Albino Sea-Cucumber

Glen Newey

  • The Imaginary Institution of Society by Cornelius Castoriadis
    Polity, 418 pp, £14.95, May 1997, ISBN 0 7456 1950 9
  • Les Carrefours de Labyrinthe: Fait et a faire by Cornelius Castoriadis
    Seuil, 281 pp, frs 139.00, February 1997, ISBN 2 02 029909 7
  • The Castoriadis Reader edited by David Ames Curtis
    Blackwell, 470 pp, £50.00, May 1997, ISBN 1 55786 703 8

The first business of government, Confucius wrote in the Analects, is to ‘rectify names’. His point was that rulers should seek agreement on final ends. But reflection on the realities of power takes us from nomenclature to the nomenklatura: names, in the right, or wrong, hands are potent instruments of rule. ‘Words,’ Hobbes noted in Leviathan, ‘are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.’ Hobbes’s nominalism became the handmaiden of his realpolitik. Terms like ‘justice’ had no meaning apart from the facts of power, in a kind of dominant ideology thesis avant la lettre. Hence Hobbes’s comparison, at the end of Leviathan, between the Papacy and the kingdom of fairies – fictive edifices both, reared on the credulity of the downtrodden. Modern writers like Ernesto Laclau have used a similar idea to explain how the meanings of words are fixed by ‘hegemonic’ power relations.

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Vol. 20 No. 3 · 5 February 1998 » Glen Newey » Albino Sea-Cucumber (print version)
pages 6-7 | 3573 words