity, has just been released from Rowman and Littlefield 

Press. 


L 


American Landscape: Lies, Fears, and the 

Distortion of Democracy 

by 


ying has always been part of politics. Traditionally, however, the lie was 

seen as a necessary evil that those in power should keep from their 

subjects. Even totalitarians tried to hide the brutal truths on which their 

regimes rested. This disparity gave critics and reformers their sense of 

purpose: to illuminate for citizens the difference between the way the world 

appeared and the way it actually functioned. In the aftermath of the Iraqi 

War, however, that sense of purpose has become imperiled along with the 

trust necessary for maintaining a democratic discourse. The Bush 

administration has boldly proclaimed the legitimacy of the lie, the irrelevance 

of trust, while the mainstream media has essentially looked the other way. 

Not since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy has such purposeful 

misrepresentation, such blatant lying, permeated the political culture of the 

United States. It has now become clear to all except the most stubborn that 

the justification for war against Iraq was not simply based on “mistaken” 

interpretations, or “false data,” but on sheer mendacity. Current discussions 

among politicians and investigators focus almost exclusively on the false 

assertion made in sixteen words of a presidential speech that Saddam sought 

to buy uranium for his weapons of mass destruction in Africa. The forest has 

already been lost for the trees. It has all become a matter of faulty intelligence 

by subordinates rather than purposeful lying by those in authority. CIA 

officials have, however, openly stated that they were pressured to make their 

research results support governmental policy. Secretary of State Colin Powell 

has still not substantiated claims concerning the existence of weapons of mass 

destruction that he made in his famous speech to the United Nations. Other 

important members of the Bush inner circle have openly admitted that that 

the threat posed by Iraq was grossly exaggerated even though emphasizing it 

served to build a consensus for war. They have nonchalantly verified what 

critics have always known: that American policy was propelled by thoughts of 



an Iraqi nation “swimming in oil,” control over four rivers in an arid region, 

throwing the fear of the western God into Teheran and Damascus, and 

establishing an alternative military presence to what once existed in Saudi 

Arabia. The Bush administration has chastised none of them and criticisms 

by politicians stemming from the Democratic Party have been tempered to 

the point of insignificance. “Leaders” of the so-called opposition party 

obviously fear being branded disloyal. 

As they quake in their boots and wring their hands, however, issues 

concerning the broader justification of the war have disappeared entirely 

from the widely read right-wing tabloids like The New York Post and, at best, 

retreated to the middle pages of more credible newspapers. Enough elected 

politicians in both parties, scurrying for cover, now routinely make sure to 

note that their support for the war did not rest on the existence of weapons of 

mass destruction in Iraq. Rarely mentioned is that the lack of such weapons, 

combined with the inability to find proof of links between Saddam Hussein 

and Al Qaeda, invalidates the claim that Iraq actually posed a national 

security threat to the United States. Everyone in the political establishment 

now points to humanitarian motives. For the most part, however, such 

concerns were not upper-most in their minds then and there is little reason to 

believe that they believed them decisive for the public opinion of the 

American public: human rights indeed became championed by self-styled 

“realists” like Paul Wolfowitz and Henry Kissinger—whose reputations were 

previously based on denying them—only when claims concerning the 

imperiled national interests of the United States were revealed as vacuous. 

President Bush and members of his cabinet may now insist that the weapons 

will ultimately be found, with luck perhaps just before the next election, and 

the links to Al Qaeda will soon be unveiled. But this is already to admit that 

the evidence did not exist when the propaganda machine began to roll out its 

arguments for war. The administration had untold intellectual resources from 

which to learn that the United States would not be welcomed as the liberator 

of Iraq and that serious problems would plague the post-war reconstruction. 

But the administration wasn’t interested: it was content to forward its 

position and then find information to back it up. This indeed begs two 

obvious questions that are still hardly ever asked by the mainstream media: 

Would the American public have supported a war against Iraq under those 

circumstances and, perhaps more importantly, did this self-induced ignorance 

about conditions in Iraq help produce the current morass in which billions of 



dollars have been wasted and, seemingly every day, another few young 

American soldiers are being injured or killed? 

Millions of dollars were wasted by a special prosecutor on investigating false 

allegations of financial impropriety by Bill and Hillary Clinton. 

Impeachment proceedings were begun following the revelations of an affair 

between the then president and an intern. The media was up in arms and its 

champions still pat themselves on the back for their role in bringing about 

the Watergate hearings. When it comes to the chorus of untruth perpetrated 

over Iraq, which brought a nation into war with the resulting loss of lives and 

resources, it seems the public interest is best served by “bi-partisan” 

committees and a submissive press. Just as the Republican Party has been 

flagrant in its refusal to rationally justify its war of “liberation,” which is 

leaving an increasingly sour taste in the mouths of occupiers and occupied 

alike, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council made famous by Bill 

Clinton is now warning the public that—with the recent surge in the polls of 

Governor Howard Dean—its party is on the verge of being taken over by a 

“far left” intent upon opposing tax cuts, introducing “costly” social programs, 

and criticizing the foreign policy of the Bush administration. 

Leading members of the DLC poignantly ask whether the Democrats wish 

“to vent or govern” and when questioned whether the current disarray in 

which the party finds itself was a product of Republican success or 

Democratic blunders, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, chairman of the 

organization, responded that it was a matter of “assisted suicide.” Forgotten 

was the election of November 2002 in which, by every serious account, it was 

the inability of the Democratic Party to offer any meaningful alternative to 

the policy of President Bush that led to the most disastrous non-presidential 

year losses in American history. It doesn’t seem to matter that the “bipartisan” 

candidates like Joseph Lieberman, who refuse to offer a coherent 

alternative on domestic and foreign policy issues, are not catching on with 

the American public. It also doesn’t seem to matter that the proposed tax cuts 

work against the interests of the party’s own constituency, that social welfare 

programs would cost a fraction of the billion dollars a month spent in Iraq, 

and that the current foreign policy is undermining respect for the United 

States throughout the world. Ignored is the way in which the Democratic 

Party—the party of FDR, Bobby Kennedy, and Paul Wellstone—has become 

a joke on the mid-night talk shows. And, all the while, the “liberal” media 

nods its head and counsels prudence. Senator Bayh has no clue: as it now 



stands, the Democratic Party can neither “vent” nor “govern.” Democrats 

should worry about their image—especially since they don’t have one. 

The United States is ever more surely appearing less like a functioning 

democracy in which ideologically distinct parties and groups debate the issues 

of the day than a one-party state ruled by shifting administrative factions. 

Free speech exists, but to have a formal right and to make substantive use of 

it is a very different matter. Consensus and bi-partisanship are becoming 

increasingly paranoid preoccupations of the media whose range of debate is 

becoming narrowed to that between humpty and dumpty. Noam Chomsky 

may not be everyone’s taste, but his little collection of interviews 9-11 (New 

York: Seven Stories Press) was the best-selling work on that terrible event: 

when was the last time you saw him interviewed on mainstream media? It is 

the same with Barbara Ehrenreich, Frances Fox Piven, and any number of 

other radical or progressive public figures. Every now and then, of course, 

Cornel West may pop up for an interview on MSNBC, there are still a few 

critical editorialists like Paul Krugman in The New York Times and Robert 

Scheer in The Los Angeles Times, and Sean Penn can still pay for a full page 

advertisement to express his critical views on the war. Nevertheless, their 

voices are being drowned out by the right-wing pundits that dominate what 

conservatives—ever ready to view themselves as the victim of the system they 

control—castigate as the “liberal” media. 

The situation brings to mind the vision of a society dominated by what 

Herbert Marcuse once termed “repressive tolerance”: a world in which 

establishmentarians can point to the rare moment of radical criticism to 

better enjoy the reign of an overwhelming conformity. The evidence is 

everywhere: CNN is only a minor player when compared with the combined 

power of television news shows with huge audiences hosted by megacelebrities—still 

relatively unknown in Europe—like Rush Limbaugh, Bill 

O’Reilly, and Pat Robertson. Belief in the reactionary character of the 

American public has generated a self-fulfilling prophecy: the public gets the 

shows it wants that, in turn, only strengthen the original prejudices. Edward 

R. Murrow, so courageous in his resistance to the hysteria of the 1950s, may 

often be invoked by the “fourth estate,” but that invocation is merely 

symbolic. 

Hardly a word is said any longer about the skepticism of millions who 

participated in the mass demonstrations that rocked the United States or how 

the mainstream media criticism of Tony Blair has transformed the English 



political landscape. One criterion for judging democracy is the plurality of 

views presented to the public. That is because the number of views expressed 

usually reflects the number of political choices from which the public can 

choose. It is striking to reflect upon the range of perspectives expressed 

during the era of Progressivism, the New Deal, and the 1960s. By the same 

token, however, the attempt to constrict civil liberties in moments of crisis 

has been a fundamental trend of American history. Thus, in the current 

context, it is chilling to consider the narrowing of debate over the legitimacy 

of a terrible war to sixteen words made in a presidential speech, an 

increasingly corrupt evaluation of policy options, and a growing inability of 

the American public to grasp the distrust its present government inspires 

elsewhere. 

A current Pew Poll of more than forty-four countries, directed by former 

Secretary of State Madeline Albright, shows that distrust of the United States 

has grown in an exceptionally dramatic fashion in each of them. This 

includes sensitive nations like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Indonesia 

where unfavorable ratings of the United States have gone from 36% in the 

summer of 2002 to 83% in May of 2003. The “streets” of Europe and, more 

importantly, the Arab world have been lost. Perhaps they will be regained at a 

future time. But the numbers in this poll express anger at a basic reality. 

With its new strategy of the “pre-emptive strike” buttressed by a $400 billion 

defense budget, bigger than that of the next eighteen nations put together, 

the United States has rendered illusory the idea of a “multi-polar world.” It 

has become the hegemon amid a world of subaltern states and it has no need 

to listen or debate. The difference between truth and falsehood no longer 

matter. There remains only the fact of victory, the fall of Saddam Hussein, 

and the bloated self-justifications attendant upon what Senator J. William 

Fulbright, the great critic of the Vietnam War, termed “the arrogance of 

power.” 

Americans have traditionally tended to rally around the president in times of 

war. But this war, according to the president, has no end in sight. A new 

department of “homeland security” is being contemplated and the civil 

liberties of citizens are imperiled. Justification is supplied by manipulative 

and self-serving “national security alerts” in which the designation of danger 

shifts from yellow to orange to red and then back again without the least 

evidence being presented regarding why a certain color was chosen and why 

it was changed. The bully pulpit of the president, as Theodore Roosevelt 

called it, can go a long way in defining the style of national discourse and a 



sense of what is acceptable to its citizenry. This is where leadership asserts 

itself. Nevertheless, precisely on this question of leadership for which 

President Bush has received such lavish praise, he is weakest. 

Beyond all social policy concerns, or disagreements over any particular issue 

of foreign policy, this president is presiding over a newly emerging culture in 

which truth is subordinate to power, reason is the preserve of academics, 

paranoia is hyped, and know-nothing nationalism is celebrated. No longer is 

the constructive criticism of genuine democratic allies taken seriously: better 

to rely on a corrupt “coalition of the willing” whose regimes have been 

bribed, whose economies have been threatened, and whose soldiers have been 

exempt from fighting this unending war on terror. There is little critical selfreflection 

and not the hint of an apology for its conduct in the weeks before 

the war broke out. It is dangerous to underestimate the moral high ground 

that has been squandered since 9/11. The question for other nations is this: 

how to trust the liar whose arrogance is such that he finds it unnecessary to 

conceal the lie? 

Democracy remains elusive in Iraq, and Afghanistan is languishing in misery 

while the creation of new threats to the national security of the United States 

is being undertaken right now. Iran trembles. Syria, too. And there is always 

Cuba or North Korea. The enemy can change in the blink of an eye. The 

point about arbitrary power is, indeed, that it is arbitrary. What happens 

once the next lie is told and the next gamble is made? It is perhaps useful to 

think back to other powerful nations whose leaders liked to lie and loved to 

gamble—and who won and won and won again until finally they believed 

their own lies and gambled once too often. 

Stephen Eric Bronner is Professor (II) of Political Science, German Studies and 

Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. A new edition of his book A 

Rumor About the Jews is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 


T 


Wither Independence? 

Iraq in Perspective: From Despotism to Occupation 

by 


I 

here has been nearly unanimous consensus among Iraqis that a new age 

of possible progress and prosperity has dawned upon their battered and 

war-fatigued country with the downfall of Saddam Hussein on April 9 th . 

However, much had tainted this rosy image, and much more could still mar 

the outcome. A principal factor has been the highly incompetent and 

nonchalant manner in which the U.S.-U.K. occupying forces have conducted 

themselves: one wonders if this is a result of sheer imperial arrogance, or 

ignorance of the region, or a combination of both. None of the above reasons 

is excusable in any way, of course. When a disproportionate U.S. force 

decimated Saddam Hussein’s two infamous sons, Uday and Qusay, and their 

few companions and then showed their battered images to the world, two 

messages may be read therefrom. First, the U.S. will absolutely contravene 

every mode of rational, moral, ethical and reasonable behavior to make their 

point and achieve success (in their own assessment). Why did they not arrest 

these two criminals and have them justly tried in Iraqi courts? Second, U.S. 

policy planners have an inveterate attachment to change through force. The 

lessons from the 20 th century are aplenty (as the Hiroshima anniversary, 

amongst others, adequately reminds us), and the difference now is of volume 

and rate rather than quality. 

Those of us who vehemently opposed the launch of an immoral, unjust and 

illegal war have to seriously address now the occupation: not in a romantic, 

knee-jerk oppositional fashion—which has become commonplace among 

western as well as Arab oppositionists to U.S. imperialist plans—but in a 

calculated manner that puts the interests of the Iraqi people 

uncompromisingly at the forefront. Thus, what are the facts on the ground, 

and what may be done? In what follows, I am more interested in raising 

questions than providing simple, speculative answers. What deeply angers 

and pains me are the cold as well as condescending views offered by Arabs or 



Americans, alike, when it comes to dealing with Iraq. To these two groups, 

governments and populace, Iraq seems to be a possession, and each has an 

opinion on what to do with it. Very little attention is given to the how to 

achieve results, which leads me, and a few others, to believe that none is really 

interested in the well-being of Iraqis. 

II 

The U.S. has waged the war against Iraq in spite of unprecedented 

worldwide public pressure against it. The pretexts for the war, Saddam 

Hussein’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and his 

alleged link to al-Qaeda, have been in dispute from the very beginning. Four 

months after the war and neither a trace of WMD exists, nor a hint of a link 

to al-Qaeda terrorists, rather an unraveling of a series of apocryphal stories 

penned by elected and unelected officials in the U.S. and U.K. governments 

with the sole purpose of manipulating public opinion prior to waging war. 

Now the sad fact is that such despicable tactics—and the list could be long— 

have placed the fallen despot, Saddam Hussein, and his regime in a rather 

romantic-heroic position among many a person within the Arab world, the 

third world and elsewhere. Rather than containing terrorist groups and 

cutting their lifelines, U.S. actions have given life to a litany of fragmented, 

but ruthless, reactionary groups intent on inflicting damage on all symbols of 

modernity—and certainly not limited to the U.S. and its interests. 

To this day, many cannot fathom the horrific and criminal nature of the 

deposed Iraqi regime; and U.S. tactics in Iraq have allowed people to 

compare to and contrast with a fictitious version of Saddam Hussein’s reign. 

Every visitor to Iraq speaks of war-torn cities, devastation, dilapidated services 

and war- and sanctions-fatigued populace, on the one hand, and the existence 

of monstrous, grand palaces and edifices, on the other: All being the direct 

outcome of 30+ years of authoritarian rule and 12 years of the most 

suffocating (U.S.-U.K. instigated and propelled) economic sanctions ever 

imposed. But Iraqis returning for the first time after decades of exile have 

observed one thing of significant importance in the midst of the rubble: 

people feel free and hopeful. There is a satisfying, inner happiness one feels 

when free that can only be understood if one’s freedom has been curtailed: no 

explanation, lengthy or terse, would do justice. This is what precisely gives 



one hope for a better tomorrow. Alas, both are slowly being nibbled at, and 

the prospects are unclear. 

Four months after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s hierarchical structure of 

governance, basic municipal and civic services are at an appallingly low level. 

The work force has no work and only portion of it has started receiving 

salaries, some of which were given in useless currency that further aggravated 

an already drained populace. 1 Security is deteriorating mainly in Baghdad and 

environs, while most other cities function much better. Further, the rumor 

mill is grinding absolutely anything imaginable, which only contributes to 

increasing the level of uncertainty in the country. The Coalition Provisional 

Authority (CPA) promulgated actions that could only worsen a very 

unsettled situation, namely: dissolving the Army and affiliated organizations, 

as well as the Ministry of Information, thus rendering more than 250,000 

without recourse to any source of livelihood. Furthermore, the so-called 

process of de-Baathification is purely ideological in nature—principally 

fueled by the hawks in the U.S. Administration and their Iraqi underlings, 

most notably Ahmed Chalabi, Kanan Makiya and Co. 

In a country where membership to the Baath party became the only means 

for advancement for many, this tactic is bound to engulf the country in a 

process of vilification and counter-vilification based on personal, rather than 

objective, accounts. What would be more a appropriate and just recourse is 

to judiciously investigate the role of senior Baath functionaries: trying before 

the law all those guilty of crimes against the people, and pardoning those 

whose hands were untainted. A national heeling and reconciliation process is 

essential if the tragedies and horrors of the past 30 years are to be 

constructively addressed, and avoid institutionalizing recrimination and guilt 

by association. The latter is likely to take the country down a dangerous 

spiral, which accentuates antiquated tribal rule—that Saddam Hussein 

himself tried to resuscitate in the latter part of the nineties to further buttress 

his reign. Iraq’s political parties must resist this and instead press for just trials 

and a process of reconciliation. Interestingly, the majority of Iraqis seems to 

favor this approach as evinced by personal and televised accounts (albeit not 

polled scientifically), thus presenting yet another hopeful scenario for Iraq 

and its people if left alone. 

Events indicate that the U.S. invading-cum-occupying forces, while 

possessing formidable fire power, have seemingly less than formidable 



planning and analytical powers. Most echelons of the decision-making 

process within the U.S. government had apparently been surprised by the run 

of events. More surprisingly, no contingency plans had been prepared for the 

(speedy) fall of Saddam Hussein’s government and the ensuing dissolution of 

ministries, state organizations, the police, etc. What would a rational person 

expect would happen if a highly centralized structure of governance 

dependent on a ruthless social policy grounded in chauvinistic and sectarian 

politics suddenly collapsed? Why, then, have U.S. planners and their research 

centers and institutes been unable to anticipate at least a general framework 

for dealing with events? 

The sanctions-fatigued, repressed Iraqis with hardly adequate access to basic 

food requirements, never mind super-dooper search engines, computing 

power, etc., could—and would—have done much better than the 

functionaries of the CPA. It is also worthy of note that this just-do-and-waitto-see-what-happens 

is essentially the same obscurantism governing 

doctrinaire religious teachings (of whatever color): a complete and utter 

absence of critical thought. This behavior fundamentally stems from what the 

U.S. feels itself to be: the unparalleled imperial power of our age. Thus, 

ideology is fundamentally and intrinsically at the core of all that is 

happening, and the media have performed a compelling job of disinforming 

the U.S. populace and effectively contributing to a brainwashing campaign at 

an astounding rate. A pressing question presents itself: Will the U.S. populace 

seek to change this through ballot boxes in 2004? Will they come to really 

understand that they would not be hated in the world if they actually 

thought of the rest of the world on an equal footing and genuinely divorced 

themselves from condescending attitudes that are so prevalent in almost every 

segment of class, profession, ethnic and religious background? 

III 

IRAQ IS BEING CONSTANTLY PORTRAYED AS A FRAGILE formation of ethnoreligious 

groups, essentially violent and vying for power. Is there a country on 

this planet that is not an amalgamation of ethno-religious groups? Even Israel 

as a Jewish State comprises various ethnicities, and hence is heterogeneous. 

Modern Iraq has been a staunchly secular country where the separation of 

religion from the state has been a fact of life—respected and adopted by all, 



and certainly by its Shiite and Sunni religious establishments. While not a 

phenomenon at the popular level, ethno-sectarian chauvinism has been 

institutionalized by the state since its inception: the progeny of the British 

concocted Cox-al-Naqeeb plan laying down the foundation for the pyramidal 

power structure in the nascent government of Iraq in 1921. To ensure 

reliance on foreign forces, state power was entrusted to a minority elite, with 

a clear segregation of the largesse among the vying groups: Officers of the 

erstwhile Ottoman Army, Sunni landowners and religious notables, and a 

handful of Shiite landowners and religious notables and Jewish and Christian 

businessmen. 2 The association was entrenched in the belonging to a group, 

ethnic, religious or sectarian, rather than to the country Iraq. It may be moot 

to question whether that was not a reflection of the lack of a national 

identity; however, history indicates that the inhabitants of Iraq had strongly 

identified themselves with the land of Mesopotamia, and their association has 

since been with it rather than strictly speaking the tribe, or religion or sect. 

1958, marking the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the 

first republic, ushered in a new period where Iraqis identified themselves as 

citizens and not according to tribal, religious or sectarian divides. The 

modern political formations, Communist or Pan-Arab—principally the 

Baath party, have been clearly secular and encompassed all sectors of society 

along ideological rather than ethno-sectarian divisions. The Baath party 

slowly degenerated since Saddam Hussein became the “strong man” in the 

early seventies, and in the summer of 1979 he consummated his power by 

annihilating the leftist wing within the party (led by Abdel Khaleq al- 

Samarai, who was summarily purged with more than 50 of his comrades, 

most of whom were executed by Saddam and his underlings). During the 

1980s Saddam Hussein embarked on entrenching a family-based rule, and 

the remnants of the party had become a façade to one of the darkest periods 

of Iraq’s history. In the 1990s, with the help of the sanctions, the government 

had further degenerated into a brutal mafia-style repression against any 

modicum of opposition. The inhabitants of the south, mostly Shias, paid a 

particularly heavy price as a result of their uprising following the 1991 Gulf 

War. Prior to 1991 the government had forcibly transferred Arabs from the 

south to the Kurdish north, especially oil-rich Kirkuk, with the objective of 

creating a new demographic reality. Moreover, a diligent student of the 

British colonizers, Saddam Hussein fervently adopted an approach favoring 

one or other Sunni clan for wealth and governmental positions, and 

continually pitted one tribe against the other. This ipso facto created a 



situation whereby those minority tribes had come to associate their 

comfortable status with the regime’s existence. 

The inhabitants of the south, on the other hand, have long been suppressed 

not because of their Shia faith per se, but because that region had always been 

a source of resistance against central authority. The south of Iraq, one of the 

richest cultural hot spots anywhere, has long been characteristically secular 

and had been the birthplace of Iraqi communism as well as the Arab socialist 

movement—including the Baath party. Hence, the brutal repression and 

suppression inflicted on the inhabitants of the south by Saddam Hussein’s 

regime simply began as a measure against a people demanding freedom, then 

metamorphosed into a sectarian identity following the disappearance of all 

secular opposition within Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s well-practiced technique of 

punishment had been collective and decisively long term: cut off the 

livelihood of any group of people who dares pose a threat to his rule. Thus, 

the Marsh Arabs, descendants of Mesopotamia’s first dwellers, have been 

dealt a most severe blow to their very livelihood and existence for demanding 

“bread and freedom”: the marshes were drained, and fertile agricultural land 

was turned arid because the Tigris had purposefully been redirected away 

from it. 

It is worthwhile pointing out that while the south had been brutally 

suppressed, not-an-insignificant number of the security apparatus torturers 

did actually come from the south too—with the top security echelons coming 

from the family mafia and affiliated subordinates. Such is the nexus of victim 

and torturer under Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror: entwined to the nth 

degree. 

IV 

Why, then, do Arab satellite TV stations and most Arab journals 

maliciously propagate an image of every event in Iraq taking place along 

sectarian lines? Al-Jazeera, in spite of clarifications and corrections from Iraqis 

inside Iraq, insists on calling the pockets of local fighting as “national 

resistance led by the Sunnis.” In many a program where audience from 

Baghdad, Cairo and Beirut talk about the situation in Iraq, you here one 

rhetorical statement after another from Cairo and Beirut devoid of genuine 

sympathy for the plight of the Iraqis and any concrete plan of how the Arabs 



wish to assist the Iraqis: Thus the strong backlash within a significant portion 

of Iraqis, educated or otherwise all across the country, against the manner in 

which Arab governments, press, intellectuals and even populace had sought 

to represent the situation in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s rule and now. 

Iraqis feel disgusted by the hypocrisy practiced by many an Arab: prior to 9 

April, 2003 Iraq’s children were a mere slogan for Arabs as the murderous 

sanctions torn them asunder, and as years of political repression sought, but 

failed, to create a docile populace. Most Iraqis contend that no progress could 

emerge in the Arab world if internal repression persists, and no justification 

should be given to any form of authoritarian rule, as the history of modern 

Iraq has amply shown: a rich nation, and highly-educated people literally 

reduced to selling their belongings to rummage for food for their offspring. 3 

Iraq may now present a scenario for the Arabs to follow. No one in Iraq is 

oblivious to U.S. reasons for waging war on Iraq, but they recognized their 

inability to stand against the U.S. mammoth—since neither Europe nor any 

other state dared oppose the U.S.. The split between the dormant left inside 

of Iraq and their comrades outside specifically addresses this point. They 

both agreed that no positive change could take place in Iraq while Saddam 

Hussein’s regime was in power, but they differed on the mechanisms for 

change. Those who lived inside Iraq and were experiencing repression on a 

daily basis felt that only an outside power could remove the despotic regime. 

Then, and only then, could work begin to rebuild the country. Hardly any 

Iraqi welcomed the invading forces, and they all agree that the occupying 

forces must leave. The collapse of the central government and all its offshoots 

created a significant power vacuum as well as a security black hole. At the 

current stage, foreign presence is required to maintain peace and order. The 

question is how and who should do it? No army in the world is trained to 

maintain peace and order among civilians, thus the tragic chaotic scenarios 

over the past four months. All visitors to Iraq acknowledge that the young 

American GIs are scared witless, and therefore shoot at everything that 

moves. This takes us back to questions I posed at the beginning of this 

article: Are the U.S. planners incompetent, nonchalant or both? 

What is clear is that a strict timeline for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. and 

British forces must be put in place, and at the same time a staunch 

commitment must be made by the UN for international forces to replace 

them at once. There should be no lapse between the two as the political 

volatility in Iraq now is serious. Moreover, the Governing Council appointed 



by Paul Bremer III, while not the transitory national government that was 

demanded by the Iraqis, is required to form a united front and work to 

immediately achieve two goals: restoring peace and security within the 

country, and restoring the functioning of municipal and governmental 

activities. Their efficacy will be judged if they achieve these two goals and 

how quickly. Once this is accomplished, an unequivocal demand for the 

institution of democratic elections to form a new government must be put in 

place through a realistic, but non-pliant timeline. Achieving success would 

require a unified approach by the Council in order to pressure the CPA into 

accepting Iraqi demands. 

The support that the world could give Iraqis is by placing pressure on their 

respective governments to demand that Iraqis receive the reigns of power, 

peacefully, systemically and quickly. The world has a chance to show that it 

cannot let the U.S. greyhound loose: it must be tamed. 

Notes 

1 

The 10,000 Dinar note is rumoured to be counterfeit and is thus being 

accepted at a much lower rate, if at all. Furthermore, prices continue to soar. 

2 

The religious establishment, as elsewhere, was split between submissive and 

oppositional. 

3 

The Arab League in the meeting held in early August by its foreign 

ministers refused to recognize the Governing Council recently formed in 

Iraq, and rationalized the decision on the basis that recognition would be 

tantamount to accepting occupation. According to the charter of the League, 

UN Security Council resolutions must be accepted and adhered to as well as 

international treaties. The UN passed Security Council resolution 1483, 

under U.S. pressure, that basically legitimized the occupation of Iraq and 

placed the country under the administrative control of the occupying forces. 

U.S. forces occupy parts of almost every Arab state, kingdom or sheikhdom 

with the exception of a few, and hence the Arab foreign ministers’ talk of not 

willing to recognize occupation by the U.S. is nothing but hogwash. 



Moreover, they are in contravention of the very UNSC resolutions that they 

proclaim to enforce. The real motive for their action lies elsewhere. A 

genuine change towards democracy in Iraq would threaten all of these 

illegitimate governments, and thus they have been united in actively 

opposing any reasonable resolution to the Iraq crisis. They have not even 

proposed any alternative to U.S. occupation, nor outlined a “road map” for 

ending occupation. Moreover, Arab official media continue to portray any 

escalation in Iraq on religious, sectarian and ethnic bases, and hardly any 

voice is given to the secular voices that are widely available inside the country. 

It is worthy of note that the clashes and confrontations with U.S. forces in 

regions surrounding Baghdad, notably Faluja, have been partly fuelled by 

religious fundamentalists, shipped to Iraq before and after the invasion of 

Iraq, bent on destabilizing the country. These deadly confrontations are not 

supported by most Iraqis and do not represent a form of armed struggle: they 

are futile violence whose goal is disruption of ordinary life and serves no 

useful goal: only innocent civilians die as a consequence. 


N 

Richard A. Couto 

The Incidental Liberation of Iraq 

by 


o one in Iraq or the U.S. believes that the primary intention of U.S. 

military action in Iraq was liberation. Yet, citizens of both nations need 

to unite to make it happen—Iraqis as an opportunity to avoid neocolonization 

and achieve some form of just and democratic self-rule and the 

U.S. as reparations for a misguided and dangerous preemptive invasion that 

is likely to exacerbate Middle East violence and instability. The U.S. Left 

cannot afford to gloat at the blunders of the Bush administration or hope for 

its failure. The stakes are far too high. The Left has to call upon those 

Democrats who can summon the courage to chart a new path to liberation, 

to face up to the deceptions that have brought us to this place, and to avoid 

the continuing deceptions about reconstruction. 

Almost universally, anyone in Baghdad will give you three reasons for the 

U.S. invasion: Israeli security; control of Iraqi oil; and weakening the Arab 

world. They appear as three faces of the underlying premise of U.S. policy 

towards Israeli security—no two Arab nations should equal Israel in military 

capacity. Iraq, with its oil wealth, had built one of the world’s largest armies, 

had the funds to support others, and Saddam, after 1991, could no longer be 

trusted to stay in line with US policy towards Israel. 

People in the U.S., thanks to the state-supporting media, are far more 

divided in opinion about the reasons for the US attack on Iraq. Among a list 

of rationale de jour’s, we find: Iraq posed an imminent threat from weapons 

of mass destruction: Iraq would be an eventual nuclear threat; Saddam had 

ties to Al-Qaeda. 

As the U.S. administration’s rationales fade from credibility, into a place 

between “technically correct” (Rumsfeld) and not “totally outrageous” 

(Powell), three conclusions are clear. 



• Iraqi perceptions of U.S. intentions forge a more convincing logic 

that connects 9/11 to our invasion and occupation of Iraq. They 

coincide with the Defense Department’s neo-conservatives’ position 

to drain the swamp that breeds terrorism. This logic proceeds from 

the premise that Islamic terrorism has its base in the 

Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Control of Iraq oil cuts off supplies to 

Palestinian organizations and makes it easier to impose a U.S./Israeli 

peace. 

• There is almost universal sentiment that it is good that Saddam 

Hussein is gone. Dividing that sentiment are reservations about the 

illegal and unjustified means to that end; concerns with the U.S. 

intentions to impose its own regime on Iraq; and worries that the 

U.S. Office of Coalitional Provisional Authority [OCPA] does not 

have the competence or will to restore basic services—electricity and 

water and police protection; 

• and the liberation of Iraq, originally incidental to our purpose, has 

taken on immense importance to end the U.S. march towards endless 

preemptive war and to prevent an accidental empire whose chief 

exports are “death and violence” as the solemn ending of Woodward’s 

book, Bush at War, envisions. Far from draining the swamp of 

terrorism, these outcomes will fill and expand it. 

If Iraq is to reach liberation, three impediments, rooted in OCPA’s 

performance up to present, will have to be removed. First, some degree of 

normal service and security needs to be restored just to demonstrate OCPA’s 

competence. Second, OCPA will have the join the rest of us in a world that is 

gray-hued and not starkly black and white. Third, OCPA will have to end 

the U.S. hubris that it can liberate Iraq without the aid of the UN and its 

member states who failed their responsibility. 

Competence 

People compare OCPA’s performance unfavorably with Saddam’s regime’s in 

1991 when electrical power was restored within a month of the end of the 

war and despite much more damage. At best, eight hours of electrical power 

are available per day, rotated through the city in 2 hour blocks. This provides 

inadequate power for cooling Baghdad’s 115 o and for pumping clean water. 

Similarly, people compare the fear they had of Saddam’s secret police and the 



diffuse fear they have now. Everyone has a story of a family member or 

neighbor robbed in their home or assaulted in the street. Women face threats 

from carjacking and sexual assault never known before. In the matters of 

safety and public services, the general assessment is that things are far worse 

than ever before. In effect, OCPA has turned all of Baghdad into a U.S. inner 

city with the variant of occupation military forces who do not speak the 

residents’ language. 

