The Metaphor of Sickness in Political Theory and its Consequences
I'm teaching a course on the subject of Political Pathologies this semester . (You can view my students' blog at http://politicalpathologies.blogspot.com; they've already have a lively conversation going on. And yes, I'm going a bit crazy on the new technologies - it's all a big experiment). So allow me to post occasional thoughts on the subject.
One of the theoretical puzzles that motivated me to think about this topic is the question of what happened to the metaphor of health and sickness in political theory. The metaphor is robustly developed, among other places, in Plato's Republic, books VIII and IX - which my class is reading for tomorrow. Socrates explicitly relates the various regimes not just to different kinds of people, but to the medical theory of his day, with the consequence that the different sorts of defective regimes - timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny - appear as stages in a sickness, or even as different illnesses, of increasing degrees of severity.
As far as I can tell (i.e., not that much), the metaphor of health and sickness in political life is used frequently, but not very deeply, by later classical and medieval political theory. I do not recall Aristotle deploying it, though it would not surprise me if he had done so; I'm pretty sure Cicero does use it; and I think many medieval thinkers did speak of healthy and diseased communities, though without pressing the metaphor very deeply. I am unsure whether Hobbes uses it, though his analogy to the human body in Leviathan would seem ideal for its deployment. (It would be interesting to know if he does).
Modern political theory, however, as far as I can tell (again, probably not that much),
seems not to use the metaphor of sickness and health very much. I have a theory - not, perhaps, a very good theory - that this has something to do with the traditional focus of political theory on the just, rather than the unjust, community. Not that political philosophers have had nothing to say about unjust societies; on the contrary. But I have a sense that the unjust regimes tend to be viewed through the lens of the just regimes, and thus as merely the non-just regimes; direct engagement with their varieties seems rare. It is perhaps no accident that it was Hannah Arendt's engagement with Soviet and Nazi tyranny that produced the category of totalitarianism not just as a name for another non-democratic regime but as an especially vicious pathology of political life - worse than run-of-the mill tyranny.
But other than that, there's very little effort on the part of political theorists to classify non-ideal regimes according to the degrees of their badness, much less to think of them through the metaphor of sickness and health. Indeed, there is very little conceptual work even within political science properly speaking regarding the varieties of non-democratic (in modern terms, non-ideal) regimes; the best work I know of that classifies non-democratic regimes is Juan Linz' Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, and it is practically an isolated case, and also entirely within the value-free tradition of Weberian sociology (though of course Linz himself has clear ideas as to which regimes are better and which are worse).
I suppose it could be argued that political sickness is a barren category - devoid of intellectual fruitulness - and that the classification of "bad" regimes, whether or not one uses the category of sickness, is theoretically and practically pointless beyond a certain point. In our everyday political speech we do not even distinguish fully between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes (the debasement of "totalitarian" is so great that I've heard political commentators apply the term with a straight face to the decrepit regime of Fidel Castro and the theatrical populism of Chavez); and influential traditions of political science (that led by Przeworski's work on democracy, for example) are quite content to operate within a simple democracy/non-democracy dichotomy.
But I would argue that a more nuanced understanding of political "badness" - similar to our own nuanced understanding of bodily sickness - would have many theoretical advantages. In particular, we do not at present seem to have (and I am happy to be corrected on this point) any good theory of politics that really tells us how to go from a less bad to a better conditio (which is not ideal), or, equivalently, a theory of politics that can (morally, ethically?) rank the many varieties of actually existing regimes. (Though we do have hunches that it would be better to live in Singapore than in Burma or North Korea, for example, it is not clear that we have theoretically sound reasons for this hunch, not to speak of a good theory of how to get from North Korea to something else a little less bad; witness Iraq).
Any thoughts on the idea of political pathology and its place in political theory?
One of the theoretical puzzles that motivated me to think about this topic is the question of what happened to the metaphor of health and sickness in political theory. The metaphor is robustly developed, among other places, in Plato's Republic, books VIII and IX - which my class is reading for tomorrow. Socrates explicitly relates the various regimes not just to different kinds of people, but to the medical theory of his day, with the consequence that the different sorts of defective regimes - timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny - appear as stages in a sickness, or even as different illnesses, of increasing degrees of severity.
As far as I can tell (i.e., not that much), the metaphor of health and sickness in political life is used frequently, but not very deeply, by later classical and medieval political theory. I do not recall Aristotle deploying it, though it would not surprise me if he had done so; I'm pretty sure Cicero does use it; and I think many medieval thinkers did speak of healthy and diseased communities, though without pressing the metaphor very deeply. I am unsure whether Hobbes uses it, though his analogy to the human body in Leviathan would seem ideal for its deployment. (It would be interesting to know if he does).
