War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent

Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought

Murad Idris
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War for Peace

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War for Peace

Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in
Western and Islamic Thought

MURAD IDRIS

1
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3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Idris, Murad, 1984– author.
Title: War for peace : genealogies of a violent ideal in Western and Islamic
thought / Murad Idris.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University
Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018018995 (print) | LCCN 2018035332 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190658021 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190658038 (Epub) |
ISBN 9780190658014 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Peace (Philosophy) | War (Philosophy)
Classification: LCC B105.P4 (ebook) | LCC B105.P4 I35 2019 (print) |
DDC 327.1/72—dc23
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In the loving memory,

of twenty-six years,
for it is all that remains.

as promised, for my brother,

Mohamad Idris
1982–2011
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Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Preface: Troubling Peace xiii

Introduction: Beyond Universal Peace 1

1. Assigning Symmetry: Plato’s Laws and the Polis’s Wars 19

2. Summoning Hostility: Al-Fārābī, Aquinas, and Warlike Peace 70

Interlude I—Deflections: Friends, Neighbors, Advisers 124

3. Loving Necessity: Erasmus between Christianity and Islam 131

4. Ordering Legality: Gentili, Grotius, and Law for War 178

Interlude II—Refractions: Missionaries, Nomads, Pirates 215

5. Colonizing Frontiers: Ibn Khaldūn, Hobbes, and Commodious

Violence 226

6. Policing Humanity: Immanuel Kant, Sayyid Quṭb, and Shades

of Empire 260

Epilogue: Unmaking Peace 314

Index 323
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Acknowledgments

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to retrace all the conversations that made this book’s present
form possible. War for Peace has never been mine alone, even if all responsi-
bility for faults and shortcomings is. I began writing what became this book at
the University of Pennsylvania. From Philadelphia, the manuscript traveled with
me to Ithaca, New York City, Cambridge, MA, and Charlottesville. Along the way,
I have incurred more debts than I can recount here.
My first thanks go to Anne Norton, my teacher. For her guidance, support,
friendship, and so much more, she always has my deepest gratitude. She is a con-
stant source of inspiration; working with her is an honor. At Penn, I was fortunate
to be surrounded by supportive faculty who created a rare intellectual world. Jeffrey
Green, Nancy Hirschmann, and Joseph Lowry have been generous interlocutors,
critical and helpful, always pushing the manuscript in productive directions. Ellen
Kennedy, Bob Vitalis, Ian Lustick, and Roger Allen introduced me to new worlds
of thinking. Since graduate school, Nicholas Harris, Rose Muravchick, Elias Saba,
and Chris Taylor have provided both friendship and intellectual companionship.
They have helped me think through so many questions essential to this book over
the years. I am forever in their debt. Elias took on the task of copyediting the final
manuscript, and Nick of completing the final proofs and index; they have been
with this book from inception to end, and with me throughout. Asma al-Nasser,
Nesrine Chahine, Ola Shtewee, Omar al-Ghazzi, Ameed Saabneh, and Adam
Miyashiro made Philly feel like home.
At Cornell University, the examples and hospitality of Peter Katzenstein, Mary
Katzenstein, Gerard Aching, Leslie Adelson, Richard Bensel, Jason Frank, Isaac
Kramnick, David Powers, and Shawkat Toorawa made my time in Ithaca a pre-
cious gift. Nicole Giannella and Suman Seth read multiple chapter drafts, and they
both continue to enrich my life with their friendship and brilliance. In New York
City, the Columbia Society of Fellows in the Humanities, under the guidance of
Eileen Gillooly and Christopher Brown, brought together an amazing group of
scholars; my fellow fellows Maggie Cao, Brian Goldstone, Hidetaka Hirota, and
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x Acknowledgments

Grant Wythoff left a mark on this project, and Willy Deringer, Dan-el Padilla
Peralta, and Rebecca Woods consistently went above and beyond. The Mahindra
Humanities Center at Harvard University provided a biweekly forum for thinking
through crucial features of war, violence, and peace with Homi Bhabha and
fellows Samuel Anderson, Hiba Bou Akar, Thiemo Breyer, Alex Fattal, Joseph
Fronczak, and Ram Natarajan. At the University of Virginia, I have been fortunate
to find great colleagues in the Department of Politics and in cognate fields. A spe-
cial thank you to Stephen White, Lawrie Balfour, Debjani Ganguly, and Jennifer
Rubenstein for their tremendous support and friendship.
I am grateful to audiences who read or heard presentations based on
portions of the book. Their questions and suggestions improved it, often in un-
expected directions. Portions of the manuscript were presented at the University
of Pennsylvania; Cornell University; University of Massachusetts–Amherst;
Columbia University; Harvard University; University of Minnesota; New York
University; University of Victoria; University of California, Berkeley; University
of California, Santa Cruz; University of Virginia; and at the American Political
Science Association, Western Political Science Association, Midwest Political
Science Association, and Association for Political Theory annual meetings. In
summer 2017, I taught Waging War and Ordering the World, a graduate sem-
inar based on the book, at the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory
in Bologna, and I thank the seminar participants for the terrific discussions and
Raffaele Laudani for the invitation.
Conversations with Roxanne Euben helped me sharpen my argument, and
her feedback proved essential. She has been an important interlocutor; for that,
I am grateful. Joseph Massad’s suggestions and encouragement have been es-
sential to my intellectual growth, and he continues to be a source of inspiration.
Reading Massad’s Colonial Effects and Euben’s Enemy in the Mirror as an under-
graduate were two critical milestones in my trajectory; it is an honor now to think
with their authors. Jill Frank generously gave line-by-line suggestions for chapter 1
that made it much stronger and crisper. Aziz Rana helped me think through the
stakes of three chapters. Jeanne Morefield read the entire manuscript and offered
helpful suggestions on its framing. Tim Waligore offered constructive suggestions
for chapter 6. As I rewrote the manuscript, Kevin Duong meticulously read and
commented on nearly every chapter’s opening pages; for making the manu-
script sharper and clearer, I and in turn the reader are grateful to him. I am also
deeply grateful to Leigh Jenco and Megan Thomas, for their friendship and un-
derstanding, especially when working on this book overtook other commitments.
Many colleagues offered valuable comments on portions of the manuscript,
pointed me to key sources, or helped me work through an argument. Thanks
to Oxford University Press’s anonymous readers and to Banu Bargu, David
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Acknowledgments xi

Bateman, Teresa Bejan, Nolan Bennett, Fahad Bishara, Ben Breen, Charles
Brittain, Michaelle Browers, Samera Esmeir, Shawn Fraistat, Leela Gandhi,
Simon Gilhooley, Michael Gorup, Sinja Graf, Kathleen Harbin, Ulas Ince, David
Johnston, Pinar Kemerli, Helen Kinsella, Jimmy Casas Klausen, Hagar Kotef,
Nadim Khoury, Alex Livingston, Andrew March, Inder Marwah, Alison McQueen,
Uday Mehta, Emily Nacol, Vijay Phulwani, Elissa Sato, Vanita Seth, Rogers Smith,
Levi Thompson, Max Tomba, Meral Ugur Cinar, and Ali Wick.
From start to finish, Angela Chnapko at Oxford University Press has been an
absolutely exemplary editor. She has my deepest appreciation and thanks for eve-
rything she has done and for her patience, enthusiasm, and support. I also wish
to thank Dia al-Azzawi for giving me permission to use his artwork on the cover,
and Louisa Macmillan, Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, and the Barjeel Art Foundation
for making this possible.
This research was generously supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s
Department of Political Science, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and
Office of the Provost and Graduate and Professional Student Assembly; the
American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation; the Mellon
Foundation and Cornell University’s Department of Government; Columbia
University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities and the Department of Middle
Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies; Harvard University’s Mahindra
Humanities Center and the Mellon Seminar on Violence/Non-Violence; the
Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory in Bologna, Italy; and the
University of Virginia’s Department of Politics, College of Arts and Sciences,
Mellon Global South Lab, Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures, and
Luce Project on Religion and Its Publics. An earlier version of chapter 4, “Loving
Necessity,” appeared in Theory and Event 17, no. 4 (2014) under the title “Alternative
Political Theologies: Erasmus on Peace, Speech, and Necessity.”
My father and my sister have patiently waited for this book. They have waited
through difficult times. They have my love and thanks.
Theresa, my love, has been supportive and caring as I wrote and rewrote this
book. She listened patiently as I read out—sometimes out of the blue—sentences
or paragraphs to her (including an earlier version of this one). Her resilience and
affection are visible to me on every page. As I write this, I am on my way to join
Theresa and our daughter, Salwa, at the Frankfurt Airport (I don’t have a Schengen
visa!). To them, and them most of all, I give my deepest and most enduring love.