Waleed Shamil, professor of theatre arts at the University of Baghdad, makes 

the point even as he qualifies the severity of these problems. He thinks back 

to his eight years of study and teaching and assesses Baghdad’s problems as 

no worse than the worst neighborhoods of LA at that time. 

Imagine any U.S. inner-city with limited electrical power and interruptions 

of clean water supply; lack of refrigeration; ice available on the black market 

at high costs in money and time; limited public transportation; the burned 

out skeletons of cars, trucks, and military vehicles everywhere; crumbling 

infrastructure everywhere; debris in the streets; thick black smoke in the air 

coming from fires to dispose of debris; no relief from searing heat until the 

rains of September; 70 percent unemployment; interrupted income from 

police, civil service, and military jobs eliminated by OCPA decree; no 

telephone service; no postal service; and an unprecedented crime wave, then 

you can understand that it is the patience of the people Baghdad, a city of 

five million people, and their hope for better times that provide the primary 

security of U.S. troops. People offered different time lines for the endurance 

of this store of patience and hope but all acknowledged that the time for 

OCPA to demonstrate its competence was limited. 

A World of Black and White 

OCPA is impeded in its effort to restore public services, in part, by the U.S. 

preference for a policy based on the theology of good and evil and its 

obsession with the latter. Continuing resistance in Iraq and the attacks upon 

occupation forces, L. Paul Bremer III, OCPA head, and Secretary of Defense 

Donald Rumsfeld attribute to hardcore Sunni and Ba’athist loyalists, al- 

Qaeda, Iranians, and thugs; always some external enemy to U.S. virtue and 

“success.” 



Students and faculty at the University of Baghdad with whom we spoke are 

adamant that the resistance in Falluja and other places is cultural not 

political. Men, who are arrested in a public and humiliating manner—face 

down on the ground with a display of deadly force and then having their 

hands tied behind their backs—have relatives who feel compelled to avenge 

the family or tribe dishonored by their treatment. Crackdowns, with more 

arrests, detentions, and injury to and death of innocent residents, increase the 

pool of resentment from which resistance emerges. Similarly, the shooting of 

a U.S. soldier at the University of Baghdad could be more cultural, dealing 

with the insufficiently respectful treatment of female students, than political 

in nature as Bremer suggested. As one dean summarized, “We are tired of 

waiting for respect for ourselves and our nation.” 

There are many causes of the lack of basic services and the continued 

resistance, some of them of our own making. To externalize the causes of 

these problems into people we demonize not only overlooks our part in the 

problem it delays our getting on with more appropriate solutions. 

Hubris 

THIS U.S. THEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IS THE CAUSE and effect of a hubris that is 

the third and perhaps the most serious impediment to OCPA’s work. Having 

sidestepped and bullied the UN in its build up to the war and having 

discredited its inspection program as too slow and ineffective, the U.S. now 

seems reluctant to admit its need for the UN in its reconstruction effort. 

Indeed, the cup-is-half-full message from Bremer and the Pentagon, for 

whom he works, calls for satisfaction and pride in what has been done, 

patience with the remaining tasks, and understanding of the complexities of 

the work before OCPA. These, of course, are the sorts of attitudes that the 

U.S. would not tolerate as it picked its fight with Iraq. 

OCPA continues to use a dual standard in its work. The University of 

Baghdad presents one small case of this impediment. Because of one of 

Bremer’s most serious errors, blanket de-Ba’athification. Sami Al-Mudaffar, 

the newly elected president of the University of Baghdad, faces the problem 

of dealing with Iraq’s premier University’s future without some of the 

administrators who ran things in the past. 



Students, faculty, and other administrators distinguish “Saddamis’ from other 

Ba’athists. Saddamis believed in the party in their souls. They informed on 

students and faculty, put pressure on them to join the party, and withheld 

travel money, promotions, salary increases, and even teaching assignments 

unless they did. Some, it is claimed, even had students picked up, detained, 

tortured, and in some instances killed. The nominal Ba’athist, on the other 

hand, joined the party in outward appearances only so as not to impede their 

careers. They often covered for other colleagues’ dissent by lying about 

matters such as undergoing military training with their students as 

prescribed. Even these distinctions are not hard and fast but represent the 

foci of the elliptical orbits of evasion and repression within which faculty and 

students moved. 

They are very interested to see that those officials guilty of serious crimes 

against others receive lawful punishment. They are just as interested to see 

those outstanding teachers with only nominal Ba’athist credentials be 

retained to contribute to the teaching and scholarship of the University. 

Judging individuals by the characteristics of a group is a gross violation of 

human rights insists one de-Ba’athified faculty member. 

The hubris of de-Ba’athification stands out if applied to Bremer; hubris 

always employs a double-standard. How could the managing partner of 

Kissinger Associates be sufficiently “de-Kissingerized” to escape the taint of 

realpolitik without a hint of human values including the support of state 

terror in Chile and Indonesia? In a particularly relevant policy, Kissinger 

supported the Iranian Shah’s wish of support of the Kurds in their fight 

against Iraq in the 1970s as part of the grand strategy of the Cold War—Iran 

with the U.S., Saddam with the Soviets. The policy of the-enemy-of-myenemy-is-my-friend 

ended when the Shah decided that he would be friends 

with Iraq. Kissinger stopped aid to the Kurds and exposed them to retaliation 

by Iraq. In a statement that helps explain why some regard the Nobel Peace 

prize winner as an international war criminal, he explained famously that 

“Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.” Similarly, 

Bremer’s record of anti-terror study with the Heritage Foundation and focus 

on Iran suggests that “anti-terrorism should not be confused with national 

reconstruction.” 

The stakes are tremendous. Iraq, a nation of 24 million people, in 1980 was 

on the threshold of first world development. After three wars and 12 years of 

sanctions, Baghdad now longs for the standards of a third world country. 



U.S. occupation has brought the lowest standard of living that Iraqis have 

known. There is fear that the U.S. will, intentionally or not, diminish Iraq 

further to the level of Afghanistan. 

It is not enough for the U.S. Left to observe all this in hopes of a Bush 

failure. First of all, the humanitarian crisis that we largely avoided in the war 

could follow from water borne diseases, food shortages, and violence. 

Secondly, Iraqis will not permit the U.S. to fail its incidental liberation of 

Iraq and play out some Kissingeresque geopolitical strategy with its citizens, 

nation, and institutions. Full-scale armed resistance to occupation without 

liberation will occur and the U.S. will face suppressing the resistance and 

maintaining an occupation of Iraq similar to the Israeli policies in its 

occupied territories. This will benefit no one and undermine the security of 

Israel and the U.S. The U.S. is unlikely to choose to abandon its intentions 

of achieving Israel security through control of Iraqi oil revenues, no matter 

how ill-conceived the means or ill-gotten the goods. As Jefferson said of 

slavery, we have a wolf by the ears. We may not want to hold it but we know 

there is danger in letting it go. 

An Iraqi policy for the Left would include dealing directly with the 

impediments to success. Such a policy would: 

• Insist on immediate visible signs of good intentions and competence 

which means 

o immediate tangible signs of progress on the resumption of 

electrical service throughout the country but especially urban 

areas; 

� accountability of the large U.S. contractors with 

responsibility for reconstruction and demand 

immediate efforts with visible results and assurance 

that profits and favoritism are not holding up 

immediate action in this emergency situation; and 

o re-establish the Iraqi military and police as quickly as possible 

and give them the tasks for security. 

• Bring new focus on Israeli security and 

o distinguish between Zionism and Israeli security and explain 

that the first is antithetical to the second; 



o acknowledge and end forty years of supporting the Israeli 

policy of military strength greater than any two Arab nations; 

and 

o acknowledge that the peace in the Middle East runs through 

Baghdad but has a different starting point than the one we 

have taken. 

� U.S. policies in Iraq should model new policies 

toward the Arab world rather than replicate 

Israeli/Palestinian relationships. This requires 

• a repudiation of past policies that used 

corruption, civil war, war between states, and 

coups to weak Arab states hostile to Israel and 

to maintain control of the region’s oil. 

• Establish democratic processes of governance and due process of 

punishment by 

o Turning over to the UN the task of establishing a national 

government in a truly democratic process that goes beyond 

giving Iraqis choices among U.S. preferences or manipulation 

of a new government to achieve the covert purposes of the 

U.S. invasion of Iraq; 

� This may mean establishing a government that may 

provide for Israel’s security in a manner different from 

U.S. and Israel’s preferences—nuclear disarmament, 

inspections for weapons of mass destruction, etc. 

o preclude from government and public office only those 

former officials duly tried and found guilty of crimes against 

Iraqi law or humanity. 

• End the sequential obsession with surrogates for elusive terrorists by 

o disconnecting Iraq from the war on terror and force our 

national leaders to admit that they manipulated the nation 

into fear for its security as a means to pursue other unstated 

policies; 

o ending the obsession with a purge of Ba’athist and other 

symbols of Saddam; and 

o describing U.S. efforts as war reparations; 

� acknowledge the U.S. part in bringing the Ba’athist to 

power, maintaining Saddam Hussein even through 



the bloody political purges of the 1960s, and 

supplying him with biological and chemical weapons 

material and 

o acknowledging the role that the U.S. insistence on the most 

stringent UN sanctions against Iraq played in reducing the 

infrastructure. 

We need to make the U.S. incidental liberation of Iraq into a deliberate, 

intentional, and successful international effort and we do not have much time 

to show our intentions and competence. Baghdad will probably sizzle the 

entire summer. We can hope, however, that serious discussion and some 

immediate action can support the hope of Iraqis for improvements to come 

and cool things off long enough to permit an intentional, effective, 

international, and genuine liberation of Iraq to begin. While we are doing 

this, of course, we must also pursue regime change in the U.S. 

Richard A. Couto is co-chair of the Task Force on Liaison with the University of 

Baghdad of Conscience International and professor of Leadership and Change at 

Antioch University. He traveled to the University of Baghdad in January for a 

symposium on peace and in June to renew conversations about the reconstruction 

of higher education. 


W 

Henry Pachter 

Who Are the Palestinians? 

by 

Henry Pachter 

ho are they, the Palestinians, and who has the right to speak for them? 

Oppressed nationalities find it difficult to get a hearing because those 

who pretend to represent them are often political adventurers who merely 

exploit them—whether for other powers’ imperialistic purposes or to vent on 

imaginary enemies their own hatred of the world. This is true of the Somalis, 

the Irish, the Bengalis, the Ibos; it is twice as true of the Palestinians because 

their country happens to lie at the crossroads of a world power struggle. 

Nowhere else do local enmities serve so many outside masters; nowhere else 

do foreign interests spread so much confusion about the very identity of the 

people whom they are pretending to save. 

So, first of all let us agree: like most Irish, most Palestinians are not terrorists; 

but like many Ulstermen or Basques, many Palestinians will condone or even 

applaud acts of terrorism as long as they lack other means to express what 

they consider their just grievances, and as long as those grievances continue to 

be seen as just by others. Let us also agree that their plight is not of their own 

making; they have been objects of other people’s policies for three thousand 

years. 

Palestine, the land of the Philistines, a Semitic people that once was 

subjugated by Joshua and by David, has retained that name through the 

centuries as it was conquered by Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, 

Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, (1) Christians from the West, Osmanli 

Turks, and the British. Until recently in modern times it was sparsely settled, 

mostly by Arab Bedouins, and considered part of Syria. A movement to 

liberate and unite the Arabs, then under Turkish domination, existed long 

before the First World War. 

Then the British used Arab tribesmen to wrest Palestine, Mesopotamia 

(Iraq), and Syria from the Turks, promising them”sovereignty” and selfdetermination. 

After prolonged uprisings those parts of Syria that lay east of 

the Jordan River were given to Hashemite sheiks, who thereafter were called 


Henry Pachter 

kings; the part west of the Jordan River was styled the British Mandate of 

Palestine and supposed to evolve toward self-government; northern Syria 

became a French mandate. The terms of the mandates were illegal even by 

the standards of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which was their 

covering law. Previously, a unilateral declaration by Foreign Minister Arthur 

Balfour had designated “Palestine” as a “Jewish homeland”; but at the same 

time Weizmann and Lord Harlech assured the Arabs that this should not 

interfere with Arab aspirations to sovereignty. 

What these terms meant or how to reconcile them was never spelled out 

except in Balfour’s memoirs, where he wondered how anybody could have 

been misled into thinking that they meant anything (2). But on the evidence 

of contemporary customs and conditions, the Balfour Declaration was 

consistent with a Jewish immigration rate of 50,000 a year and a ratio of two 

to one between Muslims and Jews. In 1930, after serious Arab riots, 

immigration was severely restricted-just when Jews were desperate, not for a 

homeland but for a place of asylum. At the outbreak of World War II, the 

population consisted of 456,000 Jews and 1.1 million Muslims; at its end, 

the census counted 1.143 million Muslims, 583,000 Jews, and 145,000 

Christians. 

The Holocaust and the war left the Allies with a “disposal problem” in 

western Europe: nearly 100,000 East European Jews who had been made 

homeless by persecution and political changes were languishing in displacedpersons 

camps, fed by charitable contributions and government aid, mostly 

from the United States which, however, did not lift its own restrictions on 

immigrants from Eastern Europe. Responding to strong pressures from 

Zionist organizations—and minding the electoral situation at home— 

President Truman resolved the problem by agreeing to the foundation of a 

Jewish state in Palestine. Soviet diplomacy gladly gave its assent, viewing any 

diminution of the British Empire as so much gain for itself, and hoping to 

ingratiate itself with both Jews and Arabs. 

At first the British wanted to build a base in Haifa because, ironically, they 

were about to fulfill another Arab demand: to evacuate the base in 

Alexandria. On the other hand, a White Paper of 1939 also promised 

independence to Palestine. Weary of Arab terrorism and immediately 

prompted by Jewish terrorism, the Labour Party government decided to 

abandon the thankless task of policing the peace between Jews and Arabs. (3) 

The deal was consummated by a United Nations Security Council resolution 


Henry Pachter 

(4) the only instrument of international law on which the state of lsrael can 

base its existence. 

It is therefore necessary to remember that the United Nations at that time 

created not one state but two on the west side of the Jordan: one Jewish and 

one Arab. The Jewish state so created was totally nonviable: it consisted of 

three noncontiguous parts encompassing most Jewish settlements and a like 

number of Arab settlements. Even Ben Gurion, however, accepted this rump 

territory because at that time he still assumed that Palestine would remain an 

economic unit where two peoples would be able to develop in symbiosis—a 

binational state in all but name. 

A word about this assumed symbiosis. Not only Jews but Arabs too had come 

into Palestine, attracted by the higher wages and better working conditions 

under Jewish employers, or simply by the promise of prosperity that the 

Jewish immigration and its foreign backers brought to the country. The 

Jewish labor organization, Histadruth, had seen with alarm how fellow Jews 

were hiring Arab labor at low wages while Jewish immigrants were jobless. 

From the early 1920s on, therefore, the Histadruth had been waging a 

campaign “to fight for places to work.” (5) Its strongly nationalistic appeal 

brought quick success to this campaign: by the 1930s Arabs worked for Jews 

mostly in menial positions that Jewish workers would not accept. Even so, a 

remarkable number of Arabs in Palestine prospered, learned mechanical 

skills, and went to college, so that former Palestinians now occupy enviable 

positions in all Arab countries as executives, opinion leaders, professional 

people, foremen, and skilled workers. 

There is no doubt that the socioeconomic upset emanating from Jewish 

Palestine was one of the reasons for Arab sheiks, kings, and capitalists to fear 

the establishment of a Jewish state. Another was the threat of Jewish mass 

immigration and the growth of a new power center that was bound to 

subvert the status quo in the Middle East. At that time, only twenty years 

after the Balfour Declaration, Zionism was still considered a tool of British 

imperialism, and the Mufti of Jerusalem broadcast for Hitler from Berlin 

during the Second World War. To him, as to many Arabs today, Zionism 

was the imperialists’ base in the Middle East. 

A lot of silly arguments have been heard about this catchword, imperialism. 

Does it apply to Zionism? It is true that Orde Wingate trained the Haganah 

(Jewish underground defense organization); but another British officer, 


Henry Pachter 

Glubb Pasha, led the army of Transjordan. And eighty years before these 

events, Lord Palmerston sponsored the unification of Italy; will anyone 

therefore charge that Garibaldi was a tool of British imperialism? The Jewish 

state was the goal of a national conquest; its conflict with Arab states or Arab 

interests is on the order of national rivalries, and this remains true even if 

Jews or Arabs or both are allied with imperial powers. At one time the British 

favored the Jews, but after 1930 they found Zionist presumptions 

increasingly embarrassing. Zionism exploited British power and then turned 

against it. The British, in turn, contrary to Lenin’s theory of imperialism, did 

not mean to “exploit” Palestine economically but, as the mandate power, to 

prohibit the development of Jewish industries. 

The United States has invested heavily in Arab oil developments. The charge 

that it uses Israel to keep the sheiks docile, however, is totally unfounded 

and, on the face of it, ridiculous. The policy of the oil companies and of the 

State Department has been consistently pro-Arab unless one defines as pro- 

Israel any policy not aiming at the destruction of the Jewish state. The 

responsibility for Israel’s preservation, as for some other elements of the status 

quo the United States is committed to defend, has been a heavy burden. But 

it is in the nature of empires to be drawn into national border conflicts where 

their clients have interests, and very often they would rather not have to 

support them. Far from being used by the Russians or the Americans for their 

purposes, both Arabs and Jews have deliberately involved their big brothers in 

their own defense concerns. 

Much has been made of the Histadruth’s job policy. Obviously, in terms of 

Lenin’s theory of imperialism, Jewish business has not been guilty of 

exploiting cheap Arab labor; rather, Jewish colonists have been guilty of 

making Arabs jobless and driving them from their lands. I have to explain 

here a subtlety of feudal law: fellahin can be sold along with the land on 

which they have been sitting, but the land cannot be sold without them; it 

cannot be pulled away from under their feet. When the Jewish agency, aware 

only of capitalist law, bought land from the callous effendis, it may honestly 

have thought that thereby it had acquired the right to expel the fellahin, 

which repeats the story of the “enclosures,” well known to readers of Marx’s 

Capital. As the Phoenicians had done at Carthage and the Athenians in 

Sicily, the Jews acquired land and Jewish colons “settled” it. This is the 

original meaning of “colonization.” (6) 


Henry Pachter 

Notwithstanding Lenin, it may be called an imperialist policy on the part of 

the nation that hopes to prevail in such a fight for the land. Jewish settlers, 

who had naively begun to cultivate this ground -including kibbutzniks who 

did so in the name of socialism - wondered why the former owners or tenants 

of those grounds were firing at them or staging surprise attacks on their 

innocent children; from the vantage point of the expelled Palestinians, the 

settlers were usurpers, colonizers, imperialists in flesh and blood, not just the 

tools of mysterious powers across the sea. (7) 

This is the background of the war of 1948, which resulted in Israel’s 

conquest of a contiguous territory (within the boundaries of 1948-1967) and 

in the Hashemite annexation of territory west of the Jordan River, including 

part of Jerusalem and such Biblical cities as Bethlehem and Nablus. Perhaps 

even more important for our present purposes, it resulted in the flight of 

600,000 Arabs from their native home (8). In the light of the communal 

strife that had preceded the British pullout, that flight is totally 

understandable. A sensible person avoids being in anybody’s line of fire, 

especially in this kind of civil war. The Jewish defense organizations had 

taken care to project an image of fierceness. Some, like Menachem Begin’s 

Irgun Zwai Leumi and the Stern gang, were outright terrorists; their tactics 

appalled even Ben Gurion. (9) In June 1945 the Irgun blew up the King 

David Hotel, causing ninety-one deaths. British soldiers were shot by snipers; 

cars loaded with dynamite were driven into British army camps. Do these 

people have a right to complain about terrorism? Even the Palmach, the 

combat organization of the Haganah, blew up bridges and derailed trains. 

The crimes that had been committed in a few—fortunately very few—places 

had frightened the Arabs; when war came to their area, they followed the 

advice to stay clear of it. In so doing, they indicated that they were not taking 

part in the war operations. Clearly, in all wars of the past, displaced 

populations did expect to go back to their places of home, of work, of 

personal contacts. To keep them from returning, to forbid them a choice 

between staying abroad and accepting conquest, violates custom and 

international law—in fact it is a crime. Yet, for reasons of national policy, the 

Israeli government seized this opportunity to create a demographically 

homogeneous Jewish state. (10) 

IT WAS AT THIS MOMENT, and through this deed, that the issue of “the 

Palestinians” was created. So far, we have encountered Palestinians as the 

inhabitants of an area that might include all of the present state of Jordan, or 


Henry Pachter 

only the population of the Mandate territory. Now the name has come to 

define almost exclusively the million Arabs who claimed that they had been 

expelled from their homeland and who were forced to live in primitive camps 

spread outside Israel in the Gaza strip, on the West Bank, in Lebanon, and in 

Syria. These camps were maintained by UNRRA, a United Nations affiliate, 

and financed mostly by American contributions. 

Aside from the moral and humanitarian outrage they constitute, maintaining 

these camps was a political mistake of the first order. They became hotbeds of 

unrest, recruiting grounds for terrorist organizations, breeding places for 

corruption, blackmail, and crime. A few cents a day per head, amounting to 

many millions of dollars per year, meant an invitation to count many heads 

twice. The fraudulent claim that there are 2 million people in those camps is 

clearly exposed by the census figures of 1946. Even if every single Arab in all 

of Palestine had fled, there could still not be more than 1.2 million. Of 

course in the thirty years that have elapsed, the original 600,000 have been 

blessed with children and grandchildren; even some “dead souls” may have 

been procreative. 

No one denies that many Arabs on the West Bank considered the miserable 

allowance in the camps preferable to their normal subsistence under Arab 

governments. On the other hand, genuine refugees from Palestine left the 

camps and found lucrative employment in other Arab states; many others 

died. All remain statistics in the camp population, and so are their children, 

although the children may live in other countries. By the most conservative 

statistics, therefore, more than half of the present camp inmates never lived in 

Israel. The Israelis who justify their claim to the land by the tribal memory of 

two thousand years obviously have no argument against people whose claim 

is based on tribal memories reaching back only thirty years. More than the 

expellees’ actual misery, the bitterness of the sacrifice that was imposed on 

them intensifies the hatred that defines the Palestinians as a nation distinct 

from other Arabs. 

Should the displaced Palestinians have been admitted by other Arab states? 

The Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after the Second World War 

were among the Federal Republic’s greatest assets. England admitted West 

Indians and mestizos whose country had become someone’s state. Why do 

not Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, or rich Kuwait, Algeria, Saudi Arabia help their 

Palestinian brothers—for whom they shed such abundant tears—get 

integrated into their countries? Although the oil sheiks have the means, they 


Henry Pachter 

feel no obligation to do so. (11) Actually, they would rather use these 

unfortunate victims of national wars as pawn in their own game of power 

politics. They are not interested in healing this wound; they want it to fester, 

but in the body of Israel, and in the body of world peace. 

How could this have been prevented? At some point between 1948 and 

1968, the United States should have stopped subsidizing the refugee camps 

and Israel should have made an offer that might have, in one bold stroke, 

drastically reduced the number of “Palestinians” and disarmed their 

militancy. The offer should have been based on recognition of legitimate 

claims by those who could prove that they had lost their property, home, or 

job in the present territory of Israel. They should have been given the option 

of either a settlement in money or return under Israeli law. Since the 

conditions of life as a second-class citizen are never enviable, even when the 

nationalities are not emotionally hostile to each other, I believe that few 

Palestinians would have opted for return. Most would rather have taken the 

money, especially if at the same time U.S. subsidies had been ended. (12) 

The Jewish authorities and public opinion have rejected such proposals on 

the twofold ground that Israel could not accommodate so many Arabs 

without disrupting her economy and without endangering the safety of her 

state. (13) The first part of this rejoinder sounds odd in view of their steady 

clamor for more immigrants from countries holding more Jews than there are 

Arab statistics in the camps. The second part is refuted by the results of the 

Six-Day War, which has added another million Arabs to the population of 

Israel and many Israelis now speak of a “Greater Israel.” 

Most Israelis would probably want to keep the occupied areas if they could 

move the Arabs out, while Arab nationalism, strangely, demands the return 

of uninhabited desert first and liberation of the bemoaned brothers later. 

In fact, Palestinians are not just the refugees in the camps of 1948. There are 

a million Arabs who live under military authorities in conquered territory. 

Despite the greater prosperity that annexation has brought to them, they are 

a source of unrest and an acute danger to peace. There can be no settlement, 

no truce, and no confidence between Arabs and Jews as long as their status is 

not determined equitably and as long as there is no international machinery 

to ascertain the will of the Palestinians themselves. Unless a political dialogue 

is initiated between Israel and responsible Arab leaders—a dialogue about 

concrete proposals, that will satisfy legitimate claims—Yasir Arafat will step 


Henry Pachter 

into the vacuum and pretend that he knows what the Palestinians want, and 

he will go on blackmailing his Arab friends and the international community. 

He also has rivals: should he not occupy the vacuum, some terrorist group or 

perhaps even the Communist Party will. The ball, therefore, is in Israel’s 

court. (14) 

At the time of the Six-Day War, the Israeli government declared that it 

would hold the occupied territories only as pawns and evacuate them in 

return for a peace treaty. It has offered to pay compensation to those who 

have lost property in old Palestine—or rather, to allow the United States to 

make such payments; but it has not given refugees a choice of taking 

payment or returning. Meanwhile, the cancer of the Palestinians not only 

continues to fester but is being transplanted to the world arena, where it eats 

away the possibilities of peaceful coexistence. A decision is urgently needed to 

attack the primary point of the evil. Neither recriminations about the past 

nor legal constructions of right and wrong are required. What is required is 

finding political answers to political problems. 

The offer to receive or to compensate legitimate claimants might be made 

with greater confidence by the Israeli government if at the same time the 

Palestinians were to be offered a state of their own. It has been suggested that 

the West Bank and the Gaza strip—two noncontiguous territories—would 

constitute such a state. Unfortunately, that state would not be economically 

viable; hence it would be a pawn in the political game of the oil sheiks. Nor 

would such a proposal be politically acceptable without including the Arab 

part of Jerusalem. The Israelis are loath to give up any part of Jerusalem, and 

there is at this time no device of condominium or international control that 

would make the administration of the city possible without friction. It is clear 

that the real point of the quarrel is not viability but sovereignty. All the 

principals are too primitive in their tribal instincts or too immature as nations 

to be reasonable on questions where self-respect is at stake. Therefore, the 

solution for Jerusalem will have to be imposed by the great powers; it cannot 

be negotiated between the parties concerned. As long as they pretend to 

negotiate about it, they merely indicate that they do not mean to make peace. 

By contrast, the return of the occupied territories must be negotiated by 

Israel itself with its neighbors, and the return of the refugees can be 

negotiated only privately between the Israeli government and those private 

parties who claim to have been residents of the area now under the 

government’s jurisdiction. By its very nature, this cannot be a problem 


Henry Pachter 

between Israel and Egypt or Syria, for neither of these countries claims 

sovereignty in Palestine. It could be negotiated between Israel and a state that 

can speak in the name of the Palestinians. These are a distinct people, 

different in background and culture from the Bedouins of Jordan, from the 

mercantile Lebanese, from the temperamental Syrians, from the millennia old 

Egyptians. They must determine their own fate, both in Israel and in the 

West Bank area. They would probably prefer to sever their political ties with 

Jordan and might be interested in economic arrangements, to mutual 

advantage, with Israel. It stands to reason that they would rather not fight 

Boumédienne’s wars and that the skimpy subsidies some of their guerrillas 

are getting from oil sheiks cannot substitute for a developmental plan and a 

technology to go with it. In the long run, a Palestinian state on the West 

Bank might easily fall into Israel’s orbit, or become a client of Moscow, 

Beijing, Washington, Teheran—who knows? 

It is not necessary to believe that appeasement will bring an early cessation of 

terrorist attacks or a lowering of the level of invective in Arab rhetoric. But it 

may lay the foundation of a more constructive relationship between the Arabs 

and Jews on the local level and perhaps bring to old Palestine some kind of 

unity on the basis of economic interests and businesslike relations. In other 

words: it is necessary to strip this political problem of ideology. Although in 

this age everybody is “raising consciousness” or seeking to establish an 

identity, there is altogether too much of that in the Middle East. The 

Palestinians speak Arabic and worship in mosques; but they have come from 

many countries and have intermarried with many conquering nations. Their 

identity is of rather recent origin, through the misfortunes of war and yet 

another foreign conquest. Their appeasement ought to be less difficult than 

their arousal. They are looking for opportunities. I am even tempted to say 

that they can be bought; but they are being terrorized, and this may be the 

greatest obstacle to peace at this moment. 

Can Israel wager her security on the vague prospect that one day the 

Palestinians might not only awaken but also mature? There are no 

alternatives, and one must look for solutions that have some promise of 

lasting. One may hope to prevent an explosion though one may not be able 

to remove the dynamite. Above all one must divide, not unite, one’s enemies. 

Third World strategists have made the Palestinian issue into a cutting edge of 

their attack on Western positions in world politics. To blunt that edge, it is 

not necessary for the United States to take drastic measures, though it needs 

to radically rethink the issue. The friends of Israel—and, surprisingly, that 


Henry Pachter 

includes many who have valiantly criticized “Cold war attitudes” in U. S. 

policies—are tied to the confrontational patterns of the past decades; they 

think in terms of security rather than in political terms. They have missed 

valuable opportunities for peace in the past ten years. They gamble on the 

survival chances of a particular structure of the Israeli state, which is a 

dangerous gamble at best and is becoming more dangerous every day. The 

thought of having Arab citizens in their midst horrifies the Israelis; but while 

staring at that danger, they don’t see the gathering of Arab armies outside the 

gate. They have too much confidence that the gate can be held shut for all 

time; this is an illusion for which others have paid dearly. In the long run, 

security lies only in the confidence of one’s neighbors. 

Aware that I have made some controversial statements, I want to make clear 

that the issue is neither moral nor judicial, but political. Those who wish to 

debate my proposal should refrain from reminding me who “started it” or 

who is “more to blame” or whose “rights” are better. Wherever I have 

touched upon such questions, my intention has merely been to show how 

Palestinians see them, and that is a political fact, not a moral judgment. 

Notes 

1. Arabs today identify themselves only by speech. Originally the term 

means conquerors coming from the Peninsula. 

2. In 1922, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill rejected the 

interpretation that Arab laws and customs had to be subordinated to 

Jewish interests, and Arab representatives rejected every constitution 

the British or the League of Nations tried to impose on the country. 

The Arab Congress in 1928 demanded a “fully democratic” 

government—whatever that meant in terms of Arab constitutions. 

3. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was no “anti-Semite”; he simply 

dropped a hot potato that cost England 50 million pounds a year. He 

was not the only Englishman, however, to wonder why the Jews were 

turning against England—of all nations—which had fought Hitler. 

Gratitude is not a political word, but bitterness is. 

4. The United Nations then had fifty-seven members; obviously the 

resolution would not pass today. Except for states recognized in the 

Westphalian Peace Treaty (1648) and at the Vienna Congress (1815), 


Henry Pachter 

no other state has received such sanction. States are usually a product 

of violence. 

5. This was the term used abroad; the Hebrew term sounds less 

offensive. 

6. A reader points out that the number affected was comparatively small 

and that terrorism developed mostly in the cities. Unfortunately, the 

symbolic and political value of the object does not depend on its size 

or price. 

7. “The revolt is largely manned by the peasantry, that is to say by the 

people whose life and livelihood are on the soil but who have no say 

whatever in its disposal; and their anger and violence are as much 

directed against the Arab landowners and brokers who have facilitated 

the sales as against the policy of the mandatory Power under whose 

aegis the transactions have taken place. The fact that some of those 

landowners have served on national Arab bodies makes them only 

more odious to the insurgent peasantry and has rendered it less 

amenable to the influence of the political leaders as a whole.” George 

Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National 

Movement (New York: Lippincott, 1939), pp. 406-7. The Jewish 

leaders—except for the Communists, Martin Buber, and some 

chalutzim—never thought of allying themselves with these victims of 

colonization. See Bernard Avishai in Dissent, Spring 1975. 

8. Some say the number was 800,000—more than had been living in 

the Jewish half of Palestine. 

9. Obviously, what applies to Arabs must apply to Jews. Most Jews may 

not have approved of terrorism—though my father, usually one of 

the most law-abiding citizens, did; but Arabs are even less able than 

Jews to distinguish between factions in the other camp. The crime 

must be condemned; an entire people must not be condemned for it. 

But I am not arguing here about the morality of terror; my aim is to 

establish the fact that the Arab population felt threatened. 

10. Unfortunately, socialists like Dissent contributors Avishai and N. 

Gordon Levin have defended this theft on the ground that “socialist 

values” can be realized better in a securely Jewish environment. 

Would they agree with the Soviet government that “Soviet values” 

can be realized better in an environment that does not include 

Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, or Trotsky? 

11. Israel claims that she accepted a million Oriental Jews, mostly 

expelled from the Arab countries. The rationale of the Jewish 

”homeland,” however, conflicts with the suggestion that these should 


Henry Pachter 

be balanced against the Arab expellees. They would be entitled to 

Israeli citizenship even without being harassed in Baghdad. Besides, a 

forcible population exchange is repugnant from any internationalist 

perspective. 

