Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo laments the timidity of current debate in political theory; his Political Responsibility is a fighting book. His academic opponents seek “normative principles, however pristine or murky, outside the political realm and its imperatives and deduce a supervenient ethical politics” (p. 25). Judith Butler’s and Jacques Derrida’s political writings, inspired by a Levinasian prepolitical ethical experience of a suffering “other,” exemplify ethicized politics (Chapter 4). Theory’s “ethical turn” has analogs in political practice. Internationally, we focus on the protection of the human rights of individuals as part of a humanitarian push to prevent catastrophe (“never again”) and relinquish more radical, future-directed ends (pp. 30–37). Domestically (considered all too briefly), we focus on the toleration or recognition of different and victimized “others” as the objects of political striving and emphasize “personal responsibility” (e.g., pp. 26, 28, 60–61, 135–36, 250–51).
Proponents and practitioners of ethical politics present abstract individuals as both bearers and recipients of responsibility. With this individualized approach to responsibility, they divert our attention from the collective character of political fate and struggle; discourage us from “re-cognizing” the structures of power that mediate our experiences, including our experience of suffering others; and license us to dodge the institutional wrestling essential to political transformation. With their tendency to treat abstractions as real (to “hypostatize”), they “depoliticize” responsibility and foreclose genuinely emancipatory projects. For Vázquez-Arroyo, in short, the ethical turn’s “moralization of political life” is “a diversion from a political understanding of a world largely defined by liberal-democratic capitalist ascendance and the defeat of the radical left” (p. 29).
Drawing from Theodor Adorno, Machiavelli, Bertolt Brecht, Antonio Gramsci, Max Weber, and Simone Weil, Vázquez-Arroyo revives and revises the tradition of “political ethic” as an alternative to ethical politics (Chapters 5–6). And lest he be guilty of depoliticization, he is clear that his political ethic pertains specifically to the struggle for a “democratic socialist order,” which he also suggests is the “only” political form under which “a robust sense of political responsibility” is “possible” (p. xvii). His exegesis is erudite but also incredibly intricate.
I highlight two crucial elements of his ethic: fidelity to a “political identity” and responsiveness to “predicaments of power.” Political identity is “constituted by values that set the parameters for collective life and its institutions—its political forms—along with a conception of political action and agency that demands fidelity to it” (p. 216). Fidelity to a political identity lets that identity operates as a “controlling end” to moderate the violence that is almost always implicated in politics, especially in the creation of new political orders. Fidelity requires that violent means must not undermine political identity (e.g. pp. 232, 243, 245, 249, 253). A political actor responds to predicaments of power by considering “the historically constituted situation in which the political actor finds herself, about how it came into being and how the actor in question came to be situated in it, along with material processes, practices, and discourses mediating her situated actions” (pp. 220–221; see also pp. x–xi, xv). The task is to “cognitively map” a “political situation,” “and accurately discern the realities of power the situation imposes in the name of the ideal that animates the need to rectify it” (pp. 255; see also pp. 204, 216, 219). “Realism” need not relinquish utopia, which defends against “accommodation to existing powers” (p. 255). This is no simple call back to concrete realities. This book is a theory-driven and theory-vindicating call to attend to the mediations that deliver what is concrete. The author worries that “ideas of normative foundations have come perilously close to replacing social theory” (p. 27).
Like most political realists, Vázquez-Arroyo wants politics to be judged by “criteria immanent to its field” (p. 223), and like many of them he still seeks the ethical dimension of politics. Although the political field is “extra-moral,” it is not without “ethical principles” (p. 222). Now, his political ethic does place significant constraints and demands on political actors; it has that binding quality we associate with the ethical. A highlight of his arguments is that responsibility must be understood, both in its historical conceptual development and as a practice, in relation to its pertinent limits, including spatial and institutional ones. For example, he shows how the very content of political responsibility changes with the death of the “polis” and the rise of empire, gradually moving away from a sharing of power (Chapter 2). The “antinomianism” and language of “limitless responsibility” in the ethical turn may obscure the limits within which political responsibility arises and with which it must grapple, especially if we are to confront “obdurate structures” (pp. 160, 171). So political responsibility should not merely move beyond the “intrasubjective” Kantian focus on intentions and character to a more “intersubjective” Hegelian concern; it must also reflect upon the limits which themselves constrain and constitute responsibility (Chaapter 3 generally and esp. pp. 136, 138).