Murad Idris
December 25, 2017
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Preface: Troubling Peace

It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered
things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these
wicked, seemingly opposite things—maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE1

PEACE IS A TROUBLING ideal. Like other ideas enshrined in the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights, such as security, justice, equality, and freedom, we
hear its name spoken as a permanently desirable and universal moral ideal. It is
today a pervasive belief that to be human, civilized, and good is to value peace, to
desire peace; only the most inhuman monsters do not love it.
But like these other ideals—maybe even more—the distinction between peace
and its opposites is not straightforward. The belief in peace as a basic desire and
universal aspiration occludes how readily its invocations dehumanize enemies,
sanitize violence, and silence dissent. This is not to disregard that, sometimes, ap-
peals to “peace” can offer an effective platform for change, resistance, or critique.
It is, however, to question the work that a general belief in or desire for peace
performs.
Peace, it seems, is a fragile condition, easily undone by signs of trouble, threat,
and tumult. Its grammar orders the world by calling for peace and security, peace
and unity, order, law, friendship, or development. This grammar prescribes faith
in peace through dialogue. It describes peace and violence in terms of symmetry
and equivalence, or the rhetoric of “two sides.” It treats peace as the one thing that
all people must wish for and desire. And within this grammar, the paradoxical idea
that “war is for the sake of peace” circulates in contemporary public discourses

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), I.2, 10.
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xiv Preface

across the globe, as well as in major works of historical and contemporary political
theory. In formulas such as “peace through dialogue and mutual understanding,”
“peoples living together in peace and security,” and “a war for the sake of peace,”
the very call for peace tends to immediately overshadow who is invested in it, to
sanitize what such invocations enable, all while obscuring relations and histories
of power.
Peace is troubling, but it has remained untroubled. Its political work is ap-
parent in the wars it authorizes and the oppositions it frames. One American
president declared, “Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They
represent evil and war.”2 He declared a war on terror, first in Afghanistan, then
in Iraq, configured as an endless search for enemies. “Our war on terror,” he
announced, “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been
found, stopped and defeated.”3 Three years later, in his 2004 State of the Union
address, he added, “Our aim is a democratic peace.”4
His successor, Barack Obama, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and delivered
an acceptance speech defending peace through “just war.” Shortly thereafter,
Obama engaged in over seven high-intensity military interventions, and au-
thorized regular drone strikes. When he announced the assassination of Osama
Bin Laden, he pointedly noted, or perhaps warned, that “his demise should be
welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.”5 Months later, Obama
again described the killing of Bin Laden in terms of peace: a man who “will never
endanger the peace of the world again.” “Peace is hard. Peace is hard,” Obama said
during his defense of military intervention in Libya: “This is how the international
community is supposed to work—nations standing together for the sake of peace
and security.”6

2. George W. Bush, “‘Islam Is Peace,’ Says President” (remarks by the president at Islamic
Center of Washington, DC), The White House, September 17, 2001, http://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-11.html.
3. George W. Bush, “President Declares ‘Freedom at War with Fear’” (address to a Joint
Session of Congress and the American People, Washington, DC), The White House,
September 20, 2001, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/
09/20010920-8.html.
4. George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address,” Washington, DC, January 20, 2004,
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040120-7.html.
5. Barack Obama, “Osama Bin Laden Dead,” Washington, DC, May 2, 2011, https://
obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead.
6. Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama in Address to the United Nations General
Assembly,” New York, September 21, 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-
office/2011/09/21/remarks-president-obama-address-united-nations-general-assemblypre.
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Preface xv

When Bush and Obama demand peace and speak in its name, they do not
describe the cessation of hostilities. They anticipate peace after the “enemies
of peace” are identified and eliminated. They do not simply ask for compliance
around the globe: one demands that Muslims perform “peace” on behalf of Islam
to a non-Muslim audience, and the other demands that peace-lovers act and feel
positively about successfully assassinating his enemy. The problem is immedi-
ately present in the contemporary moment, for in the American Global War on
Terror, and the increasing adoption of its technologies and logic by governments
and organizations across the globe, the experience of perpetual war for the sake of
perpetual peace has become ordinary. Its logic also defines the previous century.
The Cold War arms race, regional conflicts, and anxieties about global annihila-
tion valorized peace as the ultimate goal of violence. And participants in two world
wars and numerous imperial, anticolonial, nationalist, and postcolonial struggles
declared to their populations, allies, and enemies that their wars were waged in the
name of “real” peace.
The examples of Bush and Obama suggest how the vocabulary of peace
emerges today forcefully, violently, through the Muslim Question, where Islam
is one of the West’s constitutive outsides and a repository for its contradictions,
disavowals, and projections.7 Indeed, peace itself animates the discursive opposi-
tion between “Islam” and “the West” (two problematic abstractions to which I turn
later in the introduction). In contemporary discourses, the West desires, produces,
and champions peace, whereas Islam is violent and either hates peace or brings
about the wrong kind. Bush’s Islam turns out to be peace, and the popular mantra
that “Islam is a religion of peace” remains within the frame of this opposition.
In recent decades, with each act of violence dubbed “Islamic terror” by Western
politicians and media, Muslims in the United States and Europe are instructed to
declare Islam’s dedication to peace and to condemn that act of violence—a speech-
tax, so to speak, levied upon Muslims.
The language of peace has also worked to pacify and delegitimize protests
against political oppression, economic inequality, and racial injustice. From the
2011 uprising in Egypt to movements and uprisings in the United States (Occupy,
Ferguson, Baltimore), and from the durability of “peace talk” (never mind the
peace talks) surrounding the occupation of Palestine to the responses to the
counterprotesters in Charlottesville in 2017, those who engage in protest, dissent,
and resistance across the world are met with an insatiable objection, delivered in
the language of peace: they are never peaceful enough, and they must continuously

7. See Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2013); Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015);
and Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (In Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
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xvi Preface

profess their desire for peace and their commitment to upholding it. This arsenal
has proven useful to the perpetuation of inequality and violence; the grammar of
peace has tended to deflect attention from structures of power.
One might diagnose invocations of peace, in these and other struggles, by
quoting Saint Augustine: “Non ut si pax nolunt, sed ut ea sit quam volunt” (Not
that one shunned peace, but that each seeks his own).8 Peace would be plural and
fragmented, but everyone’s particular and limited perspective would participate
in a universal desire. Or one might dismiss these invocations as unimportant and
extrinsic platitudes. One might see them as evidence that appeals to peace, and
perhaps times of peace, are continuations of a metaphorical war.
In contrast to these positions, this book is an attempt at unmaking peace,
bringing into view instead of covering up what makes peace troubling. At its
barest, it is an invitation to look more critically at those who claim to speak in the
name of peace, at the ostensibly universal desire for peace, and at the dominant
grammar of peace—that is, to see peace as a problem. At its most ambitious, it is a
genealogy of the moralities of peace. Rather than foreground problems for peace,
this genealogy focuses on the problem of peace, and those problems it deflects and
others it elides.
The issue is not simply that war is not the answer—peace is also not the an-
swer; it is not the solution, but the question and the problem. The “problem of
peace,” then, is not simply how to attain and preserve peace given the demands of
power and war;9 it is how peace has been preserved as a pure ideal, to be attained
through power and war or by banishing its links to them. The problem is how
the grammar of peace supplies schematizations for how the world works and
how we should make sense of it, or how it directs and constrains our political
imaginations. The basic question is, why does the idea of peace so easily blur into
war across the history of political thought?

Peace in Political Theory: A Paradox

The boundary between war and peace is fluid. After all, war is the opposite of
peace, but peace, we are often told, is the basic aim of war. Even more, war is often
presented as the only means for realizing peace. The idea of peace thus occupies

8. St. Augustine, The City of God 19.12. For a historical discussion, see Reinhart Koselleck,
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), 101, 191, 204.
9. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 3rd ed.
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960).
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Preface xvii

the paradoxical position of both opposing war and, at the same time, authorizing
war. As Martin Heidegger wrote in 1954,

With a wink, the nations are informed that peace is the elimination of war
but that meanwhile this peace which eliminates war can only be secured
by war. Against this war-peace, in turn, we launch a peace offensive whose
attacks can hardly be called peaceful. War—the securing of peace; and
peace—the elimination of war. How is peace to be secured by what it
eliminates? Something is fundamentally out of joint here, or perhaps it
has never yet been in joint.10

Heidegger’s brief reflections on war and peace point to their odd relationship,
and end there. He is not alone in challenging the grammar of war-for-peace. The
Roman historian Tacitus famously wrote, “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under
false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”11
In 1693, the Quaker William Penn argued that pax quaeritur bello—“seek peace in
war” or “peace is the end of war”—is false because only justice produces peace;12
and a century later, a letter to John Adams made the quip that British belligerence
had modified the phrase to pax quaeritur bellis: “seek peace in wars.”13
Prominent twentieth-century political theorists similarly pointed out that the
distinction between the two basic concepts is nebulous at best and a fantasy at
worst. Max Weber formulated peace as a hyphen in conflict: “ ‘Peace’ is nothing
more than a change in the form of the conflict or in the antagonists or in the
objects of the conflict.”14 Elsewhere, he observed that moral purists who waged
war while promising peace with every offensive had discredited not war, but their
idol, peace.15 Carl Schmitt described the commonplace that the termination of a

10. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray
(New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 83.
11. Tacitus, Agricola, trans. Anthony R. Birley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), §30.
12. William Penn, An Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe by the Establishment
of an European Dyet, Parliament, or Estates (London: Randal Taylor, 1693), §4.
13. Edmund Jenings, letter to John Adams, Brussels, January 1, 1781, in Papers of John Adams,
ed. Gregg L. Lint et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003),
11:6–8.
14. Max Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” in On
the Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), 1–47, 27.
15. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), in The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and
Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone, (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004), 82, 85.
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xviii Preface

war might lead to world peace as “a dishonest fiction [eine unehrliche Fiktion],”16 for
“the secret law of this vocabulary” is that “the most terrible war is pursued only
in the name of peace.”17 Frantz Fanon diagnosed the rhetoric of “peaceful coexist-
ence” and “a dialogue on values” between the colonizer and the colonized as an
extension of colonial war.18 Michael Oakeshott noted that war and peace “stand al-
most perfectly for both themselves and their opposites,”19 while for Jean Elshtain,
pure peace “never appears without its violent doppelganger, pure war, lurking in
the shadows.”20 Kwameh Nkrumah, Mahatma Gandhi, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin
Luther King Jr., and others also observed the intimacy between invocations of
peace in the twentieth century and wars of imperial expansion and order.21
The fluidity between peace and war is part of what makes peace troubling.
As Wendy Brown brilliantly observes of tolerance, it “is never innocent of power
and normativity . . . Tolerance as such is not the problem. Rather, the call for tol-
erance, the invocation of tolerance, and the attempt to instantiate tolerance are all
signs of . . . a buried order of politics.”22 My point is that the same should be our
starting point for thinking about “peace.” Samera Esmeir puts it well in writing
about the war against Iraq, that “a certain aspiration for global peace, global se-
curity, and non-violence to be instituted by juridico-democracy accompanies the

16. Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei
Corollarien (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1979), 54. George Schwab’s translation reads, “self-
deluding.” See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, rev. ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 54.
17. Schmitt, “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen,” 79–95, in Der
Begriff des Politischen, 94 = “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (1929),” trans.
Matthias Konzett and John P. McCormick, 80–96, in Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 95.
18. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press,
2004), 9, 22, 39.
19. Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism, ed. Timothy Fuller
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 13.
20. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Peace, Security and Politics,” Peace Review: A Journal of Social
Justice 1, no. 2 (1989): 3–6, 3. Also see Elshtain, Power Trips and Other Journeys: Essays in
Feminism as Civic Discourse (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 149–162, 155;
and Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
21. Kwameh Nkrumah, Africa Must Be United (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), 180;
Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Raghavan Iyer (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 241–242; W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), 103, 112; and Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from
Here: Chaos or Community? (1968; repr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 192–193.
22. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 14.
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Preface xix

war” and its violence.23 It is a curious fact that critical strands of political theory
have interrogated the core concepts of what today is called “the political,” but have
left intact what is so often said to be its aim and ideal. We have been more likely
to cathect in peace, to dismiss peace, or to look through peace at the wars raging
behind it, than to look at it and at the political work its idealization performs.
The last two decades have offered eye-opening critiques of war and violence, and
critical examinations of the dark sides of cosmopolitanism, security, freedom,
religion, development, society, human rights, humanitarianism, modernity,
sovereignty, liberalism, and secularism, but the idea of peace has received rela-
tively little sustained attention.24 If, as Heidegger says, proclamations that war
is for peace are served up with a wink, then criticism and skepticism (including
Heidegger’s) are too often expressed with little more than a shrug.25 The discursive

23. Samera Esmeir, “The Violence of Non-violence: Law and War in Iraq,” Journal of Law and
Society 34, no. 1 (2007): 99–115, 102.
24. A noteworthy exception is Uday Singh Mehta, “Gandhi and the Common Logic of War
and Peace,” Raritan 20, no. 5 (2010): 134–156. A recent edited volume on nineteenth-century
Europe addresses some complementary dynamics: Thomas Hippler and Miloš Vec, eds.,
Paradoxes of Peace in Nineteenth Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015);
as do studies focusing on the violence of “pacification” and of “liberal peace,” for example,
Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, “The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force and Globalization,”
European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 4 (1999): 403–434; and Barkawi and Laffey,
eds. Democracy, Liberalism, and War: Rethinking the Democratic Peace Debate (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner, 2001); Mark Neocleous, “War as Peace, Peace as Pacification.” Radical Philosophy
159 (2010): 8–17; and Ilan Zvi Baron, Jonathon Havercroft, Isaac Kamola, Jonneke Koomen,
Justin Murphy, and Alex Prichard, “Liberal Pacification and the Phenomenology of Violence,”
International Studies Quarterly (forthcoming), which helpfully draws attention to pacification
as a process that renders violence invisible in liberal and colonial orders. Important critical
observations about peace emerge in theoretical studies of war, for example, Nick Mansfield,
Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou (New York: Palgrave, 2008); David William Bates,
States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (New York: Columbia University Press,
2012); and Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). This is also true of intellectual histories
of war, most notably that of Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought
and International Order from Grotius to Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999),
or works that focus on pacifism, such as Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of English
Pacifist Ideas (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1997). Scholars of nonviolence,
pacifism, and reconciliation pursue a different project, one less concerned with diagnosing
peace as a political ideal or a discursive concept, for example, Dustin Ells Howes, Toward
a Credible Pacifism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009); David Cortright,
Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and
Daniel Philpott, Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
25. This is the case even as “the need to pay tribute” to the formula, as Michael Walzer
puts it, “opens those who pay it to the criticism of the virtuous.” The formula “made war
possible in a world where,” he apologizes, “war was, sometimes, necessary.” See Michael
Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 3–4. Also see
x

xx Preface

structures, genealogies, and functions of such claims—alongside their historical

counterparts, counterpoints, and perfunctory expressions of skepticism—remain
largely unexamined.
The claim “war is for the sake of peace” is reiterated and adapted across the
history of political thought. It signifies differently across contexts, languages, and
variant formulations, from ancient thought to contemporary theory and practice
across the globe. To regard the formula as an old conviction that people have only
now overcome transposes a flawed retroactive reading of war and peace onto po-
litical thought and concepts. Such formulas about peace, and skepticism toward
them, recur with surprising frequency and remarkable stability. The tensions and
paradoxes, in other words, have deep historical roots.
Historical contestations over the definition of peace and over its involvement
with its opposites are integral aspects of the discursive life and political functions
of peace. The questions What does peace actually mean, or When is it right to
declare war for peace? risk eliding their own historicity and politics; “war for the
sake of peace” becomes a claim to be evaluated or explained (true or false, good or
evil) or an inscrutable statement to be smoothed over and made consistent. And
yet, the availability of “war is for the sake of peace” is remarkably consistent across
political thought. It is a claim that has been consistently productive, both in the
contemporary moment and in the foundations of political theory.
In a discipline that aspires to study power in all its forms, we should regard
even our highest aspirations and ideas of peace as political artifacts. While polit-
ical science is often concerned with the causes of war and finding a more durable
peace, this book turns to peace as an ideal constituted through power and consti-
tutive of otherness: it takes peace as a problem for the discipline, not just in it. By
examining the morals, oppositions, and schematizations that make peace into a
desire and ideal across the history of political thought, the next chapters aim to
unmake the apparent purity of peace, a purity that carries war into the present.

Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 5th ed. (1977;
repr. New York: Basic Books, 2015), 327.
xxi

War for Peace

xxi
1

Introduction
Beyond Universal Peace

A Political Theory in Peace

How can war be for the sake of peace if peace is the elimination of war? Why is
the language of peace sutured to war and violence? What does it mean to insist
on one’s commitment to peace while one wages war against an enemy who is
described as “the enemy of peace,” an enemy who “does not value peace”? Why do
we speak of peace and security, peace and order, and peace and justice, rather than
peace on its own? What histories of peace lurk in each of these questions?
This book is a genealogy of the political theoretic logics of “peace.” It focuses
on peace in political theory—as an ideal that paradoxically authorizes war—in the
writings of ten thinkers: Plato, Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius
Erasmus, Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Ibn Khaldūn, Thomas Hobbes,
Immanuel Kant, and Sayyid Quṭb. What compulsions of morality drive the im-
pulse to simultaneously idealize peace and note its implication in war but to leave
this link largely intact? As idealizations of peace are disseminated across polit-
ical thought, the paradoxical form is displaced from text to text, joining different
concepts and contexts. There is, however, an insistent and indelible core, a core
that valorizes peace and necessitates war. This rational structure has insinuated
itself into foundational texts and authors of political theory. At the heart of this
structure and the moralization of peace are constitutive antagonisms that are at
times forgotten but that cannot be effaced. The following chapters uncover the
traces of these antagonisms in “peace” in order to demonstrate the genealogical
2

2 WAR FoR PEACE

origins of peace’s moralities, its tactical idealizations, and three functions that it
serves.1
Peace, this book argues, functions parasitically, provincially, and polemically.
First, the frequent association of peace with other concepts, such as friendship,
security, unity, concord, and law, rewrites both peace and those other concepts.
I describe this structure of discursive additives as a parasitical logic of insinuation.
Second, peace presents itself as a global idea and a universal ideal, but the content
of peace reflects its idealizers’ particular desires, fears, anxieties, and necessarily
partial theories of the globe, humanity, or political entities. This partial univer-
salization I describe as provincial. Finally, the idealization of peace in these texts
is elaborated with specific enemies in view. Peace has a polemical structure: its
content and idealization are the products of certain antagonisms, and through
this structure, it enables hostility. Elaborating the political life of peace in terms
of these structures and their logics takes up and extends three key challenges in
contemporary theorizations of war and peace.

Parasitical: The Logic of Insinuation

To consider the structures of peace parasitically is to reframe the recurring de-
bate over whether peace should be understood “positively” (as the presence of
things in addition to peace) or “negatively” (as the absence of war). The history of
contestations over the meaning of peace is, in part, a history of its attachments to
other ideas—generally, the same set of ideas that occupy contemporary attempts to
theorize peace. In political discourse, peace commonly appears in conjunction with
other ideas, not on its own: as in peace and security, law, friendship, harmony, order,
agreement, unity, concord, dignity, development, or prosperity. Just as Uday Mehta’s
study of Gandhi points out that “war, peace, and politics are braided” in “architectonic
narratives,” wherein a “common logic” and “shared conceptual provenance” bind
war and peace, the logic of insinuation makes visible the many other threads that are
braided into and with peace.2 It reconfigures what Heidegger calls the “disjointed-
ness” of peace, providing a view into peace’s “joints”—that is, its conjoinment with
other ideas, the kinds of work such intersections perform, the shifts and histories of
these additions themselves, and how they can join peace to war.
For example, as we will see in chapter 1, Plato’s characters in the Laws observe
that peace is vulnerable and insufficient. They make it into an ideal by speaking of

1. I refer to the “genealogies” of peace—as a political concept, an ideal, and a morality—in

the spirit of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, not in the sense of disciplinary norms and a
field of knowledge and practice.
2. Mehta, “Gandhi and the Common Logic,” 136, 140, 147.
3

Introduction 3

peace and friendship, security, and law. These additions seem to strengthen peace
and make it more desirable. However, they also increase the potential for subver-
sion. Each of these added concepts also facilitates war, acting as a hinge or connec-
tion between war and peace. At the most basic level, friends wage war alongside
one another; security requires military superiority over one’s neighbors; and the
law prescribes habits that are conducive to military victory. At the same time, the
idealization of peace stretches to include these additional concepts. Peace sanitizes
them of their violence and furnishes them with alternate justifications. In short,
invoking “peace and security” is more than their sum, and quite different from
invoking one of them only.
I call the ideas that form a parasitical structure the insinuates of peace. I use
this term to foreground their recurrence, nonetheless insisting that their relation-
ship to peace is contingent; they are not necessary correlates, natural associations,
or one-off supplements. The logic of insinuation bears a family resemblance to
other logics of conceptual addition and substitution, such as Jacques Derrida’s
supplement, but there are important differences. The supplement, Derrida writes,
“adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it
is as if one fills a void.” The supplement displaces, and it “replaces a lack.” It
presents itself as “exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien
to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it . . . it is an ‘exte-
rior addition.’ ”3 The insinuate, too, winds into the concept to fold back on it. But
it presents itself as having always already dwelled therein; as providing peace’s
real, intrinsic, and necessary positivity; and as having been contained within and
implied by peace. And yet, the insinuate cannot be described as “contained,” for it
determines the container itself. It bends peace to its means, makes its aims those
of peace, and makes itself appear peaceful. The insinuate relocates peace to its
discursive terrain; in the Laws, “peace and friendship” makes peace a question of
the relations among citizens in the polis, and “peace and security” makes peace
contingent on internal and external insecurity. The objects and agents of the insin-
uate become the objects and agents of peace. Peace cohabits different discursive
spaces with these other concepts. Some select few insinuates, or their sum, appear
to already be contained under the umbrella of peace.
Whereas the supplement usually designates a single act of replacement,
insinuates are a recurrent series of additions. They form an iterative constellation of
supplementary concepts; over time, some insinuates disappear, others are added,
and the priorities among them shift. Although it may seem that a strong, good,
and stable peace requires other ideas, ideals, and relations—justice, security,

3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed.