12. Gordon Levin rejects the notion that readmission could “serve [any] 

real human interests besides a satisfaction of Arab honor.” But that is 

a question of deep concern, and it is in Israel’s power to restore that 

sense of honor. 

13. It seems that Zionism has abandoned its earliest propaganda, which 

claimed that a Jewish state would make its Arab citizens happy and 

contented. 

14. Arab notables in the occupied areas are subject to intimidation; some 

Israelis therefore think that Arafat is the only available partner. It is 

certain that no parley is now conceivable without him, a calamity that 

conforms to the pattern of the Israeli’s poor grasp of diplomatic 

realities: they have always been forced to choose between two evils 

after they had rejected an alternative that would have been, after all, 

second best. 


I 

Abbas Amanat 

From ijtihad to wilayat-i faqih: 

The Evolving of the Shi’ite Legal Authority to Political Power 

by 

Abbas Amanat 

n November 2002 an Iranian professor of history, Hashim Aghajari, a 

veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, was sentenced to death by the Islamic 

revolutionary court in Hamadan among other counts for questioning the 

practice of blind “emulating/following” (taqlid) of the mujtahids in matters of 

belief and practice. His sentencing led to several days of widespread 

university protests fueled by Aghajari’s refusal to appeal his death sentence. 

What incensed the Iranian court which accused him of blasphemy was that, 

by implication, Aghajari was denying the “authority/guardianship of the 

jurist” (Persian, wilayat-i faqih; Arabic, al-wilaya al-faqih), the very founding 

principal of the Islamic Republic. Aghajari’s objection aimed not merely at 

the practice of taqlid, but the legitimacy (or their lack of) of the “guardian 

jurist” (wali-yi faqih), the “supreme leader” of the Islamic Republic. This new 

anti-clerical quest for Islamic modernity naturally steered much interest 

among younger generations of Iranians. 

Aghajaris’ speech commemorated ’Ali Shari’ati, the renowned revolutionary 

reformist. Invoking Shari’ati’s notion of “Islamic Protestantism” as the only 

way to liberate the society from the impasse of the “traditional Islam,” 

Aghajari was striving to arrive at a new historical understanding of the Shi’ite 

heritage. Though still grounded in the Qur’an and hadith, this new reading 

was engaged more deeply with modernity, human rights and plurality. 

Aghajari called for social justice and democracy in economy and in politics 

though he implicitly distanced himself from Shari’ati’s firebrand 

revolutionary rhetoric. He does not remain untouched by Shari’ati’s 

exhortations to be the prophet of Protestant Islam, a claim made by a 

number of Islamic reformers including the celebrated Jamal al-Din 

“Afghani,” the Iranian pan-Islamic activist of the 19th century. Yet he goes so 

far as criticizing the Shi’ite establishment for its culture of condescension 

especially in the exercise of ijtihad: 


Abbas Amanat 

The people are not monkeys who merely imitate. The pupil 

understands and then acts, and then tries to expand his own 

understanding, so someday he will not need the teacher. He 

can himself directly look up (the sources) and deduct and 

form an opinion. The relationship that the traditional 

institution (i.e. the clerical establishment) seeks is one of 

master and the follower; the master remains master and the 

follower remains follower. Forever these shackles straps 

around his neck. The relationship of the (real) scholar (àlim ) 

with people is a critical one. Since he has expert knowledge, 

we listen to him as a scholar. Whenever we find something 

objectionable, we criticize, we debate. He is not a saintly 

celestial being to be treated by us as a divine figure. Of course 

this class (i.e. the clergy) first turned the infallible (Shiìte) 

Imams to divine figures so that they themselves could pose as 

divine representatives of the Imams. 1 

Such critique of the abiding authority of ijtihad and that of the so-called 

“source of emulation” (marja’-i taqlid) inevitably bring to light the much 

debated issue of legal authority in Shi’ite Islam and, more specifically, the 

problem of institutionalization of ijtihad. He obviously does not address 

openly the wilayat-i faqih, but his reference to the “imam” in the above 

passage, as in other allusions sprinkled throughout his speech, signifies the 

obvious to his sensitive audience. He deliberately seems to have touched on a 

sore point since the doctrine of the “guardianship of the jurists,” it can be 

argued, stands on shaky legal grounds. Shi’ism never historically or 

institutionally made the necessary leap from the loosely defined ijtihad to a 

centralized marja’iya, let alone ever develop the theoretical ground for 

creating a universal judicial authority. 

Before the time of Ayatollah Khomeini, Shi’i legal thought never did 

seriously engage in the sphere of public law and consequently never 

articulated a coherent theory of government. Even in the safety of the 

madrasa, Shi’ite law remained entirely preoccupied with the articulation of 

civil and private law as practiced in the mujtahid-run civil courts. Such 

practice of ijtihad was never systematized or subjected to clear and universally 

accepted norms, one may venture to say, almost by choice. The Shi’ite law on 

which the mujtahids relied remained a matter of interpretation and scholastic 

scrutiny largely within the madrasa environment rather than through the 


Abbas Amanat 

practice of the law. Throughout the Safavid and the early Qajar periods (16th 

to 19th centuries) Shi’ite law acquired a remarkable level of sophistication, 

especially in the theoretical field of the “roots of jurisprudence” (usul al-fiqh). 

Yet both in the study of the rudiments (furu’) and in the methodology of usul 

al-fiqh Shi’ite scholarship resisted systematic codification beyond what was 

established by earlier scholars largely between the 10th and 14th centuries. 

Even the “emergence” of the status of the “supreme exemplar” (marja’-i 

taqlid, lit. the source of emulation) in the 19th century remained largely an 

informal practice. No set of objective standards for designating such a 

leadership ever developed and no specific legal privileges were arrogated to 

this office. As late as the middle of the 20 th century, the marja’iyat was largely 

aimed at addressing the needs for a communal leadership rather than a 

supreme legal authority. No marj’a before Ayatullah Burujerdi ever claimed 

his legal opinions to be universally binding. Nor any of the marja’s claimed 

to be standing at the apex of a judicial hierarchy or was accepted as such by 

the mujtahids or by the community at large. Whenever they effectively 

exercised their legal power, as in the tobacco rebellion of 1890-91 or during 

the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911 or the banning of the drinking 

of Pepsi Cola in the 1950s, the marja’s relied on their popularity and prestige 

rather than any legal precept. The three preconditions for a marja’, being the 

most learned (a’lam), the most judicious (a’dal), and the most pious (atqa), 

were qualities barely measurable by legal or academic standards. No 

institutional procedure was ever set to determine such preconditions. What 

in reality determined success of a marja’, or for that matter any mujtahid, was 

his popularity and the size of his follower constituency (or congregation). 

The question thus remains as to what process, historical and legal, 

transformed this informal and democratically chaotic form of defuse judicial 

leadership into a binding, all-embracing, and authoritative office of the 

wilayat-i faqih with claim over the judicial and political authority. 

Ijtihad and the Usuli interpretation of judicial authority 

As early as the 10th century the so-called 12th Shi’ite (Ithna ’Ashari) jurists 

recognized the Occultation (ghayba) of the 12th Imam, the state of his 

invisible (but directly inaccessible) existence in the physical world, as the 

chief postulate for denouncing any form of temporal power in the absence of 

the Imam as inherently unjust and therefore illegitimate. Only the return of 


Abbas Amanat 

the Imam in an undetermined moment in future, it was believed, could 

establish on earth the ultimate values of justice and legitimate rule. This 

absolutist messianic belief in the Imam’s eventual establishing of a utopian 

perfect order has often been viewed as the chief obstacle on the way of 

articulating a legal public space in Shi’ism. The same rationale also barred in 

theory any legitimate collaboration between the jurists and the state. Every 

government was in theory seen as inherently oppressive. The same principle 

of avoiding political collaboration was conducive to the flourishing of the 

Shi’ite study of hadith, as means of emulating the models of the Prophet and 

the Imams, and early development of jurisprudence (fiqh) focusing on civil 

and contractual law as well as on devotional acts and obligations. 

In practice, however, the quietist tendency among the Shi’ite jurists, as 

opposed to powerful messianic trends throughout the Shi’ite past, 

encouraged compliance and even collaboration with the “unjust” and 

“tyrannical” (ja’ir) state especially if and when the state was accommodating 

the Shi’is. This de facto acceptance of the temporal power, needless to say, 

was in full agreement with the ancient Persian notion of the “sisterhood” of 

the religious and the state institutions, a interdependency perceived to be 

essential for the endurance of both institutions and the stability of the social 

order against the corrupting influence of “bad religion” (i.e., the antinomian, 

often messianic, alternatives to legalistic Shi’ism). While the state maintained 

peace and order, upheld the shari’a, defended the domain, and guarded the 

jurists’ vested interests, the jurists were in turn expected to maintain good 

relations with the state, and even serve in the state-controlled judiciary. 

Already by the 14th century the Shi’ite jurists developed an elaborate legal 

system of private law based on ijtihad, the exercise of logical reasoning by 

utilizing the sources of the law to form qualified legal opinion within a 

specific timeframe. The exercise of ijtihad in turn led to the development of 

an elaborate methodology of jurisprudence, the science of the usul al-fiqh. 

Some of the best legal minds articulated complex linguistic debates on legal 

semantics and phenomenological discussions on the authority of the text. Yet 

oddly enough, usul al-fiqh avoided systematic debate on ijtihad, such as the 

mujtahids’ qualifications and institutional hierarchy, and failed to discuss 

such seemingly mundane issues as the madrasa curriculum. Nor did it address 

the inconsistencies and ambiguities of the Islamic law or question the 

rationale behind its archaic categorization. 


Abbas Amanat 

Even the establishment of the Safavid state (1501-1736) and declaration of 

Shi’ism as its official creed (in obvious contrast to the rival Ottoman empire’s 

expressed upholding of “orthodox” Sunni Islam) did not substantially alter 

the mujtahids resistance to institution development. This in spite of the 

Safavid dynasty’s presumed sacred lineage, its active sponsorship of the 

clerical establishment and heavy patronage of the teaching circles. The 

immigrant jurists from the Arab Shi’ites communities of Jabal ’Amil (in 

today’s Syria and Lebanon), Qatif and Bahrain in northern Arabia and the 

Persian Gulf, and Najaf and Hilla in southern Iraq were incorporated into 

the judiciary of the Safavid Empire. These mujtahids and their Iranian 

counterparts, many being converts from Sunnism, considered the Safavid 

shahs as legitimate defenders of the faith and their empire as the guarded 

Shi’ite domain. For the “learned” (’ulama) community it was therefore 

permissible to assume judicial offices, as majority did, collect alms and the so 

called the “share of the Imam,” and even to set the congregational Friday 

prayer which considered by majority of Shi’ite jurists as impermissible in the 

absence of the Imam of the Age. 

The jurists’ reluctance in this period to solidify their gains by implementing 

a judicial leadership independent from the state is not surprising. Their 

reluctance to better define the boundaries of ijtihad was in part because the 

Safavid rulers’ successfully recruited the mujtahids as state functionaries. 

Although the office of shaykh al-Islam was held by a high-ranking jurist, this 

was not understood to be a legal supervision over the entire judicial 

community. Nor did it mean administrative or financial control, a task that 

the Safavid state consistently conferred on a non-clerical bureaucrat with the 

title of sadr (i.e., the chielf officer). Moreover, the Safavids in the late 17 th 

century did not hesitate to patronize the alternative Akhbari school which in 

contradistinction to the Usuli school rejected ijtihad and its logical 

rationalization. The debate between the two schools in the late 17th and 

throughout the 18th centuries weakened the development of usul al-fiqh as a 

discretionary methodology and favored instead a wholesale and uncritical 

validation of all the hadith as sources of the law. More specifically, all reports 

(akhbar) from diverse Shi’ite hadith sources attributed to the Prophet and the 

Imams, were considered as authentic, with little discretion for their historical 

validity. The Akhbari resistance to independent reasoning was congruent 

with the Safavid state’s aversion to allow the emergence of an independent 

mujtahid-dominated judiciary. 


Abbas Amanat 

After the collapse of the Safavid Empire in 1736 and the ensuing political 

instability, Usulism reemerged as the predominant legal school in the late 

18th and early 19th century. In the early decades of the 19th century the 

Usuli jurists made evident gains in socio-economic and educational areas 

hence laying the foundation for a clerical establishment that continued with 

little interruption up to the present. They monopolized the madrasas’ 

education and the pulpit of the mosques, controlled charitable endowments 

(awqaf), and posed as the only legitimate recipient of religious taxes. They 

developed amicable though somewhat distant relations with the early rulers 

of the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925), a mutually beneficial relation that brought 

about the golden age of Usuli ijtihad. The growth of religious circles first in 

Najaf, where Akhbarism was soundly defeated, and later in the Iranian cities 

such as Isfahan and Qum was supported with a large student body and with a 

closely-nit network of mater-pupil patronage. Impressive number of legal 

works were produced both on the specifics of the law (furu’) and on the usul 

al-fiqh with implicit emphasis on the role of the mujtahids not only as legal 

scholars but judges and social mediators. The growth of congregations in 

mosques also strengthened jurists’ ties with social groups in search of legal 

support, most noticeably the merchants of the bazaar who backed the 

mujtahids and financed their teaching circles in exchange for legal security 

and representation. 

Yet with all the success in developing a semi-independent legal network and a 

solid lay constituency, the jurists of the Qajar period did not seek to 

reconstruct the theory of ijtihad and its application to public law. Despite 

occasional “turf wars” with the state over privilege and sphere of influence, or 

later in defiance of the state’s Westernizing policies, they continued to honor 

the dichotomy of the religious law (shar’), as it concerned the jurists, versus 

the customary law (’urf), as exercised by the state. Neither side, the jurists or 

the state (at least before the rise of the European-inspired reforms) attempted 

to define each of these two spheres of shar’ and ’urf or demarcate their 

boundaries by means of codification, let alone to breach the informal 

boundaries between them. The usul al-fiqh remained essentially concerned 

with its arcane debates on the legal method and legal sources. Voluminous 

works, commentaries and glosses on commentaries were produced by the 

Usuli scholars on intricate details of semantics and epistemology. Yet the 

mujtahids simply did not see the need for a centralized corporate identity or 

for disturbing the delicate balance with the state upon which they 

continuously negotiated their power. The state in turn preferred ambiguity 

whereby through consent and coercion it hoped to persuade the jurists to 


Abbas Amanat 

comply with the state’s otherwise waning power and prestige. By the end of 

the century the jurists were more than ever isolated in their world of madrasa 

and private courts. Accordingly, the curriculum of the seminaries was 

substantially truncated to focus solely on legal studies at the expense of nonreligious 

and especially non-legal topics. Even such traditional fields as 

mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy were no longer part of the jurists’ 

general education. 

Voices of protest to the jurists’ monopolies and their intellectual petrifaction 

further moved the mujtahids toward conservatism and added to their distaste 

for new approaches. Most significantly, the messianic Babi movement in the 

middle decades of the century questioned the very legitimacy of the clerical 

community, its theoretical premises, educational methods, and legal 

practices. The Babi religion (later to be transformed into the Baha’i faith) 

denied the long-held jurist position that they collectively represent the Imam 

of the Age in Occultation. The Babi apocalyptic movement with growing 

popularity not only sought leadership in the new “Imam of the Age,” but 

declared the end of the historical cycle of Islamic shari’a by ushering a new 

cycle of prophetic manifestation. In response to the Babi challenge, the jurists 

community closed ranks and came closer to full collaboration with the state 

in crushing the Babi revolution. In no other area the jurists heeded the Babi 

call for fundamental reform though in longer run the clerical community did 

produce a new form of communal leadership. The status of the marja’ that 

was first recognized for Shaykh Murtaza Ansari in the late 1850s, not 

surprisingly coincided with the growth of the Babi clandestine anti-clerical 

subversion. His emergence as the “supreme exemplar” no doubt mirrored the 

public desire for a clerical leadership committed to higher standards of 

morality, learning, and social justice. Ansari came to represent these values 

for a growing constituency of seminarians in the madrasas and among the lay 

followers. 

The idea of marja'iya as a communal leadership with an increasing claim over 

political process continued in the second half of the century and through the 

Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911). Perhaps the height of such 

politicized marja’iya came with Mirza Hasan Shirazi, the influential jurist and 

teacher whose access to funds and his ever-growing teaching circle placed him 

ahead of his competitors as the most widely recognized marja’. His general 

ban on the use of tobacco during the Regie protest of 1890-91 for the first 

time demonstrated the marja’s power against the state and European imperial 

monopolies. The channeling of public discontent into political discourse is 


Abbas Amanat 

even more evident during the Constitutional Revolution. Several mujtahids, 

simultaneously recognized as marja`s, appealed to diverse constituencies with 

contesting political agendas. The breakdown of a united leadership during 

this period of political reform and Western-style secular democracy 

demonstrated the crucial role of the jurists' followers in promoting the cause 

of mujtahids on both sides of the constitutional debate. The greater 

polarization of the clergy especially over the issues of secular judiciary and 

civil liberties vouched for this multiplicity of leadership. A number of 

influential jurists who sided against a Western-style constitution and in favor 

of a Sharià-based alternative were defeated and lost constituency and 

prestige, even their lives. 

From marja’iya to wilayat-i faqih 

ONLY IN THE LATTER PART OF THE 20th century do we witness the gradual 

shift back toward a centralized marja’iyya under Ayatollah Husayn Burujirdi. 

He should be viewed as the first to hold a united leadership not only in the 

management of the Qum seminaries, collection of the religious taxes and 

distribution, but a certain degree of legal authority over the clerical 

community. It goes without saying that the “emergence” of this form of 

centralized marja’iya was a belated, albeit inevitable, response to the state’s 

intrusion into the judicial domain. The rise of the Pahlavi secular autocracy 

from the middle of the 1920s precipitated the growth of modern educational 

institutions. It abolished the mujtahids’ civil courts and replaced them with a 

state-controlled judiciary. The state regulating the use of charitable 

endowments, and similar measures undermined the ’ulama’s social status and 

affected their economic influence. The growth of the secularized or semisecularized 

middle classes and popularity of a variety of religious and 

ideological challenges, from the Baha’i faith to Marxism and Western-style 

modernity, persuaded the demoralized and shrunken clerical community to 

try to reorganize the madrasa and to solidify its network at the national level. 

Most importantly, the jurists gradually moved away from the state-’ulama 

alliance that was founded on the ancient principle of preserving social 

equilibrium through guarded collaboration. In due course the new marja’iya 

reconstituted its base not only in the bazaar community, where it was 

traditionally strong, but among a new class of urban and urbanized poor. 

They offered a pool for clerical recruitment and an enthusiastic mosque 

congregation. 


Abbas Amanat 

Such greater solidarity and group identity however did not result in 

reconsideration of the Shi’ite legal thought or any serious attempt to 

institutionalize the informal marja’iya leadership. Study of fiqh in the 

seminaries of Najaf, Qum and elsewhere remained almost entirely loyal to the 

arcane precepts and practices of the Shi’ite law and its obsessive 

preoccupation with devotional acts (’ibadat) and contracts (’uqud). The 

striking persistence of legal archaism among the Shi’ite jurists can be 

explained in part by inherent conservatism of the legal curriculum and in part 

by isolation from the society’s new secular discourse. Left out of the new 

state-run judiciary, the Shi’ite teaching circles in Najaf and Qum made 

almost no attempt to address new issues of public law or even offer a modern 

reading of the old legal texts. The so-called hawzas continued to operate 

along the informal teacher-pupil patronage and produce growing number of 

jurists and/or preachers in need of new congregations. 

A number of marja’s that “emerged” after the death of Burujirdi in 1960, 

including Ayatollah Khomeini, were no doubt more organized in their 

teaching and charitable operations. Yet there was no attempt in the clerical 

circles to revisit the nature and conditions of marja’iya, let alone arrive at a 

consensus about criteria for such leadership or the hierarchy. As much as the 

lay constituency of the marja’as grew and the funding sources improved, no 

equivalent of an ecclesiastical hierarchy emerged even though there existed a 

fairly coherent network of the ’ulama throughout Iran, southern Iraq and 

Lebanon. 

The defuse marja’iya leadership of this period relied heavily on both the lay 

and the clerical “followers.” To mark their place in a complex game of 

prestige and popularity the marja’s depended on their followers for higher 

standing. Naturally, at times they were bound by their whims and wishes. As 

Mutraza Mutahhari, a prominent follower of Khomeini and a leader of the 

future Islamic revolution pointed out in the early 1960’s, in this popularity 

contest no marja` could survive without his constituency's financial and 

moral backing. In a conference organized by some religious modernists on 

the theme of marja’iyat, the largely modernists, among them Mahdi 

Bazargan, joined together with a new generation of activist clerics, such as 

Mutahhri, to urge the marja’s to bring some order into the notoriously 

chaotic world of Shi’i clerical leadership. 


Abbas Amanat 

The greater politicization of the clerical community, and especially the 

clerical clique around Ayatollah Khomeini from mid-1960s, responded 

positively to this call. Among the marja’s of Qum and Najaf, Khomeini 

represented the most radical political position. His open anti-Pahlavi 

platform caused as much trouble for him as it gained him popularity 

especially among the lower and middle rank ’ulama who were disillusioned 

with other marja’s and their collaboration with the shah’s regime. Modernity 

thus came to the clerical establishment with political radicalization rather 

than a fundamental revision of the Shi’ite legal system and reconsideration of 

its curriculum and judicial premises. Even prominent students of Khomeini 

such as Husain ’Ali Muntazari and Mutaza Mutahhari seldom called for 

reconsideration of the Islamic legal tradition or new teaching methods or 

adopting a modern legal philosophy. For them legal reform equaled 

succumbing to an alien secular modernity introduced by a colonizing and 

corrupting West. 

Majority of the new seminarians and clerical followers of Khomeini, came 

from among the underprivileged in small towns and villages. Increasingly, 

they were drawn in to political dissent and political activism in the late 1960s 

and ’70s because they resented the wealth and privilege of the secularized 

urban middle classes. Equally, they resented and the state’s judiciary for 

supplanting the old and decentralized jurists’ courts. They also questioned 

subservience of the Pahlavi state. Khomeini and his prominent students 

capitalized on these discontents to promote his leadership as superior to other 

leaders not necessarily because of Khomeini’s juristic qualifications, which 

were meager, but because of his uncompromising political stance. 

In the tense environment of confrontation with the shah and his police 

apparatus, this message of political dissent was better transmitted to the lay 

people by recalling the Shi’ite narratives of defiance and self-sacrifice, as in 

the commemoration of the martyrdom of ’Ali and that of his son, Husayn 

ibn ’Ali. Laboring over the obscure and mostly redundant details of Shi’ite 

law and the theoretical intricacies of usul al-fiqh appeared secondary if not 

entirely obsolete. Even Mutahhari, the most promising intellectual product of 

Qum in the 1970s preferred to delve into Western philosophy or Islamic 

reformism and revolutionary rhetoric rather than adopting a novel approach 

in fiqh and usul. 

In a climate of state-driven secular modernity versus the ’ulama’s legal 

redundancy, Khomeini’s gradual tilt in the 1970s toward the doctrine of 


Abbas Amanat 

juridical sovereignty was the solution to the prolonged problem of 

unregulated leadership. He borrowed from the Sunni reformist milieu the 

notion of the Islamic government, long debated by the likes of Rashid Rida 

and later Abul ’Ala Maududi in order to set the legal ground for what he 

defined as the “authority of the jurist” (wilayat-i faqih). More a teacher of 

Greco-Islamic philosophy than a dabbler in jurisprudence, Khomeini was the 

right candidate to break through the inhibiting cobweb of juristic tedium. 

His theory had an unmistakable mystico-philosophical core that was colored 

by Shi’ite legal trappings. On a personal level it was the work of a reluctant 

jurist who was anxious to overcome his marja’ rivals through the 

philosophical backdoor of charismatic leadership. 

The concept of wilaya upon which Khomeini propounded his theory is a 

complex and theologically charged one. Variably read as wilaya (authority, 

guardianship) and walaya (patron-client bond of friendship), for Shi’ites it 

was the hereditary status primarily arrogated to ’Ali and his Imam 

descendants as true successors to the Prophet; a status of sovereignty over his 

true believers. In Sufism wilaya implied friendship with God, a saintly status 

of proximity to Truth, even according to some on par with prophecy. For 

the Shi’ite jurists wilaya was a purely legal term denoting the state of 

guardianship often assumed by the jurist over the legal minor (saghir) and 

mentally retarded (mahjur), hence wilaya al-faqih. Although in theory the 

guardianship of the jurist could be extended to the public sphere, in reality 

no jurist of any substance did consider as viable the jurist’s “authority to rule” 

(wilaya al-hukm). In the absence of the Occulted Imam, who is the just and 

legitimate enforcer of the wilaya, few jurists even condoned the “authority to 

judge” (wilaya al-qada) beyond mere issuance of fatwas, but without the 

necessary power to enforce them. The notion of “general deputyship” (niyaba 

’amma) on behalf of the Imam, as claimed by some jurists in the Safavid and 

early Qajar periods, was never extended to the authority to govern, though it 

did reserve for the jurist a certain prerogatives, such as declaring jihad under 

the auspices of the state. 

In the latter part of the 20th century however the prevalence of the idea of 

marja’iya seldom allowed the doctrine of collective deputyship of the 

mujtahids to be considered. The semantic shift in referring to the jurists also 

indicate a change in focus. Khomeini’s use of faqih (jurist), rather than 

mujtahid or marja’, in his own articulation of “guardianship” underlined 

sheer proficiency in fiqh rather than any acquired clerical status based on 


Abbas Amanat 

vague qualifications. His wilaya, in theory at least, could be extended to any 

jurist and not the one that is publicly recognized as the most important 

marja’ or even a mujtahid. Such definition no doubt served Khomeini well 

while languishing in the exile of Najaf away from his constituency. 

As defined by Khomeini, the doctrine of the “guardianship of the jurist” was 

applicable to public law as well as civil law. In the absence of the Hidden 

Imam, he argued, the jurist presents the least oppressive form of authority 

because contrary to temporal rule it is founded on Islamic principles. The 

jurist is the most qualified in matters of law, which according to Khomeini is 

inherently superior to any secular body of law, and he is obliged by the same 

Islamic legal principals to uphold and enforce it. It is therefore incumbent 

upon the jurist, as an “individual duty” to strive for acquiring political 

authority in order to form the Islamic government. Khomeini’s doctrine was 

a revolutionary interpretation of the authority of the jurist even though he 

tried hard in his wilayat-i faqih (later Hukumat-i Islami) to fortify his theory 

with precedent from classical legal texts and citations from such Usulis jurists 

as the 19th century Mulla Ahmad Naraqi. No Shi’ite jurist before him ever 

extended the very limited application of legal wilaya to include public affairs, 

let alone, assuming of political power. 

Legal articulations aside, Khomeini’s doctrine was driven by the requirements 

of his constituency. Not only a young generation of his students and 

followers defied the legitimacy of the Pahlavi shah, and whatever he stood 

for, but they aspired coherence and unanimity within clerical ranks. The 

wilayat-i faqih promised not only the ascendancy of the jurists to positions of 

political power but a virtual end to clerical resistance to institutionalization. 

The rise of the wilayat-i faqih as an institution harbinger the eclipse of the 

marja’iya and all the ambiguity that was inherent in qualities of the mujtahid. 

Assuming political power by Khomeini and his ’ulama backers, which came 

with the revolution of 1979, inevitably imposed a bureaucratic regime on the 

Shi’ite ’ulama more rigid than the chaotic madrasa system of Najaf and Qum 

ever did. Even the honorary clerical titles, inflated over time, gained new 

hierarchical connotation. While ayatollah (a sign of God) applied to the 

higher clerical figures, the hujjat al-Islam (a proof of Islam) signified the rank 

below. The highest status however was Khomeini’s own. As the “guardian 

jurist” (wali-yi faqih) he assumed the title of imam, first time ever used in the 

history of Shi’ism in a context other than the twelve Imams. Although the 

office of guardian jurist was considered the one and the same as the “deputy 


Abbas Amanat 

of the imam” (na’ib-i imam), more in vogue in the 19th century, in practice a 

consensus was reached on the universal and sole reference of the term imam 

to the founder of the Islamic Republic, hence “Imam Khomeini.” 

The constitutional authority and popular aura that Khomeini acquired as the 

guardian jurist, denoted not only a desire for rationalization of the clerical 

community but also a drive toward clerical absolutism. The legitimacy and 

the mandate of the guardian jurist does not derive from his constituency of 

followers, as in the case of the marja’, but from a sublime source. Despite the 

seemingly democratic trappings of the constitution of the Islamic Republic, 

the guardian jurist is answerable to no source but God, even though he is 

appointed by a Council of the Experts (Majlis-i Khubragan), a select body of 

high-ranking ’ulama (and presumably impeachable by the same body). The 

range of the guardian’s institutional authority is vast and universally abiding 

even though the Islamic Consultative Council (Majlis-i Shawra-yi Islami; i.e., 

the parliament) tends to modify his ultimate power. Similarly, articles of the 

Constitution guaranteeing the inalienable rights and freedoms of the 

individual contradict with the authoritarian power of the guardian jurist. 

Khomeini’s charismatic aura in early years of the revolution glossed over the 

obvious contradiction in the constitution between democratic freedoms and 

the totalitarian power of the guardian jurist. In post-Khomeini era, and 

twenty-three years after the revolution, the contrast is glaring. The “supreme 

leader” (rahbar) as Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah ’Ali Khamanei is 

recognized in today’s Islamic Republic, insists on these constitutional 

prerogatives to control, and if necessary quell, the legislative, the executive 

and the judicial branches of the government and remain unaccountable to 

any elected body. 

The authoritarian nature of wilayat-i faqih is indebted to the persistent 

culture of autocracy which the revolution denounced in theory but 

perpetuated in practice. But it also was reflective of the Shi’ite judicial 

community’s failure to rethink the precepts of the Shi’ite law and their 

applicability to pluralist values. The doctrine of the “guardianship of the 

jurist” was informed above all by a Shi’ite legal mindset that essentially was 

alien to the modern notions of plurality and democratic leadership even 

though, ironically, Shi’ite ijtihad and marja’iya operated on some form of 

popular representation. It was also colored, no doubt, by Khomeini’s own 

mystical propensity for classical Sufism and specifically Ibn ’Arabi’s theory of 

wilaya. Moreover, what historically informed “guardianship,” as apparent in 

the rhetoric of the Islamic revolution, was an imagined narrative of Islam’s 


Abbas Amanat 

golden age. The modern Shi’ite narrative of ’Ali’s pristine (though historically 

doomed) caliphate placed great moral emphasis on leadership qualities of 

compassion (walaya) and self-denial (ithar) essential for creating a “classless” 

society. Added to the admixture that concocted the “guardianship of the 

jurist” also was the modern revolutionary urgency for assertive leadership 

harking back to the French age of “terror” and the Russian “dictatorship of 

the proletariat.” Such presuppositions were barely conducive to a progressive 

legal framework that separates legal authority from political power and 

religion from the state. What profoundly was missing in this politico-legal 

vision of absolute leadership was a desire for re-examining the long-held 

precepts of Islamic law in a new light of historical relativity. 

As for the clerical community, in the two decades since the Islamic revolution 

it has allowed itself to be largely incorporated into the Islamic regime and 

actively sought to monopolize positions of power. A minority of the jurists 

remained critical of the theory and the implementation of leadership and 

faced the dire consequences of their criticisms. The rising opposition to 

wilayat-i faqih on the other hand unified the pro-regime clerics behind the 

doctrine and solidified the clerical hierarchy to an unprecedented degree. The 

Shi’ite establishment more than ever appears to be an equivalent of a statesponsored 

church with its ecclesiastical hierarchy, perhaps, as Said Arjomand 

observed, comparable to the Weberian “cesaro-papist” model of the state. 

The concentration of power in the hand of an oligarchy consisting of the 

guardian jurist and his top echelons of clerical allies, inevitably triggered 

much resentment. The laymen and laywomen of younger generation with 

revolutionary credentials now feel they have been left out by a clerical 

establishment that resorts to repression to preserve its privileges and 

monopolies. 

The anti-clerical content of Aghajari’s speech and his call for an Islamic 

Reformation originates in this pool of anti-clerical resentment. Younger 

Iranians are frustrated with the monopoly of power, heavy-handed treatment 

of dissident voices, and obscurantist legal outlook. They also are disillusioned 

with repeated setbacks of the seemingly pro-reform wing of the clerical 

establishment as represented by President Muhammad Khatami and his 

moderate clerical supporters. Such calls for reforming Islam are by no means 

rare in the history of antinomean Islam. Yet what distinguishes this postrevolutionary 

episode from earlier examples is that this movement of protest, 

especially since Khomeini’s death in 1989, aimed at a consolidated clerical 

hierarchy with claim to infallible and comprehensive authority. The 


Abbas Amanat 

guardianship of jurist is a far more explicit a claim over religious hegemony in 

public sphere and on behalf of the Imams than the old marja’iya ever was. 

This is what makes the new criticism especially potent and enduring. 

As for Aghajari’s fate, he seems to have been the involuntary beneficiary of 

the inconsistencies that are typical of Shiìte legal practice. The same ruling 

of the Hamadan court that sentenced him to death for blasphemy also 

sentenced him to a total of eight years of imprisonment for three other 

related counts and after that to ten years of ban from teaching in any 

university. The court does not clarify whether the death sentence should be 

carried before or after eighteen years of incarceration and banishment from 

classroom. The seemingly ludicrous verdict of the court points to the 

ambiguities of a legal culture built on negotiation and compromise, a culture 

that still seems to be thriving more that two decades of Islamic 

revolutionizing. 