Modern political theory, however, as far as I can tell (again, probably not that much),
seems not to use the metaphor of sickness and health very much. I have a theory - not, perhaps, a very good theory - that this has something to do with the traditional focus of political theory on the just, rather than the unjust, community. Not that political philosophers have had nothing to say about unjust societies; on the contrary. But I have a sense that the unjust regimes tend to be viewed through the lens of the just regimes, and thus as merely the non-just regimes; direct engagement with their varieties seems rare. It is perhaps no accident that it was Hannah Arendt's engagement with Soviet and Nazi tyranny that produced the category of totalitarianism not just as a name for another non-democratic regime but as an especially vicious pathology of political life - worse than run-of-the mill tyranny.
But other than that, there's very little effort on the part of political theorists to classify non-ideal regimes according to the degrees of their badness, much less to think of them through the metaphor of sickness and health. Indeed, there is very little conceptual work even within political science properly speaking regarding the varieties of non-democratic (in modern terms, non-ideal) regimes; the best work I know of that classifies non-democratic regimes is Juan Linz' Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, and it is practically an isolated case, and also entirely within the value-free tradition of Weberian sociology (though of course Linz himself has clear ideas as to which regimes are better and which are worse).
I suppose it could be argued that political sickness is a barren category - devoid of intellectual fruitulness - and that the classification of "bad" regimes, whether or not one uses the category of sickness, is theoretically and practically pointless beyond a certain point. In our everyday political speech we do not even distinguish fully between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes (the debasement of "totalitarian" is so great that I've heard political commentators apply the term with a straight face to the decrepit regime of Fidel Castro and the theatrical populism of Chavez); and influential traditions of political science (that led by Przeworski's work on democracy, for example) are quite content to operate within a simple democracy/non-democracy dichotomy.
But I would argue that a more nuanced understanding of political "badness" - similar to our own nuanced understanding of bodily sickness - would have many theoretical advantages. In particular, we do not at present seem to have (and I am happy to be corrected on this point) any good theory of politics that really tells us how to go from a less bad to a better conditio (which is not ideal), or, equivalently, a theory of politics that can (morally, ethically?) rank the many varieties of actually existing regimes. (Though we do have hunches that it would be better to live in Singapore than in Burma or North Korea, for example, it is not clear that we have theoretically sound reasons for this hunch, not to speak of a good theory of how to get from North Korea to something else a little less bad; witness Iraq).
Any thoughts on the idea of political pathology and its place in political theory?
posted by Xavier Marquez @ 9:35 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
I'd love to read that paper, if you want me to...I haven't done as much reading on the regime typology lit as I should have, but heck, we all have priorities.
I think you are right about the roots of the debasement of totalitarian (Linz notes that the continuity thesis was one reason why the concept fell out of favor for a while among political scientists). But I also imagine that it is a handier term of abuse than "authoritarian" (which sounds so pedagogical) and "tyrant" (which sounds vaguely archaic, though president Bush does not shy from using it).
I didn't mean to take a cheap shot at Weberian "value-free" sociology - I find it quite useful for most purposes, actually. All I meant to indicate (unclearly) is that Linz' own typology is not designed to help you figure out the question of whether life is better or worse in some regimes than in others, though he clearly thinks it is so - depending on your particular position in society. Thus, he talks about the differences between different authoritarian regimes in terms of the degree of pluralism and mobilization in society, which is certainly useful for descriptive sociology, but I think you might need a more robust notion of "pluralism" and "mobilization" than the ones he uses to make clear judgments about which one is better. (He does have a lot to say on how you get from one form to another). I've never been very fond of Huntington's work, but it is true that he does make those judgments more clearly than Linz, for example.
I haven't read the Strauss. (I know, I should, and it's in my reading list, but I'm just not motivated to read any Strauss anymore). But Strauss seems to miss the point from the comment you quote: cancer is not easily recognized (though there is a system to it) and bodily sickness is not exhausted by it anyway - there's everything from colds to alzheimer's, from easily treatable maladies to rare syndromes whose causes are unknown. (Incidentally, this makes me doubt your claim that society is massively more complex than the human body - is it, really? the human body is a truly massive society of cells itself, with a massive division of labor and incredibly complex interactions between itself and its symbionts).
I agree that medicine has dilemmas of value, but I take it that these are simply cases in which medicine is not approriate but some other form of knowledge - political philosophy, for example. So I'm not sure the analogy is broken.
I'll have to think more about the point on treatment that you make. I am tempted to suggest that there is no more comprehensive whole than the political, at least from the point of view of political "medicine." So, if "rooting out" disease (or badness) is not working that may be because that is the wrong medical theory - lots of diseases can't be cured by rooting out an infectious agent, after all, since they may be incurable or genetic, for example. But I may be misunderstanding your point.