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 145, 208.
4

4 WAR FoR PEACE

equality, friendship, or a high regard for law—this structure intensifies the po-
tential of peace for radical self-subversion, for contradictions with and among its
insinuates, and for its blurring into war.

Provincial: The Logic of Universalized Idealization

To consider peace a provincial concept is to rethink its universality—that is, how it
is designated as a universal ideal and how it constructs the world. Acknowledging
this logic, then, disrupts the way that “peace” constitutes the moral purity of
Europe, the West, and humanity. It takes up Dipesh Chakrabarty’s important chal-
lenge to provincialize Europe and its ontologies, here by focusing on a contempo-
rary ideal, its moralities, and its allegedly transhistorical, universalist global form.4
Instead of turning to minority, colonial, or precolonial histories, whether to write
back or to uncover alternate modes of being, I focus on the desires, fears, interests,
and particular affects that inform the universalization of the ideal and its theories
of difference. Idealizing “peace” allows some to cast themselves as superior, ad-
vanced, cultured, or civilized. It justifies certain kinds of hostility and refuses
others, but it does so in ways that often reveal particular interests, anxieties, and
desires—ones that make the war-waging peace-lover the privileged referent of his
frames. Even the idea that all people love or desire peace smuggles in a highly par-
ticular view of “humanity,” a view built on inequalities and hierarchies of lives.5
The logic of provincial universals opens a window onto how elaborations of
peace work or stop working in relation to other spaces and how they account for or
neglect otherness. Theorizations of peace draw maps of the universe. These maps
reflect assumptions about who counts as peace’s primary subjects, its candidates,
and its exclusions; about which places are peace’s epicenters, its peripheries, and
its voids; and which zones are marked for peace and which for pacification, which
are sources of legitimate warfare, and which are sites out of which illegitimate vio-
lence arises. These theories naturalize the attachment of peace to specific entities,
such as the polis or the state; to certain peoples, such as Christians or Europeans;
and to certain historical narratives about providence or progress. The categories
of peace order and arrange, affiliate and exclude, along these lines. When Plato
binds peace to the Greek polis and its relationship to other poleis, empires and
barbarians are peripheral to his characters’ anxious schematization of the world.

4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
5. See Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, trans. Rachel
Gomme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
5

Introduction 5

Divisions between peaceful and warlike groups and between different kinds of
war, for example, in the writings of al-Fārābī and Ibn Khaldūn (see chapters 2 and
5), themselves reflect the perspectives of those groups, cities, and empires that
desire to be seen as committed to peace and as waging just war. And similarly,
Thomas Hobbes’s and Immanuel Kant’s understandings of the desire for peace
in terms of commerce and development (see chapters 5 and 6) discount “unde-
veloped” peoples from peace based on their political economy. Who emerges as
warlike, who as peaceful? Who may wage war for the sake of peace?
Ideas, ideals, and texts inhabit multiple contexts. To unsettle the culturalizing
frames and teleological narratives in which these thinkers and texts come to repre-
sent “the West” and “Islam,” it is important to recontextualize them by considering
their contrapuntal referents, global currents, and regional relations. The limits of
their universes then become more visible: Plato’s world of polis and peace sat next
to a vast and powerful Persian Empire it called “barbarian.” Erasmus (chapter 3)
explains the Ottoman Empire as God’s admonishment to encourage Christians
to embrace peace, and Sayyid Quṭb (chapter 6) explains Western colonialism in
a parallel way, as only possible because Muslims had strayed from Islam. Each
such schematization of the world is necessarily partial and incomplete. It emerges
out of and against certain figures and spaces—its others and its elsewheres—
which it constitutes in constituting itself. Going from Plato to Kant or Quṭb, in
other words, is not a progressive expansion that gradually reflects the realities of
the globe, comes to include previously marginal peoples, or creates “better” wars.
Each shift in scope across these thinkers is a fundamental reconfiguration. With
these shifts, some later thinkers excuse or criticize earlier thinkers for their limited
views of “the world” and difference—all while denying the implications of their
own situatedness. Layer upon layer, like stable ruins built upon tilted sediments,
provincial idealizations of peace bury the theories and the affects that form them
to speak in the name of universal peace for humanity.

Polemical: The Logic of Constitutive Aggression

Peace is polemical: war, antagonism, and hostility are internal to peace, not out-
side it. Peace is made into an ideal in relation to specific antagonisms, and it then
enables hostility. This argument responds to another aspect of how the boundary
between peace and war is porous. It suggests an underlying significance to calling
some enemies “enemies of peace”: the constitution of peace as an ideal simulta-
neously constitutes some as its enemies. Their form, disposition, lacks, or history
are antithetical to peace and obstacles to its realization.
Peace’s authorization of war against certain kinds of enemies is internal to
its valorization; the multiple layers of its antagonism and hostility can intersect
6

6 WAR FoR PEACE

with peace’s provincial and parasitical structures. Its universalized idealization

can construct some parts of the globe as more readily and naturally peaceful and
others as warlike, conflict-prone, or in need of intervention. In this book, we will
see that some enemies are described as being illegitimate, incomplete, inherently
unjust, or against human history. Erasmus constructs “the Turk” (the Ottoman
Empire and Islam) as the antithesis of peace, representing destructive qualities
and waging unjustifiable war. Christian behavior, too, has become “Turkish,” he
admonishes, and Christians must reform themselves to either defeat or convert
Turks. Similarly, expansionary empires and pirates are, for Gentili and Grotius
(chapter 4), faithless. They threaten both peace and the law of nations that secures
it. For Kant, the fundamental characteristics of Arabian Bedouins and North
African pirates render them threats to the laws and histories that produce peace;
for Sayyid Quṭb, European and American empires occupy an analogous position,
as unjust enemies whose existence subverts the possibility of peace. And peace’s
attachment to insinuates, likewise, can implicate some as enemies of peace or of
the insinuate. Erasmus emphasizes peace and mutual understanding; the jurists,
peace and faith in law; and Kant and Quṭb, peace and domestic legal order. But
the Turk’s comprehension of the world is irrelevant; pirates are faithless, lawless
enemies; and some enemies’ political forms make peace impossible. The form and
content of peace are thus imbricated in contextual and conjunctural oppositions,
which then continue to flow from peace.
Genealogically, peace is an ideal with enemies and antitheses. The polemical
structure of peace is thus more than mere rhetoric that caricatures any enemy as
an “enemy of peace.” In this sense, Carl Schmitt’s reduction of “the political” to a
spectrum of friendship and enmity takes hostile proclamations only at their sur-
face meanings. The questions to be posed about peace’s polemics, however, are
how it becomes implicated in antagonism, how it transforms through antagonism,
and how polemical idealizations of peace are transferred across contexts and texts.
For Schmitt, appeals to “peace” amount to self-serving rhetoric and misuses of
the concept. If a state declares war in the name of humanity, he notes, it attempts
“to usurp [okkupieren] a universal concept against its military opponent. At the
expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as
one can misuse [mißbrauchen; also “abuse”] peace, justice, progress, and civilization
in order to claim these as one’s own and to deny the same to the enemy.” This per-
spective is limited to Schmitt’s own paraphrase of Proudhon: “whoever invokes
humanity wants to cheat [betrügen].”6

6. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 54 = Der Begriff des Politischen, 55. Schmitt regularly
observed that peace can be a rhetorical tool: “War is condemned but executions, sanctions,
punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and measures
7

Introduction 7

My argument, however, is that these uses are internal to and constitutive of

the ideal of peace. Not only can peace be weaponized, but its idealization is, struc-
turally and discursively, crafted as a weapon, with specific enemies in view, and
honed against specific others. The weapon has many lives, and its enemies shift.
These figures sometimes merge and sometimes disappear. Various enemies can
be collected under the signs “barbarian,” “infidel,” “nomad,” “traitor,” “invader,”
and “pirate” or distinguished within any of them. Each enmity calls up a response
and a mode of conduct. Rules for how to be committed to peace while facing
such enemies yield numerous possibilities; they might range from attacking,
fortifying against, or conquering the enemy to saving, trading with, learning from,
educating, studying, or explaining him. An enemy can elicit multiple expressions,
such as fear and love, envy and indifference, or loathing and contempt. The “peace-
lover” may obey a duty to correct a friend, protect a neighbor, convert a theolog-
ical enemy, or punish a lawbreaker. Within this overarching logic of constitutive
aggression resides a great historical and theoretical dynamism: configurations of
enmity draw new contours of peace within constellations of insinuates and visions
of the globe.
The weapon called peace, in turn, is picked up by others, sometimes crafted
into a new instrument that nonetheless bears some of the older nicks and
scratches—forgotten antagonisms of the past that haunt idealizations of peace
and its constellations as it is re-appropriated and re-elaborated. There is neither
a single and stable “enemy” nor a singular and transhistorical concept of enmity.
An enemy might be cast as being outside peace, but he is nevertheless constitutive
of it; he is constituted as outside peace in order to constitute peace as one’s own
promise, identity, and ideal.