Notes 

1 Aqajari: Matn-i kamel-i sokhanrani-yi Hamadan, etc. (Tehran, 1382/2003), 

p. 36. 


P 


A Mills Revival? 

by 


Prologue 

erhaps you know Foucault’s remark that despite the torrent of criticism 

directed against his philosophical system, “Hegel prowls through the 

twentieth century.” Consigned to a kind of academic purgatory for the last 

three decades of the twentieth century, at a time when social theory had 

migrated from the social sciences obsessed with case studies and social 

“problems” to literature and philosophy where he was rarely discussed and 

almost never cited., C. Wright Mills was an absent presence. All sociologists, 

and most people in other social scientific disciplines knew his name, and in 

their political unconscious, recognized his salience, but were deterred by fear 

and careerism from following his path as a public political intellectual. Yet in 

the wake of scandals involving leading corporations and their Chief Executive 

and Financial Officers, which have become daily fare even in mainstream 

media, and the hegemony of corporate capital over the American state, which 

was widely reported in the press and television with unembarrassed 

approbation, Mills’s work is experiencing a small but pronounced revival. 

Although his name rarely appears on the reading lists of fashionable graduate 

courses in social and cultural theory, the republication of four of his major 

books, with new introductions by the historian Nelson Lichtenstein (New 

Men of Power), the social critic Russell Jacoby (White Collar) political theorist 

Alan Wolfe (The Power Elite), and sociologist Todd Gitlin (The Sociological 

Imagination) is likely to aid in exposing his work to students and younger 

faculty. 

For some, Mills does not qualify in this era when social and cultural theory is 

dominated by European influences. Except for his dissertation Sociology and 

Pragmatism, he rarely engaged in philosophical speculation; more to the point 

apart from some essays, in only one major instance, Character and Social 

Structure, did he address the “meta” questions such as method or the 



underlying presuppositions of theorizing. Marxists criticize the lack, even 

disdain of “class analysis” in his work; indeed the commentaries in his 

collection of annotated readings, The Marxists constitute both an appreciation 

and an unsystematic critique of Marx and Marxism. And social historians, 

most of them informed by class and class struggle, object to his focus on the 

study of élites rather than popular expressions from below, even within social 

movements. 

Yet Mills remains a model for those who wish to become intellectuals: by the 

evidence of his massive output in the twenty-three years of publications he was 

the antithesis of the specialist or the expert. When most in the human sciences 

followed the path of least resistance by writing the same articles and books 

over and over, Mills ranged widely over historical cultural, political, social, and 

psychological domains. He was interested in the labor and radical movements 

and wrote extensively on them; as a close student of Max Weber he made 

some of the most trenchant critiques of bureaucracy; he was among the leading 

post-war critics of the emergent mass culture and the mass communications 

media and, despite its ostensibly introductory tone, The Sociological 

Imagination may be America’s best contribution to the ongoing debate about 

the relationship of scholarship to social commitment, a debate which has 

animated literary as well as social science circles for decades. 

His literary executor and biographer, Irving Louis Horowitz, turned against 

him, for the most part, so the biography tells us more about the author than 

about Mills. Other book-length treatments are sympathetic but limited, and 

to a large extent, dated. With the partial exception of some excellent 

dissertations and master’s theses, notably Tom Hayden’s insightful Radical 

Nomad more than forty years after his death, Mills awaits a major critical 

study, let alone a full-length biography. 

We may speculate that among putative readers his contemporanity, the sharp 

focus on the United States and its traditions and, most of all, his annoying 

habit of writing plainly (substituting vernacular expressions for scientific terms) 

turned away some who can only respect writers who invent neologisms and 

whose simple thoughts require complex syntax. But at a moment when these 

fashions have lost some of their luster, those who yearn for substance as well as 

style may return with pleasure to the dark ruminations of C. Wright Mills. 



Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003 

I 

C. Wright Mills is exemplary of a vanishing breed in American life: the public 

political intellectual who, despite his grating message, often received a hearing 

in mainstream media. For almost fifteen years, beginning with the publication 

of The New Men of Power in 1948 and ending with his untimely death, at age 

forty six, in 1962, Mills was among America’s best known social scientists and 

social critics. During the late 1940s and 1950s he published three books that 

constitute a theory and description of the post-World War II American social 

structure. His Sociological Imagination remains widely read in college 

classrooms, both for its attempt to provide a socially-committed introduction 

to the discipline, and its fierce critique of the prevailing tendencies in American 

sociology, what Mills calls “Grand Theory” and “Abstracted Empiricism.” The 

grand theorist’s scope is much too wide to yield practical and theoretical 

insight. And Mills criticizes the legions of Abstracted Empiricists who, in the 

service of incrementally accumulated verifiable scientific knowledge, confine 

themselves to producing small-scale investigations. Together with his 

collaborator and mentor, Hans Gerth, he edited one of the earliest and best 

collections in English translation of Max Weber’s essays. And Character and 

Social Structure (1954), written with Gerth, an unjustly neglected work, may 

be considered Mills’s premier work of social theory. This book elaborates what 

I claim was the “scaffolding” upon which he hung his major works of middle 

range theory, especially the triology. In fact, it is difficult to fully comprehend 

the harsh critiques of Sociological Imagination, and Mills’s method, without the 

elaborated theoretical framework of Character. 

While not exactly a household name, he was widely known among the 

politically active population and wide circles of academic and independent 

intellectuals. Unlike many public intellectuals he was neither a servant nor a 

supplicant of power but, in the sense of the 17th century English radical, was a 

“ranter”; in American terms, he was a Paul Revere whose job it was to sound 

the alarm. Indeed, some of his writings recall the pamphlets of the decades of 

the American revolution where the address of numerous and often anonymous 

writers was to the “publick” of small farmers and artisans, as much as to those 

holding political and economic power. Much of his later writing may be


compared to turn of the 20th century populist and socialist pamphleteers 

whose aim was to simultaneously educate and arouse workers and farmers to 

the evils of corporate power. 

Yet in his most fertile period of intellectual work, the decade and a half ending 

with the publication of The Sociological Imagination (1959), with the possible 

exception of The Power Elite, Mills hardly expected to reach a popular, let 

alone mass public. Nevertheless, he always attempted to reach out to a wider 

public than did his fellow academics, even when he was formulating new 

theories, let alone engaging in public criticism. But Mills’s intention is entirely 

subversive of contemporary mainstream social science, especially the notion 

that intellectuals should remain neutral observers of economic, political and 

social life. While he performed his fair share of funded research—notably his 

study of Puerto Rico and the collective portraits of characteristic social types— 

most of his writing is addressed to potential and actual political publics. 

Following Marx and Weber, who at the end of his life was a major contributor 

in shaping the moral and legal framework of the Weimar Republic, Mills held 

that intellectuals and their ideas were embedded in the social antagonisms and 

struggles of their own time; they bring to their analysis a definite standpoint, 

whether or not they are prepared to acknowledge it. 

Yet Mills adhered to none of the mainstream parties nor to those on the 

fringes of mainstream politics. While he was a figure of his own time (his main 

work was done in the 1940s and 1950s, when issues of sex, gender and ecology 

were barely blips on the screen), his position was congenitally critical—of the 

right, conservatives, liberals, the relatively tiny parties of the left and especially 

members of his own shrinking group, the independent leftists. Like one of his 

heroes, the economist and social theorist Thorstein Veblen, himself a pariah in 

his chosen discipline, to paraphrase a famous aphorism of Marx, Mills was “in 

but not of” the academy insofar as he refuses the distinction between 

scholarship and partisanship. But, unlike Veblen, whose alienation from 

conventional economics was almost total, Mills was, for most of his 

professional career, a sociologist in his heart as much as his mind The rhetoric 

and the methods embodied in his books on American social structure—The 

New Men of Power, White Collar, and The Power Elite—are firmly rooted in 

the perspectives of mainstream American sociology at the end of the war. 

These perspectives owed as much to the methodological precepts of Emile 



Durkheim as they did to the critical theory of Karl Marx and Max Weber. 

Using many of the tools of conventional social inquiry: surveys, interviews, 

data analysis—charts included—Mills takes pains to stay close to the “data” 

until the concluding chapters. 

But what distinguishes Mills from mainstream sociology, and from Weber, 

with whom he shares a considerable portion of his intellectual outlook, is the 

standpoint of radical social change, not of fashionable sociological neutrality. 

At the height of the Cold War and in the midst of the so-called McCarthy era, 

he fearlessly named capitalism as the system of domination from within one of 

its intellectual bastions, Columbia University, and distanced himself from exradicals 

among his colleagues who were busy “choosing the west,” otherwise 

giving aid and comfort to the witch-hunters, or neutering themselves by hiding 

behind the ideology of value-free scholarship. Anti-Stalinist to the core, toward 

the end of his life he was, nevertheless, accused of pro-Communist sympathies 

for his unsparing criticism of the militarization of America and his spirited 

defense of the Cuban revolution. 

In the light of his later writings which, to say the least, held out little hope for 

radical social change in the United States The New Men of Power, Mills’s first 

major work, occupies a singular place in the Mills corpus. Written on the heels 

of the veritable general strike of industrial workers in 1946, and the 

conservative counterattack the following year embedded in the Taft-Hartley 

amendments to the Labor Relations Act, the study of America’s labor leaders 

argues that for the first time in history the labor movement, having shown its 

capacity to shape the political economy, possessed the practical requisites to 

become a major actor in American politics as well. But as both “as army 

general and a contractor of labor,” a “machine politician” and the head of a 

“social movement,” the labor leader occupies contradictory space. (Mills, 

1948) By 1948, the year of publication of the first edition of The New Men of 

Power, buoyed by American capitalism’s unparalleled global dominance, a 

powerful conservative force was arrayed against labor’s recently acquired power 

and, according to Mills, had no intention of yielding more ground without an 

all-out industrial and political war. Yet, he found union leaders curiously 

unprepared for the struggle. Even as their cause was being abandoned by liberal 

allies, and belittled and besmirched by their natural enemies among the 

corporations and their ideological mouthpieces, right-wing intellectuals and 



conservative politicians, union leaders remained faithful to the Democratic 

party and to the New Deal, which was rapidly fading into history. Mills and 

his collaborator, Helen Schneider, found that the concept that working people 

needed a labor party to truly represent their political interests had declined 

from the perspective of most labor leaders whereas a decade earlier, the apex of 

industrial unionism, a majority favored the formation of such a party, despite 

their expedient support of the Democrats. 

You might say that Mills’s notion of power owes much to Machiavelli’s The 

Prince. Just as Machiavelli reminds the prince that the old rules of the feudal 

oligarchy no longer suffice to retain power but that a public has formed which 

intends to call the ruler to account for his actions, in his book on the labor 

leaders Mills is, at first, in dialogue with a leadership increasingly attracted to 

oligarchical rule, and to the liberal center and whose love affair with established 

power has lasted to this day. His study admonishes the labor leadership to 

attend to the post-war shift that endangers theirs and their members’ power. 

Arguing that the “main drift” is away from the collaboration between business 

and labor made necessary and viable by the war he suggests that labor leaders of 

“great stature” must come to the fore before labor is reduced. “Now there is no 

war,” but there is a powerful war machine and conservative reaction against 

labor’s power at the bargaining table. 

“Today, knit together as they are by trade associations, the corporations 

steadily translate economic strength into effective and united political power. 

The power of the federal state has increased enormously. The state is now so 

big in the economy, and the power of business is so great in the state, that 

unions can no longer seriously expect even the traditional short-run economic 

gains without considering the conditions under which their demands are 

politically realizable.” Top down rule, which implies keeping the membership 

at bay is, according to Mills, inadequate to the new situation where a militaryindustrial 

alliance was emerging, among whose aims was to weaken and 

otherwise destroy the labor movement. 

How to combat this drift? Mills forthrightly suggests that the labor leader 

become the basis for the formation of a “new power bloc.” Rather than make 

deals on the top with powerful interests, “he will have to accumulate power 

from the bottom. . . . If the democratic power of members is to be used 



against the concentrated power of money, it must in some way create its own 

political force . . . the left would create an independent labor party” based on 

labor’s formidable economic strength. At the same time, Mills argues, it must 

enlarge its own base to include the “underdogs”—few of whom are in the 

unions. By underdogs Mills does not mean those at the very bottom. They 

are, in his view, too habituated to “submission.” He means the working poor, 

the unskilled who were largely left out of the great organizing wave of the 

1930s and the war years. And he calls for the organization of elements of the 

new middle class and the rapidly growing white collar strata whose potential 

power, he argues, will remain unrealized unless they are organized. 

One may read the New Men of Power with a number of pairs of eyes. At 

minimum it can be read as a stimulating account of the problems and 

prospects facing post-World War II American labor. It is descriptively 

comprehensive of the state of organized labor and the obstacles which it faced 

in this period. If Mills was mistaken to believe that unions would have to 

become an independent political force to meet the elementary economic 

demands of their memberships, it may be argued that this limitation applies 

only to the first three decades after the war. Unions did deliver, and in some 

cases handsomely, to a substantial minority of the American working class. 

They organized neither the “underdogs” nor the new middle class and white 

collar clerical, technical and professional workers who were all but ignored by 

the postwar labor movement, but forged a new social compact with large 

employers for their own members. For a third of the labor force in unions, 

and a much larger percentage of industrial workers, they succeeded in 

negotiating what may be called a “private” welfare state, huge advances in their 

members’ standard of living and a high degree of job security and individual 

protection against arbitrary discharge and other forms of discipline. 

Ironically, this book is far more accurate in its central prognostication of 

labor’s decline for the years since 1973. Labor has paid a steep price for its 

refusal to heed Mills’s admonition to forge its own power bloc. Buffeted by 

economic globalization, corporate mergers and the deindustrialization of vast 

areas of the northeast and midwest and by the growth of the largely non-union 

south as the industrial investment of choice, many unions have despaired of 

making new gains and are hanging on to their declining memberships for dear 

life. Labor is, perhaps irreversibly, on the defensive. In this period, union 



density—the proportion of union members to the work force—has been cut 

in half. Collective bargaining stills occurs regularly in unionized industries and 

occupations and employers still sign contracts. But the last two decades are 

marked by labor’s steady retreat from hard-won gains. In many instances, 

collective bargaining as yielded to collective begging. 

Corporations and their political allies have succeeded in rolling back one of the 

most important features of the New Deal-era reforms, the provision of a 

minimum income for the long-term unemployed (pejoratively coded as 

“welfare” by post-New Deal politicians). Many who still collect checks are 

forced to work in public and private agencies for minimum wages, in some 

states replacing union labor. Social Security is on the block and privatization of 

public goods, especially schools and health care facilities, seems to be the longterm 

program of conservatives and many in the liberal center. 

Mills recognizes, as few labor leaders do, the importance of reaching out to the 

various publics that frame the political landscape. During the era of the social 

compact, union leaders saw little value in taking labor’s case to the public 

either during strikes or important legislative campaigns. As junior partners of 

the power élite they were often advised to keep conflicts in the “family” and 

rely on lobbying, influence with leading politicians through electoral support, 

and other traditionally élite tactics to achieve their goals. Labor leaders would 

rarely divulge the issues in union negotiations and during the final stages of 

bargaining because they agreed to a press blackout. Only as an act of 

desperation, when an organizing drive or a strike was in its losing stage, did 

some unions make public statements. Following Mills’s advice, one might 

argue, especially for public employees unions and unions in major national 

corporations, the public is always the third party at the bargaining table and the 

struggle to win it over has generally be won by management. 

The ambiguity comes in when the subsequent writings are considered. 

Discouraged by the labor movement’s inability to reverse or halt the 

reactionary legislative and political offensive, by the early 1950s Mills had 

abandoned hope that the labor movement was capable of stemming the tide of 

almost complete corporate capitalist domination of economic, political and 

cultural life. Discussion of the labor movement’s social weight is largely absent 

from White Collar, published in 1951, only three years after The New Men of 



Power. The Power Elite, which appeared in 1956, more or less permanently 

consigns organized labor to a subordinate status within the pantheon of 

national power. In Mills’s view the moment had come and gone when unions 

could even conceive of making a qualitative difference in power arrangements. 

Whereas in 1948, Mills’s address was chiefly to the labor leaders themselves— 

it was both a careful sociological portrait of these new men of power and an 

attempted dialogue with them—the subsequent works do not have a specific 

labor public in mind. 

It was the theory of mass society, a concept that spans radical and conservative 

critiques of late capitalism, that informed Mills’s later pessimism. Mills was a 

leading figure in the sociology of “mass” culture and mass society which 

developed along several highly visible lines in the 1940s and 1950s. He 

observed the increasing homogenization of American culture and brilliantly 

linked some of its more egregious features to the decline of the democratic 

public. While his rhetoric was distinctly in the American vein, his views 

paralleled, and were crucially influenced by, those of Theodore Adorno, Max 

Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, the leading theorists of the Frankfurt 

school. While there is little evidence that he was similarly impressed by 

psychoanalysis, like them he linked cultural massification to mounting 

political conformity associated with the emergence of fascism and other 

authoritarian movements in nearly all advanced industrial societies. 

This pioneering study of the emergence of the middle class of salaried 

professional, technical and clerical employees situates the spread of mass culture 

after World War I to their growing significance in advanced industrial societies. 

Consistent with his emerging obsession with questions of political and social 

power and of the prospects for radical social transformation, White Collar may 

be read as an assessment not only of the occupational situation of the various 

strata of the middle class in the manner of traditional sociological analysis, but 

of the social psychology of what Mills terms the “new” middle class—the 

rapidly growing strata of salaried professional, technical and administrative 

employees—many of them working in large corporations. The book opens 

with an obituary of the “old” middle class—farmers, small merchants and 

manufacturers—perhaps the leading class of the 18th and first half of 19th 

century. The transformation of property from a welter of small independent 

producers and merchants to large concentrations of capital which marked the 



second half of the 19th century reduced the economic and political influence 

of the old middle class to the middle levels of power, mostly in local 

communities. The functions of administration, sales and distribution grew 

faster than manufacturing, but even in production industries the traditional 

blue collar industrial work force expanded more slowly than the bureaucracies 

of the various strata of white collar employees. 

By World War I, the oligopolistic corporations in basic industries such as steel 

and energy, and large light-manufacturing industries such as textiles and 

durable consumer goods, banking and insurance, and wholesaling and retail 

enterprises, were hiring huge armies of clerical employees and sales personnel, 

and smaller but important coteries of engineers, technicians and managers, the 

latter growing numerically with the decline of the family owned and operated 

firm. To be sure the small firm has survived, according to Mills, but small 

business of all types is increasingly unstable: 

Nationally, the small businessman is overpowered, politically 

and economically, by big business; he therefore tries to ride 

with and benefit from the success of big business on the 

national political front, even as he fights the economic effects 

of big business on the local and state front. (Mills 1951, 51) 

Small entrepreneurs go in and out of business, their chance of survival 

diminishing with the growth and scope of large scale enterprises: grocery 

chains, department stores and large manufacturing corporations all of which 

are able to benefit from economies of scale and ample supplies of capital with 

which to invest in technological innovation to drive prices down and their 

small business competitors out of the marketplace. 

Among the diverse strata of the new middle class the managers, according to 

Mills, occupy a unique place. The “managerial demiurge” signifies a new form 

of power, and not only at the workplace. Their numbers are growing rapidly 

and, to the degree they run corporate and government bureaucracies, “the 

managerial type of man becomes more important in the total social structure.” 

(Mills 1951, 77) While the top managers are given the task of controlling the 

underlying population, at every level of economic, political and cultural 

activity—middle managers, supervisors and line foreman, as well—the job of 



coordination and of control expands with the complexity of the occupational 

structure and the manifold problems associated with advanced capitalism. 

Mills accepts the idea, first advanced by Berle and Means in the classic Modern 

Corporation and Private Property, that advanced capitalist societies are marked 

by the separation of ownership and control in the everyday functions of the 

large corporate enterprise, the owner has gradually handed more power to the 

manager. In turn, government and private corporations are run as rationalized 

bureaucracies rather than in the image of the individual corporate tycoon of the 

late 19th century who ran his business like an old fashioned sovereign. 

Although little more than elevated wage workers and, for this reason, deprived 

by their subordination to management, of the work autonomy enjoyed by the 

“old” middle class, the salaried professional and technical strata remain 

culturally tied to capital. Mills saw little hope for their unionization as long as 

mass culture—their indigenous culture—was the “the main drift” of mass 

society. On the one hand, reared in images of American exceptionalism, they 

were the embodiments of the cultural aspiration for individual social mobility; 

on the other, their growth was accompanied by the proletarianization of 

professional and technical strata, proletarian because they neither owned their 

own productive property nor controlled their labor. Some may earn higher 

salaries than industrial workers but, in contrast to unionized workers who have 

the protection of a collective bargaining agreement limiting management’s 

rights, they were subordinated to arbitrary managerial authority in the 

performance of their tasks. Yet, their eyes were fixed on the stars. Lacking a 

secure class identity which is intrinsic to those engaged in the production and 

appropriation of things, as producers of “symbols” they were likely to remain 

an atomized mass, an oxymoron which signified what Erik Olin Wright later 

described as the “contradictory class location” into which they were thrust. As 

for the clerical and administrative employees they were cogs in the vast 

machinery of the “enormous file”; they were keepers of information and of the 

proliferating records accumulated by the growing significance of sales. (Mills 

1951 189-214) 

In the absence of social movements capable of making a genuine difference in 

power relations, these studies are directed to the general, largely “liberal center” 

for whom Mills never ceased to have mixed feelings. The liberals were a 

necessary ingredient of any possible grand coalition for social change, but this 



center was marked by “looseness of its ideas,” an attribute which led it to 

“dissipate their political attention and activity.” Yet, in the wake of the failure 

of the labor leaders to face the challenge posed by the rightward drift of 

American politics, the hardening of corporate resistance to labor’s economic 

demands, the freezing of the political environment by the cold war and the 

virtual disappearance of the left, especially the independent left, until the late 

1950s Mills’s public address shifted decisively to the center, even as his 

political position remained firmly on the independent, non-communist left. 

The central category which suffuses Mills’ social thought and to which he 

returned again and again was that of power, especially the mechanisms by 

which it is achieved and retained by élites in the economy and social 

institutions. This is the signal contribution of the Italian social theorists 

Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto to Mills’s conceptual arsenal. In Pareto’s 

conception, élites, not classes, constitute the nexus of social rule. To derive his 

conception of power, Mills focuses neither on the labor process, the starting 

point for Marxists, nor on the market, the economic focus for Weberians. In 

contrast, Mills is a state theorist: élites are, for Mills, always institutionally 

constituted. He recognized the relative autonomy of corporations but 

consistent with the regulation era of advanced capitalism, he argued that the 

state had become the fundamental location of the exercise of economic, as 

much as political power. So, for example, in The Power Elite, his most famous 

and influential work, three “institutional orders” which are closely linked but 

spatially and historically independent—the corporate, the political and the 

military—constitute together what others might, in Marxist vocabulary, 

describe as a ruling class. Except it isn’t a “class” either in the sense of those 

who share a common relationship to the ownership and control of productive 

property or, as in Max Weber’s conception, groups that share a common 

interest in gaining access to market opportunities for employment and to 

acquire goods. The power élite is an alliance of the individuals who compose 

top layers of each of the crucial institutional orders and whose relative strength 

varies according to historical circumstances. 

In the immediate post-World War II period, Mills detects the autonomous 

power of the military as, increasingly, the driving force in the alliance, just as 

the political élite occupied that position during the 1930s slump, when the 

provision of social welfare attained an urgency, lest by neglecting the needs of 



the underlying population, the system might be endangered. The military, as a 

relatively autonomous power center, gained sustenance from the rearmament 

program leading to World War II but since there was no peace after 1945, it 

retained its central position in the power structure. Almost immediately the 

United States and the Soviet Union, the two remaining superpowers, were 

engaged in a new “cold” war in which nuclear and conventional weapons 

played an enormous economic as well as political role in world and domestic 

politics. And the cold aspects of the war were punctuated by discontinuous, 

but frequent, “hot” wars such as those in Korea, Southeast Asia, China, and 

Israel. Under these circumstances, the military, allying itself with those large 

corporations engaged in defense production, accumulated substantial 

independent power. Needless to say, the corporations, the holders of what he 

calls “big money,” are by no means ignored. After all, they remain the 

backbone of the entire system. 

But in his analysis of the commanding heights, Mills is not content to describe 

the three institutional orders that comprise the power élite. He shows that the 

scope of its power embraces wide sections upon which the legitimacy of 

American society depends. Chief among them are the celebrities who, as the 

premier ornaments of mass society, are routinely recruited to lend prestige to 

the high officials of the three principal institutions of power. Political parties 

and their candidates eagerly showcase celebrities who support them; corporate 

executives regularly mingle with celebrities in Hollywood and New York at 

exclusive clubs and parties; and “warlords”—high military officers, corporate 

officials, their scientists and technologists engaged in perfecting more lethal 

weapons of mass destruction, the politicians responsible for executive and 

congressional approval of military budgets—congregate in many of the same 

social and cultural spaces as well as in the business suites of warfare. In short, 

following the muckraking tradition, but also international sociological 

discourse on power, The Power Elite uses the evidentiary method first 

perfected by the independent scholars such as Ferdinand Lundberg of tracing 

interlocking networks of social and cultural association as much as business 

relationship to establish the boundaries and contour of power. Moreover, in 

this work we can see the movement of individuals among the leading 

institutional orders that constitute the nexus of power, so that their difference 

tends to blur. 



Naming the power élite as the only “independent variable” in American 

society, Mills was obliged to revise his earlier estimation of the labor 

movement. Barely eight years after designating the labor leaders “new men of 

power” who had to choose whether to lead the entire society in the name of 

working people and other subordinate groups he designated them a 

“dependent variable” in the political economy. Accordingly, he lost hope that, 

in any possible practical eventuality, working people and their unions would 

enter the historical stage as autonomous actors, at least until a powerful new 

left of intellectuals and other oppressed groups emerged to push them. 

Mills’s identification of power with the triumvirate of corporation, military 

and national state, was offered in the same period that political theorists and 

sociologists were proclaiming the concept of pluralism as a more accurate 

description. Robert Dahl’s Who Governs, a study of the city of New Haven’s 

power structure, construed power in the metaphor of a parallelogram of forces, 

none of which dominated political decision-making. Business, labor, consumer 

groups such as parent associations, taxpayers and other organized groups 

constituted power relationships through the mechanisms of compromise and 

consensus. Although not denying that big business and the political directorate 

exhibited oligarchic tendencies, Dahl vehemently refuted the concepts 

associated with both Marxism and élite theory that there were clearly 

articulated ruling groups that were the only genuine independent force. Dahl’s 

study became not only a model for the understanding of local power, but of 

national power as well. As persuasive as Mills’s argument may have been for 

progressives and other political skeptics, his views were subject to the severe 

criticism of many of his fellow academics as well as reviewers. For some he had 

failed to appreciate the resilience of American democracy, was importing ideas 

inherited from the non-applicable European context to American 

circumstances and, in any case, had offered yet another exercise in debunking. 

II 

HE DID HIS GRADUATE WORK AT Wisconsin under the mentorship of, among 

others, Hans Gerth, whose powerful mind was never matched by a body of 

equally compelling written work. In some respects, Mills gave an English 

language voice to Gerth’s ideas (although the collaboration has lately been 



subject to critical scrutiny by some scholars who contend that Mills took 

advantage of Gerth). These ideas—a complex synthesis of Marx, Max Weber, 

Gaetano Mosca and Vilfedo Pareto—introduced a wide range of concepts into 

the study of modern institutional life. Crucial to Gerth and Mills’s 

understanding of how modern institutions work was Weber’s theory of 

bureaucracy, read through the pejorative connotation of its system of rules and 

occupational hierarchies as inimical to democratic decision-making. Rather 

than viewing bureaucracies as necessary institutions to make complex industrial 

societies work more efficiently as Weber argued, Gerth also provided Mills 

with the idea that bureaucratic control of institutions entailed domination, 

which Robert Michels extended to socialist organizations in his classic, Political 

Parties. For Michels the mechanism of domination was the leadership’s 

monopoly over the means of communication. Mills sees the development of 

the state, no less than the labor movement as a series of highly institutionalized 

bureaucracies which, in contrast to his preferred model of unions—voluntary, 

democratically run and rank and file controlled organizations—were rapidly 

mutating into oligarchies of power. 

Mills’s dissertation, Sociology and Pragmatism, completed in 1943, was an 

explicit attempt to draw the implications of European sociological theory for 

the United States. He himself exemplified that connection. For pragmatism 

there is no question of intrinsic “truth” if by that term we designate the 

possibility that truth may be independent of the context within which a 

proposition about the social world is uttered. The truth of a proposition is 

closely tied to the practical consequences that might, under specific conditions, 

issue from it. And practical consequences may be evaluated only from the 

perspective of social interest. But, unlike John Dewey’s concept, there is no 

“win-win” thinking here. In the end, Mills adhered to the notion that whether 

a particular power arrangement was desirable depended on whose ox was being 

gored. 

Mills drew heavily upon Karl Mannheim’s concept of ideology, but also 

adopted his lifelong preoccupation with the intellectuals whom Mannheim 

designated as the only social formation capable of independent thought and 

action.. Mannheim’s major work Ideology and Utopia is a critique of the 

Marxist designation of the proletariat as a universal class and, particularly of 

Georg Lukács’s argument that having adopted the standpoint of the proletariat 



which, in relation to knowledge, has no interest in reproducing the 

mystifications which buttress bourgeois rule. According to Lukács, Marxism 

can penetrate the veil of reified social relations to reveal the laws of motion of 

capitalism and, therefore, produce a truthful account of how society works. 

Mills was much too skeptical to buy into this formulation; Mannheim’s 

relativism—that “standpoint” thinking inevitably led to partial knowledge— 

was more attractive and corresponded to his own pragmatic vision. 

Accordingly, knowledge is always infused with interest, even if it occurs behind 

the backs of actors. But Mills leans toward ideology as an expression of 

intentionality and this characterization is particularly applied to the labor 

leaders who are the subjects of The New Men of Power, and the business élite 

described in an essay republished in the collected essays, Power Politics and 

People and later incorporated in The Power Elite. Lacking an explicit ideology 

does not mean that labor or corporate leader can dispense with the tools of 

persuasion. But according to Mills, these are the tools of a “practical politician” 

rather than that of an ideologue. Thus, Mills’s employment of the word 

“rhetoric” to describe how leaders persuade and otherwise justify their 

constituencies of policies and programs that may or may not be in their 

interest. 

Mills was also a close reader of the political and social thought of John Dewey, 

perhaps America’s preeminent philosopher of the first half of the 20th century 

and one of the leading figures in the development of pragmatism. From 

Dewey and from his interlocutor, Walter Lippmann, whose debate with 

Dewey on whether there was a chance for a genuine democratic society and 

governance in an America increasingly dominated by experts, was among the 

most important intellectual events of the 1920s. Mills derived the concept of 

the “public” or, in his usage, “publics” from this controversy. By the time 

Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1921) appeared, many intellectuals expressed 

doubts that the ideal of the public as the foundation of a democratic polity, 

which made decisions as well as conferring consent, was at all possible in the 

wake of the emergence of mass society with its mass publics and massified 

culture. 

Lippmann argued, persuasively to many, that a public of independent-minded 

individuals was, by the end of World War I, decisively foreclosed by the 

complexity of international relations, by advanced technology, the reduction of 



genuine knowledge from which to adduce opinion to slogans by the mass 

media, and the growing role of the state. For a society of citizens, in the sense 

of the Greek city-state, who are capable of making the vital decisions affecting 

the polity, he held out no hope. Given the conditions for its formation, the 

public was shortsighted, prejudiced and, most of all, chronically ill-informed. 

While defending the claim that the élite of experts, which came into its own 

with the consolidation of the modern state and the modern corporation, was 

as desirable as it was inevitable in complex societies, Lippmann retained a trace 

of his former socialist skepticism. He wanted a democratic public to force 

experts and political leaders to obtain consent on a regular basis and, through 

the ballot, to pass judgement on their quasi-sovereign actions. Thus, 

democracy was conceived purely negatively, as the barrier against authoritarian, 

technocratic rule. 

Deeply affected by this powerful argument against participatory democracy, 

John Dewey was moved to respond. The Public and its Problems (1925) is, for 

all intents and purposes, the most penetrating case for an active polity and for 

radical democracy any American has ever written. With Dewey, Mills held that 

the promiscuous use of the term “democracy” to describe the de facto 

plebiscite of electoral politics, and other mechanisms by which consent is 

achieved by representative political institutions, is unwarranted. The 

institutions of the liberal state still need the consent of the governed. But the 

legislative and executive branches are increasingly beholden to the holders of 

institutional power, not their electors, except insofar as the public refuses to 

confer consent to policies which they perceive to be contrary to their interests 

and, as in the case of social security “reform,” succeeds in staying the hand of 

legislators beholden to corporate power, at least for a time. Having entered 

into an alliance with the military and corporate orders, the political directorate 

becomes a self-contained body, undemocratic in both the process of its 

selection and its maintenance. 

