The Autonomy of The Political: Chris Thornhill

Chris Thornhill
The autonomy of the political

A socio-theoretical response
Abstract This article sets out a series of critical reflections on recent and
contemporary theoretical literature that makes expansive claims for the
status of the political as an autonomous category of social practice in modern
society, and it argues that such theories usually rest on rather tautological
and self-supporting constructions of society’s politicality. To counter this, the
article advocates and proposes a social-functional reconstruction of what,
precisely, is political in modern society, and it suggests that modern societies
are in fact structurally dependent on their ability to reduce the volume of
social exchanges that have to be articulated as specifically political. In
particular, it asserts that many aspects of the legitimatory grammar of
modern societies – especially rights and constitutions – are devices through
which societies restrict their political concentration and de-politicize their
primary functions. On this basis, the article concludes by proposing a more
limited concept of the political that is socio-theoretically adjusted to, and
usable in, the evolved form of a modern society.
Key words conflict theory · constitutions · de-politicization · the political ·
power · rights · sociology of politics
Political autonomy and political emphasis
In recent years it has become widespread for political theory to argue

that what is political in a society possesses a particular autonomy and
that there are certain social contents and exchanges, usually obtaining
structural importance for all society, which can only be explained as
political. In recent and current debate, theories that impute this status
to the political often place themselves in the context of a wider revision
of Marxist theory. These theories tend to be committed to the socially
transformative objectives implicit in Marxism, yet they are suspicious
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 35 no 6 • pp. 705–735

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706
Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (6)
of the occasionally reductive construction of political action and polit-
ical organization that typifies some lines of Marxist analysis. More
generally, though, a concern for the determinacy of the political might
be viewed as a constitutive problem for contemporary political theory,
as modern political theory, in its origins, confronted a dramatic expan-
sion of the societal themes subject to political regulation and it was
necessarily engaged with questions about the essence and distinction of
the political. Through the 20th century and beyond, therefore, political
theory has intermittently devoted itself to accounting for the structure
of the political and to explaining how the composition of what is polit-
ical reflects and comprises, autonomously, a discrete set of contents and
concerns.
Theories that accentuate the autonomy of the political usually have
two salient characteristics. First, they tend to posit a clear distinction
between what is political and what is more generally ‘social’. In this
respect, such theories normally oppose and incorporate a critique of
sociological methods of political analysis, which tend to interpret the
political as one group of social facts among others. Second, theories
ascribing autonomy to the political also usually impute a particular
societal emphasis to the political, and they construe the political either
as a primary resource in society, whose absence or weakness resonates
in perturbing manner for all society, or as a dimension of society in
which society obtains a particularly concentrated account of its form
and its underlying directive principles. Indeed, such theories tend to
assume that, because the political is autonomous, societies converge with
particular intensity around the political, that the political is the endless
object of social contestation and conflict, and that the wider stability
and cohesion of societies rely on their ability to contest and articulate
emphatically politicized constructions of themselves.
Claims for the autonomy and emphasis of the political run through
many of the most formative modern political theories and these claims
traverse simply identifiable ideological categories. Max Weber, for
example, expressly detached the analysis of the political from his general
method of social or sociological interpretation, and he argued that the
political contains and articulates modes of behaviour and direction that
are not found in other spheres of social exchange, and it is specifically
counterpointed against the technical patterns of bureaucratic labour.1
Proceeding from this assumption, he asserted that the political is a
dominant realm of human practice in society,2 and that societies marked
by weak political culture and a weak sense of the political tend to suffer
low levels of political integration and dynamism.3 After Weber, Carl
Schmitt also argued that the political is a structurally distinct sphere of
human action, and that it possesses clear autonomy against the social.
Indeed, Schmitt claimed that societies must generate positive principles
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Thornhill: The autonomy of the political
in which they can condense political accounts of themselves, and that a
society can only construct itself as political by effacing from this self-
construction the material, instrumental and pluralistic processes that
make this society social.4 In proposing this argument, Schmitt followed
Weber in concluding that the political is an especially emphatic dimen-
sion of a society, and that societies that cannot muster concentrated or
unequivocal accounts of their politicality are usually weak and vulner-
able ones.5 These presuppositions led Schmitt, at different points in his
theoretical career, to make two quite divergent claims about the politi-
cal. First, he argued, following Weber, that the political is an irreducibly
conflictual aspect of society and that societies demonstrate their politi-
cality in the decisions through which they commit themselves, if neces-
sary in exclusionary fashion, to a categorical definition of their necessary
form. Political decisions are thus decisions in which a society condenses
a resolute description of itself, and it is central to these decisions that
they identify as enemies those persons or principles that are antagonis-
tic towards or likely to undermine this description.6 In indicating that
the political is a body of potentially exclusionary principles on which
all society is structurally centred, Schmitt concluded that the political
must be a total politics and that a total politics must decisively transmit
political principles into all areas of social exchange.7 In this, however,
Schmitt clearly differentiated between the total politics of ethical repre-
sentation and the total politics of societal domination.8 Strongly favour-
ing the former, he argued, giving a second inflection to his concept of
the political, that the political is not constructed as total because it prac-
tically pervades and regulates all realms of social activity. In fact, it is
constructed as total because it represents, in the state, positive legiti-
matory principles of order, which are situated above the pluralistic
interests of civil society, and it gives a totalizing or categorical form to
civil society, which cannot be internally distilled or mediated from the
pluralistic interests that civil society contains.9 In this second concep-
tion, therefore, Schmitt viewed the political as a corpus of ideal, ethical
or representative principles, to which all societies must refer in order to
preserve their underlying integrity and to differentiate their founding
resources from what is simply social.10 In both these constructions, he
insisted that the political is both a discrete and an emphatic or privi-
leged resource in society, and that all society existentially depends on
this resource.
The sense of the political as a quality that is both socially discrete
and emphatically important for all society also runs through later theories
of the political, which, although perhaps not directly influenced by
Schmitt, are shaped by concerns similar to those that guide Schmitt’s
thought. This is evident in Hannah Arendt’s concern that the ‘rise of
society’ has eradicated that ‘common public world’, which she defined
708
as the political, and that this has instigated a ‘worldless mentality’ in
human beings, rendering them incapable of virtue and authentic action.11
This is apparent in Leo Strauss’ idea of political society as a place that
is distinct from practices dedicated merely to the ‘administration of
things’, that has to be kept uniquely free for the pursuit of ‘superior
dignity’ and public virtue, and that ultimately serves the ‘full actualiza-
tion of humanity’.12 In each of these claims, the political is specifically
delineated against the social, and societies marked by an excess of the
social are construed as deficient societies, eroding the founding human
capacities for free foundation and shared virtue.
More recent literature on the political differs from earlier literature
in that, as mentioned above, it is often placed in the broad margins of
radical or socially progressive politics. Nonetheless, more recent litera-
ture has also tended to duplicate the two features of earlier accounts
of the political, and it has used the claim that the political is a distinct
and emphatic resource to trace out a space of radical praxis in modern
society. In the protracted fragmentation of French Marxism after 1968,
for example, Blandine Kriegel broke defiantly with Marxist orthodoxy
by repudiating Marx’s (alleged) claim that ‘the political has no particu-
lar reality’ and even by arguing that the state is the factual precondition
of social emancipation.13 Kriegel insists on the ‘independence and tran-
scendence of the political’ and she argues that the liberating conse-
quences of human agency are specifically neglected and denied by the
‘philosophy of the social’.14 In a related intellectual context, Claude
Lefort amplifies these claims for the primacy of the political over the
social and he argues throughout his work that the political articulates the
underlying ‘form of society’: the political determines the ‘contestation of
social space’, and it institutes both the intelligible and the representative
structures in which all other facts, and all other ‘social relationships’,
are located.15 Lefort thus denotes the political as a founding negotiated
project that precedes and underlies particular social forms, and whose
absence is likely to lead a society to collapse into falsely organic modes
of repression.16
In a different line of post-Marxist analysis, Ernesto Laclau has also
pursued a correction of Marxist method by disarticulating the political
from the social. Laclau insists, against the grain of Marxist sociology,
that the political is an ‘ontological category’ in society. The political, he
explains, expresses itself as a ‘subversion and dislocation of the social’,17
and the social is a set of ‘contingent relations’ that are defined and deter-
mined by a decisive and antagonistic struggle for hegemony in society,
which, Laclau (following Schmitt) indicates, is necessarily articulated
as political.18 The political is thus a relatively autonomous conflictual
dimension of society, which contains intensified and highly unstable
potentials for social disruption, change or transformation. Above all,
709
Laclau stresses, societies that eliminate or downplay the political and
so fail to permit the ‘construction of a political space’ in which contests
over dominant social structure can be conducted occlude themselves
against their founding capacities for human freedom.19
In most recent debate, however, it is Chantal Mouffe who has claimed
most loudly that there are aspects of social exchange that are distinctively,
autonomously and emphatically political. Central to Mouffe’s argument
is the assertion that every society contains ineliminable conflicts, or an
irreducible ‘dimension of antagonism’, and that these conflicts are consti-
tutive of what is political for that society.20 The political, in this construc-
tion, resides in a particular configuration of antagonism and hegemony.
A theme in society becomes political when it is asserted as a principle
either of hegemonic or of counter-hegemonic discourse and where,
because it is asserted in this manner, it enters a relation of antagonism
towards other themes and towards other actors articulating other
themes in similar fashion. In defining the political in these terms, Mouffe
indicates that there is a clear distinction between the political and the
social. She qualifies this by stating that there are ‘displacements’ in this
relation and that the boundaries of the political are often redrawn as
new social themes become objects of hegemonic assertions and become
relevant for the power structures of a society.21 However, the political
comprises a number of ‘originary’ hegemonic acts that pre-form the
social, and the social exists as a set of ‘sedimented practices’, which are
originally subject to political determination.22 Like Laclau, in fact, Mouffe
cites Heidegger to indicate that the political in society resides ontolog-
ically beneath what is simply ‘social’ and that there are political contents
ingrained in the social that can be awakened or repoliticized at any time
as their antagonistic substance is contested in hegemonic discourses.23
As with earlier theories of the political, Mouffe also extends this
analysis to assert that societies that do not obtain emphatic experiences
of their own politicality are structurally deficient and often unfree soci-
eties. Each society, she argues, owes its underlying form to political
conflicts, and societies that forget this, or, in liberal-democratic style,
presuppose necessary harmony or ‘dictates of reason’ as their structural
foundation, are self-deluding. She thus indicates that Schmitt got some-
thing right when he suggested that, in a world without final or meta-
physical certainties, all political values are formed through decisive
conflict, and that society as a whole can only be stabilized and consol-
idated through decisively articulated contests or ‘agonistic struggle’.24
Indeed, Mouffe concludes that, in some instances, a society must con-
dense itself into entirely emphatic, and even into ultimately exclusionary,
accounts of its political form. ‘Antagonistic principles of legitimacy’, she
states, ‘cannot coexist within the same political association’ and each
‘mode of collective existence’ requires a categorical statement of its
710
proper and constitutive principles.25 The dimension of conflict inscribed
in the political, therefore, culminates in a conflict over society’s own
defining self-description.
Why the political?
These descriptions of the political are clearly stationed at very different