THIS BOOK TRACKS these three structures and their transformations. As the
contexts and antagonisms that generated earlier thinkers’ idealizations of peace
were forgotten, they appeared to be natural to their successors, and each of the
three functions has intensified. These functions and shifts form the discursive
life of peace as a moral ideal. They underlie dominant formulations of peace in
many of the principal works in the history of political theory and in contemporary
discourse.
Not every discussion of peace performs this work; peace can emerge in other
forms, attached to other logics. I do not pretend to exhaust the range of peace’s
political and nonpolitical deployments and discursive registers, nor should I be

to assure peace remain. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber
of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity.” Schmitt, Concept of the
Political, 79.
8

8 WAR FoR PEACE

taken to suggest that these logics are exclusive to peace. I thus agree with Judith
Butler’s diagnosis that “for those who cannot think outside the framework of war,
the critique of war can be heard only as a war cry.” The frame of war takes acts
of protest and techniques of nonviolent resistance as war maneuvers. My point,
however, is that what she calls the “effort to imagine peace” as an ideal outside the
logic of war is actually quite difficult and perhaps even unworkable.7 This effort
has to work against “peace” in the history of political thought and in contem-
porary discourse, if not also against what the apparently universal and ordinary
commitment to peace masks. The parasitical, provincial, and polemical are three
long compulsions that have constituted peace as a morality. It is internal to the
inner structure of peace, as a moralized and idealized concept, when it performs
these functions. As peace is invoked and idealized, it is articulated with logics that
open into these three structures. The next chapters track a series of failed attempts
to idealize peace beyond war. The argument here should lead us to be less san-
guine than contemporary critics might wish to be about how easy and straightfor-
ward it may be for the ideal of “peace” to exit or overcome the framework of war.
Peace’s own paradoxes, histories, contradictions, and constellations should not be
put aside.
The focus of the next six chapters is on these political theoretic logics and their
implications. These are not, however, essential to the idea of peace or inevitable.
At the end of the book, I briefly point to how we can find, contained within the
very same texts, alternative understandings of peace—less as a moral ideal and
more as a political idea. These understandings correspond to the three functions,
and they might help us think beyond them. Beyond peace’s parasitical structure,
I recover the truce from its denigrated status, not as a less durable or temporary
peace, but as peace without insinuates. The truce is located outside the pretense
of permanence and certainty. Beyond the provincial structure, I identify the signif-
icance of speaking of this or that peace, that is, of a particular peace, with its con-
crete relations, local and global formations, and multiple histories. Particularizing
peace also helps reorient us away from discussing peace between overgeneralized
and hypostatic fictions (e.g., “Islam,” “the West,” “Muslim-Christian relations”)
and toward pressing for the concreteness of the relations in question. Finally, be-
yond the polemical structure, I propose recentering separation, or estrangement
and keeping distance, as a basic form of peace. Like war, idealized forms of peace
hinge on presumptions of gathering or bringing together discrete entities. In war,

7. Judith Butler, “The Criminalization of Knowledge,” The Chronicle Review 64, May 27,
2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Criminalization-of/243501/.
9

Introduction 9

they collide; in peace, they agree, unite, or love. Separation challenges the predica-
tion of peace on “saving” others, intervening on their behalf, or living with them.
It would make little sense to idealize these alternatives. I offer them neither as
moral legislation nor as policy prescriptions. But if we discipline ourselves to treat
them as basic forms of peace, we might learn to identify and challenge the limits
of the parasitical, provincial, and polemical conceptual structures and their logics.
A brief sketch of each alternative is offered in the epilogue.

other Wars for Peace: Situating

the Argument
For now, it is helpful to situate this project, its premises, and its three logics in
relation to some other critical perspectives on war and peace.
Inverting Clausewitz. The most common view is the inversion of Clausewitz’s
formula in which peace (in place of “politics”) is said to be “the continuation of war
by other means.” Two exemplars who mobilize this reversal, Michel Foucault and
Hannah Arendt, helpfully point to the co-implication of war and peace. This in-
version tends to limit itself to renaming peace either a metaphorical war or a euphe-
mism for politics, policing, domination, injustice, or violence. When Foucault calls
peace “a form of war” in which power is reinscribed “through a form of unspoken
warfare,” peace is only an ideological mask for war. War installs and makes visible
a power disequilibrium; peace maintains and conceals it so that it may return in
the next war, which technically never ended.8 Within this frame, as Tarak Barkawi
and Keith Stanski observe, “war, as it were, exceeds ‘war’ as the clash of arms,”
defining and inflecting institutions and society.9 This frame helpfully points to
the blurriness of peace by foregrounding an expansive notion of war. Although
Foucault’s move has been immensely productive in laying bare the micropolitics

8. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow
(New York: Pantheon, 1984), 64–65; Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 168; Foucault, “Two Lectures” (1976), in
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans.
Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980),
78–108, 90–92; Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–
1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador,
2003), 50–51.
9. Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski, “Introduction: Orientalism and War,” in Orientalism
and War, ed. Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012),
1–16, 6–7. For a provocative discussion of the “politics as war” formula and the insufficiency
of war as a category, see Étienne Balibar, “What’s in a War? (Politics as War, War as Politics),”
Ratio Juris 21, no. 3 (2008): 365–386.
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10 WAR FoR PEACE

of everyday life, it obscures the political life of “peace.” Meanwhile, Arendt’s casual
substitution of the word “peace” for the word “politics” in Clausewitz’s formula
begs the question of the non-distinction, not only between war and peace, but also
between peace and politics.10 If there is a war in peace, and if peace is an extension
of war, this should encourage us to hone in on peace’s political grammars and
discourses.
Empty talk. A second dominant view treats invocations of peace as mere
rhetoric. This view is at times expressed by Carl Schmitt, as we saw, and by
self-described realists, such as Hans Morgenthau and E. H. Carr, as well as by
Johan Galtung, one of the leading scholars of peace studies. The four come to
a surprising agreement: invocations of peace in political discourses are vacuous
platitudes and extrinsic abuses and misuses. Peace is a word that is “so often
used and abused” that appeals to it are “misuses,” ideological tricks, “meaningless
platitudes,” and “a peculiar combination of platitude and falseness”; professions
of peace are “ideological disguises” that one must “see through,” attempts to con-
ceal or manipulate that are otherwise “meaningless.”11 Rather than quarantine
peace talk as unimportant, ungrammatical, or meaningless, it should, I think, be
viewed as basic to peace’s life as a discursive concept. Peace has been imbued with
meaning and embedded in politics through such invocations and the nebulous
distinction between peace and war that such invocations suggest.
The boundary eroded. Third, my premise that the boundary between peace and
war is unstable draws on critical and postcolonial theorists’ explication of how,
in a variety of contexts and ways, peace has blurred into war. As Achille Mbembe
powerfully observes, the colony is a site “where ‘peace’ is more likely to take on
the face of a ‘war without end’ ”; in colonial warfare, “the distinction between war
and peace does not avail.”12 Frantz Fanon identifies how the peace of the settler
is predicated on wars of pacification against the colonized; and Arjun Appadurai
offers key insights into how terror and the normalization of violence blurs peace
and war.13 Other theorists, notably Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt,
and Martin Heidegger, explain the erosion of the boundary between peace and war

10. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1970), 9, 51.
11. E. H. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, ed. Michael Cox (1939; New York: Palgrave,
2001), 31, 50–51, 67, 76–78; Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 95–96; and Johan Galtung,
“Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–191, 167.
12. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–
40, 23, 25; and Mbembe, On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), 89, 178, 182.
13. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 5, 19–21, 39; and Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An
Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 31–32.
11

Introduction 11

by referring to the rise of modern society, modern technology, nuclear weapons,

or the Cold War.14 Taking these contexts together suggests the multiple and
overdetermined ways in which the boundary becomes unstable. This, however,
should not lead us to think that the boundary had been stable previously or clear
by default; taking all these insights together is an invitation to consider not only
how war overtakes peace, but how peace’s discursive structures open up to war.
The three logics of insinuation, universalized idealization, and constitutive ag-
gression extend these analyses toward a view of how, conceptually and discur-
sively, peace always already blurred with war.
Just war theory. Fourth, a different perspective for theorizing war and peace
today belongs to just war theory and its principal advocate over the last forty years,
Michael Walzer. Just war theory upholds peace as the aim of the right kind of war.
It is a vast and elaborate theoretical literature, with numerous applications and
internal debates. In general, just war theory possesses the capacity to speak truth
to power by publicizing the injustice of a war, as Walzer notes.15 However, just
war theory is problematic for purposes of theorizing the idea of peace today, for
two reasons. First, the vocabulary of “just war” undid itself the moment it became
a handbook for military publicists seeking to validate their violence or to present
themselves as more ethical, more moral, more humane than their enemies. As
Walzer recognizes, just war theory is a public relations campaign for civilian sup-
port and global “hearts and minds.”16 It is wedded to the state and apparently just
as invested in summoning a “we,” an “our tradition,” and an “our shared moral
consciousness”—a stylized hypostasis of “the West.”17 Today, military action is rou-
tinely defended and facilitated in the rhetoric of just war theory; perhaps this body
of knowledge could only serve its purposes when it was divorced from public advo-
cacy. More deeply, Walzer’s theorization of war and his applications of his theories,

14. For example: Martin Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” in The End of Philosophy, trans.
Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 84–110, 104 = “Überwindung
der Metaphysik” (1936–1946), in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann,
2000), 67–98, 91; Arendt, On Violence, 9–10; Schmitt, Vorwort (1963), in Der Begriff Des
Politischen, 1–19, 19; Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus
Publicum Europeum (1950), trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003), 59.
15. Walzer, Arguing about War, 3–4.
16. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, xix. A related curiosity of just war theory is what, exactly, its
evaluations can mean in practice for the enemy (is it supposed to comfort enemy civilians to
know that their deaths are unfortunate but that the war that killed them can be philosoph-
ically justified?), especially where the architecture of the theory approximates an internal
monologue.
17. For example, Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 41, 53, 63.
21

12 WAR FoR PEACE

as Talal Asad has demonstrated, structurally tilt the scales to the benefit of certain
powers against others, erasing some histories in favor of others.18
“Just war” is one language among many, even if Walzer claims that it is the
only viable one for assessing war. Critics, including Asad, Véronique Pin-Fat (on
Walzer’s politics of language), and Ronan O’Callaghan (on Walzer and the Iraq
War), have shown the limits of Walzer’s just war grammar.19 Within the just war
theory literature, some critics advocate various forms of pacifism, but there has
been little space for a critical examination of the aspiration for peace.20 Walzer him-
self responds to a hypothetical question that refuses this grammar—a variation of
which animates this book—“What is this morality of yours?” by excommunicating
the questioner from “the comfortable world of moral agreement” and “from the
wider world of agreement and disagreement, justification, and criticism.”21 The
three logics I have elaborated offer an alternate way of thinking about appeals to
peace and “this morality,” one that focuses on the functions of peace.