Dewey’s concept of democracy recalls the New England town meeting in 

which the “public” was not a consumer of the work of active and influential 

people, but a participant, a decision-maker, in the community’s political and 

social life. In this respect, it is important to recall Mills’s “Letter to the New 

Left” (1960). The letter outlined the principles of participatory democracy on 

the basis of Dewey’s concept of the public, and was, perhaps, the single most 



influential document in the early history of Students for a Democratic Society, 

one of the key organizations in the development of the social movements of 

the 1960s. SDS’s program, enunciated in its manifesto, The Port Huron 

Statement was constructed around the concept/demand for “participatory” 

democracy in which “ordinary people” could control the “decisions that 

affected their lives.” It presupposed the same distrust of the state and its 

branches that Mills evinced years earlier. But unlike the immediate post-World 

War II years when, notwithstanding its de facto expiration, the New Deal still 

inspired broad support for what Herbert Croly termed The Promise of 

American Life (which Mills names as the most important work of liberal 

statism), two decades of militaristic statism and the appearance of a new 

generation of political activism made Mills’s radical democratic appeal more 

audible. 

III 

Mills was also a great taxonomist. With his mentor, Hans Gerth, he published 

in 1953 a major social psychology, Character and Social Structure, which 

situates the self firmly in the social and historical context which shapes and is 

shaped by it. This work is, perhaps, the premier instance of Mills’s efforts to 

combine theoretical social science with the distinctly American psychology of 

William James and George Herbert Mead, but in these days when the little 

boxes of the mind seem to pervade social thought, this book languishes in the 

archives of largely unread masterworks. Gerth and Mills’s bold juxtapositions 

are simply too adventuresome for a social science academy for which 

conventional wisdom seems to be the farthest horizon of possibility.. And his 

numerous essays covered the broad expanse of issues in American politics and 

culture, a range which has caused more than one detractor to complain that he 

is “all over the place.” In this respect, Mills is a true scion of the great thinkers 

who founded the social sciences. Their task was to provide a philosophical 

scaffolding to the disciplines, a project which Mills understood did not end 

with the canonical works. As a pragmatist, he was acutely aware that theory 

requires constant renewal and revisions and that, contrary to much current 

thinking, the problem is not one of “applications” of received wisdom but to 

interrogate the wisdom in the light of contemporary developments. So, even as 



Mills borrows concepts such as “élite” from eminent forebears, he refuses the 

hierarchical thinking that informed the writings of theorists such as Mosca and 

Pareto. For example, he invests new significance to it in the process of 

investigating historically-situated élites. As a result, the labor union élite and 

the power (ruling) élite display different characteristics, although in The New 

Men of Power we can see the first pass at the development of a new theory 

His main theoretical project, explicated most fully in Character and Social 

Structure, was to situate the biographies of leading economic and political 

actors—labor leaders, the main figures in business, military and political 

institutions—within the social structure and the spatio-temporal context 

which set the limits and provided the opportunities for their activity. This 

methodological imperative is designed to account for individual variation of 

broad types, but also demonstrate the degree to which the social structure— 

explicitly named in terms of key institutional orders sets, at a specific time and 

specific place, the limits as well as the opportunities for individual and group 

action. Thus, our biographies mediate, and are mediated by, the institutional 

frameworks which condition decision-making. While, except in White Collar 

Mills is interested mainly in describing and explaining the structure of power, 

rather than of the worlds of the relatively powerless, this work is always 

undertaken in the interest of reconstructing a democratic public. 

we shall use this term psychic structure (emphasis in the 

original) to refer to man conceived as an integration of 

perception, emotion, and impulse. Of course there are other 

psychic functions, memory and imagination for example, but 

we shall limit our terms at this point. For our purpose, 

“psychic structure” will refer to when, how and why man feels, 

perceives and wills. 

At the core of Gerth and Mills’s theory are the concepts of “institution” and 

“self.” The notion of institutional order connotes the complex of institutions 

which, taken together, constitute what we loosely designate as the structure of 

power in “society,” chiefly the political, economic and military orders. Thus 

conceived the character structure of individuals formed by physical, and social 

conditions, particularly those of childhood biography, including family and 

schooling prepares them for playing certain “roles” within the institutional 



orders to which they gravitate or are assigned by virtue of their education and 

training, situations which themselves are the outcome of certain interactions 

and relationships. The formation of the self in childhood is crucial for 

structuring the life chances of individuals, conditioning, if not completely 

determining the ways they structure knowledge, their emotional and volitional 

proclivities. But these processes are only relatively unique in individuals; 

conditions of social location, class, race and ethnicity, and education—play a 

decisive part in shaping the choices available to whole groups of people. The 

basic unit of analysis then, is not the individual but collective selves. 

Thus his writings are suffused with “ideal types”—Weber’s methodological 

prescription to fashion composite profiles against which to measure any 

particular instance of the type—arranged horizontally as well as vertically. The 

models assembled in The New Men of Power—of labor leaders, or in The 

Power Elite, where he provides a collective portrait of business leaders, and in 

his essays published in the collection Power Politics and People which contains 

several composites of the various publics which he addresses and to which he is 

obliged to respond—give a glimpse of Mills’s lifelong approach to social 

knowledge: first, produce a composite profile of the subject. Then, provide 

detailed historically-informed descriptions of the context within which the 

subject(s) operate, and evaluate the relative salience of each element of this 

context to how the subject is shaped. Then, return to the subject by unpacking 

the composite to break down the different social and character types. Finally, 

re-place them in the larger political, economic and cultural situations. To what 

end? To find out what are the alternatives to the main drift of politics and 

ideologies. Needless to say, although a student of élites, Mills asks whether the 

democratic movement from below, of the rank and file union members, 

fractured publics of consumers and intellectuals, may succeed in overcoming 

the pervasive tendency toward oligarchic domination of government and civil 

life. 

For most of his academic career Mills taught sociology at Columbia 

University. He produced social knowledge but was also an intellectual agitator. 

He was deeply interested in advancing the science of sociology as a means of 

giving us a wider understanding of how society worked. But, from the late 

1940s when, at age thirty two, Mills and Helen Schneider produced their 

landmark study of the American labor union leaders, he remained a close 



student of social movements; his writings span analyses of the labor 

movement, the student left, the peace movement and others. He swam, 

intellectually, against the current, yet unlike many independent leftists who 

saw only defeat in the post-war drift toward militaristic-corporate political 

economy and despaired of relevant political practice, he was, above all, a 

practical thinker whose interest was always to describe the “main” chance as a 

dead end and to counterpose the chances for leftward social change. 

Consequently, even when he is the most descriptive of, say, labor leaders, and 

portrays the new middle class in terms of subordination and as allies of the 

leading élites, his eyes never strayed far from the question of “ what is to be 

done?” What are the levers for changing the prevailing relations of power? 

How can those at or near the bottom emerge as historical subjects? 

Mills is aware that to reach beyond the audience of professional social scientists 

he is obliged to employ a rhetoric that, as much as possible, stays within 

natural, even colloquial language. Addressing the general reader as well as his 

diminishing audience of academic colleagues, Mills conveyed often difficult 

and theoretically sophisticated concepts in plain, but often visual prose, 

described by one critic as “muscular.” And, perhaps most famously, he was a 

phrasemaker. For example, his concept of the “main drift” to connote 

conventional wisdom, as well as centrist politics encapsulates in a single phrase 

what others require paragraphs to explain. And, instead of using the Marxianloaded 

term “crisis” or the technical dodge “recession,” to describe conditions 

of economic woe he employed the colloquial “slump.” He characterizes the rise 

of industrial unions after 1935 as the “big story” for American labor, a term 

which encompasses history and common perception. But the imperatives of 

the Cold War—especially the emergence of the military as a dominant 

institutional order—constitutes the big story of the immediate post-war era. 

Mills wrote scholarly works but, in keeping with the style of a public 

intellectual, he was also a pamphleteer, a proclivity that often disturbed his 

colleagues and, in one of the more odious forms of academic hubris, led some 

to dismiss him as a “mere journalist.” In fact, this dismissal may, in addition to 

his boldness in attacking the big themes of social theory and analysis, account 

for the sad truth that since the late 1970s his major works are virtually unread 

in social science classrooms, have disappeared from many scholarly references, 

and are largely undiscussed in the academic trade. In the last decade of his life, 



manifestos and indictments of the prevailing social and political order issued 

from his pen as frequently as sociological works. In fact, The Power Elite, 

which has inspired a sub-discipline whose academic practitioners include G. 

William Domhoff, America’s leading consumer advocate and anti-corporate 

campaigner, Ralph Nader, and a veritable army of “public interest” researchers, 

has always been controversial on theoretical grounds, but also, despite its often 

meticulous and comprehensive collection of “data,” criticized for lack of 

objectivity in its clear democratic bias. In these days when most members of 

the professorate have retreated from public engagement except as consultants 

for large corporations, media experts, and recipients of the grant largesse of 

corporate foundations and government agencies who want their research to 

assist in policy formulation, or confine their interventions to professional 

journals and meetings, Mills remains an embarrassing reminder of one possible 

answer to this veritable privatization of legitimate intellectual knowledge. In 

1939 his colleague Robert S. Lynd published a probing challenge to 

knowledge producers of all sorts called Knowledge for What? He asked the 

fundamental question: to whom is the knowledge producer responsible? To 

the state? To private corporations? To publics that are concerned with issues of 

equality social justice? (Robert S. Lynd, 1939) 

Mills rejects as spurious the prevailing doctrine according to which the social 

investigator is obliged to purge the work of social and political commitment. 

His values infuse the sociological research and theorizing and he never hides 

behind methodological protestations of neutrality. Mills is, instead, a partisan 

of movements of social freedom and emancipation while, at the same time, 

preserving his dedication to dry-eyed, critical theory and dispassionate, 

empirical inquiry. An advocate of a democratic, radical labor movement he 

was, nevertheless, moved to indict its leadership, not by fulmination, but by a 

careful investigation of how unions actually worked in the immediate post-war 

period. A self-described “man of the left,” in the late 1940s Mills provoked his 

left publics to outrage when he concluded that the “old” socialist and 

communist movements had come to the end of the road. By the late fifties, as 

the frost of the Cold War melted a bit after the rise of Nikita Khruschev to 

power in the Soviet Union and the power élite’s recognition that the anti- 

Communist purges had hurt U.S. domestic as well as foreign policy, he was 

loudly proclaiming the need for a “new” left that had the courage to throw off 



the ideological baggage of the past, especially Marxist orthodoxy and 

Stalinism. 

Like Jean-Paul Sartre, whose Critique of Dialectical Reason appeared in 1960, 

he came to regard tradition, even radical tradition, as a political albatross. He 

never used Sartre’s fancy term “practico-inert” to mark the encrusted habits 

that induce people to reproduce the past in the present but he was a persistent 

critic of the habituation of the left to old ideas. A withering opponent of the 

Communists, sensing the impending doom of the Soviet Union after the 

opening provided by the Khruschev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes at the 20th 

Communist Party Congress in 1956, he was among the first to urge the young 

to disdain their elders’ preoccupation with the “Russian” question and instead 

attend with fresh eyes and hearts to the tasks at hand: to oppose U.S. 

intervention in the affairs of revolutionary societies and to establish the 

framework for a radical democratic society. 

I have no doubt he was right to urge the young radicals to distance themselves 

from the past, at least in the short or intermediate term. But he never made 

clear that he himself had been reared, politically, on the Russian question and 

forgot that those who ignore addressing the failure of the revolution were 

doomed to relive it, an eventuality he was never cursed to witness. That the 

New Left, which soon captured the imagination of an entire generation, went 

awry may not be attributed exclusively to its refusal to address really existing 

socialisms of the Stalinist variety. But, it was entirely disarmed when, in the 

wake of the heating up of the war in southeast Asia, various Marxist ideologies 

became matters of urgent debate; most young leftists found themselves 

overwhelmed. They were moved by guilt as much as ignorance to confer 

uncritical support to the Vietnamese communists and even hailed the efforts of 

Pol Pot in Cambodia. By 1970, many reared the New Left were no longer 

Mills’ spiritual children; they all but renounced his democratic faith in favor of 

a “third world” dogma of national liberation at all costs. But, ironically, Mills 

himself was not immune from such enthusiasms. 

The book-length pamphlets were received as more than controversial, not only 

because they were, in many minds, notoriously heretical for their tacit 

violation of academic insularity, but also because they broke from the main 

tenets of the Cold War anti-Communist consensus at a time when, under 



siege, political repression was still alive and well in the United States. The 

Causes of World War Three (1958) is, in many respects, a popularization and 

application to the international scale of The Power Elite. It depicts world 

politics in terms of the rivalry to two power blocs, one led by the United 

States and the other by the Soviet Union, both of which are governed by 

irresponsible élites whose conduct of the nuclear arms race threatens the very 

existence of humanity. Written in a period when one could count the number 

of radicals with full-time appointments in American universities on one hand 

and when the preponderant ex-radicals had “chosen the west,” this equalization 

of responsibility for the world crisis between east and west endeared Mills 

neither to the communists and their periphery, for whom the Soviet Union 

was virtually blameless for the state of things, nor to Cold War liberals for 

whom any suggestion that United States foreign policy could contribute to the 

chances for the outbreak of World War III was as shocking as it was absurd. 

Hidden in the pages of his work is the influence of the one rather obscure 

strain of radicalism which, after the war, declared that both camps were forms 

of a new anti-democratic, militaristic capitalism and boldly, but futilely, called 

for the formation of a “third” camp whose base would be a radicalized labor 

movement in alliance with other anti-capitalist elements of the population. 

The project failed since at the time of its formulation, the leading unions in 

every capitalist country were busy making deals with their own corporations 

and with the capitalist state, and leftists were divided between those who were 

safely ensconced in the Cold War consensus or, despite everything, remained 

Soviet apologists. Mills’s appeal to the “public,” translated in this context to an 

appeal to the middle class liberal center, proved more effective for it 

corresponded to the emergence of a mass movement against the testing and use 

of nuclear weapons and for an end to the Cold War. Needless to say, the 

preponderance of American labor leaders, including Walter Reuther, the liberal 

president of the largest industrial union, the auto workers, were aligned with 

their own government’s policies and were convinced that the price of 

demilitarization was nothing less than a new slump. And even as he discounted 

the politicos as allies to the top layers of corporate and military power, Mills 

was equally skeptical that the intellectuals, the social type upon which political 

dissent conventionally relies, were adequate to the occasion. 



A self-declared independent leftist (which, in the Cold War era meant an anti- 

Stalinist, but unaligned radical), Mills had been influenced by Trotskyism early 

in his life. He carefully separated the still influential Communists from 

radicalism. The Communists were influential precisely because the party had 

been an important vehicle for organizing major industrial unions and for 

bringing militant workers into the New Deal. During the war, they played a 

major role in enforcing the wartime no-strike pledge and the government’s 

drive for productivity. Mills believed that whatever oppositional politics they 

evinced after the war was due, almost exclusively, to the chasm between the 

United States and the Soviet Union. 

Listen Yankee (1961) an exemplary instance of Mills’s penchant for rowing 

upstream, was, during its early years, a fierce defense of the Cuban revolution 

when, even for many anti-Stalinist radicals, it appeared that the regime was 

dedicated to raising living standards and was still open to a democratic society. 

At a time when even the liberal icon, Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, was a 

vocal advocate of counterrevolution and supported the Kennedy 

administration’s ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, Mills asserted the right of the 

Cuban people to determine their own destiny and sharply condemned U.S. 

policy in the Caribbean and Latin America. He excoriated liberals and 

conservatives alike for their support of anti-popular regimes such as that of 

Batista in Cuba and Somoza’s brutal Nicaraguan dictatorship, pointing out 

how the U.S. government had opposed democratic efforts by financing 

military counterinsurgency, especially against the Arbenz regime in Guatemala 

as well as Cuba’s new revolutionary government. While he had been a lifelong 

anti-Communist, Mills saw the Cuban revolution as a harbinger of the long 

struggle of peasants and workers for liberation from colonialism and 

imperialism and predicted serious future confrontations between the spreading 

insurgencies and the United States which, under Democratic and Republican 

national administrations alike, became the main defender of the dictators. 

Indeed, for the length of the 1960s and beyond, Mills’s provocative 

intervention seemed prescient. In Colombia, Douglas Bravo led a formidable 

armed uprising and Che Guevara led a band of guerillas into the Bolivian 

jungle which, like the Colombian revolt, failed. But, with Cuba’s material 

help the Sandanistas in Nicaragua and the National Liberation Front in El 

Salvador were alive with revolutionary activity and, by the mid-1960s the 



dormant Puerto Rican independence movement revived under Marxist 

leadership which closely identified with the Cuban revolution. In the 1970s, 

Maurice Bishop organized a successful uprising in Grenada which openly 

aligned itself with the Cuban revolution and Michael Manley’s democraticallyelected 

left social-democratic government in Jamaica forged close ties with 

Cuba. However much he was smitten, Mills framed much of his own 

discourse in terms of the significant of these events for America’s neo-colonial 

foreign policy and for America’s future. Lacking the tools of discriminating 

evaluation, many young radicals not only gave their unconditional support but 

enlisted as volunteers in Grenada, Cuba and Nicaragua’s education and health 

efforts. 

IV 

Mills is both an exhilarating exemplar of the role and reach of the public 

radical intellectual, and at the same time, a sobering reminder of how far the 

human sciences have descended since the end of the Vietnam War. For even in 

death Mills was an inspiration to a generation of young intellectuals estranged 

from the suburban nightmare of post-World War II America and eager to 

shape their own destiny, and to some in his own generation who, in fear and 

trembling, had withdrawn from public involvement, but yearned to return. 

The decline of social engagement and political responsibility that accompanied 

the ebbing of the impulse to reform and revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, 

witnessed the shift of labor, socialist and social liberal parties and movements 

to the liberal center. Many erstwhile radical intellectuals who retained their 

public voice moved steadily to the right, motivated, they said, by the 

authoritarianism of the New as well as the Old Left, and by their conviction 

that American capitalism and its democratic institutions were the best of all 

possible worlds. 

He suffered the sometimes scorching rebuke of his contemporaries and, even as 

he won the admiration of the young as well as the tattered battalions of left 

intellectuals, had severed his ties with much of the liberal center which sorely 

needed to hear his argument that, in face of the awesome and almost complete 

hegemony of the power élite, American democratic institutions were in a state 

of almost complete meltdown. That recently a small body of scholars have 

revisited his legacy should be welcomed. The question of whether intellectuals 



will remain tucked into their academic bunkers depends not only on the 

depressions or wars to pry them out. Indeed the economic slumps that have 

punctuated the last two decades have failed to move most to utterance, 

although there is evidence that, after 9/11 some radical intellectuals have 

engaged in protest against the U.S. promulgated war on Iraq or have entered 

the debate on the side of the government. In the final reckoning, even if, after 

1950, most of Mills’s tirades were self-motivated, although a decade later 

Mills looked to an aroused coterie of young intellectuals as the source of a new 

democratic public, it is usually resurgent labor and other social movements to 

which intellectuals respond. While it can be argued that prior to 9/11 there 

were signs of revival in the political opposition, it remains to be seen whether, 

after suffering the defeats of the early years of the 21st century, the radical, 

nomadic spirit of C. Wright Mills will inculcate the minds and hearts of the 

intellectuals and activists upon whom he bestowed so much hope. 

Stanley Aronowitz is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate 

Center, CUNY. His latest book, How Class Works, is available from Yale 

University Press. 


P 

Ali Hossaini 

Vision of the Gods: 

An Inquiry Into the Meaning of Photography 

by 

Ali Hossaini 

hotography is ubiquitous within global culture, but we hardly understand 

its meaning. And we have only a dim comprehension of its origin. Unlike 

cinema, which contains the complexities of motion and montage, the 

photograph is simple and, for the most part, brutally realistic. Perhaps the 

photograph has seemed too obvious to merit prolonged scholarly attention. 

Histories of the medium abound, but their authors follow a pattern 

exemplified by Alison and Helmut Gernsheim’s distinguished History of 

Photography, first published in 1955. By the standard account, the first 

inklings of photography appeared when a 5th century scholar noticed a 

camera-like phenomenon, and culminated in the 1820s, when Nicephore 

Niepce doped a pewter plate with light-sensitive chemicals and exposed it 

within a camera obscura. At their most comprehensive, standard histories 

include references to the mediaeval scientists who experimented with pinhole 

optics and ultimately invented the camera obscura. 

Though the standard account is correct in its details, it neglects the broader 

context of photography. Photography is an evolutionary phenomenon, not a 

fixed process, and it has drastically altered society at each stage of refinement. 

Starting with simple devices, the medium has branched into an enormous 

family of technologies that includes cinema, television and digital imagery. 

Individuals use cameras, but the medium is far more powerful in the hands of 

corporations and the state. Optical media entertain and inform, impress and 

oppress; they permeate everyday life, yet cultural theory does not approach 

this variety from a coherent base of understanding. What ties together 

snapshots and surveillance? Theorists perceive the social effects of mass 

media, which range from liberation to abject dehumanization, but the origin 

of these effects has not been outlined. We need a paradigm that captures the 

common thread of photographic technologies, one that matches the 

sophistication of contemporary engineering. Current theory of the 

photograph depends on the camera, but the physical device is insufficient to 


Ali Hossaini 

explain the evolution of the optical media, particularly as it progresses toward 

the dematerialized realm of digital imagery and virtual reality. 

Much has already been written about virtual reality. Though the medium is 

not yet viable, it has ample precedents ranging from Plato’s Cave Passage to 

nineteenth century dioramas. The strongest precedent, however, is the virtual 

experience offered by photography and cinema, both of which derive, like the 

examples I just gave, from reflection upon optics. Whether or not it comes to 

pass, the idea of a virtual environment should serve as a boundary condition 

for photographic theory, because it illustrates the profound impact of optics 

on society. For most of its existence humanity has experienced the world 

through natural faculties, but the introduction of optical media has 

reorganized perception and replaced subjectivity. As a consequence, 

individuals have become part of increasingly larger collectives where both 

thought and experience are defined by objective standards. The environment 

has become mediated, defined by surveillance and institutions, and, as Jean 

Baudrillard has poignantly described, experience is often equated with media. 

The central issues in photographic theory are defined by the history of optics. 

The study of vision and light has an ancient pedigree which scholars have 

only nodded toward when discussing photography. Scientific optics matured 

by the 3rd century BCE, when Euclid codified its principles alongside its 

parent discipline, geometry. Organized as a set of formal principles, Euclid’s 

Geometry describes the construction of forms in an abstract space, giving their 

appearance to an ideal intelligence. In contrast, his Optics described the 

behavior of light in relation to a situated viewer. Taken together, the two 

works present a theory of how the physical world is constituted in reality and 

appearance, with the latter describing how light transmits information from 

the physical, geometric realm to the eyes. 

Euclid’s optical study represents a high point of knowledge that remained 

almost unmatched until the scientist Ibn al-Haytham published his optical 

treatises in the 9th century. 1 Building on the work of Euclid and his 

successor, Claudius Ptolemy, Al-Haytham founded physiological optics, 

which distinguished the functioning of the eye from the behavior of light. He 

also laid the groundwork for the camera obscura by accurately explaining the 

pinhole effect which underlies its mechanism. Several centuries later, well 

after al-Haytham’s Optics passed into Europe, the camera obscura emerged 

from the laboratory as a tool for artists, but it was not until the 1600s that 

Johannes Kepler discovered the proper operation of the eye. Much like a 


Ali Hossaini 

camera, human eyes augment the pinhole effect with a lens, bringing an 

inverted image to bear on a light-sensitive surface, the retina. (See Figure 1) 

Figure 1: The structure of the eye compared to the camera 

(Wald, 1953) 

Unlike those who followed, Kepler considered retinal inversion to be an 

important problem. But he despaired of solving it and left its resolution to 

later generations. 2 Progress came slowly. Little was known about the nervous 

system until the nineteenth century, and only recently have scientists learned 

how to inspect thought in real time. Now we know how the brain 

apprehends the retinal image. But many questions still elude us. What effect 

does media have on perception? Has sharing images—sharing perceptions— 

affected individuality? Optical technologies permeate daily life, and, by 

bridging vast distances, they have changed the nature of vision. The personal 

has become institutional, mediated by cameras and computers, and we 

inhabit virtual bodies created by photography, the telephone and television. 

So our primary question might address how technology affects biology. Is 

technology a form of evolution? Has social evolution superseded biological 

evolution? Will governments and corporations completely subsume the 

individual, limiting choice to matters of consumption? In confronting these 

questions, optics is relevant to some of the most pressing issues in cultural 

theory and, for that matter, human existence. 


Ali Hossaini 

Photography represents the growing intimacy of humanity with machines. 

Tools originally amplified physical strength, but, with the advent of tools like 

the abacus, the compass and eyeglasses, they have been applied increasingly to 

mental faculties, giving us both modern media and digital computers. And 

recent advances in bioengineering are giving tools a quasi-organic status, 

merging them with our bodies. In 1950, biologist George Wald said 

photography was the product of convergent evolution: 

Of all the instruments made by man, none resembles a part of 

his body more than the camera does the eye. Yet this is not by 

design. A camera is no more a copy of an eye than the wing of 

a bird is a copy of that of an insect. Each is the product of an 

independent evolution; and if this has brought the camera 

and the eye together, it is not because one has mimicked the 

other, but because both have had to meet the same problems, 

and have frequently done so in the same way. This is the type 

of phenomenon that biologists call convergent evolution, yet 

peculiar in that one evolution is organic, the other 

technological. 3 

Wald then makes structural, mechanical and chemical comparisons between 

eyes and the photographic process. The similarities are numerous. Both use a 

lens to project an image within a dark chamber, both correct for aberrations 

in form and color, and both apprehend images through a grid of 

photosensitive receptors. As the capstone to his argument, Wald ends his 

essay with a discussion of optography, the art of making images with eyes. 

Willy Kuhne, a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg, 

invented optography in 1878. Kuhne was studying rhodopsin, the retinal 

pigment that changes state in response to light. During the course of his 

experiments, he realized that he might be able to take pictures with a living 

eye. He immobilized a rabbit and forced it to look at a window for three 

minutes. He then decapitated the animal, sliced open its eye, and soaked its 

retina in alum to fix the rhodopsin. The next day the dried retina revealed an 

image of the window. Two years later he repeated the process with the head 

of an executed criminal. The resulting optigram, which he reproduced in a 

drawing, is the only known picture taken with a human eye. Unfortunately, 

the scene it displayed was unidentifiable. (See Figures 2 and 3) 


Ali Hossaini 

Figure 2: The rabbit’s last view (Wald, 1953) 


Ali Hossaini 

Figure 3: A human optigram 

(Wald, 1953) 

Evolutionary convergence explains the utility of cameras and casts a revealing 

light on media theory, particularly the work of Marshall McLuhan. 

McLuhan’s descriptions of how media affect cognition seem hyperbolic, 

more metaphor than science, but if we accept Wald’s conclusions, then the 

spread of media has a biological basis. Photography is an auxiliary form of 

perception. It amplifies vision, takes it to extremes of size, distance and speed. 

It extends the human nervous system, particularly when coupled to electronic 

distribution. Visual media are among the cornerstones of modern civilization, 

found in the service of law, science and industry, as well as the arts and 

personal life. When we examine the category of photography as a whole, 

including cinema, video and digital imagery with paper and film, we find a 

medium that mimics vision, providing sensations that bridge space and time. 

Photographs are concrete perceptions that orient groups of people around a 

singular, objective experience. Along with social hierarchy, and other 

technologies of communication, photographic images constitute a body social 

that behaves according to common impulses. 


Ali Hossaini 

Photography has thus developed along two axes. The first is a train of 

technical and scientific discovery that stretches deep into history. As far as we 

know, optics was invented by the mathematicians of ancient Greece, but its 

parent science, geometry, is of far older pedigree, having reached an advanced 

state in the pre-Classical cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The other axis 

derives from the communication needs of the cultures that developed 

photography and related technologies. Each axis reinforces our understanding 

of the other, and, by linking the two together, we can describe the evolution 

of technologies which led from archaic times to photography then cinema, 

television and virtual reality. As I discuss in a larger work, Archaeology of the 

Photograph, a consistent set of social, political and economic goals has driven 

the emergence of these practices, and photography stands as the paradigm of 

both their physical appearance and mechanical functioning. 

The Ontology of the Photograph 

CAMERAS ARE THE MOST OBVIOUS ELEMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHY, but we 

should not stay preoccupied with them. Photographs are conveniently 

rendered by cameras, but the information within a photograph—the 

information that defines it—can be generated in several ways. Photorealist 

imagery can be produced by hand and computer, so we cannot rely solely on 

the camera to define photography. Nor can we place cameras at the 

beginning of the medium, for we still need to ask the question, “What is the 

origin of the camera?” Many histories of photography have been written, but 

only lately with the emergence of satellite surveillance and virtual reality, can 

we completely define the paradigm of optics. An unwritten history lies 

behind the development of photography. 

To access this history, we cannot, as scholars have traditionally done, treat 

photography as a discrete industrial process. Photography is not a specific 

activity but a way of seeing, a mechanized form of perception. It is a technical 

approach to visual representation based on optics. (Or perspective: they mean 

the same thing in their original usage.) And photography is ultimately 

geometric since optics/perspective derives from the investigation of space. As 

we shall see, photography also relates to the physiology of vision, and its 

advances have tracked fundamental progress in the scientific understanding 

of cognition. Starting with its invention in the nineteenth century, 

photography projects forward into cinema, television and digital media. And 


Ali Hossaini 

it telescopes backward into earlier modalities based in painting, drawing, 

cartography and geometry. Media scholars have hinted at this history, but 

engineers have written it, and it remains inscribed in generations of tools. 

Photography is paradigmatic act of representation, one which blankets the 

environment with information. The expression of photographic technology 

has followed a path set in the formative days of civilization, and, ironically, its 

purpose is clearest in its earliest forms. 

Like most machines, cameras automated processes previously done by hand. 

The tools of Renaissance painters are obvious forebears to the camera which 

makes photography closely related to classical modes of representation like 

architecture and mapping. If we trace these practices—perspectival painting, 

architecture and cartography—to their collective origin, we arrive at the 

archaic civilization of Sumer and the technology of land surveying, or applied 

geometry. Surveying occupies a privileged place in the history of photography 

and, more generally, of technical drawing. It inspired theoretic geometry, 

which in turn spawned optics, astronomy and cartography, the first sciences. 

I will collectively refer to these geometric disciplines as technologies of 

perception. Succeeding civilizations around the Mediterranean and Europe 

have adopted these perceptual practices, and a direct line of transmission 

links Sumerian land surveying to present-day photography and electronic 

media. 

Within this article, I will describe some of the connections between archaic 

surveying and modern technology. An important premise of my discussion 

lies in the nature of automation or, more precisely, the definition of the 

machine. I mentioned above that preoccupation with cameras can lead to 

misunderstandings about photography. The photographic camera is a 

machine for taking pictures, and it thus seems different in kind from any 

other apparatus, even the camera obscura, which still requires an artist to 

draw the image. But since a photograph is simply information—the 

information specific to a visual display—we need to question whether 

cameras are necessary to produce a photographic “thing,” that is, an optically 

correct image. This is clearly not the case. Renaissance painters and their 

successors devised accurate methods for producing optically correct images, 

and their work conditioned the emergence of the camera obscura and 

photographic machinery. 

I submit that the work of perspectival artists—a group that ranges from 

Donatello to the photorealists—lies between intuition and automation. In 


Ali Hossaini 

other words, perspectival drawing lies between the delicate naturalism of 

Paleolithic painting and the stark realism of photography. During the 

Renaissance, the production of art began to be mechanized, and picture 

making went beyond expression to become media. 

The work of Lewis Mumford may clarify my position. In Technics and 

Human Civilization, Mumford introduces the concept of the megamachine, a 

social machine that coordinates human rather than nonhuman energy. 

Arising in early civilizations, the megamachine arose when leaders used 

scientific principles to increase the size, power and precision of work crews. 

By coordinating human labor with precise measurements and tools, early 

leaders were able to direct the construction of massive pyramids without the 

use of engines and other advanced technologies. Unlike many other human 

endeavors, a primary feature of the megamachine is the dominance of 

method. Like an inorganic mechanism, workers applied tools of 

measurement that let them precisely engineer buildings according to plan. 

Their own judgment was auxiliary to measurements and central direction. 

Like earlier surveyors and architects, Renaissance painters allowed scientific 

principles to determine the structure of their work. Their work was closely 

allied with engineering and architecture. Optical effects were difficult to 

realize with medieval tools, so artists quickly adopted more advanced 

machines to assist their efforts. The requirements of perspective conditioned 

the emergence of the camera obscura in the late Renaissance, and the desire 

of successive generations to fully automate image production led to 

photography. The process continues today. Electronic processing is 

dematerializing the camera into the universal machine (and universal 

medium) of computers. New technologies like digital animation and virtual 

reality use optical principles, but, like Renaissance painting, they posit the 

camera as an ideal machine, a perspective that organizes representation 

according to a coherent point of view. 

