and intellectual rigor how liberal war (both externally and internally) has subsequently informed its juridical commitments and not vice versa. Here I am invariably provoking the well-rehearsed “Laws of War” sermon, which I believe more accurately should be rephrased as the “Wars of Law.” Nevertheless, despite this pressing need to rewrite the liberal encounter in language whose familiarity would be capable of penetrating the rather conservative but equally esoteric specialist field of International Relations, sufficient contemporary grounds already exist which enable us to provide a challenging account of global civil war from the perspective of liberal biopolitical rule. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid’s The Liberal Way of War encapsulates these sentiments, with the following abridged passage worth quoting:
A biopolitical discourse of species existence is also a biopolitical discourse of species endangerment. As a form of rule whose referent object is that of species existence, the liberal way of rule is simultaneously also a problematization of fear and danger involving threats to the peace and prosperity of the species. Hence its allied need, in pursuing the peace and prosperity of the species, to make war on whatever threatens it. That is the reason why liberal peacemaking is lethal. Its violence is a necessary corollary of the aporetic character of its mission to foster the peace and prosperity of the species ... There is, then, a martial face to liberal peace. The liberal way of rule is contoured by the liberal way of war ... Liberalism is therefore obliged to exercise a strategic calculus of necessary killing, in the course of which calculus ought to be able to say how much killing is enough ... [However] it has no better way of saying how much killing is enough, once it starts killing to make life live, than does the geopolitical strategic calculus of necessary killing.
This brings me to the problem of inside/outside. It is possible to account for the conflation of the two by acknowledging the onset of a global political imaginary that no longer permits any relationship with the outside. One could then support the kind of hypothesis you mention, which, rather than affirming the best of the enlightened liberal tradition, actually correlates the hollowing out of liberal values to the inability to carve out any meaningful distinctions between inside/outside, peace/war, friend/enemy, good/evil, truth/falsehood, and so forth. But this approach would no doubt either re-enforce the militaristic paradigm or raise further critical doubts about the postmodern/post-structural turn in political thought, and it is misleading. The collapse of these meaningful distinctions is not inimical to liberal rationality. To the contrary, the erosion of these great dialectical interplays now actually provides liberalism with its very generative principles of formation. I felt that you began to explore this in Empire by noting how Foucault’s idea of biopolitics was inadequate to our complex, adaptive, and emergent times. To rectify this, Deleuze’s notion of “societies of control” was introduced, which is more in line with contemporary systems of rule. My interest in this, however, is what actually lies behind: namely, the realization that societies of control are informed by a fundamental change in the biopolitical account of life, which, although affording life great potentiality, presents it in an altogether more dangerous light. This is what I would term the “liberal paradox of potentiality” — revealing contemporary liberalism’s irresolvable biopolitical aporia. On the one hand, the body liberated from the former disciplinary regimes is a body whose capacity to be free is assumed to increase exponentially — not implying that every situation presents a certain degree of freedom, or, for that matter, that one can simply “be free,” but that freedom is something which needs to be continually produced. And yet it is precisely because a body is now endowed with adaptive and emergent qualities — capable of becoming other than what was once epistemologically certain — that a life sets off more alarms. After all, who knows what a body is now capable of doing? Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza thus seems rather prophetic. For what a body is capable of becoming is the war cry heeded by contemporary security practitioners, which is reflected in recent developments in counter-terrorism. A marked shift is now clearly taking place in this field, which is moving us away from the traditional actions-based (punish after the event) or intentions-based (punish if intentions can be established) approaches, tending instead towards a more pervasive capabilities assessment (punish if one can establish the capability to strike).
MICHAEL HARDT: I find it interesting how the decline of the division between inside and outside does not undermine liberal rationality, as you say, from the perspectives or in the fields of international relations and security studies, although it does undermine the logic of a variety of liberal and radical democratic projects in the field of political theory. It seems to me that the collapse of a meaningful distinction between inside and outside is inimical to liberal democracy — or radical democracy — for these authors. For the critique and/or redemption of liberal democracy in political theorists such as William Connolly and Wendy Brown, a discrete and bounded space is required for the effectiveness of liberal rights, formal equality, freedoms, and representation. Ernesto Laclau’s notion of the people, Chantal Mouffe’s concept of hegemony, and Etienne Balibar’s idea of citizenship (even in a supranational context such as Europe) all similarly require a delimited sovereign space and a specific population. The focus in all these cases, it seems to me, is not on the outside or the conflict across the inside/outside border, but rather on the circumscribed nature of the inside. The people to whom these notions of liberal or radical democracy apply must be determinate and limited. That is not to say, I should repeat, that the projects of these political theorists require the definition of an enemy or focus on mechanisms of exclusion, but rather that they rely on a definite conception of the “inside,” that is, a coherent social body (such as a people) and a delimited sovereign space (whether national or not).
Perhaps this disjunction regarding the status of liberalism between International Relations and Political Theory is due, in part, to disciplinary differences that make it difficult to communicate between those fields. Perhaps it is due also to the ambiguous topological metaphor of inside and outside, which might be doing too much work here and thus leading to confusion. In addition, some difficulty certainly arises from the different meanings attributed to the term “liberalism.” We already have the problem of a primarily economic conception of liberalism (more prevalent in Europe) that refers to the freedoms of trade and markets, and a primarily political conception (more prevalent in North America) that emphasizes rights, the rule of law, constitutional freedom, and so forth. In your work, however, as well as that of Dillon and Reid, and perhaps more generally in the field of International Relations, there seems to me a somewhat distinct idea of liberalism, which is certainly based on juridical notions of the international rule of law but also highlights humanitarianism and the preservation of life as grounding principles. This is perhaps why the discourse of liberalism in International Relations moves so easily into questions of biopower — and also why the division between inside and outside is not necessary as a ground here. Tracing the meaning of liberalism across these disciplinary fields to separate the terminological differences from the differences in argument can certainly help clarify the question.
More interesting, though, is the possibility that the disjunction I’m highlighting is not merely explained by metaphorical ambiguities and terminological differences but really points to a conceptual and political conflict, which is revealed by looking at the issue and phenomena from different disciplinary perspectives. In other words, perhaps if political theorists were to adopt the disciplinary framework of International Relations scholars in this case, they would be forced to question their grounding in a coherent “inside,” that is, a determinate population and a circumscribed space of sovereignty, for liberal or radical democratic projects. In turn, such an exchange might force International Relations scholars to think more critically about what kind of democratic projects are possible in a context in which the division between inside and outside has declined.
BRAD EVANS: Agreed. There is a need for much greater cross-fertilization of ideas across the disciplines not only to permit more sophisticated meaningful critiques but also to have a more fruitful search for common political alternatives. To begin this process (with the intention of outliving it), I would suggest that we need to be more definitive about “What is liberalism?”. While it could be argued that the “many liberalisms” we can speak of show the richness of the tradition, one can speak the language of freedom and give juridical pronouncements without ever acknowledging the liberal recourse
