Dissertation
Title: “Politics and Action in the Age of Instrumentality”
This project takes up the question of action in the public sphere as a function of government-centered politics in a presentation in two parts, one theoretical and one practical.
The first three chapters of this dissertation will describe mainstream political science beliefs about political action within the public sphere. To do this, I plan to use a chapter each to describe the dominant political science material on public policy, foreign policy, and electoral behavior. At the end of each chapter I will demonstrate how political science, as a field, fails to realize the fallacy of the assumption that political actors within the public sphere in the U.S. and Western Europe act autonomously within the political realm according to the normative will of the majority of the public. The field has painted itself into a corner by relying heavily upon assumptions of rationality and by belief in quaint notions such as ‘checks and balances.’
At the close of the first part, I will demonstrate the evolution of the current system and create a model based upon a historical epistemology, that shows how major theories of action in political science do not adequately describe political behavior and its relationship to economic behavior in late capitalism. Against the background of conventional historical definitions of action in the public sphere as political and normative, the second section of this project will derive a new model for the public sphere: the Three Realms of Action model, a model that divides realms of action in the public sphere into the normative (that of meaning generation), political, and economic realms.
In contrast, current scholarship on globalization and empire (David Harvey, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt) bring to light the dominance of economics in the public sphere, deforming our traditional image of the domain of political action.
To factor these observations into the new model for political action on the national level that I seek, I draw on several contemporary philosophers to show what is at stake ethically and practically when the domain of economic action subordinates the realms of political and normative action. My point of departure is, first, traditional definitions of political action from Nietzsche, Machievelli, and Schmitt. Then I will turn Habermas’ original definitions of the public sphere and communicative action, especially as nuanced by critics like Nancy Fraser, in order to define what the realm of normative action is. I will look at what theorists of deliberative democracy and communicative action have done to redefine the polis. Agamben’s work on states of exception will figure prominently here. From there, I will use the work of Harvey, Negri, and Hardt to model what kinds of action pertain to the realm of economic action. Finally, I will use the work of Hannah Arendt, Heidegger, and Marcuse, maybe along with a non-western philosopher or two, to talk about the ethical implications of the substitution of economic instrumentality for the more traditional model of the polis as the main driver for action in the public sphere.
The second part of the project offers two case studies in chapters 5 and 6, applying this model to the action of government in two cases, one in the U.S. and one in Egypt (pre- and post-revolution), to show what it brings to the table that traditional analyses do not. The irony of both the U.S. and pre-revolution Egypt, is that the political systems in both paid lip service to the sovereignty of the public, the morality of their actions, and the rational execution of policy, while promising security and prosperity. In both cases political actors construed their action as normatively supported, economically rational, and politically autonomous. However, the actions of political actors has only rarely been rational, autonomous, and normative. Instead, economic actors have sacrificed both the political and normative realms of action.