points in the theoretical landscape, and they assign different social func-
tions to those conditions and practices that they determine as political.
Despite this, however, these theories have certain structural similarities,
and they are informed by overlapping assumptions in their accounts of
why the political should be perceived as an autonomous and emphatic
social commodity. For this reason, these theories provide a framework
for critical inquiry into the construction of the political, and, precisely
because of their ideological distinctions, they make it possible to examine
the integral problems attached to assumptions about the autonomy and
emphasis of society’s politics. Across different programmatic positions,
these views all converge around the argument that modern societies
and their constituents need more politics: that is, that these societies are
inclining inexorably towards a pathological condition of social encroach-
ment or de-politicization,26 and that the demise of the political signals
a dreadful depletion of integrally human possibilities. Most importantly,
then, each of these theories suggests that a repoliticization of the polit-
ical is required and that the emphatic experiences that are tied to the
political are of crucial significance for the people who inhabit modern
societies. The need for political emphasis, therefore, seems to reflect a
body of social-diagnostic or even existential desires, and in each of these
theories the political is allowed to form an imaginary around which
vaguely articulated social apprehensions, experiences of unfreedom and
subjective anxieties are congregated. This article contends, however, that
the lamenting or diagnostic tone implicit in theories of the political has
obstructed analysis of what the political factually is, and the conflation
of political analysis with broad reflections on the conditions of human
life has produced a series of reductions and aporia in accounts of the
political, which can only be remedied through a thorough change of
analytical paradigm.
The first salient problem with these accounts of the political is that
their two central assertions – namely, that the political is socially auton-
omous and that, because of this, it is socially emphatic – are elaborated
in a conceptually self-serving and tautological style. In delineating the
political as autonomous (that is, as not social), these theories all ascribe
the autonomy of the political to the fact that, as they claim, the politi-
cal possesses a characteristically emphatic quality in a society and that,
711
because of this emphasis, other areas of society are determined by the
political, they refer to the political as their substructure, or they exper-
ience degradation through loss of the political. The political is thus
characterized as autonomous because it is also characterized as an
emphatic and privileged resource in society. In imputing particular
societal emphasis to the political, however, these theories also deduce
this societal emphasis from the assumption that the political is always
other than what is merely social, and it obtains its emphatic quality
because of its otherness to the social. The political is thus characterized
as emphatic because it is also characterized as autonomous. Underlying
these theories of the political, therefore, is an act of theoretical con-
cealment: the political is classified as autonomous (not social) because
it is emphatic, and it is classified as emphatic because it is autonomous
(not social). However, exactly what the political is, and why it might be
construed either as autonomous or as emphatic, does not come clearly
into view.
To add to this critical observation, furthermore, it might also be
argued that theories of the political normally sustain their approaches
through a pre-designation of the political. This means that theories of
the political habitually construct the political by virtue of a primary
demarcation, in which they identify or isolate certain aspects of social
life as principally political, and they then organize their analysis of
society, and its politics, in a perspective derived from this theoretical
preconstruction. In this respect, theories of the political normally uphold
their account of the political as autonomous, not by factually identifying
the political and effectively explaining its distinction from or emphasis
against the social, but by stabilizing a category of the political as prior
to any analysis of its content or its societal position and so by deducing
the content of the political from strategically or artificially constructed
hypostases. This difficulty in accounting for the content of the political
is evident in all the theories considered above. Indeed, all of these
theories examine the political, not as plausibly – or autonomously –
distinct from the social, but, through hypostatizing pre-designation, as
prior to the social.
Weber and Schmitt, for example, both explained the political through
reference to assumptions implicitly derived from a philosophical anthro-
pology, and they employed anthropological principles in order to detach
certain elements of human action from their specific social location and
to ascribe a specific dignity – as political – to these elements of action.
Weber described the political as an arena of social exchange that expresses
a human predisposition for ‘competitive conflict’ over power,27 and
which is focused, naturally, on ‘the quest for a share of power’.28 Schmitt
substantially followed this argument, although, as discussed, he added
to this the ethical claim that the political incorporates the integral
712
dimensions of human life, situated above what is merely material or
technical in humanity, and so it has an inherent representative quality.29
In analogy to this, later, Arendt also supported her analyses of the
political through essentially philosophical-anthropological constructions,
constructing the political around an account of authentic human life as
a specific capacity for freedom that is not determined in all its disposi-
tions by material purposes or universal strategies.30 In each of these
theories of the political, therefore, the distinction of the political from
the social is established through a characterization of the human being,
in prior abstraction from factual social process, as a bearer of certain
dominant attributes or propensities, which theory takes upon itself to
describe as founding the political. The emphatic precedence of the polit-
ical over the social is sustained solely by a sequence of prior anthropo-
logical postulates, and exactly why these features of human character
need to be determined as political is left to rest on theory’s own precon-
struction of the political. In fact, in these anthropological analyses the
political is once again derived from a tautology: in each case, the politi-
cal is seen as what is ingrained, as political, in human nature, and a society
is seen as possessing an autonomously and emphatically political char-
acter because it is a society of human beings, who, through their innate
constitution, are always emphatically political. What is precisely politi-
cal in those human dispositions and capacities that, in their politicality,
are supposed perennially to underscore and guarantee integrity for society
is thus examined only through highly self-serving conceptual constructs.
More recent theory has been less comfortable with anthropological
presuppositions about the political. For example, although influenced
by Arendt, Lefort derives his concept of the political from the suspension
of positive anthropological forms, and he defines what is authentically
political in a human society as a condition of agency where all positive
or categorical certitude is suspended and human beings are placed in a
state of subjective ‘indeterminacy’, in which the foundations of power,
law and knowledge have to be continuously recontested and rearticu-
lated.31 Similarly, Laclau clearly detaches his theory from all suspicion
of existential hypostasis or philosophical anthropology. In identifying
the place of political agency as a relation between hegemonic structures,
he negates the idea that there is one dominant political agent or ‘one
positive and unified conception of human nature’ underlying all society,
and he expressly denies that the content of the political can be distilled
from monofocal human interests, motivations or modes of organiza-
tion.32 It is in fact fundamental to Laclau’s political deconstruction of
classical Marxism that he identifies many ‘political subjects’ and many
forms of agency as constructing sites of the political.33
Despite such anthropological scepticism, however, both Lefort and
Laclau follow earlier theories in determining the political through a
713
process of predesignation. Lefort sees political agency as a condition of
reflexive liberty and primary freedom which is an inherent characteristic
of authentic human life. Laclau, analogously, also explains the political
as a particular shape of agency that is located at decisive moments in
social formation: agency is political in those moments where the ‘indeter-
mination of a historical juncture’ becomes evident, and where a constel-
lation for social liberation or hegemonic contestation becomes possible.
For Laclau, the political is always a distinctive space of emancipatory
activity, and this space can be occupied wherever a ‘structural disloca-
tion’ in society creates an opening for effective transformation.34 The
political, therefore, is not expressly derived from any anthropological
construction. However, it is still defined as a particular condition of
being: it is a socio-ontological reality that a subject accepts as its own
as it conflictually participates in the rearticulation of hegemonic claims
and the reshaping of social structures.35 The space of the political is
consequently, if not anthropologically, then surely ontologically pre-
designated. In fact, Laclau’s work might be seen to hinge on a conver-
sion of originally anthropological claims into quasi-ontological analyses.
Through this conversion, what is political in a society is once again
determined as political before any specific construction of its content.
Similar critical observations can be made about Mouffe’s theory of
the political. Mouffe argues that the political is a prior element of human
life. As a dimension of conflict, the political is embedded in all human
actions and dispositions, and because they all have an essential proclivity
for conflict all human beings have an essential proclivity for pursuing
acts of hegemonic or counter-hegemonic antagonism: that is, for acting
politically. Human societies, then, obtain their defining structure from
this original conflictual or political proclivity of human beings: the inner-
