Schmitt and G.D.H. Cole on the Political
It is largely forgotten that G. D. H. Cole (1889 – 1959) was the first Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. For much of the period since he has been overshadowed by his successor, Isaiah Berlin. And if Cole is mentioned at all, it is usually as a proponent of so-called guild socialism. (I usually refer to him as a translator of Rousseau’s Social Contract.)
In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Cole’s philosophical contributions are mentioned only twice. Once as a source for Dewey’s theorizing; and once in the bibliography of an entry on Bosanquet. That entry includes an annotation, “A round table, with a discussion of Bosanquet’s theory of international politics” and it includes, Russell, Bertrand, C. Delisle Burns, and G.D.H. Cole, 1915–1916, “The Nature of the State in its External Relations”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s. vol. XVI: 290–310.
That round table with Cole (et al.) is very much worth reading because it is clear that while lacking the vocabulary of ‘global ethics’ and ‘human rights’ all three of the contributors argue for the need (and reality) of such moral projects. For them, Bosanquet’s theory of the state is a principal obstacle to such projects.
So much for set up.
Recently, I taught Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. And I was much surprised to notice that Cole was one of his official targets. And since he cites the Proceedings issue, we can also discern that views like Russell’s may be among his unnamed targets. (Some other times more on this! ‘Schmitt vs Russell’ is an irresistible fight card.) There are a few passages worth examining. Here’s the first passage (labeled ‘[A]’ by me) in George Schwab’s translation:
[A] Ever since 1901 [Leon Duguit] has tried to refute the conception of sovereignty and the conception of the personality of the state with some accurate arguments against an uncritical metaphysics of the state and personifications of the state, which are, after all, only remnants from the world of princely absolutism but in essence miss the actual political meaning of the concept of sovereignty. Similarly, this also holds true for G. D. H. Cole's and Harold Laski's so-called theory of pluralism, which appeared somewhat later in the Anglo-Saxon world. Their pluralism consists in denying the sovereignty of the political entity by stressing time and again that the individual lives in numerous different social entities and associations. He is a member of a religious institution, nation, labor union, family, sports club, and many other associations. These control him in differing degrees from case to case, and impose on him a cluster of obligations in such a way that no one of these associations can be said to be decisive and sovereign. On the contrary, each one in a different field may prove to be the strongest, and then the conflict of loyalties can only be resolved from case to case. It is conceivable, for example, that a labor union should decide to order its members no longer to attend church, but in spite of it they continue to do so, and that simultaneously a demand by the church that members leave the labor union remains likewise unheeded.
Particularly striking in this example is the co-ordination of religious associations and labor unions, which could result in an alliance because of their common antipathy toward the state. This is typical of the pluralism which appears in the Anglo-Saxon countries. (pp. 40-41)
In [A] Cole is associated with two distinct positions. First, he is correctly treated by Schmitt as somebody who rejects the personification(s) of the state. Cole himself associates Bosanquet with such a position. Cole’s motive to question that states are persons/have personality is that he wishes to reject that states are “ends in themselves.” (p. 314)
As it turns out, Cole is happy to treat states as being persons as long as they are not treated as true ends. For him “the citizen is an individual in a far deeper sense than the State.” (p. 315) And ‘deeper’ here means a kind of precedence for the individual. As Cole puts it, “[The state’s individuality] is not greater than its citizens, and it cannot claim to use them as mere pawns in its own game. Its sovereignty is relative and not absolute; and this relativity exists for it both in its relations with its members and in its relations with other States.” (p. 315) Keep the last quoted sentence in mind.
As an aside, Cole thinks that the effect of treating states as not just ends in themselves, but ultimate ends, is to displace ethics with political theory. (p. 314) And it is worth asking to what degree his own approach does not anticipate the opposite effect of displacing political theory with ethics.
Second, Schmitt associates Cole with the denial of the sovereignty of the political entity (generally the state). As we have seen this is clearly right to some degree. But Schmitt presents Cole as denying such sovereignty in virtue of a kind of social theory (pluralism) in which individuals are de facto part of a wide web of social relations and subordinate to multiple authorities.
