Martin Breaugh’s critical remarks focus essentially on two issues, both strictly related to the critical perspective he developed in his Plebeian Experience: The interpretation of Roman secession and the neglect of important contemporary theorists such as Claude Lefort and Miguel Abensour—both very influential in Breaugh’s own perspective—in the chapter dedicated to the “return” of disobedience in the global age.
Let us start from the end: Breaugh is certainly right in pointing out the partiality of the authors and perspectives discussed in the last chapter. But this is true also for the previous ones. My book was not intended as an exhaustive reconstruction of all authors that in the history of political thought have approached disobedience and radical dissent. On the contrary, the main intention of the book was—as Breaugh clearly acknowledged in the opening lines of his review—the conceptualization of a new political concept: destituent power. The hidden goal of the book was, then, theoretical. Selection, of authors and traditions of thought, was thus inevitable. As the founding scholars of the Italian journal Filosofia politica, to which I myself belong, explained almost 30 years ago in their dialogue with the German Begriffsgeschichte: In its true meaning, the history of political concepts is always a form of political philosophy.
To offer more details, the reason for a direct confrontation with Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, instead of Abensour (or others who could be equally included in this picture), is double: First of all, because of Negri’s workerist beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s, they appeared to me a better tool for confronting the political theory of global radical movements than that of their immediate global predecessors. Moreover, several groups today have declared themselves inspired by Negri’s and Hardt’s perspective. The critical discussion of their perspective was then a useful tool for discussing the potential and the limits of global radical movements.
Where I disagree with Breaugh is in his description of Negri’s and Hardt’s perspective as containing “potentially authoritarian strands of Marxism.” Frankly, I do not see in their analysis any authoritarian risk. And I believe that the old distinction between authoritarian and libertarian perspectives is somewhat ineffective today. Negri’s and Hardt’s controversial and unresolved argument is essentially the same around which radical movements have been struggling since the 1960s (and maybe even back to the very beginning of anticapitalist movements): How is it possible to combine the destituent spontaneity of the many with the constituent imperative of producing durable changes within society? How can spontaneity be organized? Their incapacity to give satisfying answers to these dilemmas is that of all contemporary radical movements and, probably, one of the reasons for neoliberalism’s enduring domination, notwithstanding its recurrent crises.
The other critical remark—the interpretation of Roman secession—is not unrelated to these more political questions: I believe that secessio was a radical form of dissent in the form of the withdrawal of consent, without, however, defying the fundamental social hierarchy of Roman society. In fact, it operated as a tool of Roman auctoritas, contributing to its enduring greatness and stability. This is at least the way Roman political thinkers (particularly Cicero) saw it.
Then again, the question is not only academic but political: In the historical plebeian experience we can see, mutatis mutandis, the same problem that is affecting some of the most advanced political experiences of our times. At the end of the twentieth century, social movements’ capacity of destituing political power was a fundamental component in the rise of several postneoliberal governments in Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, and Ecuador, among others). The force and peculiarity of these innovative political experiences was the delicate equilibrium between conflicting negotiation and inclusion of radical movements that kept open to the “underlying population” the channels of political decisions. After 15 years, what remains of this innovative experience? The brutal repression of social protests during the last soccer World Cup in Brazil, under the progressive administration of Dilma Rousseff, has openly put an end to this peculiar form of governance of society, while continuing to benefit several important and historical Brazilian social movements.
In more theoretical terms, the question is how to conceive a radical praxis of social movements based on the model of Roman plebeian experience without transforming this praxis into a sui generis form of lobbying unable to affect the essential structure of power in existing societies.