most social recesses and habits of human societies bear memories of the
articulations of this proclivity and their organization is constantly shaped
and reshaped by its renewed configurations. Like the theories discussed
above, however, this theory constructs what is political in a society by
simply presupposing that the agents that constitute this society, or at
least certain select behavioural tendencies attached to these agents, are
originally political, and are consequently inclined to manifest themselves
politically. Mouffe’s theory thus replicates, in new form, some of the
anthropological premises of earlier doctrines and, like these doctrines,
it struggles to examine the political in terms that are not either recur-
sive or simplificatory, or both.
In each of these cases, in sum, theory that delineates the political as
relatively autonomous against the social and ascribes particular emphasis
to the political does not offer an entirely plausible description of what
the political might be or of why it needs to be construed as autonomous.
Indeed, across this range of theories it is tempting to observe that we
714
do not find one persuasive account of the political as a category of
autonomous social practice, and each theory has difficulty in providing
non-tautological terms to elucidate the content of the political. In fact,
it might be observed that theories attributing autonomy to the political
against the social usually accomplish this by deducing the political from
human attributes or structural relations that are hypostatically deter-
mined as prior to or invariable within society, and, in so doing, they
signally fail to examine the political as autonomous. Theory that argues
that the political is autonomous because it can be distilled from an
imputed substratum of behavioural features or structural relations does
not explain the autonomy of politics: it merely circumvents societal
analysis of the political by resorting to reductive and crudely founda-
tional constructions. On this basis, then, it might also be argued that,
as they fail plausibly to determine the grounds for the autonomy of the
political, theories of the political are also unpersuasive in their assertion
that the political is emphatic through all society or that a demise of the
political is acutely experienced in all parts of society. In the theories
examined above, the claim for the general emphasis of the political
relies on the simple assumption that some aspects of human behaviour
are naturally emphatic and that, because these behavioural emphases
are classified as political, the political must also be an emphatic social
resource.
A short history of the political
In expressing this critique, this article does not oppose the fundamen-
tal theoretical claim that the political is an autonomous category of
social exchange. However, it argues, against hypostatic or quasi-anthro-
pological constructions, that there are other, more effective, methods for
examining the specificity of the political and that the tautologies and
aporia in theories of the political are commonly caused by the manner
in which such theories examine the social. Indeed, this article argues that
theories of the political habitually rely on anthropological or hypostatic
preconditions precisely because they disarticulate the political from the
social, or from the sociological, and that theory plausibly accounting
for the political, and for its autonomy, must find ways of reintegrating
the social, or the sociological, in its analyses. In consequence, it claims
that political theory that reopens itself to sociology, or specifically to
historical sociology, might observe that there are certain quite clear
socio-historical processes underlying the structure of the political in
modern societies, and that it is possible to employ socio-historical or
socio-theoretical perspectives to demonstrate how modern societies distil
the political, or something political, as an autonomous element of their
715
functional fabric. Moreover, it also claims that modern societies tend
to evolve political structures in relatively generalizable manner and that
it is possible to give a quite circumscribed account of the function,
examination and status of the political in such societies. This article thus
proposes a change of methodological paradigm in the construction of
the political, moving from the hypostatic to the socio-theoretical, and
it suggests that this adjustment might alter both the manner in which
theory accounts for the political and the claims made for the role and
emphasis of the political in society. Following this change of paradigm,
this article argues that it only makes sense to talk of the political if it is
understood, not as a body of behavioural residues or structural relations,
but as a term under which a society itself interprets and articulates its
processes, or some of its processes, as political. The concept of the polit-
ical, thus, can be given meaning only through an analysis of society’s
own description of its political functions.
Examined historically, the formation of what is recognized as politi-
cal in modern societies began as a process in which certain resources of
social power were gradually abstracted from the highly diffuse familial,
local and ecclesiastical forms of feudal society and incrementally invested
in formally structured institutions. Central to the emergence of the politi-
cal was a consolidation of power as specifically political power, and an
organization of certain social exchanges as necessarily determined by
and responsive to such power. The institutions that developed to transmit
political power, crucially, acquired two capacities that determined them
as political: first, they were able to apply power in increasingly gener-
alized form across regional, sectoral or patrimonial boundaries; second,
they were able positively to authorize and implement their own decisions
and to generate iterable templates to explain their decisions without
constant rearticulation of why these decisions warranted compliance
and without the repeated validation of these decisions by particular agree-
ments.36 The initial distinction of what was political from what was not
political, therefore, depended on the abstraction of power as a general-
ized social quantity that could be mobilized in a form not specifically
or exclusively determined by the immediate objective relations to which
it was applied. For this reason, the emergence of something determinable
as political in society also depended on the specific capacity of political
actors to use law as a positive medium for the general transmission of
power.37 That is to say that, in the earliest formation of the political, law
provided politics with a technically consistent form that could commu-
nicate power by referring to written, or at least reasonably consistent,
patterns of legitimacy which it, as law, already contained and pre-
supposed.38 Law thus permitted politics to mobilize these legitimatory
patterns in order to transmit its power across variations of place and
time. As a consequence of these features, law offered to politics the
716
inestimable benefit that it was able to avert the need for an incessant
contestation or recontestation of the motives for power’s application
and it enabled politics to transplant and replicate throughout society
the preconditions for the authorized use of power. Fundamental to the
formation of the political, therefore, was a process of schematic legal
borrowing, in which political actors (later to become states) appropri-
ated the legal apparatus of the papal Church, often (although not always)
including the principles of Roman law,39 with which the Church had
already begun to organize and legitimize itself as a hierarchically centred
and relatively autonomous institutional agent.40 These legal forms offered
principles that were at once relatively stable and iterable, and they
allowed political actors to consolidate and explain their authority as
positively autonomous and increasingly dominant centres of power.41
One crucial point in this short analysis is that political theory is
correct to identify the political as an autonomous category of societal
practice. From their very first inception, modern societies began to acquire
specifically political resources, and their continued evolution depended
on their ability increasingly to abstract these resources as autonomous.
It is in fact fundamental to emerging modern societies that they learned
to identify those social themes to which power needed to be applied in
generalized form, that they consolidated political vocabularies and
references that enabled them to make and transmit political decisions,
and that, by means of these references, they could gradually establish
procedures for communicating political power which were formally dis-
tinct from procedures used for communicating decisions in other parts
of society. Indeed, underlying the emergence of modern society and its
modes of political transmission it is possible to identify a broader
dynamic of socio-functional differentiation, in which all different realms
of social practice gradually condensed around specific functions and
evolved explanations of their functions in accordance with positive, rela-
tively independent, and increasingly self-authorizing patterns.42 For this
reason, it is arguable that the autonomy of the political is a necessary
and formative fact for modern societies. The first indications of some-
thing distinctively political in society refracted, through law, a process
in which the political separated itself, in increasing autonomy, from
other social functions, and devised ways of explaining and legitimizing
itself which required a dramatically decreasing level of interpenetration
with the discursive forms specific to other parts of society.
Attached to this general account of the autonomy of the political,
however, are two further points, which run counter to more common
claims about the political. First, in emerging modern societies the polit-
ical was formed as autonomous, not as a specific group of behavioural
emphases or a particular set of liberating practices, but as a store of terms
in which the political actors of a society could explain their functions
717
as political and designate these functions as different from other social
functions. The political, therefore, did not evolve as autonomous because
it is separate or in some way ontologically distinct from the social: it
evolved as the self-construction of one body of societal facts in relation
to others. The political, even in its earliest abstraction, was formed as
an amalgam of terms in which a society provided a construction of its
politics (of its need to generalize a certain type of power) and generated