Beyond “Dialogue and Mutual Understanding”

In drawing on poststructuralist, postcolonial, and critical approaches, these three
logics offer a genealogical critique of the premises of a normative ideal in order
to denude its moralities. They seek to go beyond the rhetoric of equivalence and
hypostasis prevalent in “cross-cultural” studies of war and peace. In numerous
disciplines—including philosophy, religious studies, political science, and law—it
is common to present “Islamic” and “Western” conceptions of peace as discrete
ideas or to contrast “just war,” “holy war,” and “jihad” as though they refer to stable
doctrines and represent civilizational, cultural, or religious visions. This, it seems,
is the understanding Walzer taps into when he writes of medieval Christian
Europe’s priests, preachers, lords, barons, and kings who legitimated wars against
unbelievers: “they had their own version of jihad.” Here, jihād is summoned as

18. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 19–63.
19. Véronique Pin-Fat, Universality, Ethics and International Relations: A Grammatical Reading
(London: Routledge, 2010); and Ronan O’Callaghan, Walzer, Just War and Iraq: Ethics as
Response (London: Routledge, 2016).
20. For example, Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009);
Larry May, War Crimes and Just War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); May,
After War Ends: A Philosophical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012);
and L. Robert Phillips and Duane L. Cady, Humanitarian Intervention: Just War vs. Pacifism
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).
21. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, xxvi–xxvii.
13

Introduction 13

shorthand and paradigm for anglophone understandings of fanatical and illegiti-

mate “religious violence.”22
As Roxanne Euben observes, the terms “West” and “Islam” do not “correspond to
stable, fixed, and clear entities,” and the idea of “ ‘Islam versus the West’ is an entire
system of representation” that carves up the world, erases fissures, and renarrates
history. My approach to reading “Western” and “Islamic” thinkers builds on Euben’s
agenda-setting call to remain attuned to the politics of translation, the genealogies
of our frames and categories, and the discursive work of imagined unities and
reifications.23 The link is further complicated, as Joseph Massad argues, by how
the idea of the “liberal West” constitutes Islam as its outside and antonym.24 With a
universalized concept like peace, then, this requires attention to the features through
which the idea of “the West” has been defined against its “occluded insides” and “con-
stitutive outsides,” including, for example, law, progress, democracy, and just war.25
Juxtapositions are not neutral; we would do well to attend to the politics of compar-
ison and their imbrications in empire, Orientalism, and various forms of exclusion
and hierarchy.26
In these senses, the ten thinkers examined in these chapters are not “Western”
and/or “Islamic,” if these terms imply the key ways in which they should be read.
Although later thinkers discuss, cite, or dismiss earlier thinkers, they are not cul-
tural ambassadors in a dialogue.27 There is something perverse in claims about

22. Walzer, Arguing about War, 4. Although the word “jihad” is now an English word, the
roman type fails to signify that it is domesticated precisely as something foreign and that its
status is a source of political controversy; in these senses, there are important distinctions
between jihad and jihād, and the stakes of writing one or the other are different from other
borrowings, such as algebra instead of al-jabr or coffee instead of qahwa. The italics and
diacritics mark the difference.
23. Roxanne Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2006), 3–7.
24. Massad, Islam in Liberalism.
25. I adapt this formulation from Wendy Brown, “We Are All Democrats Now . . .” Theory
and Event 13, no. 2 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.0.0133.
26. See Murad Idris, “Political Theory and the Politics of Comparison,” Political Theory
(2016): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716659812.
27. The belief that civilizations can make peace if they speak through their human mediums
accepts the same untenable premises and participates in the same grammar of difference
as the view that they clash. Consider, for example, the framing of comparative thought
as a force of “global peace through dialogue” in Fred Dallmayr and Abbas Manoocheri,
eds., Civilizational Dialogue and Political Thought: Tehran Papers (Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2007), xvii, which claims to respond to Samuel Huntington, The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). See
Jimmy Casas Klausen, “Civilization and Culture in Anticolonial and Comparative Political
41

14 WAR FoR PEACE

notions of peace belonging to distinct traditions, cultures, or civilizations, be they

“Western” and “Islamic,” or “Indian,” “African,” or “Confucian.”28 Such claims are
built on the presumption that peace is, or must be, a universal ideal for the West’s
many internal and external others. As I argue, the development of peace as an
ideal is, in part, the product of antagonisms and the production of a constitutive
outside. The subsequent insistence that these very same others and enemies—as
a “culture” or “civilization” made legible either in historical texts or in contempo-
rary speech—must valorize peace or be shown to have equivalent or translatable
notions of it has a darker side: it cements the belief that these others would be a
problem for not valuing peace properly. The demand reinscribes the West’s own
identity as committed to peace. It requires of those against and through whom the
ideal of peace was elaborated to now show that their “traditions,” too, cherish and
idealize peace.
The search for equivalents of peace across the world, claims about the idea of
“peace in Islam,” and proclamations by ideologues about why its idealizations are
absent in some “traditions” leave intact the value of peace. Such endeavors must be
flipped on their head to ask: What are the political projects, self-understandings,
and global imaginaries to which such inquiries contribute? What moralities and
interests drive the presumption that peace should appear as an ideal, be it for eve-
ryone, only for “us,” or “for them, too”? How do idealizations of peace function,
historically, politically, discursively?
The “Islamic” thinkers in the next chapters—Sayyid Quṭb, Ibn Khaldūn, al-
Fārābī, and, once upon a time, Plato—are today already ensconced as part of the
core of political theory. A different project might take up important thinkers who
are marginal to Euro-American political theory, such as al-Murādī, al-Masʿūdī,

Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory, ed. Leigh K. Jenco, Murad
Idris, and Megan C. Thomas (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). On the
theological commitments that structure such views of “dialogue,” see chapter 3 of this book.
28. This is Johan Galtung’s approach in an article that compares the idea of peace across
“traditions,” “cultures,” or “civilizations.” The gesture of pluralist inclusion only reifies
historical variation and geographic spread into static forms of “civilization” and “culture,”
casting the word in each language as an ahistorical concept. He translates numerous
terms under the sign of “peace” to reaffirm its universality and then recasts differences as
civilizational, cultural, or religious. He concludes that “Western” peace is “external.” The
further east one goes, the more “internal” the different notions of “Oriental” peace are.
Through the different words, he writes, the traditions or civilizations have much to teach
each other. It is no coincidence that the different notions of peace perform Galtung’s notion
of peace. They are gathered together to unite and teach one another through dialogue, to-
ward a fundamental agreement in the name of peace. Difference is introduced in order to
be overcome. This mode of comparison already aspires to an ideal of peace as a morality of
mutual exchange, saving, and consensus. See Johan Galtung, “Social Cosmology and the
Concept of Peace,” Journal of Peace Research 18, no. 2 (1981): 183–199.
15

Introduction 15

al-Jāḥiẓ, or Muḥammad Luṭfī Jumʿa, each of whom makes a brief appearance in

the next chapters. But al-Fārābī, Ibn Khaldūn, and Quṭb are important today be-
cause each has come to represent a distinct caricature of Islam, peace, and war.
A philosopher who fears religious orthodoxy and violence writes in riddles to con-
ceal his beliefs from the masses; he was saddled with Muslims and Islam, and
as Derrida laments, “Islamic ‘political philosophy’ ” had an overdose of Plato’s
philosopher-king and a deficiency in Aristotle’s Politics (hence the violence and ab-
sence of democracy in “Arab and/or Islamic spaces”).29 A world historian theorizes
the dynamic of war between city dwellers and nomads, but he had to be “discov-
ered” by European readers. And a fundamentalist, radical Islamist turned religion
into an “ideology” of war and continues to inspire “Islamic terror.”
Each of the ten thinkers discussed in the next chapters, from Plato to Kant
and Quṭb, makes visible the questions of power that are crucial for theorizing
peace, and each takes up some version of the claim that “war is for the sake of
peace.” At the same time, each today is inserted into civilizational narratives that
construct “the West” and “Islam”; they have become cultural icons, feeding into
the various forms that the Islam/West opposition takes, and how this opposition
is itself inflected by the polarization between peace and war, or good war and bad
war, good peace and bad peace.