Schmitt’s interpretation of Cole is not false. Cole is a pluralist in his social theory. And Schmitt is right to suggest that in Cole we have a complex web of obligations to different authorities. But Cole’s purported denial of sovereignty of the political (in Schmitt’s sense) is really not an effect of his social theory. But rather follows from his denial of the State as an end. I quote Cole:
This denial that the State is an end in itself carries with it great consequences. It is in no sense a denial of the "reality" of the State or of the obligations which it imposes upon the individual. It is a limitation, and not an abrogation, of State authority; it does nothing to undermine the loyalty which the nationalist may feel to his State, as, to some extent, the embodiment of his nationality… (p. 315 [emphasis added])
So, the key question from the perspective of Schmitt’s theory is to what degree the limitation of State authority is a limitation on the power to declare an enemy. Cole’s wording is compatible with the thought that this power is not left to other institutions, but remains with a sovereign authority (that may well be the state or the nation that it embodies).
Now, that’s not the end of the matter. Because Schmitt may well claim that regardless of Cole’s intentions his ‘pluralism’ undermines the very possibility of a unified sovereign that has the power to declare an enemy. For,
[B] A pluralist theory is either the theory of state which arrives at the unity of state by a federalism of social associations or a theory of the dissolution or rebuttal of the state. If, in fact, it challenges the entity and places the political association on an equal level with the others, for example, religious or economic associations, it must, above all, answer the question as to the specific content of the political…The state simply transforms itself into an association which competes with other associations; it becomes a society among some other societies which exist within or outside the state. That is the pluralism of this theory of state. Its entire ingenuity is directed against earlier exaggerations of the state, against its majesty and its personality, against its claim to possess the monopoly of the highest unity, while it remains unclear what, according to this pluralist theory of state, the political entity should be. At times it appears in its old liberal form, as a mere servant of the essentially economically determined society, at times pluralistically as a distinct type of society, that is, as one association among other associations, at times as the product of a federalism of social associations or an umbrella association of a conglomeration of associations. Above all, it has to be explained why human beings should have to form a governmental association in addition to the religious, cultural, economic, and other associations, and what would be its specific political meaning. No clear chain of thought is discernible here. What appears finally is an all-embracing, monistically global, and by no means pluralist concept, namely Cole's "society" and Laski's "humanity." (p. 44-45)
So, if Cole is a pluralist in Schmitt’s sense, then regardless of what he states, Cole still may contribute to depoliticized understanding of international affairs. Crucially, then, it turns out that the problem is not just that Cole seems to dissolve genuine political sovereignty in many different kinds of bits (the problem of decomposing or distributing political sovereignty), but also, and more importantly, that Cole is guilty of a kind of de-politicization by way of a globalizing abstraction. (In Laski’s case that is self-evident from Schmitt’s perspective.) For Schmitt such de-politicization is characteristic of liberalism and Kantianism (but also pacificism) and it literally makes him, as Strauss discerned, nauseous.
I am not sure that Cole is really guilty of Schmitt’s charge. Here’s how he introduces the issue:
So, behind states and societies are nations. And Cole is clear that a nation is a collectivity held together by some belief or feeling (“consciousness of unity”). This is very close to Schmitt’s own understanding, except that Schmitt would add, and it is not a small addition, that the unity is itself constituted by the awareness of potentially dangerous other unities.
Now, before I continue, on my reading of Schmitt, the sovereign need not be lodged in the state at all. The key passage is this:
[C] In any event, that grouping is always political which orients itself toward this most extreme possibility. This grouping is therefore always the decisive human grouping, the political entity. If such an entity exists at all, it is always the decisive entity, and it is sovereign in the sense that the decision about the critical situation, even if it is the exception, must always necessarily reside there.
The decisive human grouping is compatible with many kinds of ways of organizing collectivities. So, that Cole privileges societies or nations at the expense of states is wholly orthogonal to the question whether he dissolves the political. Here’s Cole:
Now, it turns out what Cole is really pluralist about is the character of representation of the unified belief or opinion that constitutes the nation. And that’s because Cole presupposes that the nation itself, the “consciousness of unity,” is characterized by heterogeneity of parts (etc.). And so representing it accurately, requires “complexes of national institutions.” A view like this can also be found in Lippmann’s reading of Madison.
Now, it’s quite clear that a view like Cole’s leads to a lot of partial representations of a nation. And so it can well appear to lead to a fracturing and distribution of authority. But it does not follow that on Cole’s view there is no and cannot be an entity that represents the nation’s sovereignty in the political sense. Cole’s use of society is not guilty of depoliticizing in Schmitt’s sense. That strikes me as a mistaken reading, although enabled by Cole’s relative silence on the issue.