reproducible formulae for explaining its politics in categories distinguish-
able as political. The political, therefore, originally evolved as irreducibly
social, and it was in fact first constructed as political precisely because
it was an element of the social. Second, then, even in the very earliest
formation of the political as an autonomous societal category the politi-
cal was dialectically linked to a process of social de-politicization. That
is to say that political power was able to articulate itself as such specifi-
cally because it learned to transmit and explain itself by self-detachment
from other areas of social exchange and by self-authorization through
legal media, which could be generalized across place and time without
their recurrent emphasis or localized politicization. In many social con-
texts the formation of centralized political institutions, supported by
incrementally unified laws, was in fact driven by a concerted endeavour
(often promoted by those likely to be subject to governmental power
and uniform laws) to defuse particular social conflicts, to obviate the
need for a disruption of society caused by private judgement or partic-
ularized contests over law-finding, and so to pursue the abstraction of
political power as an explicit strategy of societal (self-)pacification.43 In
other words, therefore, political actors first began to act and auton-
omously to explain themselves as political actors because they obtained
relatively iterable and positive legal formulae, which rendered it possible
for political decisions to be made in a manner that required less and less
integration of other social contents into the political system, and so
involved a possible minimum of particularized societal politicization.
The very earliest period of political formation was thus marked by
the fact that societies gradually accounted for power and its application
as political, that they obtained legal means to apply political power, and
that they restricted or at least conferred a predictable structure on their
own residual politicality. This period, then, was followed by an era of
concentrated state building (usually described as ‘early modernity’) in
which societies began more clearly to circumscribe a limited group of
themes as political, to form institutions dedicated consistently and auton-
omously to the administration of these themes, and to produce a clear
and replicable corpus of principles in reference to which political insti-
tutions could elucidate their reactions to those themes described as polit-
ical. Historical sociologies of European states have usually claimed that
early modern European history was characterized by the arrogation of
718
exclusive jurisdictional powers by a small number of political actors and
thus by an undivided concentration of political authority and powers of
extraction in territorial states.44 This is indubitably accurate. However,
it would be a mistake to view the composition of the political at this
historical juncture as driven solely by a logic of societal convergence or
by a fully coercive colonization of society by omnipotent political actors.
On the contrary, in fact, this process of political evolution was also
shaped by a widening societal recognition that, through the increasing
differentiation of society, political power had irreversibly dislocated
itself from other social relationships, and that power was now distilled
around quite specific and concentrated exchanges, which required both
distinct institutional organization and distinctively positivized – that is,
distinctively political – authorizations for itself. Emergent states, there-
fore, can be seen as early articulations of a society’s autonomous con-
struction of its politicality, and the nascence of states in early modern
Europe reflected an expanding awareness that, as a relatively differen-
tiated resource, political power needed, not only a positive judicial struc-
ture and a coherent body of laws, but an administrative apparatus that
could apply power in a relatively consistent and conventionalized manner.
Far from solely tracing a process in which political actors annexed other
spheres of society, however, the emergence of states also expressed and
reinforced the autonomy of society’s politics as a resource that was distinc-
tively limited against parts of society and other types of social exchange.
In parallel to the institutional consolidation and regional centraliza-
tion of the political in states, the early modern era of European history
also witnessed the emergence of a theoretical canon that allowed the
political to accentuate its status as an autonomous realm of social life.
Naturally, theoretical abstractions arising from this process of political
evolution were subject to extreme national variations. Nonetheless,
across the borders between emergent states political thinkers in early
modern Europe appear to have apprehended the emerging autonomy of
politics as a clear and general pattern in their social environments, and
they habitually devoted their mental energies to elucidating how the
political could be accounted for in fully positive and autonomous terms.
It was for this reason, for instance, that Marsilius of Padua, the great
harbinger of early modern politics, first insisted on ‘civil justice and the
common benefit’ as the final criteria to determine the ‘necessity of law
in its last and most proper sense’.45 It was for this reason, then, that
Martin Luther asserted that in the world the authorities have a duty to
preserve ‘external peace’,46 and, as long as they accomplish this, they
‘command what they want, and the subjects accept it’.47 It was for this
reason, later, that Thomas Hobbes used a theory of the social contract
to propose an entirely positive analysis of the autonomy of the body
politic, which ascribed largely unlimited authority to political authority
719
and in fact allowed this authority to pass laws – not as ‘Counsell’, but
as ‘Command’ – without any external source or derivation.48 And it was
for this reason, still later, that Christian Thomasius definitively severed
the thread between law and religion to claim that law is a science whose
sole purpose is to show the ‘ways and means to further external politi-
cal peace and order’.49 Across national divisions, in sum, early modern
controversies about the political were settled by the acceptance that a
society possesses something categorically political and that what is politi-
cal in a society is distinct and abstracted from its other resources. These
controversies coincided in the verdict that the political incorporates an
aggregate of social functions focused on themes that have generalized
implications across society and cannot be fully resolved by local or
sectoral institutions, and that, in responding to these themes, institutions
need autonomous, positive and generalized (that is, locally and objec-
tively unspecified) explanations to facilitate their use of power. In conse-
quence of this, the political gradually emerged as a mode of autonomous
theoretical self-reflection in most European societies, as all societies
increasingly presupposed relatively generalized or at least consistently
iterable conceptual preconditions to designate some social themes as
political and to support, authorize, simplify and accelerate the applica-
tion of power to themes of this kind.50
By the middle of the 17th century, therefore, the political had become
a constantly co-implied substructure in the social communications of
most European societies, and reference could be made to the political,
and the powers and justifications that it contained, whenever a society
needed to articulate responses to social themes likely to acquire gener-
alized resonance. By this stage, moreover, it might also be argued that
the political had developed techniques that allowed it to presuppose or
preserve an account of its own autonomy, and that societies constantly
relied on the presence of abstracted political functions and autonomous
political validity claims to perpetuate their everyday realities. It is there-
fore surely no coincidence that this period in European history also saw
the consolidation of distinctive concepts of political legitimacy, which
usually utilized (very flexibly defined) principles of natural right to justify
general forms and particular acts of government. Early concepts of legiti-
macy formed a repository of terms in which early political actors (now
close to being states) could enunciate accounts of their functions and
store a volume of justifications for their actions in easily available and
conveniently transferable theoretical memories.51 The concept of legiti-
macy, in other words, although widely perceived as a dominant locus of
theoretical politicization in early modern Europe, evolved as a variable
template in which societies could simplify accounts of their politics and
so finally consolidate their political functions as fully autonomous. In
fact, the concept of legitimacy enabled what was political in a society
720
to refer to a constructed description of itself that concentrated the politi-
cal as autonomous but that also preserved the political as relatively
immune to broader societal politicization.
It is important to note, however, that, precisely at the point in
European history where a relatively autonomous concept of the politi-
cal had begun to stabilize and fully generalize itself in society, this concept
was unsettled and refigured by a wider process of social transformation.
This occurred in the period usually known as the Enlightenment, in which
European societies experienced an increasingly widespread and acceler-
ated dynamic of socio-functional evolution and differentiation, in which
other spheres of social practice (especially the economy, the sciences,
medicine and the arts) also rapidly approached a condition of full func-
tional autonomy.52 This meant that the evolving political system was
suddenly forced to account for its autonomy by reflecting on how what
is political in a society could explain itself in a societal constellation
defined by an increasingly pluralistic functional fabric and on how
political contents could be legitimized across the boundaries between
social spheres which were increasingly structured by dramatically diver-
gent imperatives and interests. As a result of this, it transpired that the
political could only stabilize its autonomy and legitimacy, and indeed
perpetuate itself as political, by providing precise formulae to mark its
boundaries and to sensibilize itself towards other realms of social practice.
In the longer period of Enlightenment, therefore, the general autonomy
and legitimacy of the political became dependent on acts of self-limiting,
and the political came to require both a self-explanation and a mode of