The author rightfully claims that a distinctive contribution of his critique of the ethical turn is his conceptually attentive historico-political account of the ethical turn’s emergence in both North Atlantic theory and its practice (Chapter 1). Factors in the rise of “ethical politics” include antitotalitarian and anticommunist political currents in the North Atlantic world; specifics of the reception of Continental thought in the United States; the narrowly cultural focus of the 1960s U.S. counterculture; the “conservative backlash” in the United States in the 1980s; and the exhaustion of the Left after many defeats. I am unqualified to contest these historical claims. But I wonder why we have so many critiques of the ethical turn and calls for political realism now? In the spirit of Vázquez-Arroyo’s political ethic, we should ask how realist critiques of the ethical turn (whatever their merits) themselves reflect present predicaments of power. Do realist critiques arise from the same sources generating the machismo of much contemporary populist politics?
Further, again mirroring Vázquez-Arroyo’s own maneuvers, how might the “turn to political realism” itself divert us from the demands of political struggle? Focusing on the political at the expense of the ethical might be a mode of avoiding or downplaying the personal burdens of political transformation. I doubt that structural or technological change will ever eradicate the need for personal sacrifice for the collective. Yet it is all too tempting to believe that only the privileged 1% need to make sacrifices, say, for socialized health care. Thus some ethical work on the self may well be required as preparation for sacrificing for, or expressing believable solidarity with, the collective (consider Simone Weil’s life). Vázquez–Arroyo appears to approve a related idea in Gramsci’s thought (p. 232), but he condemns Butler’s appreciation for “practices of the self” (p. 162). Ethical politics and even individualized responsibility are not necessarily “neutralizations” or avoidance of politics; whether they are depends on the “situation.”
Vázquez-Arroyo says that his political ethic “refuses to impose ethical categories and moralizing discourse in political life” (p. 219). But what exactly is the character of the ethical field he is opposing to politics and his political ethic? He defines the sphere of morality/ethics in terms of responsibility as it pertains to “the domain of individual conduct and action qua individual” (though also “mediated by institutions, intersubjective and social relations”). In contrast, a “genuinely political ethic is an ethic of collective life” (even accepting that actions begin with individuals; see pp. 219–220). But more needs to be said about the ethical sphere that is outside of politics, beyond the difference between an individualist and collective aspect, especially because Vázquez-Arroyo argues that his political ethic does not revert to ethics, unlike the kinds of political ethos proposed by other critics of the ethical turn (e.g., Alain Badiou in Ethics 2001 and Ella Myers in Worldly Ethics 2013; see p. 26). Since we do not have a clear account of the nonpolitical ethical field I cannot arbitrate this claim. Yet Vázquez-Arroyo actually faults political ethicists for having no clear conception of the ethical. Quoting Jacques Rancière, he argues that the ethical turn is not fundamentally about imposing morality on politics. Instead, the ethical appears as an all-encompassing and “indistinct sphere.” Ethics is a “placeholder,” obscuring operations of power and so “idealizing the present” (p. 37).
Finally, I want to temper the claim that politics should be judged by “criteria immanent to its field” (pp. 223, 212). While the author does make this claim, he also refers to the “intersections” between ethics and politics, and the “relative autonomy” (my emphasis) of the political, and so he too might qualify this claim (e.g., pp. 19, 218–219, 222). My belief is that we should not deny extrapolitical ethics or morality in their entirety all standing to judge politics. Granting politics its own logic, we might still consider politics from the perspective of other spheres to gain a better picture of the political “situation” and its stakes. For example, we might gain a fuller picture of what we might be sacrificing of ourselves for politics. As Vázquez-Arroyo himself argues, politics plays a decisive role in whether it is even possible for us to be morally accountable or have a certain ethical caliber as individuals. And surely a lesson of contemporary U.S. politics is that our institutions depend on the sensitivity to ethics (and not just the political ethic) of participating individuals. That politics and ethics should be allowed to speak to (but not colonize) one another is a lesson I take from Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” and it is an insight derivable from his theory of conflicting life spheres. The challenge is to see if we can look at politics from an outside ethical point of view without moralizing politics. And this may be achieved, in part, by looking out for the political “mediations” of morality itself, as suggested by Vázquez-Arroyo.
So my lingering questions are about the political conditions for the turn to realism itself, the way that a focus on politics can also be an avoidance of political responsibility, and the contours of the ethical both within and outside politics. Nevertheless, as a treatment of the logic of politics and how it can itself generate ethical constraints that are specific to and supportive of politics, Political Responsibility is a tour de force.
