Glen Newey

Atrip to Berlin last year offered a chance to take stock of the once and future capital of Europe, and the none too stealthy ascent of the Fourth Reich. Its monuments, largely built by foreign coolies, are rising from the ashes of the Potsdamer Platz, while, down the road, Unter den Linden retains its old Prussic astringency, as if the last fifty years had been but a waking dream. In deference to the BSE brouhaha, posters in every public eatery in town vouchsafed that the dead quadruped on offer was rein deutscher Herkunft – of pure German origin; grim photos in Der Spiegel showed British bovines being shoved into Topf-style incinerators. Irony, or even memory, was at a discount.

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.’‘

‘Statecraft’ is a word not much heard nowadays. The idea that politics could be a craft or techne, familiar to readers of Plato and Machiavelli, is well-nigh beyond superannuation. But even though there’s little bite left in the old dog, it can still bark at a full moon. Its main currency now is in conspiracy theory – or, with the recursive tic which marks this style of political analysis, conspiracy theory theory. For a peerless example, see Lyndon LaRouche Jr on Daniel Pipes’s Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes from in Executive Intelligence Review:’‘

Goya’s The Third of May, 1808. The scene is laid in darkness outside Madrid, where the city’s captured defenders face a firing-squad. Some already lie dead, boltered with pink gore; meanwhile, the squad – a faceless testudo – takes aim again. The eye is drawn to a man, arms raised, pleading for his life. A point of suspension between life and death, he effectively sabotages the representation. His shirt is a splash of paint so incandescently white it looks as if it belongs in a Persil ad. One dwells on the improbably lingering moment, his dazzling shirt, the wayward compositional lines; and the longer you look the odder it gets.’

In Being and Nothingness Sartre has an admirable passage about the stubborn human tendency to ‘fill’, the fact that a good part of human life, in politics as elsewhere, is devoted to ‘plugging up holes’. Holes are vacant, and the humdrum psychopathy of political life seeks them out, in the cause of repletion – by contrast, the bore of omnipresence, as Sartre...