transmission that acknowledged, sanctioned and protected the basic
autonomy of other, equally autonomous, social spheres.
At this juncture, then, the formation and articulation of the political
as an autonomous social category entered a third and decisive period.
During the Enlightenment, the political, in its autonomy, became struc-
turally dependent upon the constitutional inscription of formal rights,53
and rights became crucial preconditions for the modern form of the
political. Rights acted as preconditions for the political in three distinct
ways. First, in identifying persons as bearers of uniform subjective rights
states were able to generalize the conditions under which they applied
power to social agents in different social spheres and they could avoid
stimulating controversies over the application of power across ranks,
locations and functional distinctions. As a result of this, rights helped
states both to facilitate their own operations and to externalize a legiti-
matory account of themselves as respecting and protecting the dignity
and freedom of particular social agents and, in consequence, they allowed
states to propose themselves as entitled to integrate the addressees of
their power in relatively pacified manner. Both practically and theoreti-
cally, therefore, rights permitted states to consolidate generally structured
721
interfaces between themselves and other parts of society and, at the same
time, to condense a self-construction of the political that could be used
to accompany, justify and diffusely de-emphasize the application of power.
In the context of a rapidly evolving and functionally pluralized society,
therefore, rights became the distinctively modern reference which the
political employed to perpetuate its autonomy. Second, rights also acted
to place clear limits on the place of the political in society and to restrict
what was political against other emergent spheres of social practice.54
For example, by defining freedoms of ownership, contract, movement
and expression as subject to constitutional protection, rights acted to
withdraw certain activities (i.e. economic activities requiring freedom of
ownership, contract or movement, or scientific issues requiring freedom
of expression) from emphatic or obdurate political control. In perform-
ing this role, rights had the function that they enabled states to concen-
trate their own self-explanation and legitimacy around specific groups
of – clearly political – themes, they provided criteria by which states
could identify and preselect those themes to which their power should
be applied, and they allowed states to avoid being overburdened (and
perhaps de-legitimized) by the requirement that they address an exces-
sively high volume of excessively politicized issues.55 Rights, thus, rapidly
acquired the function that they placed boundaries around what was
constructed as political and they objectivized the limits of the political
in relation to themes in society that could not effectively be politicized.
In this respect, third, rights also acted, not only to preserve the political
as an autonomous group of functions, but proportionately to locate the
political in society, to obstruct the expansion of the political directives
beyond the limits of the political, and so to support and maintain society
as a whole in its emergent condition of differentiation.
At this stage in social evolution, therefore, societies clearly required
autonomous accounts of the political: that is, they needed positive forms
to allow them to respond and apply power to matters of socially gener-
alized significance. Simultaneously, however, other spheres of social
practice also obtained highly refined capacities for self-regulation, and
society’s need for dramatically totalized political decisions became increas-
ingly scarce. Moreover, in a condition of increasing social plurality other
spheres of social practice could not be easily or advantageously regu-
lated by political decisions, and the legitimacy of a political system could
easily be undermined in cases where it sought coercively to determine
exchanges in areas not immediately sensitive to political power. At this
point in modern history, then, rights and constitutions served, at one
and the same time, both to generalize and to limit the political, and to
reflect the fact that, in a pluralistically evolving society, the political
could only preserve its autonomy (and legitimacy) by stating this in
terms that were simultaneously general and limited.56 Indeed, it might
722
be suggested, as a speculative thesis, that the reason why modern states
began to develop constitutions, and why these constitutions instituted
a formal rights regime that transformed rights from honoured privileges
and immunities of social groups into universal/subjective rights of
particular persons, was that states could utilize rights to underwrite the
autonomy of their power and to ensure that their power was applied as
efficiently and as unemphatically as possible to the many increasingly
pluralistic social environments by which they were surrounded.57 Conse-
quently, if the emergence of the political during the first formation of
modern societies was marked by a twofold or even dialectical process,
in which, at one and the same time, the political was crystallized as
autonomous and de-emphasized in relation to other areas of society, this
telos of political construction culminated in the formation of constitu-
tions and constitutional rights. Natural rights, constitutional rights and
human rights evolved, during the period of Enlightenment, as institu-
tions through which political actors could both simplify their own justi-
ficatory accounts of themselves and reduce the emphasis of their relation
with other spheres and modes of social practice, and so produce prac-
tical and theoretical conditions under which they could pursue those
objectives delineated as political.
This emerging function of rights was clearly reflected in both the
theoretical and the practical aspects of state building and political evolu-
tion during the Enlightenment. Political theories of this era were normally
in agreement that politics as a whole must be positively accounted for
as a distinct and generalized focus of accountability in society: they
agreed that politics was formed by substantive and generalizable agree-
ments (often called social contracts) that provided positively demonstra-
ble principles to authorize political power. However, they also agreed,
by and large, that political power was necessarily curtailed, and it was
limited at once by proprietary rights, procedural rights and (rudimen-
tary) rights of subjective or personal autonomy.58 In this respect, the main
theories of the Enlightenment appropriated and rearticulated earlier ideas
of natural law to insist on the inviolability of subjective and proprietary
rights of particular persons, usually to be defended by constitutions.59
Moreover, theorists at this time also normally agreed that respect for
rights should be guaranteed through the dismemberment of the state
into executive and sub-executive competences, and the ‘growth of the
judicial power’, enshrined in a written or informal constitution, was
almost universally perceived as a necessary principle of legitimate polit-
ical administration.60 In the revolutionary upheavals of this period, then,
institutional actors also began to accept relatively constrained constructs
of the political and they increasingly employed constitutions and consti-
tutional rights to consolidate their functions through an immunization of
their societal boundaries. At this time, for instance, states began to insist
723
on the autonomy of religion in relation to the political: they achieved
this by prescribing tolerance as a civic necessity and by granting rights
of freedom of belief and protection for religious minorities. States began
to insist on the autonomy of the economy in relation to the political:
they achieved this by extending the consensual element in monetary
policy,61 instituting rights of fiscal consent,62 and even transforming
mandatory taxpayers into rights-bearing citizens.63 Additionally, states
also began to insist on the integrity of the law in relation to the political:
they achieved this by sanctioning judicial neutrality and by instituting
permanent constitutional documents to protect the law from constant
variation and from either legislative or executive encroachment. These
processes acted to preserve the differentiation and autonomy of all parts
of society. In all these processes, however, states specifically used the
ascription of rights to conserve their own power, and their legitimatory
accounts of their own power, as specifically and autonomously political.
On these grounds, it can be concluded that in modern societies the
political is necessarily autonomous. In fact, it can be viewed as a struc-
tural precondition of modern societies that the political forms itself as a
fully distinct sphere of practice and legitimization. However, the politi-
cal is not autonomous because, in some ancient Aristotelian manner, it
expresses distinctive human features, emphatic structural relationships,
or sites of reflexive or discursive liberty. The political is a resource distilled
from a many-layered evolutionary trajectory: this process involves, first,
the increasing articulation of a set of themes that require generalized
resolutions and a number of institutions capable of meeting this require-
ment; second, the increasing structural divergence of different dimen-
sions of modern society; third, the increasing ability of political actors
to reduce the manifest emphasis of their communications with other
social sectors. At the fulcrum of this evolutionary trajectory is the forma-
tion of constitutional rights. Fundamental to a modern society’s ability
to account for itself as possessing something autonomously political is
the fact that states have learned to filter social themes, and to control
their responses to social themes, through the formalization of rights. In
modern societies the political explains itself as autonomous (and legiti-
mate) by using rights to limit the probability that themes originating
in the economy, law, religion, or the arts will become disruptive or
politically exceptional, and, in the same process, to ensure that its own
responses to such themes are commensurately measured to the plurality
and differentiation of contemporary social life-contexts.64 The autonomy
of the political, therefore, is always a curtailed or equivalent autonomy,
and in a modern society the political, structured around rights, always
presupposes its own reflexive de-politicization.
724
The political and its autonomy reconsidered
Generally, the formation of rights in the state is viewed as a constitutional