Photographs function by reproducing the vantage of the eye, and the analogy 

between eyes and cameras runs deep. As Kuhne first demonstrated, the eye is 

a camera, and vice versa, and they can sometimes be exchanged. Our 

understanding of the brain is on the increase; it seems likely that, in the near 

future, cameras will induce vision through direct neural implants. 4 When fed 

directly to the brain, media becomes immediate, more like an environment 

than an overlay. McLuhan’s description of an optical-electronic nervous 

system may have sounded fictional when he uttered it, but it is rapidly 


Ali Hossaini 

becoming true in the fundamental sense, mainly because media now 

integrates our perceptual apparatus. The convergence of technology with 

biology continues on the level of image processing. Like human vision, the 

camera produces internal representations of the world which can be recalled 

and manipulated. Fidelity is key to photography and natural perception 

because both are directed toward depicting an environment that must be 

exploited for navigation, communication and survival. Thus the ontology of 

the photograph derives from its fundamental utility as a representation of the 

visual environment—and from the act of vision itself. 

Andre Bazin presented one of the first theoretic statements regarding 

photographic realism in his essay, “What is a Photograph,” which appeared 

in 1937. He attributes a simple realism to the medium, as he opens and shuts 

the door on a theory of photography. 

Besides, painting is . . . an ersatz of the processes of 

reproduction. Only a photographic lens can give us the kind 

of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep 

need man has to substitute for it [the object] something more 

than a mere approximation . . . The photographic image is 

the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time 

and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or 

discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the 

image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its 

becoming, the being of the model of which it is the 

reproduction; it is the model. 5 

Even as he gives the final word on photography, Bazin indicates that cinema 

is a much richer field for theory, closing with, “On the other hand, cinema is 

also a language.” Bazin subsequently founded the field of cinema studies, and 

for decades scholars had little to say about photography. In the late 1950s, 

Roland Barthes discussed photographs, taking a linguistic approach adopted 

in the 1970s by a coterie that included Alan Sekula, Victor Burgin and Judith 

Williamson. Since then a field of critical photographic studies has emerged to 

analyze the various uses of photography in propaganda, advertising, 

surveillance and personal life. 

Though placed in a multitude of disciplines, most studies of photography are 

either sociological, seeking a language of photography within its human 

elements, or phenomenological, attending to the mysteries of perception at a 


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distance. Some claim that perspective is simply a Western convention for 

representation, though such arguments are difficult to maintain against 

optics. The dawn of the digital era has added a twist to writing on 

photography, giving a new generation of scholars the opportunity to decry a 

post-objective era. 

Current scholarship on photography is fragmented because it possesses no 

disciplinary paradigm. Beyond an unproductive dichotomy between realism 

and conventionalism, and an often-blurry technical history, we have no 

concrete understanding of how photography emerged, let alone how it 

engages the social mechanism. What forces gave impulse to the camera and 

its trajectory of development? While Bazin painfully emphasizes the objective 

realism of photography, and derails further study, he points to a generative 

function within the medium. The photographic image is not just an ersatz 

representation. It reproduces the environment, the thing itself, and becomes 

an ideal (or virtual) reality for the viewer. Bazin introduces photography with 

a discussion of cave paintings and Egyptian mummification. These practices, 

he claims, reveal the primal motives of artistic representation. He justifies this 

strange comparison by claiming our ancestors sought to overcome space and 

time by preserving appearances. In other words, to control life by 

constructing an idealized, artificial environment. Though concerned at this 

point with the plastic arts, from an historical perspective Bazin has 

approached the crux of photography and the technologies supporting it. 

While the comparison of mummies to photographs may stretch our powers 

of analysis, we can find other representational practices in ancient cultures 

which do not. 

Land surveying has been a profession for over six thousand years. First 

invented in Sumer and spreading quickly to Egypt, it emerged as one of the 

essential technologies of civilization, and it underlies virtually every advance 

in urban culture, technical representation and mass communication. It is a 

critical form of organized perception, but its contributions to society are 

often overlooked. Neither cities nor social hierarchies could exist without 

surveyors and the property boundaries they create. Estates, buildings, roads, 

and aqueducts all depend on the related acts of surveying, planning and 

impressing new designs into the earth. 

Bazin described mummification as a primal impulse behind photography, 

but study of surveying provides far more insight. Beyond the fact that optics 

derived from geometric investigation, surveying also plays the preservative 


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role described by Bazin. Since ancient times surveyors have preserved the 

state and its social organization by defining property boundaries. Herodotus’s 

description of ancient Egyptian land surveyors is no less apt today. 

For this cause Egypt was intersected. The king moreover (so 

they said) divided the country among all the Egyptians by 

giving each an equal square parcel of land, and made this his 

source of revenue, appointing the payment of a yearly tax. 

And any man who was robbed by the river of a part of his 

land would come to Sesostris and declare what had befallen 

him; then the king would send men to look into it and 

measure the space by which the land was divided, so that 

thereafter it should pay in proportion to the tax originally 

imposed. From this, to my thinking, the Greeks originally 

learnt the art of measuring land. 

Like photography, surveying was invented to extend perceptual powers. 

Urban planners could not comprehend the expanses necessary to build cities 

and empires, and surveying was the first in a long series of perceptual 

technologies invented to create objective, accurate images of the 

environment. It functioned as the eyes and visual memory of the early 

megamachine, a state bureaucracy that created specialized labor and social 

hierarchy. In contrast to cave paintings or mummification, the goal of 

surveying and related practices is to inform, not to express aesthetic or ritual 

values. At the core of a survey map is data, a representation of visual space 

which conveys useful information. 

We should keep in mind that visual representations are not necessarily 

pictorial. Archaic survey records, or cadastres, do not contain visual 

representations; they are nothing more than tables of measurements which, if 

associated with a particular area, describe a plot of land. In form and content 

they resemble digital databases which exist for the same purpose. However, 

by 2300 BCE an interesting parallel to the evolution of digital computing 

occurs in Mesopotamia. Cadastres had been growing in both size and detail 

since their invention in the fourth millennium, and an unknown surveyor in 

the service of the great UR III bureaucracy introduced an innovative means 

to displaying geometric data: a graphic interface. We would now call this 

device a map. 6 Survey maps developed rapidly within Mesopotamia, 

becoming a means to manipulate land through urban planning. Maps were 

used to manage estates, design buildings and govern cities. (See Figure 4) 


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Much like the modern GUI, the cadastral map appealed to the innate 

capacities of human vision. While tables continued to exist, then as now, the 

map was a preferred means of displaying complex environmental data in 

some situations. 

Figure 4: An UR III Empire survey map, dating from approximately 2300 BCE 

(Nissen, 1993) 

Another telling parallel exists between archaic and contemporary civilizations. 

When placed alongside an early cadastral map, an aerial photograph reveals 

the origins and purpose of our quintessentially modern art. (See Figure 5) 

Both present an expanse of land, and both achieve geometric accuracy by 

assuming an ideal aerial perspective. More importantly, both are directed at 

the same purpose: the comprehension and management of productive earth. 

Despite the distance of time, the Mesopotamian scribes who staffed the first 

bureaucracies would have understood the function and purpose of our late 

model GIS computers, the Geographic Information Systems that overlay 

representations of land with useful information about productivity, access 

and ownership. 7 (See Figure 6) 


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Figure 5: An aerial photograph (Space Imaging EOSAT Notes, 1997) 

Bazin’s recognition that the photograph is a model for reality, as well as an 

objective reality in its own right, aim at the core of photography and related 

practices. We often think of perception, visual or otherwise, as passive, 

oriented only toward accurate representation. Photography has often been 

treated in a similar manner, as a wax tablet supplying “truth at twenty-four 

times a second” but little more. But the ontology of truth tells only half the 

story. In practice neither vision nor photography has ever 

Figure 6: A GIS display 

Like the earliest survey maps, Geographic Information Systems display an image of terrain 

overlaid with information such as ownership, usage, disposition of the soil. (Antenucci, 

1991) 


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been passive. Each supplies information as a means to action, and, like the 

related practices of surveying and architecture, each provides a medium for 

the redesign of the environment. Like life, which sustains its own biosphere, 

humanity generates a milieu friendly to its needs. Vision, architecture and the 

intermediate technologies of photography, surveying and planning are the 

means to creating a genuinely human environment. 

The Idiot King 

SURVEYING EMERGED WITH THE EARLY city-state, and it has served the cause 

of urban civilization ever since. The ancients did not have distinct concepts 

of technology, science and politics, but their ideologies, which are religious in 

nature, still reveal the essential relationships between their disciplines. Prior 

to urbanization, Mesopotamians adhered to animistic beliefs similar to those 

of contemporary tribes. After the advent of cities, they developed state 

ideologies based on the sovereignty of sky gods like Inanna and Ningursu. 

Divine sanction conferred legitimacy upon rulers, and worship occupied 

most ceremonies of state. Sky gods were associated with planets—Inanna rose 

with Venus—and their celestial vantage revealed their transcendent authority. 

Hovering over their lands, they were the lords of all they saw, and their 

followers built ziggurats as aerial vantages for divine supervision. 

Mesopotamian hymns capture the awe, and lack of privacy, early civilization 

felt before these symbols: 

It [the temple Eninnu] kept an eye on the country; 

no arrogant one could walk 

in its sight. 

awe of Eninnu 

covered all lands like a cloth. 8 

Toward [the temple] Shugalam, dread place 

the place from where [the god] Ningursu 

keeps an eye on all lands . . . 

Thrust against heaven 

is its dread halo, 

and over all lands hovers 

great awe of my house 9 


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The urban state has unfolded from the concept of the sky god, idealized as a 

tyrant who governs the earthly state through all-encompassing vision. Aerial 

perspective—conceived as a divine seat, but realized as the technology of 

surveying—was a key advance in the feasibility of state institutions. 

Surveying realizes the perspective of the Inanna and her ilk, and architecture 

embodies their creative will, which depended on their ability to view land 

from an objective vantage. From its first appearance in land surveying, the 

organization of vision has driven the development of optics, and the drive to 

merge individual and collective perception continues. Architecture and media 

both derive from the objective gaze, and the modern spy satellite, surveying 

the masses below, is its virtual embodiment. In non-political terms, we could 

say that photography arose from a concern with method. What is the proper 

way to represent the environment? Whether manifest in Sumerian surveying, 

Renaissance painting or aerial surveillance, this question bears on the 

aesthetic, political and scientific concerns surrounding perceptual 

technologies. Though technical in nature, it is wrapped in the institutions of 

power—property and architecture—that caused it to emerge. 

How do we define property as a practical concept? Sumerian religion 

provided the first transactive language, or code, for comprehending land in 

terms of legal ownership. Pre-urban societies assign landholdings according to 

organic need, and the size of plots are naturally limited by the ability of 

owners to manage an area. Sky gods owned the land beneath their gaze, and 

they conveyed ownership to select classes within society as a legal right. By 

underpinning the legal doctrine of ownership, the sky god constituted the 

state and simultaneously posed a perceptual problem to its adherents. 

Ownership demanded management, but Mesopotamian leaders could only 

comprehend small areas with their native faculties—an area big enough to 

feed themselves and their families. In order to govern larger areas, they 

needed to attain the perspective of the sky god. Land surveying solved their 

problem. By combining simple surveying techniques with advances in 

accounting, early managers could remotely manage their estates, an ability 

which greatly extended their capacity to rule. The priests of Mesopotamia 

used geometry to attain the vision of gods. 

In contemporary terms, we might call this action at a distance telepresence or 

virtual experience. The key to understanding why these terms apply lies in 

our definition of reality. If “real” means a visually correct image of a distant 

place, then they are certainly inappropriate. But if “real” describes an accurate 


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representation, then a bureaucrat reviewing survey maps surely has 

experienced a distant place in a meaningful way. Mathematical knowledge 

lies at the basis of perceptual technology, and the data generated by 

technology is independent of a particular display. We admire photographs for 

their resemblance to vision, but both photography and vision operate by 

decomposing a visual scene into components. We can hardly say that 

photographs carried within television signals, or a computers, have lost their 

identity. They have simply changed mode, a process that occurs when our 

brains translate retinal images into neural impulses. 

Geometry derived from conscious reflection on material practices. As a 

cognitive process, it is related to our ability to communicate and coordinate 

the self within society. Despite our singular feelings of value, self-awareness 

may have evolved as an outgrowth of language, perhaps simply to facilitate 

cooperation. But this does not mean consciousness is merely the capacity for 

symbolizing. Thought lacks direct instrumentality, arising as it does from the 

unique situation of the body in its environment. It is the awakening of 

symbol to itself, the realization of the capacity to communicate through 

structured discourse. Through its embodiment, its placement in a desiring 

body, consciousness projects thought onto its environment, understanding its 

surroundings through stories that reflect its awareness of self, situation and 

desire. Aside from sheer presence, which demands acknowledgment, the gap 

between situation and desire, between the real and the ideal, is the primary 

motive for conscious beings to communicate. We imagine a better situation, 

and then, with the aid of others, try to realize it. Individual desire calls society 

and its tools for communication into being. 

Millennia of social development preceded the relatively quick formation of 

the first city-states in Mesopotamia. It is not a given that archaic 

Mesopotamians were evolving toward urban civilization. Instead it seems 

likely that they confronted conditions such as drought which forced them 

into progressively smaller regions. Necessity demanded they create efficient 

organizations of production and distribution, and bureaucracy emerged to 

handle the administrative load. Sky gods emerged to consolidate 

Mesopotamian society within state institutions, and, though our society is 

more sophisticated, we are still realizing the consequences of Sumerian 

ideology. 

Ancient priests may have conceived social hierarchy, private property and 

land surveying as a religious exercise, but their practical intent was the 


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maintenance of cities. These institutions have persisted until today, gaining 

in variety and complexity, but never losing the ideal form of legal sovereignty 

and unchallenged will. To be effective, Sumerian religion absorbed the 

natural sovereignty of individuals, who gradually became subjects of the state 

and its dictates. By appropriating taxes and labor, the state constituted itself 

as a corporate regime defined by the active surveillance of territory. The 

image of the sky god gained force over time, and it eventually entered the 

divinely ordained king whose will embodied the political state. 

Though symbolically concentrated in his body, the king could hardly manage 

every facet of daily administration. As a practical matter, the royal will and its 

divine legitimacy was dispersed among a hierarchy of officials. In many 

modern states, every individual bears some degree of legal sovereignty, 

though their liberty is constrained by law. In all states, property ownership is 

a key signifier of status, and it became the basis for the division of physical 

and cognitive labor. Property constituted the res publica by situating 

individuals within abstract mechanisms of hierarchy, land rights and surplus 

value. On this basis, the state and its institutions could organize themselves as 

virtual bodies, performing their duties in urban interiors according to rational 

divisions of labor. Surveying and bookkeeping documents mediated 

communication within states, sending information from the peripheries and 

directives from the center. As Herodotus notes, records migrated toward 

central locations, archives that contained virtual images of land. Maps, 

calendars and accounting tables became essential tools within complex civil 

societies, serving as percepts that greatly expanded the faculties of their users. 

Mediated by tablets, papyrus and pens, and transported throughout the 

nation, these representations became a sensory apparatus, one that supported 

the state through disciplined perceptions. 

Early technologies like surveying clarify the essence of later practices like 

photography, mass media and digital imagery. For centuries the 

Mesopotamians did not distinguish the representation of land from other 

forms of information. Aside from its tools of measure, geometry was not 

treated as a special discipline, and cadastres contained only written 

measurements accompanied by descriptions of location. Later sketches 

displayed the same prosaic attitude, although it was no doubt difficult, if not 

impossible, to achieve visual effects on a clay tablet. But the first maps 

nonetheless transformed raw information into something resembling vision, 

and they inspired a transformation of the way we understand our visual 

environment. 


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The transformation accelerated when the sciences of Mesopotamia and Egypt 

passed into Greece. A critical attitude evolved within Greek science, perhaps 

because thinkers tried to reconcile alternative systems. By the sixth century 

BCE, Greek artists began to display a concern with realism, and we see the 

beginning of furious philosophic debates over proper representation. 

Investigations into visual truth began emanating from workshops and 

academies, and over centuries painters adapted the techniques of perspective, 

laying the foundation for optical science. Greek investigations into scientific 

representation culminated in Euclid’s Geometry and Optics, which were 

completed in the third century BCE. 

Among their many accomplishments, Euclid’s mathematical studies reconcile 

the dualism that plagued Platonic philosophy. Plato denigrated perception 

because the shifting appearances of things contradicted what we know. In 

mathematical terms, geometry describes what we know, and optics describes 

how we see. By deriving optics from geometry, Euclid demonstrated the 

validity of visual information. Vision distorts geometric space—it distorts 

reality—but it does so systematically. As any surveyor knows, by accounting 

for the effects of perspective, we can glean accurate data about visual objects. 

The obvious solution to Plato’s dilemma is to systematically relate optical 

“slices,” individual perspectives, to a coordinated, geometric whole. 

Thinkers from Claudius Ptolemy 10 to Rudolph Arnheim 11 have proposed 

something like Euclid’s schema, and Stephen Kosslyn’s work Image and Brain 

extends that work to the imagination. When we remember a visual image, 

the visual cortex hosts an event physiologically similar to actual perception. 

We may recall James Gibson’s arguments against mental imagery, but 

Kosslyn presents convincing experimental evidence for pictorialism and the 

matter should be closed. 12 However, we can still query the human visual 

system, questioning why it evolved as it did. Could we have evolved a 

“sightless vision,” the cybernetic vision Paul Virilio describes in The Vision 

Machine? We sometimes perceive without sensation, as when we 

automatically block a stray ball. There are alternative forms of visual 

perception that do not rely in internal representation, for instance, in 

computers that use neural nets for navigation. The human brain is often 

described as a neural net. Could consciousness have evolved differently? 

What role does preconscious processing play in our responses? How does 

vision relate to faculties like language? 


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Visualization became important when Paleolithic toolmakers began working 

together. Unlike most animals, humans have few inborn skills, so their 

survival depends on creativity and learning. Even when chipping rudimentary 

knives, early humans needed mental conceptions, and probably verbal 

descriptions, to guide their activities. Speech and imagination sufficed to 

organize society until the advent of city-states, when large projects demanded 

precise and durable forms of visualization. Thousands of workers often 

contributed to a project, and monumental works could not be built without 

coordinating (and subordinating) their judgment. Leaders needed objective 

standards to manage projects, and they invented the disciplines of 

measurement and quantitative analysis. Perceptual technologies coordinated 

the social body, allowing large groups to behave as one. While planning 

scribes would gather physical data such as size, weight and volume. They 

would then devise schedules by analyzing productivity, available labor and 

other factors. Deployed within a social body, geometric representation 

formed a matrix of objective perception, and the mechanical accuracy of 

surveyors enabled the functioning of social technics, the megamachine 

described by Mumford. 

And what of our human art? Must we not say in building it 

produces an actual house, and in painting a house of a different 

sort, as it were a man-made dream for waking eyes? 

Plato, “The Sophist” 

I have described perceptual technologies as activities that coordinate an 

autonomous social body. But, from the individual standpoint, the products 

of surveying and related technologies create far more than external pictures. 

They constitute institutions, and they structure society by defining relations 

of property, administration and commerce. Unlike natural vision, which 

views the environment as a continuum, perceptual technologies couple 

attention to social boundaries consisting of laws, architecture, contracts, 

receipts and deadlines. By organizing perception into an objective whole, 

they create a secondary environment based on institutional rather than 

individual imperatives. Property lines, buildings, calendars—none of these 

are pregiven in experience. They are human creations that reenact nature. 

Subjectivity and objectivity take on new meanings in this context. Like 

geometry and optics, they refer to strategies of political organization, not 


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scientific truths. Taking the state as an analytic condition, we might speculate 

on the next stage of perceptual technology. Surveying produced perspective, 

which in turn led to photography and television. Engineers are already 

producing immersive digital environments, some of which may do away with 

cameras and material displays. Direct neural couplings will be widely 

available in the foreseeable future. Scientists have already bypassed eyes and 

ears, and advanced haptic interfaces could simulate the balance of senses. 

There is no reason to feed real-world camera images into a neural coupling— 

digital environments would work just as well. Artists and engineers have 

already started designing imaginary spaces, giving us a taste of possible future 

environments. (See Figure 7) In a stable virtual world, neurally induced 

experiences could collapse the opposition between subject and object, along 

with distinctions among vision, photography and architecture. As our senses 

adapted to the new environment, culture might evade nature altogether, 

referring only to itself. What sort of societies might evolve in such a space? 

Figure 7: A Virtual Space 

Designed by the NOX studio in Rotterdam, this virtual space is accessed through head 

mounted goggles. Within a few years, the environment may be accessed through direct 

neural coupling between the brain and the computer which generates it. (Zellner, 1999) 

Strict control of virtual worlds could create a kind of planetary dungeon. 

Economics would dictate the rhythm of daily life, which would be governed 

by a central body according to laws of consumption and production. 

Freedom could be severely curtailed in this environment, which might 

resemble a digital version of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. Proposed in the 

eighteenth century, the panopticon was designed as an ideal prison which 

concealed nothing from the guards. Misbehavior was unlikely in such a place. 

More advanced technologies are beginning to impose a similar effect on 


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society at large. Surveillance cameras blanket most cities, and authorities are 

using computer networks to increase their effectiveness. Complemented by 

satellite-based surveillance, an immersive cyberspace could completely 

assimilate individual faculties to objective data. Privacy would be impossible 

since every perception would be controlled, even witnessed. Videotapes in 

arcade games capture the completeness of digital surveillance. People can 

either join the game, or they can observe it from the perspective of one or 

more players. 

On the other hand, these same technologies could celebrate an extreme form 

of individuality. A wave of progress in genetics and engineering could take 

humanity well beyond its current state, and, driven by the urge for selffulfillment, 

an elite, or perhaps an entire society, might decide to fuse with 

machines and retreat into cyberspace. Here they would develop a poetics of 

technology, crafting experience with unlimited mental resources. 13 Freed 

from productive labor, these cyborgs might reject the objective order 

altogether. Imagination would become the organizing principle of experience. 

(See Figure 8) It may be difficult to sustain a collective under such 

conditions, particularly if companionship could be provided by one’s own 

creations. Unchecked individualism could break down society, creating a 

future bizarrely reminiscent of myth. Living in a programmed environment, 

bodies and the world could assume any shape, support any whimsy. 

Computers would then plunge individuals into a kind of idiocy—immersed 

in technology they would be playmates who met only for companionship. Or 

who never met at all. Confined to their individual worlds, each person would 

exist as a mechanical god, an idiot king presiding over a terrain of 

information. 


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Figure 8: Architecture of the Future 

Marcos Novak designs virtual environments according to poetics rather than gravity. 

Unencumbered by mass and utility, they function as fantastic playgrounds for the mind. 

(Zellner, 1999) 

The scenarios outlined above describe the polar tendencies toward freedom 

and tyranny inherent within perceptual technologies, the machines we use for 

observation and communication. As a concept, the sky god displays both 

tendencies, and, when applied within society as an ideology, it creates the 

primal existential dilemma. What is the role of the individual within society? 

The previous scenarios represent extreme possibilities in the development of 

media, and we can hope that society evolves within their balance. It is hard to 

predict what scenario may come to pass. Biotechnology is advancing more 

quickly than we would have imagined even ten years ago, and engineers are 

busy devising new ways to reconstruct our senses. Already we largely dwell 

within a virtual reality, an artificial world enclosed by architecture, media and 

telecommunication. But we may never build a completely cybernetic world, 

preferring to simply augment natural perception with layers of information. 

The sky god can model transcendent freedom, or it can subsume the 

individual to a corporate will. We see within it the modern individual who 

uses machines to control destiny. In the beginning this power was wielded 

only by kings, but, since the beginning of urbanization, more and more 

individuals have gained the power to structure their world. Personal liberty 

has never been greater except perhaps in certain tribal cultures. At the same 

time, the ability of central authorities to control expression, movement and 

now biology has advanced immeasurably, and we always stand on the brink 

of totalitarianism. Whether concrete or digital, our cities embody the creative 


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gaze and the architectural will of the sky gods. Though our kings have lost 

divine right, we have launched the sky god into orbit, just as the Sumerians 

conceived. The constant presence of surveillance cameras, whether hanging 

from buildings or satellites, should remind us of the potency of such vision, 

and how it might alter our environment. However it evolves, virtual reality 

will bear the imprint, and the dangers, of the ideal state and the vision of the 

gods. 

References 

Antenucci, John (1991) with Kay Brown, Peter Croswell and Michael 

Kevany. Geographic Information Systems: An Introduction to the Technology. 

New York: Van Nostrand Rheinhold. 

Arnheim, Rudolph (1969) Visual Thinking. Berkely, CA: 1969. 

Bazin, Andre (1967) ‘Ontology of the Photograph’ in Trachtenberg, Alan, 

(ed.) Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, CN: Lee’s Island Books: 

237-245. 

Crary, Jonathon. (1990) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity 

in the Nineteenth Century. Boston, MA: MIT Press. 

Euclid (1908) The Thirteen Books of The Elements. Sir Thomas Heath (trans.) 

New York: Dover Publications. 

Euclid (1945) Optics in The Journal of the Optical Society of America 35 (5): 

357-372. 

Fried, Itzhak, Christof Koch and Gabriel Kreiman (2000) Nature 408 

(6810): 357 – 361. 

Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison (1955) The History of Photography from the 

Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura up to 1914. London: Oxford University 

Press. 

Gibson, James J. (1968) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. London: 

George Allen & Unwin. 

Herodotus (1992) The Histories. trans. George Rawlinson. London, UK: The 

Guernsey Press. 

Jakobsen, Thorkild (1987) The Harp that Once . . . New Haven, CT: Yale 


Kosslyn, Stephen (1994) Image and Brain. Boston: MIT Press. 

Lindberg, David C. (1976) Theories of Vision: From Al-Kindi to Kepler. 

Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 


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Mumford, Lewis (1966) The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human 

Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich. 

Nissen, Hans (1993), Robert K. Englund and Peter Damerow. Archaic 

Bookkeeping. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Ptolemy, Claudius. The Geography. New York: Dover Publications, 1991. 

Sabra, A. I. (1989) Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics. London: The Warburg Institute. 

Space Imaging EOSAT Notes, Spring 1997 

Stephens, Ferris. J. (1953) “A Surveyor’s Map of a Field.” Journal of 

Cuneiform Studies 7 (1) 1953. 

Virilio, Paul (1995) The Vision Machine. Bloomington, IN: The Indiana 


Wald, George (1953) ‘Eye and Camera’ in Scientific American Reader. NY: 

Simon & Schuster: 555-68. 

Zellner, Peter (1999) Hybrid Space: New Forms on Digital Architecture. New 

York. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

I would like to thank Douglas Kellner of UCLA, Robert Solomon of 

University of Texas at Austin and Steve Best of the University of Texas at El 

Paso for their comments and encouragement. 

Notes 

1 

Sabra, A. I. (1989) Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics. London: The Warburg 

Institute. 

2 

This important episode on the history of optics has often been misconstrued 

by modern commentators, for example, in Techniques of the Observer (Crary, 

1990: 27, 35, 38). In support of his statements, Crary cites David Lindberg. 

Crary seems to have missed the conclusion of Lindberg’s argument. At one 

point, Lindberg states that Kepler was familiar with the argument that an 

earlier attempt to construe the eye as a camera obscura. But on the next page, 

the comparison capitulates to a powerful counter-argument (Lindberg 1976: 

182-206). Other inaccuracies in Crary’s work include the surprising assertion 

that Euclid and Aristotle were familiar with the pinhole effect (Crary, 1990: 

27). 

3 

Wald, George (1953) ‘Eye and Camera’ in Scientific American Reader. NY: 

Simon & Schuster: pp. 555-68. 


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4 

Research in this area has made great strides. Scientists at both the University 

of North Carolina and MIT have developed retinal implants that carry 

impulses from a camera directly to the optic nerve, temporarily giving limited 

vision to blind people. Reports are available in the websites of their respective 

universities. 

5 

Bazin, Andre (1967) “Ontology of the Photograph” in Trachtenberg, Alan, 

(ed.) Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, CN: Lee’s Island Books: pp. 

237-245. 

6 

Stephens, Ferris. J. (1953) “A Surveyor’s Map of a Field.” Journal of 

Cuneiform Studies 7 (1) 1953 and Nissen, Hans (1993), Robert K. Englund 

and Peter Damerow. Archaic Bookkeeping. Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press. 

7 

Antenucci, John (1991) with Kay Brown, Peter Croswell and Michael 

Kevany. Geographic Information Systems: An Introduction to the Technology. 

New York: Van Nostrand Rheinhold. 

8 

Jakobsen, Thorkild (1987) The Harp that Once . . . New Haven, CT: Yale 

University Press, p 422. 

9 

Ibid., pp. 398-400. 

10 

Ptolemy, Claudius. The Geography. New York: Dover Publications, 1991. 

11 

Arnheim, Rudolph (1969) Visual Thinking. Berkely, CA: 1969. 

12 

UCLA neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried and a team of researchers reported in 

Nature that the mind's eye—the imagination or mental view—generates 

mental pictures by using the same neurons that were activated when it saw 

the object or image. “Our study reveals that the same brain cells that fire 

when a person looks at a picture of the Mona Lisa are, in fact, the same 

neurons that excite when that person is asked to imagine the Mona Lisa.” 

(Fried, 2000) 

13 

Zellner, Peter (1999) Hybrid Space: New Forms on Digital Architecture. 

New York. 


A 

Thomas de Zengotita 

Fiction 

The Other Side * 

by 


t first only a few of us noticed, and we didn’t talk about it until later— 

though most of us probably tried to check with someone early on. I know 

I did. Putting it as a matter of curiosity, in passing, but seriously, the way you 

might ask “Have you ever had a dream where you dreamed you woke up?” But 

of course, in that case, a lot of people say yes, and the others at least know 

what you mean. 

All in all, it seemed like a good idea just to move on. Everything else was okay. 

Well, nothing was actually okay, because it was happening to everything, but 

nothing else was happening to anything, that’s the point. So you could adjust. 

I mean, if one day you woke up and everything in the world was yellow, it 

would definitely be weird. But after awhile you might be able to just say “Hey, 

one-color world,” and go about your business. But that comparison doesn’t 

really work because there would be major confusion in some areas, like 

recognizing beverages, if everything was yellow. Anyway, in the actual case, 

most of us made the adjustment and moved on. 

Except that, after awhile, it got more—pronounced, would be a good word. 

At first, you were only glimpsing the edges of the other side of things. And 

even those were in hazy outline, like a degraded holograph. So you weren’t 

100% sure that you hadn’t been seeing them all along, but just hadn’t noticed. 

Sort of like, when you feel a slight pain or ache, you sometimes think that 

maybe it has been with you for some time after all. Or as if you realized, 

through some accidental circumstance, that your peripheral vision was broader 

than you had realized up until now. Only, of course, your periphery wasn’t the 

issue in this case. 

* With acknowledgments to Edmund Husserl. 



So you could still tell jokes and enjoy life for a certain time, even as it became 

definite that your view of the other side of things was extending further and 

getting more solid. Color and texture, and so on. Some people stuck it out 

longer than others, though. Because it did get harder to cope. 

In the early days, I went to a lot of movies. So did other people, I noticed. It 

was because things in the movies don’t have any thickness to see around. So 

everything in the movies stayed normal, or as normal as things in the movies 

ever were. So it was quite a relief to go to the movies. 

But later on, as the whole process advanced, and people were starting to lose it 

publicly and you really had to suck it up and hang tough just to navigate, I 

stopped going to the movies. It was too heartbreaking, the discrepancy. For 

me it was. When you went outside afterwards there was just no ignoring how 

drastic the change was. You couldn’t help but notice that you were seeing a lot 

of the other side of everything. The disparity was so stark. For me anyway, the 

movies caused this intense longing for the simpler times I had taken for 

granted, so I stopped going. 

But plenty of people reacted the opposite. They went more and more often. 

They went from one stall in the multiplex to the other to the other. If they 

could afford it. The movie theater people began to make sure that people 

bought another ticket each time, though. But they also began to stay open 24 

hours, which was good for people who could afford it. And they built more of 

them too. 

Other people stayed in their rooms a lot, in the dark with the TV or the VCR. 

After a certain point, the TV—the live TV—got really strange, though. There 

had obviously been some policy decision, and live TV people continued to 

pretend that nothing had changed. It got more and more obvious that they 

were pretending. You could see them trying not to look at things around them 

on the set. And they began to stare at their own monitors much more, to 

communicate with each other through the screens on the set much more. You 

could see that it was getting to be a struggle for them too. Not good to watch. 

Not helpful. 

But just the VCR could be really good. If you had just the VCR on, and the 

rest of the room was dark, it was almost completely okay. You knew where 

stuff was, just being guided by shadowy shapes was enough, and everything felt 



the same, so you could really be almost completely normal in a darkly 

shadowed room. That’s why so many people just went ahead and put out their 

eyes in the later stages. Many did it in groups. They ritualized it and, 

afterwards, when they were all together, touching in the dark, they could really 

say good-bye. Except that some of those groups went into panic, so that was a 

gamble too. Any way you chose was going to be a gamble. 

It wasn’t transparency, that’s the what you think when it’s first described, that 

things are going transparent, starting at the edges and then spreading further 

around. That wouldn’t have been a comfortable experience either, of course, 

but at least it’s conceivable. I remember once, when things were pretty well 

advanced but not up to any major threshold, some of us were starting to form 

groups, and we were talking to this woman who was still insisting that she 

didn’t notice anything specific, just a mood of disorientation. A lot of people 

went through a long stage of that, by the way. Something like that famous 

psychology experiment where you give people playing cards that are normal 

except the hearts are colored black and the clubs are colored red. People just go 

ahead and play poker or canasta or whatever, apparently without noticing. But 

their blood pressure and galvanic skin responses go haywire, and they get 

irritable and anxious and they want to stop playing all the time, but they never 

realize why. Sort of like that, except of course, you couldn’t stop playing in 

this case. 