A Plan for War for Peace: Structure

of the Book
Put differently, war and peace contain a series of binaries. Different groups and
identities, including Islam and the West, are grafted onto them. These are the
oppositions between well-ordered peace and disordering violence, the peaceful and
the warlike, just war and illegitimate aggression, peace-lovers and peace-haters,
the lawful and the lawless, civilized peace and uncivilized war, and productive war

29. See Ernest Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme: Essai historique (Paris: Durand, 1852) and Études
d’histoire religieuse (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1857); Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on
Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2005), 31–32. After repeated attempts at recusatio—for example, “From what I have
been able to understand,” “From the little I know,” and “I don’t know how much weight
to give in this whole story to the rather troubling fact”—Derrida asserts (incorrectly) “that
Aristotle’s Politics, by a curious exception, was absent in the Islamic importation, reception,
translation, and mediation of Greek philosophy.” On al-Fārābī’s access to Aristotle’s Politics,
see Shlomo Pines, “Aristotle’s Politics in Arabic Philosophy,” Studies in Arabic Versions of
Greek Texts and in Mediaeval Science (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 154–160. On Derrida and Islam, see
Norton, On the Muslim Question, 118–137; and Massad, Islam in Liberalism.
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16 WAR FoR PEACE

and purposeless war. These binaries, the peace they make and the violence they
sanction, open the next six chapters.
Chapter 1, “Assigning Symmetry,” examines the ordering of peace and war in
Plato’s Laws. The speakers in this dialogue schematize war and peace in terms of an
aesthetic of symmetry (proportion, equivalence, ratio, size) and an aesthetic of the
whole (parts, wholes). The wars they describe adhere to a pattern, of polis against
polis, person against person. These wars demand an orderly universe. Ultimately,
the speakers locate peace in the wholeness of the polis. Their generalization of
the polis as the primary site of well-ordered peace and war, I argue, reflects provin-
cial anxieties about the polis’s finitude and about sources of disordering violence,
notably Greek empires, Persia, and slave revolts. Second, Plato has his characters
rehabilitate peace against arguments about its insufficiency by affirming that “war
is for the sake of peace” and by appealing to the parasitical structure of peace: they
insinuate fraternity, friendship, unity, security, and law into peace. In Plato’s Laws
and in contemporaneous Athenian orations, these insinuates gain primacy over
peace and facilitate war, including wars that govern the polis’s interior and police
its surrounding neighbors.
In chapter 2, “Summoning Hostility,” al-Fārābī and Aquinas recite that war is
for peace from Plato’s Laws (via Galen and Aristotle, respectively). Their writings
make visible a morality that informs the oppositions between the peaceful and the
warlike and between just war and illegitimate aggression. In al-Fārābī’s and Aquinas’s
typologies of different groups and cities, each designates some group as warlike
or as waging war for no good reason. They contrast this group’s disposition to
engage in illegitimate aggression to other kinds of violence and war, including
“just war” for Aquinas. But each also implies—at times inadvertently—that re-
course to violence can radically transform those who use it, which puts into
question the political work of such classifications and elisions. At the same time,
when al-Fārābī describes a political group that is committed to peace, and when
Aquinas theorizes the commitment to peace (and a greatly expanded parasitical
structure), each is explicit that the peace-loving group wages war nonetheless.
Unlike diagnoses of the warlike disposition, the commitment to peace privileges
“intentions” in a way that elides and ultimately sanctions the desire to correct
others—one’s brothers, neighbors, friends, and enemies—in the name of peace.
In Interlude I, “Deflections,” I discuss the aporetic quality of this desire in the
writings of other thinkers, including Erasmus.
The desire to transform or “save” the enemy, we see in chapter 3, “Loving
Necessity,” is fundamental to Erasmus’s understanding of peace, and he twins it
with the desire to reform oneself. This chapter argues that theorists who look to
Erasmus’s writings for his alleged (and allegedly secular) pacifism misunderstand
his political theology of peace. The parasitical, provincial, and polemical structures
17

Introduction 17

of Erasmus’s “universal peace” revolve around the distinction between Christianity

and the Ottoman Empire (“the Turk”), and the providential primacy of Christians.
He calls for peace, unity, and love; these insinuates again are found in peace and
overtake it, and he defines each in opposition to the Turk. Erasmus privileges the
Christian as the true subject of peace, and Christian speech and dialogue as an en-
actment of God’s Word. In this political theology, peace is necessary, but necessity
also authorizes Christian war and the conversion of the non-Christian.
If the moralities of peace that thinkers like Plato and Erasmus made for them-
selves belong to anxieties about inferiority, fears of the weak, and anticipations of
power, the seventeenth century sees aspects of these moralities among those who
became dominant. Erasmus wrote at the apex of the Ottoman Empire’s power,
but Hugo Grotius and Alberico Gentili write after the conquest of the Americas
and during the ongoing expansion of European empires. These jurists, I argue in
chapter 4, “Ordering Legality,” absorb war and peace into the frame of law. They
license the parasitical expansion of law as a new prime insinuate and as the basic
measure for both conceptualizing and regulating war and peace. In the process,
they produce a polemical opposition between enemies by law and enemies of law,
or the lawful and the lawless. Against lawless, faithless enemies of law, peace is
uncertain, if not impossible. Such enemies include those with a different form,
such as pirates, expansionary empires, and peoples with “criminal” or “unnat-
ural” customs. At the same time, Gentili and Grotius imagine that the laws of
war and peace are perpetual and universal: they apply to all peoples everywhere.
Colonialism enables them to gather and treat distant peoples’ practices as an as-
surance of their law’s universality.
Interlude II, “Refractions,” unfolds additional intersections across these
chapters, through the contexts of colonialism and histories of textual citation—
from the translation of Grotius’s theological writings into Arabic and other jurists’
writings on pirates to claims about Ibn Khaldūn, Europe, and Arab Bedouins, as
well as the contention that Hobbes duplicated Plato’s arguments.
Chapter 5, “Colonizing Frontiers,” focuses on the opposition between civilized
commodious peace and uncivilized war and the affiliated idea that peace brings pros-
perity and development, whereas war is unproductive and primitive. Hobbes’s
idealization of peace denies the ways in which the things of peace can come from
and bring about violence and war. Ibn Khaldūn, meanwhile, helps us ask how, for
whom, and when peace becomes a basic desire. In both cases, this economy of the
morals of peace grows out of a particular political economic arrangement, one that
cannot be described as peaceful. This arrangement of peace produces frontiers,
or spaces in which other laws, or lawlessness, are upheld. With Ibn Khaldūn,
the Arabian Bedouin or desert nomad becomes the sedentary dynasty’s enemy
and its past. Hobbes’s heavily neglected discussions (and slippages) of settler
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18 WAR FoR PEACE

colonialism and empire frame his understanding of peace, its sanitized “commo-
dious” insinuates, its antonyms in the savage and nomad, and the ways it spreads
war and death across the globe.
Chapter 6, “Policing Humanity,” examines the opposition between produc-
tive war and purposeless violence through Immanuel Kant’s and Sayyid Quṭb’s
writings on peace. Although Kant and Quṭb are commonly understood as
philosophers of democratic peace and Islamic violence, respectively, both are
theorists of violence that pushes history in the “correct” direction, against
enemies whose violence hinders progress. Kant criticizes colonialism, but
his anxieties about the meaninglessness of existence passively sanction its
historical structures, just as his peace plan’s ambiguities about intervention
and statehood cede significant conceptual terrain to imperial practice. Kant’s
discussions of Arabian Bedouins, political economy, and hospitality, as well as
his construction of the globe through imagery drawn from Orientalism, frame
the provincial and polemical structure of his conception of peace. This con-
ception ultimately produces an unjust enemy who makes peace impossible.
Meanwhile, Quṭb’s theorizations of empire and postcolonialism diagnose Euro-
American empires as unjust enemies of Islamic peace. In his neglected peace
plan, he proposes reforming the legal order of states in the “Islamic world,”
creating a federation, and policing the globe against imperial aggression. Kant
and Quṭb insinuate the law of the state and interstate union into universal
peace. The attempt to realize this peace, however, authorizes violence. The se-
quence of state, law, and federation provides a grammar for determining who
polices the globe and for diagnosing whose political form and legal order are
wrong. The idea of universal peace anticipates a lawless enemy of peace.
The epilogue gathers these ten thinkers. It returns to the parasitical, provin-
cial, and polemical structures, highlighting some of their major continuities and
transformations. It then turns to the idea of Islam and peace, and concludes by
briefly sketching the three alternative understandings of peace mentioned here.
These next chapters are critical of idealizations of peace. This is neither for
the sake of peace nor in the name of war—a simplistic binary that shields peace
from critique and obscures its genealogies. Instead of asking how we might attain
world peace for all, the question here is why we insist on the name “peace,” how
that name orders understandings of political solutions, and who can ponder such
solutions and invoke peace in the process.
Peace is not the solution. It is a problem. This is a genealogy of peace, to move
beyond peace.
91

Assigning Symmetry
Plato’s Laws and the Polis’s Wars

“peace” is a defining feature of “our” aspirations, activities, and

T H E I D E A T H AT
wars continues to animate, indeed to authorize, dominant civilizational and im-
perial discourses. In such discourses, we aim for peace, whereas our enemies do
not value it. Peace is often imagined as a unity, but it also draws a boundary that
re-creates enemies: we can have peace with other peace-lovers, which our enemies
are not, but even our wars with these peace-hating enemies are waged for the
sake of peace. Against such discourses, the peace-cynic might describe appeals to
peace as extensions of war by rhetorical means, or he might deny the possibility
of peace altogether; peace dissolves into shades of war. Meanwhile, the peace-
advocate laments these as extrinsic abuses of the word, insisting that everyone
does, or should, desire peace. This discursive choreography is written into the life
of peace across the history of political thought; it enables its parasitical, provincial,
and polemical functions.
Writing in the fourth century Bce, Plato, in the Laws—his final and lengthiest
dialogue—stages a parallel confrontation between two such responses. Broadly
speaking, the exchange resonates with the contemporary crisis of peace. One of the
interlocutors, Cleinias the Cretan, claims that peace is an empty word that masks
war. Another speaker, the Athenian Stranger, provokes Cleinias into affirming his
commitment to peace. Between these two moments in the Laws, Plato puts on dis-
play the limits and anatomy of two competing principles: that there is no peace,
only war, and that peace exists, because war is waged for the sake of peace. When
Cleinias sketches his understanding of universal and perpetual war, the Athenian
challenges the grammars of such schematizations of war. The first half of this
02

