In Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970), Albert O. Hirschman argued that customers of a business, members of an organization, or citizens of a polity may remain loyal, even when they disagree with certain actions undertaken by the entity of which they are a part. Alternatively, they may express disagreement by voicing their complaints to the relevant authorities, or, in extreme cases, by withdrawing their membership and support.
Exit, voice, and loyalty were all political responses, according to Hirschman, but in this book, Jennet Kirkpatrick expands our understanding of the political meaning of “exit.” As she persuasively argues, the performative act of “exiting” itself encompasses several different options; there are many different ways to leave organizations, communities, or polities that have become dangerous to ourselves, our loved ones, or the causes we hold dear.
Indeed, Kirkpatrick argues that exiting is not merely a leaving or retreat, as it is commonly understood. It is an existential choice for those who find themselves deeply at odds with their government, or their fellow citizens who animate it. Exit sometimes expresses outright rejection of a political regime, but the author shows how it can also be an enduring form of criticism, aimed at reform. In that respect, she highlights the dilemma that all dissidents face: Shall I voice my dissent or exit, and if exit is my choice, shall I leave noisily, or go quietly?
To explore this dilemma, Kirkpatrick begins with Socrates’ rebuff of Crito’s entreaties to cheat death by escaping to Thessaly. She pays close attention to Socrates’ argument, underscoring the dilemma facing anyone who contemplates asylum, even if his or her own death, or the death of loved ones, is the inescapable consequence of remaining in place. There are always good reasons to remain, even noble ones. But there are always sound reasons to leave, even virtuous ones. Taken as a whole, Socrates’ dialogue with Crito “elucidates a tension between the desire to be free of the homeland and the yearning to remain part of it” (p. 47).
This makes the decision to exit difficult, but it also shapes the form of exit chosen by those who elect to distance themselves from a polity and sever “quasi-familial attachments to its inhabitants, to their comrades in arms in a political cause, or to their role as social critic or agitator” (p. 45). Subsequent chapters examine different forms of exiting, differentiated by the depth of separation and the extent to which relations with the homeland are maintained.
Socrates chose to stay, and die, in Athens instead of fleeing for Thessaly. For him, the choice was binary, but it is not always so. Kirkpatrick presents Henry David Thoreau, who admittedly did not face a sentence of death for not paying his poll tax, as a practitioner of “expressive exit,” that is, a noisy exit that expresses profound disagreement with a person’s community or polity.
The class of expressive exits is large, and Thoreau’s specific version took the form of periodic withdrawals from life in Concord to consult his conscience. But these exits were not simple withdrawals, according to Kirkpatrick. His sojourn at Walden Pond, and his night in the Concord jail, were demonstrations of his contempt for slavery of all kinds, whether maintained by the law and lash or enforced by custom, commerce, and fashion. Walden: A Life in the Woods was an indirect, but unmistakable, indictment of civil life in Concord, where most men lived lives of quiet desperation. “Resistance to Civil Government” was a searing condemnation of the hypocrisy of people who ostensibly opposed slavery but refused to withhold support for it. Both essays were critical expressions, intended as political acts and not merely the solitary reflections of a hermit.
Quite reasonably, Kirkpatrick calls this a “resistant exit,” whereby Thoreau “pulled away from his political community as a way of critically engaging with it” (p. 68). His literary works, speeches, and defense of John Brown were meant to awaken a community, state, and nation that had fallen asleep, morally speaking—and to call forth a new kind of democracy, in which the power of the state was not on the side of slavery, and which tolerated dissenters.
Thoreau was familiar with the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. In the most powerful chapter of her book, Kirkpatrick considers the stories of fugitive slaves, who, as individuals, escaped from captivity but found limited freedom in northern states, and continued to identify with those who remained in bondage. They were unable to separate their personal freedom, such as it was, from the fate of those who remained enslaved: “[T]he fleeing slave was never alone, despite what it looked like. She or he was accompanied—psychically, spiritually, or politically, by allies, friends, and family, and was connected to them regardless of physical distance or time” (p. 88).
The issue here, as Kirkpatrick notes, was the desire to “walk (away) together” (p. 87). Exiting is not always, or even primarily, an individual action. What remains unsettled in this chapter is the difference between slaves who escaped to Canada, where slavery was banned, and those who retreated to the North, where prejudices ran strong and fugitive slave laws were infamously enforced. Were those who escaped to Canada merely seeking asylum, or were they, too, committed to walking away together?
The group dimension of exiting a polity is further represented by the expatriate James Baldwin, who exited the American polity out of concern over its racism. Baldwin found asylum in France but never abandoned his project of criticizing race relations in the United States. Indeed, he briefly returned in support of the Civil Rights movement. On the other hand, Stokely Carmichael’s withdrawal to Guinea was complete; there was no further engagement with Civil Rights activists in the United States. His was not a resistant exit, according to Kirkpatrick, whereas Chen Guangcheng continued to plague authorities in the People’s Republic of China from exile. That form of “connected criticism,” to use Michael Walzer’s term, is what distinguishes resistant exiters from simple asylum seekers. It is a cardinal virtue of exiting, in the political sense of that term.
Political theorists in particular will benefit from Kirkpatrick’s phenomenology of exiting. The possibility of exiting ensures personal autonomy, as liberals have long recognized, but the agonies it entails have seldom been considered, nor has their impact on the choice of exit strategies been fully appreciated. In this regard, the author offers a useful typology of exits for us to consider. She also points to the creative possibilities that a group’s exodus can yield.
Now that Kirkpatrick has shown us the importance of understanding differences in exit strategies, we may begin to discern other forms and ultimately to understand how these different forms relate to one another. In The Virtues of Exit, the notion of a “resistant exit” is both a subcategory of expressive exits and a category unto itself. Thoreau exemplifies the former, whereas Baldwin typifies the latter. The difference is that Thoreau occasionally (and partially) withdrew from life in Concord, always to return as moral scourge and proselytizer. Perhaps he represents a “prophetic exit,” the better to distinguish him from Baldwin and others who went into permanent exile while remaining critical from a distance, with only occasional visits to the homeland.