process that external forces, usually guided by ethically inflected or polit-
ically intensified social programmes, have imposed upon the state, often
to restrict the state’s manifest political authority.65 However, this article
argues that the granting of rights by states is not, or at least not pri-
marily, the outcome of voluntaristic political conflicts or socio-political
opposition to the state. Instead, the historical process of rights allocation
can equally be viewed as an internal evolutionary function that states
have elaborated in order specifically to preserve their autonomy as polit-
ical actors: that is, to remain political.
As discussed, states of the Enlightenment first used rights to protect
their own growing political autonomy: in allocating basic civil rights and
proprietary rights emergent modern states were able to concentrate their
power in consistently circumscribed and legitimized parameters. Yet it
can also be argued that political rights had an analogous function. After
the earliest wave of constitutional formation, the allocation of constitu-
tionally enshrined rights of political inclusion and participation to some,
and then (gradually) to most, social agents can also be interpreted as a
mechanism that states evolved for their own internal functional reasons.
In applying political rights to designate social agents as entitled to play
a role in endorsing or even establishing state power, states created a
secondary apparatus by means of which, against the background of a
rapidly evolving social reality, they could reaffirm and restabilize the
preconditions of their autonomy. In conferring political rights on social
agents, states developed a technique through which they were able to
extract the addressees of their power from their different and increasingly
pluralized life-contexts and to transpose a construction of these agents
into their own manifest, yet also relatively manufactured and control-
lable, external periphery. By examining agents in this periphery as rights-
holders or fully entitled citizens, states were able to include these agents
(and their rights) in their own self-explanation as legitimate and so,
through this construction, to articulate and substantiate positive, evident
and iterable explanations for their decisions and laws. The principle of
political citizenship thus became a factual institution in which states could
objectively externalize the grounds of their legitimacy and even give a
demonstrable or experiential structure to justificatory principles that had,
at earlier stages in the state’s evolution, possessed a largely inchoate or
implicit conceptual status. Primarily, therefore, the early rights of citizen-
ship served externally to underscore the autonomy and the positive
politicality of the state, and through the conferring of these rights states,
far from suffering a diminution of power, obtained clear practical benefits
and a concrete reinforcement of their power. As the young Karl Marx
725
apprehended, the fact that citizens were allotted shared political rights
allowed states to pre-structure the conditions in which social themes
were channelled into the political arena, to harden the periphery of the
political order against emergent or unpredictable issues, and so, again,
consistently to de-emphasize the relation between politics and other social
functions.66 Like earlier private or civil rights, therefore, political rights
also acted as material filters by means of which states could stabilize their
relations to other spheres of society, generate fluid and de-politicized
premises for their actions, and articulate their legitimacy without func-
tionally compromising their autonomy.
In addition to this, in fact, this theory of rights can also be expanded
to include the allocation of material rights or social rights. Analysis of
social rights usually assumes that recent history (albeit with certain
lapses) has witnessed an edifying thickening of the rights offered by the
state, so that citizens are now integrated in the political system, not only
as bearers of civil and political rights, but also as claimants to material
dignity.67 Against this classical view, however, the construction of social
rights around principles of welfare might also be seen as a formal self-
articulation of autonomous political functions in which the political
system, in a hypertrophically complex society, uses rights to stabilize the
terms of sustainable interaction between itself and the economy. Indeed,
social rights might also be seen as devices that states utilize to control
the parameters of political and economic exchanges, and, in enshrining
entitlements to allocable resources, to palliate and control the residual
politicality of precarious social themes. In earlier periods of societal evo-
lution, therefore, the inscription of civil, proprietary and political rights
in the state’s constitution created manifest and generalized formulae to
sustain the autonomy and legitimacy of the political system. Contem-
porary political systems now deploy social rights in order, in one and
the same act, both to include and to exclude social themes as political
and to generalize and to limit their own power. Even the imputation of
social rights by modern states can thus be conceived as a necessary and
constitutive self-restriction of the political.
If this historical-theoretical account of the political is accepted, it can
be concluded that what is political in a society evolves as autonomous
because in a modern society the primary function of the political system
is to act as an agent of social filtration and societal de-politicization.
The political system fulfils its de-politicizing function in three function-
ally and historically overlapping ways. First, it uses proprietary civil and
political rights to generalize its relation to its social environments and,
by these means, it ensures that the foundations for its policies and deci-
sions are positively secure and need not be repeatedly renegotiated.
Second, it applies legal titles (usually through civil and political rights)
to matters acquiring problematic importance in other spheres of society
726
and it limits the extent to which these can be or need to be politicized.
Third, it applies rights to trace the threshold of politicality in the relation
between politics and other areas of society (especially the economy), and
it marks out formulae for the simultaneous political inclusion and exclu-
sion of socio-economic themes. In all of these processes, therefore, rights
are used by the political system to restrict the degree to which social
themes become political, and to preserve the political system as an auton-
omous and legitimate, but also relatively limited, political agent: as an
agent, in fact, whose autonomy, legitimacy and politicality depend on its
self-limitation. The political system then uses the aggregate of legitima-
tory benefits accruing to it through its use of rights to fulfil a (relatively
limited) range of functions, which are underpinned and legitimized by
its self-explanation as political. In a modern society, therefore, the polit-
ical is indeed autonomous. Yet its autonomy is largely founded in the
dual capacity of the political system to subject nascent social conflicts
to legal filtration and to ensure that its own political power is not
emphatically applied or challenged.
What remains of the political?
The concept of the political outlined here suggests that, although the
political surely possesses a certain autonomy in modern society, the polit-
ical is specifically not the outgrowth of emphatic behavioural or struc-
tural features of a society. While other theories accounting for the
political as autonomous suggest that the political is a positive reality in
which a society provides a description of its fundamental character, this
theory argues that, in many ways, the opposite is the case. What is
political in a modern society is concentrated around rights. Like all legit-
imatory expressions of a society’s politicality, rights might be perceived
as a normative structure in which a society gives a generalized explana-
tion of itself and of the ways in which it responds to those social concerns
that require generalized resolution. Yet rights possess this status precisely
because they are the forms in which a society elects to defuse or to de-
politicize these concerns, and they in fact serve as institutions by means
of which a society can avoid producing or confronting a socially con-
densed or fully political account of itself. Rights permit societies to escape
the difficult and de-stabilizing experience of its convergence around cate-
gorical political conflicts or emphatic political decisions. In other words,
what is political in a modern society sustains its autonomy and legiti-
macy precisely in that moment that it de-politicizes itself, and a society’s
description of its politics is always likely to recede behind the principles
(usually enshrined as rights) through which it protects itself against polit-
ical emphasis, concentration and self-confrontation. In a modern society,
727
therefore, the political is not positively or substantially constituted. The
political is an ongoing process of society’s own de-politicization, and
what is political can be extracted and deciphered, almost ex negativo,
only from the conditions of this process.
Following this analysis, if theory insists that the political is auton-
omous and if it demands that in contemporary society the political
should be emphatically contested and negotiated, the terrain for this re-
emphasis of the political ought to be reconsidered. On the account
offered here, what is autonomously political in a modern society is the
set of processes by means of which a society stabilizes its conflicts through
rights. In consequence, political contests in society can only, ultimately,
be conflicts over rights: rights are the formulae in which in modern
society social themes can assume political relevance and demand polit-
ical inclusion. As such, however, political contests are only, at a most
essential level, contests over the sustainable conditions of social de-
politicization: they are contests that require the political system to re-
formulate the conditions of its autonomy by capping new social themes
with legal titles – rights – and by integrating these into the external form
in which it explains and underwrites its relation to other spheres of
social exchange. In most instances, it should be stated, political contests
are likely to occur through the internal or judicial dynamics of the fabric
of rights that the political system has already evolved. That is to say
that political contents are normally expressed where a political system
is made to identify contradictions between different elements in the
clusters of rights which its constitution contains and where a political
system is obliged to expand one right in such a cluster in order to liberate,
extend, qualify, or obstruct the application of one other right or a number
of other rights. A primary example of this, at the level of political rights,
is the historical contest through which rights of civil equality were,
because of their inner tensions, gradually amplified, first, to include
formal rights of political equality, and then to incorporate all social
sectors in effective enfranchisement.68 A further example of this, at the
level of social or material rights, is the classical conflict in early consti-
tutions between inviolable rights of property ownership and rights of
human dignity, a conflict eventually (in part) resolved through the formal
or informal acceptance that rights of dignity include rights to a share in
national wealth and so countervail or at least qualify formal rights of
ownership. At a more contemporary level, this might also be identified