Anyway, about this woman, I’m pretty sure she was just in denial. Her body 

language had that wound-up stretching quality and her eyes tended to rest at 

unlikely angles on the sky or some other blank expanse. When she had to deal 

directly with your face or with some object, her eyes had that stare-right-past-it 

look that allowed you to see something just enough to be able to use it 

without acknowledging it particularly. But I couldn’t be sure, of course; you 

couldn’t see what other people were seeing, so you could never be sure. 

Anyway, we were trying to describe it to her and she seemed to be trying to 

understand. She kept saying things like “You mean things are getting thinner 

and you can see through them?” 

She was trying to strike a bargain. If we would accept her description, she 

might be willing to admit the whole business. Otherwise, she wasn’t going to 

see it. But our group was committed. We were not one of the soft groups. 

That’s not it, we said, you just see around, you see the other side. But that’s 

impossible, she kept saying, my eyes are on this side. That was the big item for 



her, her own eyes—her outlook, so to speak. Sometimes she would touch her 

eyes. People like her didn’t last. 

But transparent things were good to look at, by the way. At least at first they 

were. Especially if whatever was around you wasn’t distinct from other things 

around you. Like in a room with the same wall paper all over, or sitting in the 

bushes. Then you could see the beginnings of the other side of the transparent 

thing—say a glass ball—but what you saw through it wasn’t that different 

from what you saw through your side, so the overall experience was pretty 

normal. When things got more advanced, though, you didn’t ever want to 

look at a transparent thing, of course. Or mirrors. 

Rushing water, say in fountains or waterfalls, was good too. Also fire. Seeing 

the other side of them was like seeing more of the same. But more. That 

feeling you used to get in normal times, watching a stream or campfire—the 

same feeling, but richer. That kind of thing became a point of pride for the 

hard groups. Others might gather under some phony explanation, but, in the 

hard groups, you were expected to meet it straight on and even revel in it. It 

was this feeling that, if you could just ride it, go with it—then you would reap 

some reward. And also the feeling that it didn’t matter what you did anyway, 

so you might as well enjoy it for as long as you could. You can see the machomasochism 

potential. The ultimate analogy would be jumping off a really tall 

building and deciding to enjoy the fall. 

So when we discovered intense experience enhancements, like rushing water or 

fires, we spent hours extolling the sensations and our own daring. Actually, I 

didn’t last with my hard group past a certain point. It got too forced. But it 

was a brave choice, you have to admit that. 

Another good thing was to be in the desert or by the ocean. Wide open spaces, 

in other words. If you looked into the distance and not at your immediate 

surroundings, well, the effect of expansion and release that you got in normal 

times had only been a muffled intimation. Large objects in the distance, 

mountains, say, and, most of all, the horizon itself on a clear day, the folding 

over and around of one’s vision on so grand a scale—it was like a dream of 

flying, soaring, but you were a great flock. 

So a lot of people gathered on beaches and deserts. When these places started 

to jam up, of course it defeated the purpose. There were crowd control 

problems, sanitation and so on—so that whole movement didn’t last long. 



Some people just went out in boats, just went out to sea with supplies. I don’t 

know how it went for them in the later stages. 

And, yes, night got to be very welcome. That became when most people went 

out and mingled and did their errands. Of course, there had always been a 

welcome kind of night, the kind that comes after a really oppressive hot day, 

with gentle breezes stirring the trees in the dark around you when you step 

outside. Night in general got to be more like that. The dawn got to be what 

you dreaded. On some level, you kept expecting things to be alright again 

when you woke up. But they never were. That was bad. 

In the last stages, the only way you knew the difference between your side and 

the other side of anything was through your body habits. If you let it alone, 

your body knew what it would feel if you touched a thing—for example, that 

you would get a grip on the handle if you reached for the cup this way or that. 

But you had to take it for granted. That’s what I learned the hard way from 

being with someone when he started to touch things just for the reassurance. 

Once he began to do that, he got into this guessing game with himself about 

which side was facing his body and very quickly lost his ability to distinguish 

between the sides. In one afternoon, actually. I tried to distract him when I 

realized what was happening, but he was locked in by then. He would guess 

right a few times, and the relief would start to flow, and the desire for more 

relief would drive him to another flurry of touching, at which point, of course, 

he would miss a few and the fear would come back in that “Oh, god, please, 

not again” way that can be so wearing—and back he would go to testing, 

lining things up one by one after he had figured out with his hands which side 

was which, trying to memorize for each thing which side was which so that 

maybe he could learn how to tell the difference again. Impossible to do it that 

way, of course. It was a knack. 

When he started trying to get me to help him figure it out, I had to cut him 

loose. There was no way I could risk it. But that’s how I learned the 

importance of taking it for granted in my actions that I knew which side was 

which. 

Connected with this was not looking at any part of your own body— 

obviously never in a mirror, but also not in the course of your routine 

activities. The key parts to avoid were your hands and forearms, above all, but 

also your feet and legs if you had to look down for some reason. Luckily, this 

requirement dovetailed with learning how use your eyes in a general way to 



supervise overall performance, locating things, selecting what to reach for and 

so on, and then letting your hands do the detail work. So you would need to 

be letting your body habits determine which side of a thing you were on at 

exactly the very instant when you needed to turn your eyes away so as not to 

see your own limbs. You got in this groove of looking away just as you 

reached out or stepped down or whatever it was. That coincidence of 

requirements was really what made it possible to continue functioning in the 

later stages. 

Touching your own body parts, on the other hand, as opposed to looking at 

them, was probably the most grounding thing you could do. Touching 

anything was good, of course. That quickly became the source of your 

moment-to-moment faith. If you had ever wondered how blind people could 

possibly “read” those little Braille dots in the elevator, you didn’t wonder 

anymore! Stroking and holding things in public was acceptable right from the 

beginning. You could continue to conduct normal transactions with someone 

who was doing that—it didn’t really disrupt the interaction any more than if 

they had an unusual haircut, say, or an especially striking fashion accessory. But 

touching your own body parts was different because it wasn’t so easy to 

overlook in social situations, so for a long time people mostly did that in 

private or at least in the dark. Then it became okay to do in crowds, because of 

the anonymity. In the end, it didn’t matter any more and people did whatever 

they needed to do. 

Of course, if you were just rubbing your hands together or stroking your arms 

or keeping them folded snugly, that was okay anywhere right from the 

beginning. It just got more common. What wasn’t publicly acceptable for a 

long time was feeling slowly all over and around as far as possible, the way 

people learned to do almost by instinct, feeling not just with your hands but 

with your arms, and especially all over your face and head, and your legs and 

feet feeling each other, and also pressing your back, your spine, really hard 

against something solid. Your spine became very important. 

Reciprocal touching in social situations, handshaking and so on, that ended 

quickly. It led to clinging and violence. Besides, there were pairs and groups 

forming everywhere for all that. Almost everyone who lasted gravitated into 

the touching groups during the last stages. But, though comforting, such 

groups were risky, subject to obsessive pacts or outbursts of impulse that 

couldn’t be contained. The most durable groups prohibited both looking and 

touching, relying instead on conversation—and, of course, the singing. They 



stayed together and found some peace, right up to the end. I was in one of 

those groups, thank God. It just worked out that way, by accidental 

encounter. We gave ourselves in gratitude to music, and to words, which took 

no sides. We dwelt together in our voices and the stories that we told, stories 

of our world remembered. There were many beautiful moments. 

Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor at Harper's magazine. He teaches 

at The Dalton School and at the Draper Graduate Program at New York 

University. His most recent essay, "The Romance of Empire," appeared in 

Harper's, July 2003. "Hannah's Birthday" is forthcoming in Fiction, Summer 

2003. He is working on a book for Bloomsbury called Mediated, due out in the 

Fall of 2004. 


Two Poems 

by 

Andy Clausen 

WCW BLUES 

Sexual lust may weaken me 

but I've always come back 

to my senses 

Sweet Free Emotion 

no one is corny 

here Sister, Brother 

It permeates! 

It melds and it 

coats and immerses 

It entwines 

and conceives 

It is gestating 

It is birthing! 

It's composing 

It's decomposing 

It has become 

One with 

the language! 

Young I felt 

I felt It 

I felt young 

With the super special 

extra souled tenacity 

of beneficial madmen 

That It, Yes It 

would come easy 

easy as sunrise 

We're not just talking 

Andy Clausen 


lessed by the Muse 

here 

We're talking 

All Out 

Eternal Verse 

We're talking 

The Best 

The Best Ever 

I didn't want to quit 

my day job 

for a literary prize 

at South Sophomore State 

nor a token wild man be 

at the Festival of Squares 

Andy Clausen 

When I wrote tragedy 

It was earth shaking 

It was Epic 

You may have seen an oafish pretentious 

unlearned freak 

a trouble maker 

A bombed comedian 

a no literary value boor 

with severe problems 

Last night I tried to take a bottle of Rum 

to the Clear Light 

I am no longer possessed of an extra soul 

Those tragedies and lonelinesses I romanticized 

are real and pathetic 

The entire reason I deal with the outward show 

this Maya this supposed life 

in front of me 

The melodrama of art 

The death in life 

The purpose and cause 

Is aching like a mother fucker 

Now I know they really were against us 


Andy Clausen 

They had scorn and repugnance for the poor 

They didn't want their literature 

open to the creole cultures 

the underground metaphor 

They really didn't want the lower classes 

to rise 

Okay cartoonize, abstract, or use us 

rise as an individual maybe 

but as a class never 

This must be the working class writer blues 

This must be the working class blues 

This must the working class 

This must be the blues 

INSIDE OTISVILLE 

First in-class writing 

at the correctional facility 

(State Prison) 

I see 11 men--- 11 good men 

How do I know they're good? 

How does anyone know--- 

I see the concertina wire, its cutting music 

I can't hear, only see 

I see the mind of a heart 

jump out of a hand 

the dream not deferred 

but exploding 

a load lightened by a gram 

an ounce a mote a speck 

and the heavy load is carried by 

a body that is not mine 

any longer 

a ghost carrying a cross 

I dream refrigerators and big deep couches 

and free dentists and the time I'll be home 


and her arms 

I will not share--- but somehow 

that embrace that breath 

living inside the breath 

It will survive and enter the waters 

Andy Clausen 

I see the faces I've seen in the bars 

the off track betting parlors 

and littered parks, that I've seen 

down in the rust and black smoke 

down in the alligator warehouses 

up again on that gold dust sidewalk 

in the car next to me entering the Mid 

Town Tunnel selling flowers, papers 

at the Tri-Boro toll booth 

The face on the working streets of South Ozone Park 

that catch my eyes and turn away as do mine 

I see a little stream of light with floating lint butterflies 

and milky ways of insect fragments 

A woman's face in a piece of bread 

a dead man's last words in the grain 

of the sidewalks 

the grey and the dull 

institutional green 

What does that mean? 

What is a mistake that is paid for? 

What is the price society has set? 

I'm not society---I don't even like society 

I want to live in the Future 

freedom is another chance 

freedom is a big black bird 

over the rooftops 

undaunted by the smoky grim spume 

of strange industry 

Evil is not human 

Let me 12 years old again be 

and I'll show you a different world 

destiny 

Let me live That 


I would give you how the moon 

is high 

How it is free to do whatever it wants 

and the only sounds are 

water air insects wind 

the weeping leaves of grass 

the laughing of machineless nights 

A festival of sleep walking 

a dream not a dream 

Andy Clausen 

Andy Clausen is the author of nine books of poetry, including 40th Century 

Man: Selected Verse 1996-1966 (Autonomedia, 1997), and Without Doubt 

(Zeitgeist Press, 1991, introduction by Allen Ginsberg). A coeditor of Poems for 

the Nation (Seven Stories Press, 2000), Clausen is a construction worker and 

teaches poetry in public schools and prisons in New York. 


C 

Kurt Jacobsen 

Review 

Terror and Liberalism 

by Paul Berman 

reviewed by 

Kurt Jacobsen 

an’t we all just get along? If not, do you mind awfully if we do away with 

you? Paul Berman argues that realists and leftists alike ignore irrational 

forces—“pathological mass movements”—that motivate global violence. He 

accordingly urges that liberal Western societies intervene militarily to stamp 

out these threats with, as the venerable saying goes, extreme prejudice. 

Berman delves into the extraordinarily complex question of terrorism and, in 

so doing, displays a desperate need to occupy the middle ground no matter 

where it may be. This hoary tactic can place one in strange, and even silly, 

positions. Where exactly is the middle ground regarding mass murder or 

female circumcision or slavery? (Spartacists may be annoying extremists but 

was Spartacus an extremist?) So Berman prudently takes the precaution of 

controlling where he winds up by dictating where the loony left and right 

margins are supposedly set. 

In Terror and Liberalism Berman tirelessly reiterates whatever the mainstream 

American media finds fit to print. Saddam in 1991 was poised to roll over 

Saudi Arabia. Arab problems are internally generated because heaven forfend 

that anyone mention colonial legacies or neo-imperial ploys. Saddam “threw 

the inspectors out” in 1998 (when they were withdrawn under severe White 

House pressure). The U.S. consequently “complained from the sidelines”— 

from which it had infiltrated CIA agents into UNSCOM. Scapegoating is 

Saddam’s “special genius”—although CIA Director George Tenet may beg to 

differ these days. 

Saddam gassed “his own” people, although most Kurds, as the gory record 

over many decades shows, hardly viewed themselves as “his” people, or even 

as Iraqis. Gas, of course, evokes gasps of horror in the West, partly because 

the West cannot be accused of using it, at least not since the RAF lavishly 

gassed rebel Kurdish and Arab villages in the conveniently forgotten 1920s. 

Even so stodgy a journal as Foreign Affairs noted in 1999 that economic 


Kurt Jacobsen 

sanctions have killed more people than all other weapons of mass destruction 

combined. Yet this daintier, distant form of death-dealing doesn’t appear to 

faze Berman, or most Westerners, at all. Berman knows, and plays to, his 

audience. 

Berman also recycles the tall tale that Clinton persuaded Barak to withdraw 

from “all but small portions of the West bank” so, accordingly, there is no 

rational “explanation for Arafat’s refusal of this magnanimous offer.” 

Palestinians do not want peace; ergo, they crave jihadic glory. Berman further 

speculates that they sought wider borders; a ravenous Palestinian imperialism 

clawing at Israel, or Lebanon or even New Jersey. As for Israel, anything 

short of Waffen SS behavior is construed as a heartwarming testament to its 

unparalleled humanity. Jenin was not Lidice; hence, the Israelis there 

accomplished a “breakthrough in relatively civilized army tactics.” Can 

Israelis, who hail the stand at Massada, really fail to grasp what happens to a 

populace which feels it has its back to the wall? 

Suicide bombers are a stunning inexplicable barbarity who “produced a 

philosophical crisis, among everyone around the world who wanted to believe 

that a rational logic governs the world,” says Berman. One can say much the 

same for many who watched the Bush team at work after 9/11. Berman 

seems to believe that the degree of civilization is measured by the distance at 

which a state neatly can kill. One gets the impression that if Palestinians had 

a nifty weapons lab devising remote control devices, Berman would think 

better of them. By contrast, Berman sees Israel as a perfectly reasonable 

liberal state, a judgment only about half of Israelis may grant him at any 

given time, depending on who is in charge. 

Berman laments that “war and hysteria” work to keep fearful citizens 

distracted and obedient, but he imagines this ancient formula applies only to 

Middle East tyrannies. Berman, like Christopher Hitchens, champions an 

“anti-totalitarian war” and, thus flatteringly framed, who but fools and tools 

of tyrants can object? The dark but distinct possibility that overtly noble wars 

really would be conducted according to realpolitik tenets and exploitative 

aims seems lost on Berman who likes to chide leftists who fret about 

“America’s imperial motives, about the greed of big corporations, and their 

influence in White House policy; and could not get beyond their worries.” 

Apparently after 9/11 no one was so depravedly partisan as to attach their 

own agenda to the security crisis for their own advantage. Pay no attention to 


Kurt Jacobsen 

the man behind the curtain, Berman admonishes, watch the impressive 

fireworks and shut up. 

Berman is wary of realists, too. Realists figure that “world politics is driven by 

wealth, power, and geography” (although a lot of realists overlook the role of 

wealth). While it may be unwise to start or end with realist precepts about 

power, one cannot ignore them, as Berman does, when examining how the 

world works. To characterize the first Gulf War as fought in defense of 

Muslims in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is mad hatter logic—like saying the 

U.S. cavalry wiped out the Indians to protect Chinese coolies toiling on the 

railroads. In this same vein, Berman imagines that America sided with the 

Palestinans. He even quotes an Israeli negotiator lauding Clinton for doing 

more for the Palestinians than any one else. It’s rather like a participant 

praising the diplomatic feats of Chamberlain at Munich. 

Turning to Islam after a brief detour through Camus, Berman contends that 

“pan-Arabism and the philosophical roots of Europe’s right wing 

nationalisms were the same.” Islamic extremism (unlike other religious 

extremisms?) preaches utter obedience to an unrealizable ideal, and so 

generates totalitarianism. Totalitarianism and terror are the same. So terror, 

as defined by the White House, is totalitarian. Naturally, Berman exempts 

state-sponsored terrorism. All progress, he also says, depended on “a freedom 

that recognizes the existence of other freedoms too.” This sounds okay, but 

he blithely proceeds to applaud “the idea of progress toward ever more 

freedom, ever more rationality, ever more wealth”—as if these pursuits were 

not difficult to coordinate, or were not contradictory. 

To sustain the pretty notion that liberal democratic societies cannot do 

systematically illiberal things, he predictably taps a “heart of darkness” 

argument about King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo. There, liberal 

colonialists, evidently demented by the primitive milieu, took up “murder for 

murders sake.” No, it was murder for profit’s sake. They operated in environs 

where it was expeditious to work natives to death to extract resources quickly. 

Liberals aren’t immune to such tempting incentives. Why that would be 

irrational. One would never guess when reading Berman that the simpleminded 

Western optimists of the nineteenth century, as he describes them, 

swiftly conquered 85% of the earth. 

Berman’s knowledge of Islam is, to say the least, shaky. He states: “Islamism 

got under way in Pakistan in the 1930s (organizationally in 1941),” when 


Kurt Jacobsen 

Pakistan was still only a flickering gleam in Jinnah’s eye. (Perhaps he means 

the Punjab, or part of it, but how did this get past the editors?) Pious 

people—one can be pious about a secular ideology too—are very scary 

critters mostly because their piety usually conceals nasty motives. 

Throughout the wobbly course of this book he writes as if religion or 

ideology alone dictates action, with no attention needed for underlying 

political or economic drives. 

Sayyid Qutb, Berman’s key Islamic figure, was a sort of Muslim Straussian, 

an elitist textual interpreter who spun out an Islam-based theory of 

alienation. Here was the very same siren song every cult belts out: we offer 

safe harbor in the bosum of Abraham or Allah or L. Ron Hubbard in 

exchange for every earthly thing you’ve got. Qutb blamed Socrates’ belief in 

reason for the ensuing split between materiality and spirit, which inflicted a 

“hideous schizophrenia” on poor humanity. Even so, Qtub had his lucid 

moments: as when remarking that John Foster Dulles “wants merely to 

mobilize a religiously-veneered patriotism that might protect the western 

order from communism.” The Saudis too were keen to keep their restive 

populace in line via importing Qutb’s severe brand of religion. The big 

question is how widespread is this doctrine? 

Berman says that the governing elite of Pakistan (presumably Zia) viewed 

Islamist fundamentalists as better neighbors than secular Marxist ones. 

(Washington certainly hoped so too, and dished out cash and arms 

accordingly.) Berman claims that Shariah law in Khomeini’s Iran after 1979 

“excited admiration and envy in the Arab and Muslim world.” If so, why was 

it not instituted in every Muslim majority state? Berman says that the 

Taliban were celebrated through the Islamic world.” Evidence, please. His 

whole case rests on the uniqueness of the Islamic fundamentalist threat. So he 

mentions Sadat’s assassination by a Muslim fundamentalist in 1981 but 

omits that of Rabin by a Jewish fundamentalist in 1994. Berman’s answer for 

all our worldly woes is “pathological mass movements.” This diagnosis allows 

him to remark on “communism morphing into nationalism” in former 

Yugoslavia without bothering to pry into the role that neo-liberal Western 

banks had in demolishing the federation in the first place. 

Berman scolds the sappy hand-wringing Left for being seduced by Stalin, 

Mao and Pol Pot—all of whom at one time or another were allied with the 

U.S. government (which, as we all know, was in thrall to sappy handwringing 

leftists). He then castigates a faction of 1930s French socialists for 


Kurt Jacobsen 

an imprudent anti-war stance but somehow fails to mention the French 

Right’s hearty slogan “Better Hitler than Blum.” He blandly compares peace 

demonstrations today to 1930s appeasers. Indeed, dissenters are pictured as 

nothing less than dyspeptic collaborators with the rabid Taliban whom the 

West subsequently did not so much bomb as bribe into submission. So those 

teeming Muslim fanatics know the value of a dollar after all which, 

perversely, is a hopeful sign. Nonetheless, Berman envisions a long “war 

between liberalism and the apocalyptic and phantasmagorical movements.” 

Noam Chomsky is pilloried for explaining “every last quirk of human 

behavior by invoking a tiny number of factors,” unlike, say, the professions of 

economics or sociology or political science. Berman, by contrast, narrows our 

buzzing, blooming confusion down tidily to one factor, those darned 

pathological mass movements. So he apparently believes that Pol Pot would 

have slouched toward Phnom Penh for his own inscrutable Oriental reasons, 

and without the midwivery of B-52 carpet bombing or bloody “incursions.” 

Nothing distresses Berman more than the fact that while American media 

sagely regard Chomsky as a “crank,” much of the rest of the planet treats him 

as a voice worth heeding. But what ultimately becomes crystal clear is that for 

Berman the whole planet now is pretty much a “pathological mass political 

movement” mobilizing irrationally to resist the liberal national interests of 

the United State, as ordained by born again George W. Bush. 

Kurt Jacobsen is research fellow in the Department of Political Science at the 

University of Chicago. 


T 

Jason Schulman 

Review 

Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism 

by Joshua Muravchik 

reviewed by 


here are, to be sure, intelligent right-wing critiques of socialism, as both 

concept and practice. Joshua Muravchik’s The Rise and Fall of Socialism, 

however, does not constitute such a critique. Its greatest failing is that it 

simply has nothing new to say, and as is to be expected, what it does have to 

say is largely wrong. 

Supposedly, Joshua Muravchik is to be taken seriously because he comes 

from a socialist family and he was the national chairman of the youth section 

of the Socialist Party, USA, from 1968 until 1973. But Muravchik’s SP was a 

quite different animal than it was in the days of Eugene V. Debs, dominated 

as it was by supporters of the Vietnam War. Anti-Communism had become 

the sole motivating factor for “socialists” of Muravchik’s stripe, hence their 

general move toward neoconservatism was perfectly predictable. Like his 

erstwhile comrades from the former SP (now inaccurately calling itself “Social 

Democrats USA”), Muravchik has moved from anti-Communism to a 

wholesale rejection of all strands of socialism. His understanding of 

“socialism” largely reduces it to a notion of state- (or communal colony-) 

driven social engineering to achieve earthly perfection. There have always 

been what the American Marxist Hal Draper called “the two souls of 

socialism”: that of “enlightened” elites autocratically seeking to create 

“rational” societies, and that of ordinary people working toward a world 

where all institutions are accountable and socially-produced wealth is 

democratically controlled by those who create it. Muravchik sees only elites, 

and the “other soul” of socialism is left unexamined. Do not expect to find an 

index entry for “workers’ self-management” in this book. 

Little of what Muravchik says about Gracchus Babeuf or Robert Owen is 

controversial. Babeuf, as Draper once wrote, spearheaded the idea of the 



Educational Dictatorship of benevolent anti-capitalists. Owen was also elitist, 

but Muravchik is considerably easier on him because he was a nonrevolutionary 

who “recognized that there was no need to seize power. 

Endowed with some land and capital, socialists could form their own 

communities.” Commenting on the failure of Owen’s utopian society, New 

Harmony—and, later in the book, the Israeli kibbutzim—Muravchik offers 

the traditional “socialism goes against human nature” canard: “If men were 

angels then an economy might succeed without selfish incentives, but if men 

were angels it would not matter whether the economy succeeded since they 

would have no material needs.” Whatever relevance this may have to the 

socialism of utopian colonists, it is irrelevant as a critique of political 

democratic socialism, which has always acknowledged the importance of 

“selfish” incentives under conditions of (relative) scarcity. Men and women 

are indeed not angels, and among capitalism’s problems is that it encourages 

them to be devils: the market encourages every individual to regard and treat 

all others as means to earn his or her living, just as it compels every firm to 

act as if it were the center of the universe, never mind the “externalities.” 

Muravchik’s analysis of Marx and Engels similarly lacks depth. Besides 

attributing the phrase “property is theft” to “Marxism”—it was the anarchist 

forefather Pierre Joseph-Proudhon who coined it—he rehashes the 

controversy of Marx’s use of anti-Semitic language, specifically the stereotype 

of Jews as merchant-hucksters. Muravchik fails to mention that the language 

of Part II of Marx’s On the Jewish Question followed the view of the Jews’ role 

given in an essay On the Money System which had just been written by Moses 

Hess, one of the progenitors of Zionism. Subsequent Zionists used similar 

phraseology. 1 Marx supported legal equality and civil rights for Jews; his 

analysis was that Jews were essentially a commercial class within medieval 

Europe, and the Jewish religion was an ideology reflecting the outlook of this 

class. While it is certainly true that Marx wrote terrible things in his personal 

letters to Engels, such as his derision of German socialist leader Ferdinand 

Lassalle as a “Jewish nigger,” even as he publicly opposed black slavery in the 

United States, this merely proves that Marx was, in fact, a nineteenth century 

European. There was nothing anti-Semitic in the politics of Marx and 

Engels—unless one considers atheism to be objectively anti-Semitic, and even 

then, Marx opposed the attempt by Mikhail Bakunin and his followers to 

make atheism an official doctrine of the International Workingmen’s 

Association. Whatever Marx’s personal failings, the movement that took his 

name was in no way anti-Semitic. August Bebel famously attacked anti- 

Semitism as “the socialism of fools”; Karl Kautsky denounced New 



Testament authors for demonizing the Jews and inciting hatred against them 

as the murderers of Christ in his book, The Foundations of Christianity; Lenin 

wrote “it is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people” but “the 

capitalists of all countries.” 2 

Muravchik claims that Marx and Engels “reconnected socialism to the thrill 

of violence”—as if they ever supported violence for its own sake, or ever said 

that countries which were sufficiently democratic and non-militarized might 

achieve socialism by peaceful means. He dismisses Capital as “ponderous” 

and “blather”; one wonders what the noted conservative economist Joseph 

Schumpeter saw in it. (Of course, Schumpeter could understand the 

difference between use-value and exchange-value; Muravchik is confounded 

by such stuff. Then again, he terms class struggle to be “high theory,” i.e., not 

real.) 

He attacks the duo for seeing themselves as “leaders of the proletariat”— 

never part of Marx and Engels’s self-description—despite their lack of 

working class roots. Indeed, this is a frequent theme in Muravchik’s book: 

real workers always become, at the most, reformist social democrats, while 

revolutionaries are always from the affluent classes (this former member of 

the American SP seems to know nothing of Eugene Debs’s background) and 

socialism itself is ultimately an ideology imported into the working class by 

intellectuals from outside it. Irony of ironies, Muravchik’s view is a sort of 

inverted Trotskyism: it is socialism, not ordinary reformism, which represents 

the influence of “alien class forces” on the proletariat! Missing in all this is 

any acknowledgement of the commitment by Marx and Engels to “winning 

the battle of democracy,” as The Communist Manifesto puts it, or any 

examination of their role in transforming socialism from a doctrine of 

wealthy colony-founders and secret conspirators to a doctrine of workingclass 

self-emancipation from exploitation. A serious critique of Marx and 

Engels would comment on their real flaws: their denigration of the role of 

moral values and individual rights in promoting socialist goals and their 

belief that an abundant communist society would transcend the need to 

deliberate politically about its economic priorities. Instead, Muravchik merely 

offers the conservative same-old same-old. 

Muravchik is far nicer to Eduard Bernstein, who embraced the goals of 

“more political and social legislation, better pay and working conditions” 

while abandoning the idea of a socialist “final goal.” While in retrospect, 

Bernstein’s rejection of orthodox Marxist teleology was correct, the ultimate 



result of the logic of Bernstein’s politics has lately been turned against its own 

reformist ends. For if the logic of Bernsteinian social democracy has been, as 

Stephen Eric Bronner puts it, “the achievement of incremental reforms 

through calculable compromises with the party as broker,” 3 the role of social 

democracy is now, in our age of capitalist globalization, at best to polish the 

sharpest edges of corporate power—a role embraced by Tony Blair, whom 

Muravchik praises as an “undertaker” of socialism. Similarly, Clement Atlee 

gets off easy because he was a gradualist social democrat, though still deluded 

about the ostensible benefits of public ownership. The difficulties of the Atlee 

government and, decades later, the sudden about-face of the radical-reformist 

Mitterand government of France supposedly illustrate the folly of socialist 

interference in the market. In reality, they are simply examples of the 

perennial dilemma that socialist governments face: the specter of capital 

flight, the constraints imposed by the need for continued private investment. 

The twentieth century’s exemplar of the radical-democratic “other soul” of 

socialism, Rosa Luxemburg, is dismissed by Muravchik as a “child of 

privilege” whose mantra was “the spontaneity of the masses,” an oft-stated 

myth. Lenin, of course, is demonized, and while Lenin’s thought and 

political practice deserves sharp criticism, Muravchik mostly offers the 

traditional fallacies, claiming that the Bolshevik revolution was a mere coup 

d’etat and attributing all its tragedies to Leninism’s innate evil and nothing to 

the civil war in which the Bolsheviks were fighting a full scale invasion by 

fourteen different states. 4 Lenin—who supposedly ordered “tens of thousands 

of deaths,” though no proof is offered—gets blamed not only for Stalinism 

but also for fascism because of his supposed similarities with Mussolini, a 

former member of the Italian Socialist Party; the Fascists supposedly believed 

themselves the “true heirs” of Lenin despite their anti-Marxism. Muravchik 

goes so far as to claim that “Mussolini’s rule rested far more on popular 

support than Lenin’s.” All he proves in his chapter on fascism is that the 

“logic” of anti-internationalist anti-capitalism leads in fascist directions. 5 And 

while few will disagree with Muravchik’s assessment of the bureaucraticallydirected 

“African socialism” of the late Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, 

he takes no notice that even Tanzania has suffered much less than some of its 

neighbors who never strayed from the World Bank/IMF orthodoxy, such as 

Rwanda and Burundi. The “free market” has devastated postcolonial Africa. 

Capitalism has failed Africa as surely as has “Ujamaa.” 

The heroes of Muravchik’s book are Samuel Gompers and George Meany, 

for their role in making America “impervious to socialism.” “Pure and simple 



unionism,” Gompers style, supposedly represented “true” trade unionism 

uncorrupted by middle-class socialist intellectuals who cared nothing for 

“meliorating the immediate conditions of the workers.” The historic 

opposition of Gompers’s American Federation of Labor to the inclusion of 

women, blacks, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, or most unskilled 

laborers in the labor movement is ignored, as is the autocratic nature of the 

unionism that he consolidated. Meany is praised for being an enthusiastic 

Cold Warrior who purged Communists from American unions and 

“rid[ding] the movement of racial discrimination.” The truth is that Meany 

opposed the historic March on Washington in 1963, and whatever efforts he 

did put toward anti-racist measures—such as lobbying for the 1965 Civil 

Rights Bill—were done in order to stave off criticisms for having done little 

in the past; he was far more interested in fighting Communists (and left 

critics) than fighting racists. Muravchik, of course, identifies with Meany’s 

support of the Vietnam War and his animosity toward the peace movement 

(Meany once denounced peaceniks as “fags”). He glosses over the merger of 

the foreign operations of the AFL-CIO with the counterintelligence sections 

of the CIA and their reactionary consequences both in Latin America and at 

home. He repeats the falsehood that Meany molded the labor movement 

“into a mighty force in American life.” 

The truth is that, as Paul Buhle writes, labor’s support for U.S. imperialism 

“paid virtually all of its [job-creating] benefits in the short run, and to a 

relatively select proportion of working people. Rather than reproducing 

union loyalty, the defense-linked rise of Sun Belt industry created large 

pockets of white working class conservatism, just as big-ticket construction of 

suburbs reinforced racial boundaries and in several different ways greatly 

diminished prospects of union democracy. The environmental recklessness of 

everything-for-production, taken with hypocritical race policies and a 

staggering indifference to the expanding clerical (especially female) sectors of 

the workforce, made the labor movement increasingly unpalatable and 

unsuccessful as time went on.” 6 The weakness of the U.S. labor movement 

today is the legacy of Cold War business unionism. To this, Muravchik is 

indifferent; it is, after all, working class conservatism that he supports, or 

more precisely working class support for the “American counter-model” to 

socialism. As the Stalinists of yesteryear saw the USSR or China as the 

Vanguard Country, so Muravchik sees America as the Vanguard, the envy of 

the world. No, America has “not always been loved,” but its imperialism is 

only “supposed.” Given how many people around the world currently see the 



U.S. as the world’s main danger to peace, the publication of such comments 

could not have been more ill timed. 