I think you are right that political theorists are at least prone to that kind of cheap shot. (I wonder if this has to do with the self-imposed isolation of at least some political theorists from much of the rest of the discipline). And certainly there's value-laden work, good and bad, in comparative politics; I was thinking of posting something about one such piece in the latest APSR ("Centripetal Democratic Governance: A Theory and Global Inquiry," by Gerring, Thacker, and Moreno; see here for more detail).
In fact, in teaching the course I've become a bit frustrated with the way the field boundaries work to discourage serious fact-based inquiry into political pathology (or political health). The theoretical work (starting with Plato) is sometimes too devoid of real detail; but the empirical work is conceptually less rich than it could be. So you end up with a weird bifurcation that is hard to bridge satisfactorily: the theory is too abstract, the cases too concrete, at least from the point of view of teaching.
I think it's true as you point out that human society is rule-governed whereas mere human biology is not (or at least not in the same way) but I am not entiely certain that this amounts to a difference in complexity. Or perhaps it does, but the notion of complexity can be thrown around to justify a lot of unnecessary hand-waving. Rules and meaning do not imply that explanations become impossible (not that you were implying that, of course).
Mental health is definitely a better metaphor in most cases. I should say that one should always be aware of the metaphorical character of the analogy, however: whatever is bad in politics may not ultimately have a clear analogy to the body or the soul. I guess with this caveat I would still want to use the metaphor as a way of focusing the inquiry into political bads.
I grant the point that the 1st-person/3rd person doubleness of society adds complexity to social processes (through reflectivity, which makes actions and behaviors dependent on beliefs and desires about other beliefs and desires), but I am not sure that it impacts explanation, especially of, say, the emergence of tyranny. Or even that it adds that much complexity.
It seems to me that when looking at the activities of a large number of people their actions display statistical regularities (which may be relatively short-lived and dependent on features of the environment - I'm not talking about essential features of human nature). So the "reflexivity" or first-person-ness of human action is often irrelevant when human activities are considered en masse, so to speak.
This does not mean that the meaning of social features is irrelevant, but this meaning can be treated as one more fact in the social environment - one that is subject to change, but no more resistant to explanation than any other social feature.
But maybe I'm missing the point. Jeff, do you mean to suggest that only the first-person perspective (which you seem to equate with the transcending of nature) brings with it the introduction of value, i.e., that there is no value except from the first person perspective? Nature is valueless until the human comes along?
If that is the claim, I should say that I'm not altogether comfortable with a sharp distinction between nature and geist. There are great continuities between nature in general and the human; there is no sharpt dividing line between human behavior that desires and values and animal behavior that does, for example. Natura non facit saltus.
Emma, I don't think you sound Straussian. Your point about the problems the tradition of political and philosophical thought has often found with metaphors is very good; I didn't remember Aristotle had condemned arguments from metaphor and analogy. At the same time it is unclear, as you note, how one could avoid metaphor at all - language seems to be based on metaphor, and the cognitive capacities of human beings seem to be based in part on the use of analogical reasoning (reasoning from the known to the unknown).
I would add that some contemporary philosophers (Dennett comes to mind) actually argue that metaphor is essential to philosophical argument - they are "the tools of thought" in Dennett's formulation, an idea that comes, I think, from Wittgenstein, who warned not against metaphor but against the relative paucity of examples and analogies on which philosophers drew.
There is some reason to think that arguments from analogy can be barren. I think Foucault argues in Les mots et les choses that much of "science" in say, the 16th century, was a search for similarity and difference: the world was seen as a system of signs, the signs similar to the thing signified, in a total system of mirroring, a system of multiple metaphors: all knowledge, Foucaul remarks, is then expressed as commentary. Foucault does not appear to think that this form of knowledge was intrinsically better or worse than say, the modern form, but it does seem to me that such an idea of knowledge (controlled almost exclusively by the idea that everything is a metaphor for everything else) is not very fruitful (here, more metaphors!).
The Problem that I see is that we are to willing to categorize everything by the type of government instead of how the government is run. A practical government for many third world countries is an authoritarian communism. Democracy is not the best form of government, it is simply the form of government that gives the most people the opportunity to participate. In the United States this is the type of government that we most desire, but in an islamic state a theocracy would be a practical choice.
It is all about the skill of the people that are leading the country, not the actual form of government. In a democracy the power is spread to more people so one person cannot do a huge amount of damage (in theory). In some countries however, results are much more important. In third world countries, it is similar to a buissness, if you can be right over fifty percent of the time right NOW it is much more valuable than being right ninty percent of the time, but taking forever to get things accomplished.
Every metaphor is imperfect. That is not to say it is useless. Xavier's point about in unavoidability when arguing from the known to the unknown sounds like Hume's position. In fact, I believe Hume argued that all reasoning is analogical. I would guess that this is the origin of the approach taken by those "other fields of study" that Emma mentions.
Post a Comment
<< Home