in current debates about environmental rights, in which some rights
of ownership are increasingly seen as conflicting with general rights of
personal dignity or with specific social rights,69 and the tension in the
relation between these rights makes (as far as is possible) their re-
equilibration, through some guarantee of environmentally founded rights,
probable, or even foreseeable. Such contests over rights might be seen
728
as articulations of the political in a society because they attach to ques-
tions that force the political system to address and include new themes
and to restructure the boundaries of the political. Most particularly,
however, such contests are political because they oblige the political
system to articulate new strategies for simplifying its relation to other
parts of society, to effect a renewed exclusion of certain themes from
emphatic politicization, and to use new concepts – that is, new, or newly
formalized, rights – to mark those themes subject to such exclusion.70
Essentially, therefore, if the political entails conflict, it is a conflict over
the terms of social de-politicization.
This article consequently concludes that the claim that a society
displays the political, as distinct from the social, through emphatic
positive exchanges or primary descriptions of its structural orientations
badly misarticulates the status and the content of the political in society.
Likewise, theory that demands more politics, or that views a repoliti-
cization of the political in society as a path to greater human freedom,
is also deeply misguided in its analysis. In fact, the difficulties that theory
encounters in attempting to provide a substantial foundation for the
political are linked to the fact that the political is not a substantial
resource, and, although it possesses relative autonomy, this autonomy
is socially neutral, and it is not formally distinct from the autonomy of
medicine, the arts, the law, the economy, or education. The political is
in fact a group of strategies for social de-politicization, which are, in
modern society, necessarily attached to rights. These strategies have no
primary ontological or anthropological basis, and they can be compre-
hended only through a wider sociological reconstruction of a society’s
evolution, its functional specification, and its need for effective differen-
tiation. Theorists who claim autonomy for the political, in short, might
productively revise their attitudes to sociological theory, and to under-
stand the political they might benefit from observing it (in purely socio-
logical terms) as a construct of society itself, or in fact as a form in
which a society communicates about itself and its functions. Moreover,
theorists who claim autonomy for the political might accept that,
precisely because the political is autonomous, it refers to a very discrete
set of societal exchanges, and that societies do not lightly allow their
political accounts of themselves to be confronted or challenged. Rights,
once again, trace the contours of society’s politics, but they have the
specific function that they make it difficult for the content of politics to
be directly addressed or emphasized.
The implications of this construction of the political are dialectical.
It implies at one level that a society can only allow its politics to be
approached through contests over rights and that any theory or activity
placing emphasis on the political must express itself through an
attempted reconfiguration of society’s rights. At the same time, however,
729
it also indicates that rights help societies to de-politicize themselves and
that their primary function is to preserve societies from an undifferen-
tiated excess of the political. For this reason, this article concludes that,
precisely because the political is an autonomous realm within society,
not all societal contents can be emphatically or even meaningfully politi-
cized, and the assumption that every conflictual exchange is a political
contest, or that the political has a necessary conflictual structure, is
illusory, naïve and theoretically unsustainable. It is fictitious to associate
what is political in society with what is positively emphatic in society:
this association contradicts the entire logic of modern societal forma-
tion.71 Despite this, however, the relatively modest account of society’s
politics that is proposed here still allows a space for the political, and
it invites theories or activities accounting for themselves as political to
reflect on and even position themselves and their strategies as techniques
of possible societal de-politicization. Nonetheless, the account of politics
given here suggests that theories or activities proposing themselves as
political ought perhaps to understand their own politicality within the
wider horizon of a society’s politicality and to sense that their political
strategies are not likely to be effective or successful if they are not pro-
portioned to the broader processes in which a society is able to consti-
tute and articulate itself (or some of its exchanges) as political.
Department of Politics, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK
PSC
Notes
I would like to thank my Glasgow colleague, Chris Berry, and my London
colleague, Samantha Ashenden, for showing great generosity in reading earlier
drafts of this article and for providing illuminating and stimulating critical
commentary on some of its themes. I have tried to respond to their criticisms
in the final version.
1 See Jeffrey Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, vol. III, The Classical
Attempt at Theoretical Synthesis: Max Weber (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1983), p. 76.
2 Max Weber, ‘Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland’,
in Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1922), pp. 306–43 (340).
3 ibid., p. 309.
4 Carl Schmitt, Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentaris-
mus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1923), p. 22; Carl Schmitt, Der Hüter
der Verfassung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1931), p. 90.
5 Schmitt, Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage, p. 13.
730
6 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,
1932), p. 29.
7 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1922),
p. 7.
8 On the centrality of concept of representation for Schmitt, see Reinhard
Mehring, Pathetisches Denken. Carl Schmitts Denkweg am Leitfaden
Hegels: Katholische Grundstellung und anti-marxistische Hegelstrategie
(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), p. 55.
9 See Carl Schmitt, ‘Weiterentwicklung des totalen Staats in Deutschland’,
in C. Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954.
Materialien zu einer Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958),
pp. 359–66; Schmitt, Der Hüter der Verfassung, p. 79.
10 Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1928), p. 209.
11 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1958), p. 257.
12 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1953), pp. 133–6.
13 Blandine Kriegel, L’État et les Esclaves: Réflexion pour l’histoire des États
(Paris: Payot, 1989), p. 32.
14 ibid., p. 64.
15 Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1986), p. 20.
16 ibid., p. 29.
17 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (London:
Verso, 1999), p. 61.
18 See Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political
Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), p. 172.
19 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2001),
p. 186.
20 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 9. See also
Glen Newey, After Politics: The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary
Liberal Philosophy (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2001), p. 209.
21 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 18.
22 ibid., p. 17.
23 ibid.
24 ibid., p. 21.
25 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), p. 131.
26 See, especially, Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, pp. 88–95; Žižek, The
Ticklish Subject, p. 188. This idea has also found its way into the theory
of international relations. In my view, the theory of international relations
has not been greatly improved by this. See Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism
and International Relations: Bringing the Political back in (London: Lynne
Rienner, 1999), p. 139.
27 Weber, ‘Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland’, p. 341.
28 Max Weber, ‘Politik als Beruf’, in Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften,
pp. 505–60 (506).
29 Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, p. 209.
30 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 176.
31 Lefort, Essais, p. 30.
731
32 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 181.
33 ibid., p. 161.
34 Laclau, New Reflections, pp. 50–1.
35 ibid., p. 20.
36 See Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe,
900–1300, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 39; John W.
Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French
Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley and London: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1986), p. 42.
37 My theory of legal positivization as a key to understanding the genesis of
modern society and modern politics is strongly influenced by Niklas
Luhmann. For an account of this fundamental aspect of Luhmann’s work,
see Niklas Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1993), p. 280. Luhmann does not principally use the concept
of legal positivization as an element of historical-sociological method, but
it can surely be applied as such and, in my view, it is particularly useful
and illuminating in this context.
38 See Ralph V. Turner, The English Judiciary in the Age of Glanvill and
Bracton, c. 1176–1239 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
p. 236; Alan Harding, Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 191. On the importance of
written documentation in this process, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory
to Written Record. England 1066–1307 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979),
pp. 46, 50. It is often argued that the relation between power and law was
at the heart of the first formation of a distinct definition of the political.
See Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘The History of the Word Politicus in Early-
modern Europe’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.) The Languages of Political
Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), pp. 51–6 (50).
39 Early English law is a clear exception to this model. In England the law
could presuppose a traditionally present political society to underwrite
itself as positive. See the resultant critique of Roman law in John Fortescue,
De Laudibus Legum Anglie, ed. and trans. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 25.
40 See Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050
to 1250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 388, 402, 575. On
the specific role of Roman law in reinforcing papal power within the
Church, see Ludwig Buisson, Potestas und Caritas. Die päbstliche Gewalt
im Spätmittelalter (Cologne: Böhlau, 1958), p. 74.
41 See Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution. The Formation of the Western
Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 113.
42 Here again my analysis is influenced by Luhmann’s evolutionary perspective
on social formation. For Luhmann’s account of functional differentiation
as it impacts on the legal system, see Niklas Luhmann, Ausdifferenzierung
des Rechts. Beiträge zur Rechtssoziologie und Rechtstheorie (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 35–52.
43 See Harding, Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State, pp. 22, 33,