Muravchik sees the dying out of the Israeli kibbutzim as the final nail in 

socialism’s coffin. But the kibbutzim, regardless of their adoption of the 

formula “to each according to their needs” (an impossibility under conditions 

of scarcity) or adoption of communal childrearing (not much of a priority 

outside of utopian colonies), were hardly pure institutions. In 1964, ninetytwo 

percent of kibbutzim were affiliated to companies which sold goods 

produced for a profit. This profit ended up in the hands of companies such as 

Koor (a major company of construction and manufacturing company) and 

AMPAL (American Israel Corporation, a finance company that directed U.S. 

capital investment in Israel), not Israeli workers. During the 1960s, more 

than fifty percent of kibbutz labor was wage labor, not voluntary labor, with 

the “dirty jobs” performed by foreign Jewish volunteers. This is not to 

mention the kibbutzim’s role in helping the Haganah army to drive out Arab 

inhabitants who had not already fled, confiscating their land, and later 

destroying the remaining houses—not exactly behavior exemplifying 

proletarian internationalism. 7 And the increasing social inequality in Israel, 

mirroring that in the U.S., goes unmentioned by Muravchik. 

Muravchik’s book ends with a return to the theme of socialism-as-religion, 

stating that in contrast to traditional religion, socialism “lacks any internal 

code of conduct to limit what believers may do. The socialist narrative turned 

history into a morality play without the morality.” Democratic socialism, he 

says, is a contradiction in terms; socialism is inevitably coercive. Of course, 

capitalism is coercive—it is based upon the coercion of market forces, backed 

up by state power. History has shown that capitalism is compatible with the 

most coercive possible governments, including ones that claim to be 

“socialist.” Capitalism is itself innately authoritarian. But the whole point of 

socialism, when it has not been hijacked by authoritarians, is not the elite 

engineering of the “New Man,” but the full democratization of political and 

economic power; indeed, the end of power itself as the organizing principle 

of social life. 8 This is the core of the “other soul” of socialism. It is still worth 

fighting for. 



Notes 

1 See Hal Draper, “Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype,” in Karl Marx’s 

Theory of Revolution, Vol.1: State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly 

Review Press, 1977), pp. 591-608. 

2 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972) p. 

252. 

3 Stephen Eric Bronner, Socialism Unbound, 2nd Edition (Boulder: Westview 

Press, 2000), p. 65. 

4 “With the country isolated within the international community, facing 

economic collapse and internal revolts, it was no wonder that the Bolsheviks 

should have become obsessed with unity, discipline, economic efficiency, and 

the administrative centralization of power.” Bronner, ibid., pp. 96-97. 

5 Muravchik argues that Nazism did not differ from traditional socialisms in 

its “virulence against despised peoples,” citing Marx’s desire for the 

“annihilation” of “Croats, Pandurs, Czechs and similar scum.” The context 

of those comments is the revolutionary upsurge of 1848, when on the 

promise of national autonomy (limited self-government)—and with the 

backing of Tsarist Russia—the Czechs, Croats, Slovenians and Ukrainians 

sided with the Hapsburg monarchy to smash the revolts of the Polish and 

Hungarian nationalists and the democrats of Vienna. Marx and Engels 

opposed the “principle of nationalities” (promulgated by Napoleon) as a 

doctrine that falsely claimed that all nations had the equal historical, 

geographical, political and industrial conditions for a viable independence. 

This doctrine was being used to justify the division and occupation of Poland 

and to incite the Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Czechs. Marx and 

Engels supported the right of the great European nations to independence, 

but nationalities that were not struggling against imperial rule could claim no 

such right. They would never become nations and embark upon their own 

path of independent democratic development. Instead, civilization would be 

imposed on them by the great historic nations. A Darwinian view, perhaps, 

but not analogous to Nazi doctrine. 

6 Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane 

Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (New York: Monthly Review 

Press, 1999), p. 2. 

7 See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1987). 

8 This is how Ralph Miliband puts it in Socialism for a Sceptical Age (London: 

Verso, 1995), p. 57. 



Jason Schulman is a Ph. D. student in Political Science at the Graduate Center, 

CUNY. 


I 

Desmond Macnamara 

Review 

Why Orwell Matters 

By Christopher Hitchens 

Reviewed by 


t might be best, before considering this book, to read something 

Christopher Hitchens wrote earlier this spring as the Iraq invasion loomed: 

There will be no war. There will be a fairly brief 

and ruthless military intervention. The President 

will give an order. The attack will be rapid, 

accurate and dazzling. It will be greeted by the 

majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation” 

Possibly Hitchens makes no claim as a military strategist, though some might 

feel that such a dubious prophecy might call into question his attempt at an 

appraisal of George Orwell’s inner beliefs and motives. One can only imagine 

what Orwell would say about current events, but it is difficult to imagine 

Orwell backing Hitchens, Bush and Blair in that affair. Orwell died in 1950 

and most of his celebrated works were based on events leading to the brink of 

the Cold War—a very different era from present days of woe. Eric Arthur 

Blair (George Orwell) came from a family of British colonial civil servants 

“serving” in Bengal (his father worked for the Opium Department of the 

government of India) in the unanticipated twilight of the empire, an 

institution that started to bleed steadily after the 1916 uprising in Dublin. 

As a child, young Blair, as was the custom, was shipped home from India to 

England (not Scotland, as his name suggests: Perthsire is full of Blairs: Blair 

Gowrie, Blair Athol and so forth) for an education. He very properly was 

installed in a public school, those expensive and very unpublic forcing-beds 

of empire and Latin verbs, where the White Man’s Burden was laid on the 

shoulders of the whitest of white flannels on the cricket field. The best 

educated (or the best connected) formed the administration for successive 

governments which presided over palm and pine. 



There were exceptions emerging from such highfalutin institutions, of course: 

liberals and finally socialists, a valiant though mixed lot, some of whom 

claimed Orwell as one of their own. After public school, Blair joined the 

Burmese Police, the bigoted cruelties and mindset of which drove him 

rapidly back to Europe. A rather notorious event (and essay) involving the 

shooting of a rogue elephant led to his resignation and utter rejection of 

imperialism. This anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian mode remained 

with him until his tragic early death and underlaid his staunch socialist 

beliefs. It also determined his later detestation of Stalinism (begun during the 

Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, but also, one supposes, his earlier doubts 

about Trotskyism, despite his connections with the PUOM in Spain in 

1936). By this time, Eric Blair had morphed promisingly into George 

Orwell. 

He resolutely embarked on an examination of society’s outcasts which 

resulted in Down and Out in London and Paris, which would make you never 

want to work or dine out in a posh restaurant again, and then The Road to 

Wigan Pier, considering the unemployed wasteland of northern England. 

The pier ordinarily is a symbol of English seaside gaiety. Being inland, Wigan 

had no pier, only junctions of derelict canals built in a bygone era of 

prosperity. Keep the Aspidistra Flying opened the lid on the lower middle 

classes, exposing their poverty of thought and their pretensions to 

respectability. (A lamentable condition also to be found in some areas of the 

solid, securely employed workers.) 

When it finally appeared in 1945 after rejections, according to Orwell, by 

four publishers, Animal Farm raised the ire of those (including most people 

in wartime Britain) who hailed our gallant Soviet allies at Stalingrad, and the 

outcry even led to calls for its banning. Imagine that. Published a few years 

later, 1984 was never intended as a satire on socialism, as conservative 

commentators smugly would have it, but as a bleak caricature of an overregulated 

dictatorial society, whatever the “ism” underlying it. The book 

depicted a drab world, heavily administered with a ration of one egg and two 

pieces of cheese a week, unrationed whale steak and a morsel of meat. The 

future offered no flicker of light or hope, and words had all degenerated into 

the stuff of slogans. The post-Yalta world of zones and euphemism seemed to 

a dying tubercular man an era of unconscionable doublespeak. 



Hitchens structures his book into separate essays rather than chronological 

chapters: Orwell on empire, on Englishness, on English medieval heritage, on 

the left and right, on America and on feminism. In the course of this 

judicious categorizing of Orwell’s vision of splendors and frailties, he is 

portrayed, in Hitchens’s rendering, as a slightly cantankerous gentlemen from 

the Shires who soon turns upside down the conventional Tory assumptions 

with which he was overladen. Orwell becomes an unapologetic socialist of 

perceptive honesty who nonetheless rejected anything inconsistent with his 

own views and standards. It earned him enemies, and earned him praise from 

some of those whom he would have despised. 

Every essay stands alone; joined only by Hitchens’s analysis of Orwell’s 

beliefs as descried in his writing. Understandably, there is a multitude of 

judgments trotted out here to be embraced or disdained. On the question of 

Orwell’s attitude to women, for example, Hitchens is absolutely right. The 

women in his novels are dull, unimaginative and universally unintellectual, 

although his late marriage to an Irish woman may have been a mercifully 

happy one. 

This year is the 100th anniversary of Orwell’s birth, and new books are 

appearing. Thomas Pynchon has produced a biography and an intriguing tale 

of espionage is added to the Orwell history after sixty years, by Gordon 

Bowker. Hitchens, however, is more concerned with Orwell’s oeuvre and 

attitudes than with biographical details and Catalonian adventures. Orwell 

too was an essayist and, interestingly, another still widely read essayist is 

being celebrated in London this spring. William Hazlitt’s tombstone has just 

been re-erected in London’s Soho. Both men inspired later writers as well as 

generations of appreciative readers. Neither was an academic—indeed, 

Hazlitt despised academics. Perhaps donnish attitudes were more aridly 

classical in his day. But Orwell was a writer and journalist and chose 

(unhappily for him, happily for us) the Burmese police force to transform his 

view of the world. Why Orwell Matters is a lively guide to Orwell’s thought 

and personality. The treatment of the subjects in the essays is always 

interesting and generally acceptable, even if the some of the author’s recent 

activities may not seem so. The latter need not, in all instances, affect the 

former. 



Desmond MacNamara Irish-born, is a retired lecturer in art, a sculptor, and 

author of five books, including The Book of Intrusions (Dalkey Archive Press, 

1994). He has written for the New Statesman, The Tablet, Studies: An Irish 

Quarterly Review and other periodicals. Several works are on display in the Irish 

National Gallery and National Writer's Museum in Dublin. 


J 

Diana Judd 

Review 

Straw Dogs by John Gray 

Reviewed by 

Diana Judd 

ohn Gray has a bone to pick. His latest book, Straw Dogs, takes aim at a 

host of targets in what appears to be a wholesale deconstruction of human 

thought. Religion, humanism, philosophy, belief in progress (indeed, belief 

in anything), industrialization, even civilization itself has, according to Gray, 

kept us from realizing our true nature: that we are just one more species of 

animal. And since “other animals do not need a purpose in life . . . can we 

not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?” 

In two hundred pages of text, Gray never explains what this means. Instead, 

the reader is treated to an array of disconnected quotations from Aristotle to 

Zarathustra, none of which serve to illustrate a coherent argument. Straw 

Dogs does contain moments where important topics such as the environment 

and the idea of progress, the future of genetic engineering and its effect on 

humanity, and the underlying philosophies of western and eastern religions 

are raised. Yet Gray merely dabbles on the surface of these issues (each of 

which would require a separate volume to explore), content merely to 

mention their existence. The end result is an incoherent book which goes 

nowhere and says very little. Gray’s final message—that humanity’s purpose 

in life should be “simply to see,” yet the human animal “cannot do with out a 

purpose,” is at best anti-climatic and at worst a failure to tie together its 

preceding chapters. 

The book is a string of aphorisms, each varying wildly in both length and 

subject matter. No doubt Gray was influenced by such works as Nietzsche’s 

Human, All Too Human and Adorno’s Minima Moralia, but Straw Dogs lacks 

both the depth and coherence that characterize those two works. What’s 

more, his aphoristic format seems forced. Gray states in his acknowledgments 

that though his thoughts are presented in “fragments,” they are not 

unsystematic. He also writes that the aphorisms may either be read in 

sequence or “dipped into at will.” Whatever his intentions, the overall effect 


Diana Judd 

of his schema is a nearly random flitting from topic to topic, his thoughts 

never alighting long enough to explore any one of them in useful detail. 

Gray’s book contains many inconsistencies and contradictions. Among the 

most egregious is his treatment of science. On the one hand, Gray states that 

“the origins of science are not in rational inquiry but in faith, magic and 

trickery,” while on the other hand he equates science with technology, from 

which, according to Gray, its power flows. While he does not go so far as to 

declare that technology is trickery or magic, the implication is clear. 

Furthermore, his stance that the origins of science lie in magic and trickery 

while its success lies in superior rhetoric betrays a fundamental 

misunderstanding of the history and philosophy of science. It is rather 

surprising that a professor of European Thought at the London School of 

Economics would so thoroughly neglect both Francis Bacon and Rene 

Descartes. 

Another inconsistency lies in Gray’s extensive usage of quotations from both 

western and eastern philosophy to buttress his argument that philosophy is so 

much bunk obscuring the truth about humanity. In addition, he continually 

references Darwin (without once explaining the actual theory of evolution) 

and recent advances in genetic research to illustrate his point that humans are 

merely animals and should consider themselves as such, while at the same 

time relentlessly decrying science and its origins. Apparently, Gray believes 

that neither Darwin’s theory of evolution nor genetic research fall under the 

rubric of science, or for that matter, philosophy as he understands it. 

All in all, Straw Dogs is a confusing book with no useful underlying message. 

While Gray does at times raise some interesting and controversial topics, his 

treatment of them is too brief and shallow to justify a serious perusal of the 

work. No doubt Gray intended Straw Dogs to be a work of popular 

philosophy and not an academic offering. It is a shame that he thinks the 

former must be characterized by inconsistency, contradiction, and 

superficiality. 

Diana Judd received her Ph. D. in Political Science from Rutgers University. 


D 

Robert J. Antonio 

Review 

The Spector of Democracy 

by Dick Howard 

Reviewed by 


ick Howard’s The Spector of Democracy is composed primarily of recent 

essays revised for this volume. They express ideas that he has been 

developing for about three decades. Cutting a broad swath, he critically 

explores the relations between theory, history, and politics. The essays reflect 

his intellectual journey—his early engagements with Marx, the Frankfurt 

School, and, especially, Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis, his later 

works on politics, political judgment, and French and American political 

history, and his current ideas about Marx and political theory after 

communism. Howard’s post-Marxist theoretical argument provides a 

connective thread in the loosely integrated essays. He states that re-engaging 

Marx is timely in a “post-1989 world that wants to replace political choice by 

submission to the ‘natural necessity’ of the market.” 1 He contends that Marx’s 

effort to conjure up proletarian revolutionary subjectivity from technical 

progress and economic crisis has a similar “antipolitical” thrust. Howard (p. 

10) holds that “Marx was essentially a philosopher,” but that his attempt to 

radically historicize Hegelianism, translating it into a materialist theory of 

historical rationality and social progress, subordinated his philosophical critique 

of alienation to a deterministic “sociology.” 2 According to Howard, Marx’s 

practice of “philosophy by other means”obscured the normative nature of his 

critique, conflated the realm of freedom with necessity, and blinded him to the 

“democratic political implications of his own analysis” (emphasis in the original). 

Howard attempts to execute a complicated theoretical maneuver; he criticizes 

Marx’s sociological reduction of politics in order to recover the “philosophical 

Marx” and, then, ultimately go beyond him “to open the path to politics” and 

democracy that he sees to be absent in Marx (p. xiii). 

Howard acknowledges considerable debt to Lefort and Castoriadis, devoting 



several chapters to their ideas and employing them throughout the book. 

Increasingly skeptical about communism after the suppressed 1956 Hungarian 

revolt, they and others in the Socialisme ou Barbarie circle declared the 

autonomy of politics from economic determination, engaged new forms of 

protest that went beyond class, and brought to the foreground communist 

repression, which generally had been ignored by the French left. As Howard 

explains, Lefort and Castoriadis saw Hegelian historicism to be a root of 

Marx’s reductive claim that progressive development of the mode of 

production leads inevitably to emancipation. Rather than an advance over 

Hegelian idealism, they argued, his materialism grants pseudohistorical 

necessity to contingent historical processes. Stressing an affinity for 

totalitarianism, they held that Marx’s historicism has been deployed by 

communist regimes and parties to justify the suppression of political 

opposition. Howard shares their view that Marxism neutralizes its own 

democratic political potentiality and that realization of it requires a radical 

break with historicism and a new openness to history. 

Howard also agrees with Lefort’s definition of the political as the “symbolic 

institution of society,” or creation and reproduction of the normative bases of 

societal institutions. Lefort held that pre-existing hierarchical societies limited 

these symbolic practices to élites, who fashioned “external or transcendent” 

religious and metaphysical legitimations to justify their dominance. As 

Howard explains, he argued that democracy seeks “unity from within” society 

and expects its “members to take responsibility for their own individuality.” 

Lefort held that democracy arose when the ancien régime collapsed and citizens 

asserted the “right to have rights,” or the right to demand from the state 

recognition of their individual rights. He portrayed democracy as a plural 

“public space” where diverse citizens and groups, empowered by their rights, 

engage in open-ended, historically-variable deliberations. In his view, the 

consequent “radical indeterminacy” rules out unified publics and determination 

by general social conditions. However, Lefort contended that these 

reductionist ideas are products of modern ideologies, which arise to ease 

uncertainty and mask contingency. For example, liberalism’s claims about a 

rational self-interested subject and the inevitable operations of “market forces” 

provide a sense a certainty about liberal society’s foundations that discourage 

consideration of political alternatives. Lefort believed that an independent, 

open civil society is the best bulwark against the ideological reflex’s antipolitics. 



Following Lefort, Howard holds that Marx’s sociological reduction and vision 

of materially-driven proletarian unity deny politics’ discursive, contingent 

nature and that these historicist ideas, combined with Marx’s highly negative 

view of civil society and liberal rights, constitutes a proto-totalitarian ideology 

(pp. 77-80, 116-18,166, 209-10, 327, note 10). 

Howard states that Castoriadis acknowledged that “Marx bet on history and 

lost” (i.e., his hopes about the emancipatory proletariat failed). Howard 

implies, however, that Castoriadis still carried on the Marxist project to 

transcend Hegelianism with the understanding that it required a much more 

radical break than Marx was willing to make. Howard shares Castoriadis’s goal 

of moving beyond historicist teleology to a position recognizing history’s 

uniqueness, autonomy, and contingency (pp. 87-88). By contrast, Howard 

argues, the Frankfurt School failed to make this decisive post-Marxist, post- 

Hegelian move and, when their revolutionary hopes crashed, they sought 

aesthetic transcendence and rejected “everyday politics” (pp.39-41). Howard 

speculates that their deeply pessimistic vision of consumer capitalism’s 

seamlessly integrated, depoliticized, “one-dimensional” culture helped inspire 

later postmodernist claims about the end of modernity and exhaustion of 

politics. In his view, this “antipolitics” or “politics of theory” manifest 

constricted political vision, rather than politics’ actual demise. Howard 

explains his youthful affiliation with Telos, stressing the initial trouble that he 

had getting that formerly left journal, which was then still operating in Marx’s 

tracks, to take up Lefort and Castoriadis. He did not mention, however, that 

the editor and his inner circle, at that time, posed an extreme version of the 

one-dimensionality thesis portraying a near total closure of historical 

contradictions and of immanent possibilities for progressive change. This view 

not only anticipated pessimistic forms of postmodernism, but the Telos inner 

circle’s consequent search for organic community led them to take up Carl 

Schmitt in the 1980s and, after, to make an anti-liberal, neopopulist turn. 

Howard devotes considerable attention to historical comparison of French and 

American political cultures. He holds that the framers of the French republican 

regime had to pose a new conception of unity to replace the old monarchy’s 

lost integration. Faced with the problem of fragmentation, Howard contends, 

they envisioned a republican state reviving political unity. He argues that the 

framers of the new French regime stressed inclusion at the national level, 



calling for universal citizenship and state action to insure social and political 

rights and to secure social equality. By contrast, he explains, engaging a setting 

that lacked the ancien régime’s cultural and political unity, American framers 

forged a vision of a self-managed democracy that is composed of diverse 

communities and individuals and that secures inclusion through free 

association and minimal reliance on state power. He holds that adoption of 

judicial autonomy and competitive political parties made clear that rights had 

to be won and defended politically. Howard embraces American “republican 

democracy,” which he sees to be inherently pluralist, open, and dynamic, while 

he implies that the state-centered French “democratic republic” is prone to the 

sociological reduction and proto-totalitarian singularity that he says inheres in 

Marxism. Still, he argues that American democracy may also express 

antipolitical tendencies; e.g., its emphasis on individual rights can degenerate 

into a “procedural republic” manifesting “right over good,” legal formality, and 

social fragmentation. In his view, the republican idea in France as well as in the 

United States is “political” rather than “socio-economic” and, thus, can be 

employed critically against the sociological reduction and collective subjects 

(pp. 174, 184). Howard’s historical accounts of French and American 

republicanism are too complex to adequately summarize here. However, their 

unifying thread is emphatic critique of the reduction of discursively-mediated 

political action to general sociological contexts and fictive collective subjects, 

which he implies deprive politics of their historical particularity and complex, 

dynamic, plural, dispersed agency. 

Howard speaks briefly about a totalizing “politics of will” that posits— 

independent of political action—a “right thing to be done” and a “unified 

actor” to do it and about an opposed “politics of judgement” that reflects 

critically on the consequences of political action and acts prudently. Stressing 

the need to take “responsibility” for political decision, which the politics of 

will abjures, Howard suggests that the politics of judgement suffuse republican 

democracy and his own analyses (pp. 18-22, 30, 78, 74, 107, 194-96). He also 

mentions in passing Max Weber’s related “ethics of conviction” and “ethics of 

responsibility” (p. 236). These concepts were part of Weber’s broader posttraditional 

argument about political responsibility, which rejected ideas of 

historical necessity and collective subjects and the consequent aversion of 

political decision. Moreover, Weber warned that fanatical forms of conviction 

suspend ethical reflection as well as political prudence, justifying extreme 



control, violence, and repression and giving rise to the total state. Addressing 

Weber might have prompted Howard to clarify his concepts of politics of will 

and politics of judgment, which are central to his argument, but are left 

unelaborated. John Dewey’s radical democratic theory also seems to converge 

at key points with Howard’s project. Dewey stressed democracy’s uncertain, 

plural, discursive, historically particular, incomplete, experimental nature. He 

aimed to fashion a radically historicist, antifoundationalist democratic 

alternative to Hegelian historicism that breaks as fundamentally from modern 

ideas of historical necessity as it does from traditional metaphysics, religion, 

and political philosophy. Also, Dewey posed his mature social theory contra 

totalitarianism—Fascism and Stalinism. Engaging Dewey critically also might 

have sharpened Howard’s argument. However, his failure to address these 

particular thinkers is not problematic per se. Rather, the problem is that he 

does not situate adequately his theory relative to related political theories and 

social theories. Developing this theoretical context would have helped Howard 

bring forward more clearly and completely his overall position on democracy 

and its connections to current historical and political contexts. 

Howard’s unqualified claims about the “autonomy” and “radical 

indeterminacy” of politics and negative comments about “the flat terrain of 

sociology” and the “mere sociologist” (pp. 77, 81) draw an overly sharp 

boundary between politics and its “sociological” contexts. Exaggerating the 

threat of sociological reduction, he largely ignores the interdependence between 

these relatively autonomous spheres. Moreover, he does not distinguish the 

pseudo-sociology employed in bogus historicist arguments from genuine 

sociological inquiry about conditions that influence the direction and content 

of politics. He recognizes passingly that sociological analysis may have a 

limited role in normative critique, but he does not explain that role and, being 

very wary of the “totalitarian temptation,” he asserts that such analysis easily 

turns reductive (p. 134). He also implies that a sociological moment in 

normative critique would be positivist, suggesting the kind of disembodied 

eye, oblivious to normative conditioning of social inquiry, that thinkers like 

Weber and Dewey dismissed early last century. By contrast, Howard does not 

acknowledge that philosophy, which he strongly privileges in political critique, 

may need a sociological moment to avert the very tendency “to fly above 

reality” that he attributes to positivism. Strong claims about autonomy may 

inhere in efforts to make radical breaks from powerful constraints, but these 



moves still manifest the sociological context. Lefort’s and Castoriadis’s 

emphatic claims about autonomy and indeterminacy make sense in light of 

their effort to break politically, intellectually, and even personally from post- 

World War II communism and from its patently constrained politics and 

sterile deterministic theories. However, this context has faded long ago. Today, 

politically ambiguous Schmitteans and populists as well as “New Right” 

proto-fascists make similar strong claims about the autonomy of politics and 

attack sociological reduction in their critiques of globalization and 

neoliberalism. Howard surely opposes such positions, but the context of his 

own work is not clear and he does not explain its political relevance. 

Howard recognizes the problem. He says that he does “not want to leave the 

impression that the theoretical arguments presented here have no immediate 

political implications,” and he invites readers to his website to sample some of 

his recent “directly political” commentaries, which he says illustrate his 

“understanding of democracy as radical.” I accepted his invitation, but his 

many well-reasoned points about the American political climate in the wake of 

9/11 do not clarify the political direction of his overall argument and, 

especially, why it should be construed to be an extension of Marx or to be 

radically democratic. Howard analyzes how historicism and sociological 

reduction contribute to de-politicization and de-democratization, but he 

explains neither the current relevance of his strong claims about autonomy nor 

his overall substantive vision of democracy. Like Dewey, he stresses an affinity 

between historicism and democracy, but, by contrast to Dewey, he does not 

offer tools for a critique of “really existing” democracy—e.g., to evaluate 

whether the United States has “strong” or “weak” republican democracy and to 

suggest how it might be made “stronger” and more just. This is an ironic 

problem for a thinker who endorses political critique and democracy so 

enthusiastically. 

The issue of historicity and sociology brings us back to Marx. Howard’s 

critique of historical necessity addresses a deeply problematic thread in Marx’s 

work. However, he implies that determinism rules Marx’s analysis of 

capitalism. Howard does not acknowledge the side of Marx’s work that 

stresses sociological inquiry into the specific conditions of particular situations 

(i.e., recognizing the contingent nature of the social) and that employs 

concepts as heuristic devices (simplifying a contingent empirical world for 



analytical purposes). Even young Marx countered his Hegelian side with points 

about the need to study “definite individuals” sharing historically-specific social 

and political relations. However, the materialist transparency promised at the 

end of the Manifesto’s famous passage about “all that is solid melts into air” is 

replaced, in his mature work, by a warning that the “appearance of simplicity 

vanishes.” In Capital, Marx spoke of an “economistic law of motion” 

operating with “iron necessity” and leading “inevitably” to proletarian 

emancipation. However, he also held that proliferation of “middle and 

intermediate strata,” in England, “obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere.” 

He understood that advanced capitalism’s complex class relations and 

interventionist state posed problems for his political hopes and that his social 

theory had to be brought to bear on increasingly diverse types of capitalism. 

Late in life, Marx even doubted that full capitalist modernization would 

extend beyond western Europe. His sociological uncertainty appears in other 

forms. For example, he conditioned his core materialist idea that the pumping 

out of surplus product from direct producers is “the hidden basis of the entire 

social structure” with the qualification that the process has “infinite variations 

and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the 

empirically given circumstances.” Similar qualifications about empirical 

variability appear in other parts of Capital, implying that Marx saw his theory 

as a heuristic model as well as the mirror of the Telos of History. The point is 

that Marx expressed two types of “historical” narratives—sociological 

historicism and Hegelian historicism. Howard criticizes sharply Marx’s 

historicism, but his position should be evaluated in the broader light of the 

tensions between and entwinement of his determinism and his sociology. 

Engels admitted after Marx’s death that he and Marx had exaggerated the 

“economic side,” but he also declared famously that their materialist method 

claimed nothing more than: “the ultimately determining element in history is 

the production of and reproduction of real life.” Holding that “all history 

must be studied afresh,” Engels insisted that they created “a guide to study, not 

a lever after the manner of the Hegelian.” 3 Engels’s afterthought understates the 

determinist thread in Marx’s and his materialism, but it stresses correctly the 

importance of their sociological historicism. The master narrative of their texts 

is still a matter of debate. However, Howard’s privileging of the “philosophical 

Marx” and reducing of his sociological side to Hegelianism understates the 

significance of his sociology. The enduring value of Marx’s work derives as 



much from his sociology as from his normative ideas. His analysis of 

capitalism poses still compelling questions about its highly problematic 

relationship with democracy. His view that socio-economic matters condition 

fundamentally the shape, quality, and possibility of democracy and, thus, need 

to be taken account of in theory and practice does not by itself constitute a 

sociological reduction of politics. By contrast, unqualified emphasis on the 

autonomy of politics does not favor inquiry into the impacts of wealth and 

power on democracy, which are often concealed or intentionally suppressed. 

Addressing the impacts of expanded corporate power and increased economic 

inequality, under neoliberal globalization, is essential to today’s debates over 

the prospects for democracy and does not preclude the relative autonomy of 

politics or deny other forms exclusion. A theory of radical democracy must 

bring to the foreground the unequal and unjust distribution of the material 

and cultural means of participation. Marx’s impassioned emphasis on this 

matter gives him more than nine lives and is the reason that his specter still 

hangs over us today. In this light, Howard’s emphasis on the importance of 

Marx’s normative side makes sense. But Marx’s vision of capitalist inequality is 

the main point of conjuncture between his philosophy and sociology—his 

sociology provides his normative vision of justice specificity and historicity. 

That Howard is silent about the relation of capitalism and democracy raises 

questions about the methodological adequacy as well as the historicity of his 

claims about the autonomy of politics and his dim view of the sociological 

moment of criticism. 

Arguably Marx founded the tradition of modern “social theory.” Social 

theorists frame normative arguments, but their work is distinguished from 

earlier types of normative theory by a strong sociological moment. Although 

the borders are fluid, social theory’s normative thrust distinguishes it from 

more narrowly-focused, empirically-oriented “sociological theory” and social 

science. By contrast to religion and metaphysics the legitimacy of social theory 

depends on the discursively-mediated, empirical-historical validity of its 

“sociological” claims as well as the consistency, persuasiveness, and 

emotional/aesthetic force of its normative facets. Social theory’s project of 

providing an “historical” alternative to absolutist normative argument is neither 

complete nor transparent. First-generation social theorists, like Marx, often 

conflated History with history and tried to justify their practice as “science,” 

obscuring its normative thrust. Howard rightly criticizes this reduction, which 



is still a problem today. However, as in Marx’s case, social theorists’ historicist 

and scientistic claims have often appeared alongside, in the same texts, valid 

types of sociological and normative argument. Today, after multiple waves of 

critiques of scientism, theorists sometimes deny or understate social theory’s 

empirical-historical side and, thus, lean back toward absolutism or simply fail 

to justify their normative practices at all. Howard does not make this error, 

but he suggests a rather narrowly construed conception of political theory that 

understates the role of sociological contexts in conditioning political action and 

political thought. The interdependence of the sociological and political 

moments call for a broader view of theory that takes fuller account of the fact 

that democracy is a “social thing.” 

That confusion still reigns over the nature of social theory and its boundaries 

with empirical-historical work has been easy to see in later 20th century 

polemics over postmodernism and other interdisciplinary theories. Opposing 

sides in these disputes have often pitted science and social theory against each 

other. By contrast, these practices, regardless of their independent logics, are 

culturally entwined; social theory provides a post-traditional language to debate 

the normative directions of science and policy and social science provides the 

historical knowledge for social theory arguments, in which normative 

justification depends largely on claims about the socio-cultural and political 

consequences of the proposed policy regimes. Howard’s critique of historicism 

contributes to the project of social theory. His points about the sociological 

reduction eroding political responsibility and sapping democratic vitality likely 

has as much cultural significance after communism, as they did when Lefort 

and Castoriadis posed their ideas. Recall Howard’s passing comment that his 

critique of Marxist antipolitics is relevant to neoliberalism; its collective 

subject, the rational economizer, and claims about the inevitable impacts of 

“market forces” suggest an abdication of political decision parallel to that 

generated by Marxist certainty about the emancipatory proletariat and 

communism. Hopefully, Howard will follow up on this provocative point, 

bringing to bear his broader argument about the political on neoliberalism, 

which will likely make his position clearer and perhaps answer the concerns 

that I have raised. 



Notes 

1 Dick Howard, The Spector of Democracy (New York: Columbia University 

Press, 2002), p. 287. Further page references to this work are in parentheses in 

the text of this essay. 

2 “Sociology” is used here to refer to social science, rather than to the explicit 

discipline of sociology. Howard identifies Marx’s “economic” theory as 

“sociological.” Marx’s historical materialism focuses on the social relationships 

by which ruling or dominant classes extract surplus from direct producers. His 

“labor theory of value” addresses the capitalist version of this social 

relationship. 

3 Frederick Engels, “Engels to Conrad Schmidt” and “Engels to Joseph Bloch” 

(Letters written in 1890), pp.395-400 in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on 

Politics and Philosophy, edited by Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, NY: Anchor 

Books, 1959). 

Robert J. Antonio is professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas.

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