82–91; Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order: England and
France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 145.
732
44 For a sample of the most influential literature on the historical sociology of
states, see: Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verste-
henden Soziologie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1921), pp. 558–9; Joseph Schumpeter,
‘Die Krise des Steuerstaats’, in R. Goldscheid and J. Schumpeter, Die
Finanzkrise des Steuerstaats. Beiträge zur politischen Ökonomie der Staats-
finanzen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 329–79; Charles Tilly,
‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making’, in Charles Tilly (ed.)
The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 3–83 (42); Michael Mann, States,
War and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell,
1988), pp. 9, 14; Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 1988), p. 138; Thomas Ertman,
Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1–34.
45 Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis (New York: Columbia University Pres,
1956), p. 37. Pierangelo Schiera makes a related claim about Marsilius and
the legitimatory function of early-modern political theory. See Pierangelo
Schiera, ‘Legitimacy, Discipline, and Institutions: Three Necessary Condi-
tions for the Birth of the Modern State’, in Julius Kirshner (ed.) The Origins
of the State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press,
1996), pp. 11–33 (19–20).
46 Martin Luther, ‘Von weltlicher Oberkeit’, in Weimarer Ausgabe, 120 vols
(Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–), vol. 11, pp. 245–81 (252).
47 Martin Luther, ‘Daß ein christliche Versammlung oder Gemeine Recht und
Macht habe’, in Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 11, pp. 408–16 (411).
48 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: J. M. Dent, 1914), p. 140. For a
similar argument, see Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vols. II, Renais-
sance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 368–413.
49 Christian Thomasius, Summarischer Entwurf der Grundlehren, die einem
studioso iuris zu wissen und auf universitäten zu lernen nötig sind (Halle:
Renger, 1699), pp. 35–6.
50 On the gradual emergence of positive statute laws as the expression of
political decision-making, see the still (after nearly 100 years) deeply
admirable work, Charles Howard McIlwain, The High Court of Parlia-
ment and its Supremacy: An Historical Essay on the Boundaries between
Legislation and Adjudication in England (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1910), pp. 42, 44, 356.
51 See Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought
at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Hart, 2000), p. 102.
52 For an excellent account of more general patterns of social differentiation
in early-modern Europe, see Rudolf Stichweh, Der frühmoderne Staat und
die europäische Universität. Zur Interaktion von Politik und Erziehungs-
system im Prozeß ihrer Ausdifferenzierung (16.–18. Jahrhundert) (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 82.
53 Ian Shapiro comes to similar conclusions about the early relation between
subjective rights and the abstraction of the state, though he identifies the
beginning of this process at a slightly earlier stage. See Ian Shapiro, The
Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University
733
Press, 1986), pp. 52, 59. For an altogether more humanistic account of the
origins of rights, see: Micheline R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights:
From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley and London: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2004), pp. 65–9.
54 My debt to Niklas Luhmann’s systemic-functionalist theory of human
rights should be clear at this point. For an argument that is similar to mine,
see Niklas Luhmann, Grundrechte als Institution. Ein Beitrag zur politis-
chen Soziologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1965), p. 37.
55 In this, I again refer to Luhmann’s theory of ‘alleviation’ as a motive for
communication between politics and law. See Niklas Luhmann, ‘Macht-
kreislauf und Recht in Demokratien’, Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie 2(2)
(1981): 158–67 (166).
56 This is a standard principle in constitutional theory. See Jan-Erik Lane,
Constitutions and Political Theory (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1996), p. 19.
57 In relation to this, Luhmann argues that ‘the self-description of the political
system’ – that is, the condition in which it makes itself plausible – depends
‘first and foremost’ on its reference to a constitution. See Niklas Luhmann,
Die Politik der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 352.
58 See Immanuel Kant, Zum Ewigen Frieden, in Werkausgabe, ed. W. Weischedel,
12 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), vol. XI, pp. 195–251 (197).
59 The works of Locke might be seen as emblematic for this. See John Locke,
Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1960), p. 367. On the concession of rights in the French
Revolution, see: Michael P. Fitzsimmons, The Remaking of France: The
National Assembly and the Constitution of 1791 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), p. 12; Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of
Taxation in Eighteenth-century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 170; P. M. Jones, Reform and
Revolution in France: The Politics of Transition, 1774–1791 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 156; Marcel Marion, Histoire
financière de la France depuis 1715, 5 vols (Paris: Rousseau. 1914), vol. I,
p. 445.
60 Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978), pp. 313–14.
61 On England in this respect, see David Harris Sacks, ‘The Paradox of
Taxation: Fiscal Crises, Parliament, and Liberty in England, 1450–1640’,
in Philip T. Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg (eds) Fiscal Crises and Repre-
sentative Government, 1450–1789 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1994), pp. 7–66 (55–6); see also Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and
English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 319; Frederick
Dietz, English Public Finance, 1558–1641 (London: Frank Cass, 1964),
p. 127; Robert Ashton, The Crown and the Money Market, 1603–1640
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), p. 45; C. D. Chandaman, The English Public
Revenue 1660–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 261.
62 On France in this respect, see Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation,
p. 1; Jones, Reform and Revolution, p. 7. On the USA, similarly, see James
W. Ely, Jr, The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History
734
of Property Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 27; Marc
W. Kruman, Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution Making in
Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina Press, 1997), p. 87; Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Consti-
tutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and
the United States 1607–1788 (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 81–4.
63 This formative correlation between tax, revolutions, rights and citizenship
seems crucial to me, and in examining this nexus I find myself in agree-
ment with some people with whom I otherwise strongly disagree. See, for
example, Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution, intro. John
Gray (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1990), pp. 73–4.
64 This de-politicizing function of rights does not have central status in more
standard commentaries on human rights. However, it is widely accepted
that rights of religious freedom were strategically formulated to de-politicize
religious controversy. See Leonard W. Levy, The Origins of the Bill of Rights
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 102. In some cases it is
recognized that rights act to de-politicize legislative power tout court. See
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787
(New York: Norton, 1969), p. 462. For an excellent recent critique of rights-
based constitutionalism that applies similar principles to contemporary
judicial politics, see: Ran Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and
the Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004), p. 43.
65 See Michael Foley, The Politics of the British Constitution (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 18. For samples of the historio-
graphical debate on this issue, see: Charles Howard McIlwain, Constitu-
tionalism Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1947),
p. 95; H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977), p. 59;
James S. Hart, The Rule of Law 1603–1660: Crowns, Courts and Judges
(Harlow, Essex: Longman, 2003), p. 227; Corinne Comstock Weston and
Janelle Renfrow Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Contro-
versy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), pp. 1–7, 222, 246, 249; Alan Cromartie, The Con-
stitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 261. On more recent
processes of rights inscription, see: Ishay, The History of Human Rights,
pp. 316–17; Andrew Arato, Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy
(Lanham, MA and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 80.
66 Karl Marx, Zur Judenfrage, in Werke, 43 vols (Berlin: Dietz, 1956), vol. I,
pp. 347–77.
67 T. H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class (London:
Pluto Press, 1992), pp. 27–9.
68 The ‘equal protection’ clause in the US constitution might be seen as exem-
plifying this. See John A. Rohr, Founding Republics in France and America:
A Study in Constitutional Governance (Kansas City: University of Kansas
Press, 1995), p. 222; Michael J. Perry, We the People: The Fourteenth
Amendment and the Supreme Court (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 68.
735
69 Asghar Ali, ‘A Conceptual Framework for Environmental Justice based on
Shared but Differentiated Responsibilities’, in Tony Shallcross and John
Robinson (eds), Global Citizenship and Environmental Justice (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2006), pp. 41–80 (49).
70 This explains the increasingly pressing relation between civil and political
rights and environmental rights. See Michael R. Anderson, ‘Human Rights:
Approaches to Environmental Protection’, in Alan E. Boyle and Michael
R. Anderson (eds) Human Rights Approaches to Environmental Protection
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 1–24 (5).
71 The fashionable borrowing of Schmitt’s lament about the ‘de-politicization’
of politics in modern society thus seems particularly misplaced to me. For
the source of this argument, see Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen,
pp. 79–95. On my account, politics presupposes – or is in fact coterminous
with – societal de-politicization.

The Autonomy of The Political: Chris Thornhill

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The Autonomy of The Political: Chris Thornhill

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Chris Thornhill

The autonomy of the political

Political autonomy and political emphasis

In recent years it has become widespread for political theory to argue

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 35 no 6 • pp. 705–735

Why the political?

These descriptions of the political are clearly stationed at very different

A short history of the political

Generally, the formation of rights in the state is viewed as a constitutional

What remains of the political?

Department of Politics, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK

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