20 WAR FoR PEACE

chapter focuses on Cleinias’s schematizations—a war of all against all cities, a war
among all cities, and a series of nested wars inside the city. As we will see, these
schematizations are predicated on the elision of relations that can exist independ-
ently of war, such as friendship, and on a selective silence about war’s relationship
to empire. The Laws rehabilitates peace by foregrounding what schematizations
of war keep hidden.
But, as this chapter will also argue, Plato stages the limits of this rehabilitation.
The Athenian Stranger reproduces Cleinias’s imperatives of war mere moments
after exposing their inadequacy. The rehabilitation of peace reaches its apex with a
variation on that commonplace of “war for peace”: a lawgiver should “legislate the
things of war for the sake of peace.”1 The dialogue invites skepticism, first toward
visions of the world that mistrust or deny peace. It then invites skepticism toward
the distinction between peace and war, and finally, toward their conjoinment, for
the speakers refuse to think beyond the violence of the poleis (cities). In a prime
example of what I call peace’s parasitical structure, the Athenian shows Cleinias
that he values peace because he values friendship. But he then makes friendship—
a prime insinuate, or one of peace’s recurrent additives—a virtue of war. Likewise,
against the denial of peace, the Athenian defends peace as the aim of war and of
law. But the laws and practices he endorses anticipate war, even during peace.
He finds Cleinias’s vision of war with neighbors untenable, but his own proposal
for policing neighboring cities adopts the core of Cleinias’s vision of hostility. If
Cleinias’s ordering of the world defends war as a necessity, the Athenian’s counter-
vision nevertheless sanctions other wars by necessity, this time in the name of
peace. His counter-vision casts enemies inside the city as enemies of the whole
city, and it constitutes some external enemies as incomplete parts that do not add
up to a whole. Peace authorizes domestic and foreign hostility, setting into motion
a vocabulary of war.
One of my aims, then, is to recover how it is that “war for peace” operates.
Rather than simply announce that “war is for the sake of peace,” Plato’s Laws
ventriloquizes the blurring, failure, and erasure of peace. The interpretation
I offer is one that medieval and modern adapters of the Laws, some of whom ap-
pear in the next chapters, overlook. This is, in part, because they do not consider
the discursive work of naming “peace” in the Laws; if they mention it, they keep it,

1. Plato, The Laws of Plato, trans. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1988). Hereafter cited as “Laws book.passage.” All translations are Pangle’s unless other-
wise noted. Where I have supplied the original Greek, it is from Platonis Opera 5, ed. John
Burnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907). When I amend the translation, I supply
both Pangle’s translation and the original Greek. Laws 1.628de.
21

Assigning Symmetry 21

like Plato’s characters, as the reason to wage war.2 The dialogue’s formulation of
war in the service of peace goes beyond the belief that Foucault associates with
Plato and the West, namely, in an opposition between violence, disorder and war,
versus the purity of peaceful knowledge (even as he aptly advises that “we should
always be wary of blaming poor old Plato for everything we want to banish”).3 And
yet the skepticism and the desire for peace that Plato has his characters perform
remain bound to the paradox of the polis as a peaceful entity that wages war.

Staging an Aesthetics of Measure

Plato’s rehabilitative declaration of war for peace represents a reorientation from
his other discussions of war. Perhaps his best-known statement on the subject
appears in the Republic, where Socrates says that wars among Greeks are morally
worse than wars abroad with non-Greeks, or barbarians; in the standard reading
of this passage, Socrates calls for labeling wars among Greeks “civil wars,” because
Greeks are kin and friends by nature, and for labeling wars with barbarians or
non-Greeks “war,” because they are strangers and enemies by nature.4 As Danielle
Allen notes, Plato posits a sharp, and at times violent, distinction between Greek
and barbarian in other dialogues as well.5 Modern schemas of racial, religious, or
cultural selfhood and otherness resonate with this archetypal universe of internal
and external war, and they resonate with its opposition between Greek reason and
non-Greek unreason: on the one hand, logos, as reason and speech, the measure
of the world, the accounting of all things, and comprehension; and on the other
hand, the incomprehensible and uncomprehending (barbaros), the non-Greek
barbarian who metonymizes a political, linguistic, and epistemological site of
non-understanding and only passively participates in logos—accounted for by it
as one unable to account for it.

2. A notable exception that focuses on the idea of amnesty is Adam Sitze, “Keeping the
Peace,” in Forgiveness, Mercy, and Clemency, ed. Austin Sarat and Nasser Hussain (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 156–223.
3. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 173.
4. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1991),
5.470cd. See Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 28–29n9.
5. Danielle S. Allen, Why Plato Wrote (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 164–165n23. For
an interpretation of Plato as not affirming the distinction between Greeks and non-Greeks
but demonstrating its instability, see Jill Frank, Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s Republic
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); and Frank, “Wages of War: On Judgment in
Plato’s Republic,” Political Theory 35, no. 4 (2007): 433–467.
2

22 WAR FoR PEACE

The Laws for many interpreters constructs a city based on the rule of law and
the rule of peace;6 it might even be “the most democratic state ever.”7 Unlike the
usual reading of the Republic’s binary mapping of civil war and war onto Greece
and non-Greece, respectively, Plato’s Laws binds war to peace and both war and
peace to the law of the polis.8 While the Republic highlights a boundary between
the two wars in terms of barbarian otherness—linguistic, epistemic, geographic,
ethnic—the Laws makes sense of the political world by relying on a structure of
symmetry and asymmetry. In his schematizations of war, Cleinias presents war
first as an asymmetrical structure waged against all cities and then as a symmetrical
structure among cities. The Athenian appeals to the asymmetry between the city’s
laws and those of its neighbors and to the symmetry between a city’s laws and the
heavens, where the law molds the polis’s territory into a fractal that mimics celes-
tial order. In the Laws, law brings order, or, rather, its own order, imposing a logic,
coherence, and aesthetic on war and peace. Both Cleinias’s and the Athenian’s
visions, we will see, rely on a shared aesthetic of ordered symmetry.
Put slightly differently, Plato’s Laws shows how the arrangement of war
and peace draws the contours of a world, offering a picture or scape. Such
arrangements, whether presented as general frameworks or models, are articu-
lated in part through aesthetics. By “aesthetics,” I mean how formal representations
implicitly appeal to aspect and to equivalence—as in symmetry, proportion, and
size. Aesthetic qualities are essential to how theories of war and peace imagine
that the world operates: symmetry and asymmetry, simplicity and complexity,
elegance and parsimony, proximity and distance, density and sequence, propor-
tion and size, visibility and opacity, wholes and parts, layers and boundaries—
each of these seemingly inconspicuous features leaves indelible marks on how
we learn to see the world. These aesthetic qualities prefigure and condition how
we understand the universes of war and peace. At the same time, these qualities
can become moralizing distinctions about the right kinds of war and the right
kinds of peace. Put crudely, a representation looks right, so it feels right, and
then it can also designate right. A formalistic impulse rests at the heart of these

6. See R. F. Stalley, An Introduction to Plato’s “Laws” (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 84; and
Robert Hall, “Law in the Republic, Politicus, and Laws,” in Plato (1981; London: Routledge,
2004), 77–97.
7. Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty, ed. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), bk.2, ch. 1, p. 103; also see T. J. Saunders, “Epieikeia: Plato and the Controversial
Virtue of the Greeks,” in Plato’s “Laws” and Its Historical Significance, ed. Francisco Leonardo
Lisi (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2001), 65–93. For an excellent discussion, see Sitze,
“Keeping the Peace,” in Sarat and Hussain, Forgiveness, Mercy, and Clemency, 200.
8. The Republic, too, claims peace is the effect of law, specifically as freedom from faction
and civil war. See 5.465b.
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system, giving it elegance of style and completeness of method. He
thought it possible to change law from a system of habits into a
system of commands. These were, of course, the ideas which were
most attractive, most congenial, to the mind of Austin.
But, however natural such conceptions may have been to Austin,
it must certainly be regarded as singular that, although rejected on
the Continent, where sovereignty had throughout the most important
formative periods of European history been quite unequivocally
lodged in unmistakable sovereigns, these notions should have been
accepted in England, the land where law had been least subject to
doctrine, most observant of times and circumstances, most
piecemeal in its manner of construction, least like a set of
commands, and most like a set of habits and conventions. Doubtless
we are to remember, however, that the feudal theory of law had long
been held with perfect confidence by English lawyers in calm despite
of fact. Probably it is true that the English mind (our own), with its
practical habit, likes nice systems well enough because of their
appearance of completeness, has a sense of order which enjoys
logic, without having any curiosity or capacity for the examination of
premises. The Englishman has always been found ready to accept,
from those who had the leisure to amuse themselves in that way,
interesting explanations of his institutions which did not at all fit the
actual facts. It has caused him no inconvenience, for he has not
perceived the lack of adjustment between his actual transactions and
the theory he has accepted concerning them. He has, of course, not
troubled himself to alter his institutions to suit his philosophy. That
philosophy satisfied his thought and inconvenienced neither
Parliament nor the law courts. And so he had no doubt Austin was
right.
Austin’s logic is unrelenting, and the loyalty of his followers
unflinching. Sir Henry Maine having shown that throughout the
greater part of history the world has been full of independent political
societies possessing no law-making sovereign at all, and it having
become notorious that legislation has everywhere played a late and
comparatively subordinate part in the production of law, the latest
writers of the Austinian school have reduced jurisprudence to a
merely formal science, professing to care nothing for the actual
manner in which law may originate, nothing even for most of the
motives which induce men to obey law, provided you will but
concede that there is, among a great many other imperative motives,
one which is universally operative, namely, the fear of the
compulsion of physical force, and that there is at least one sovereign
function, namely, the application of that physical force in the carrying
out of the law. They ask to be allowed to confine themselves to such
a definition of positive law as will limit it to “rules which are enforced
by a political superior in his capacity as such.” They take for their
province only a systematic description of the forms and method “of
the influence of government upon human conduct” through the
operation of law. They thus virtually abandon the attempt to find any
universal doctrines respecting the rôle of government as a maker of
laws. For them government is not a creative agent, but only an
instrumentality for the effectuation of legal rules already in existence.
So hard is the principle of life to get at that they give over all
attempts to find it, and, turning away from the larger topics of the
biology, restrict themselves to the morphology, of law.
When it came to pointing out the body of persons with which
sovereignty was lodged in particular states of complex constitutional
structure, Austin was sometimes very unsatisfactory. Sovereignty is
lodged in England, he says, in the king, the peers, and—not the
House of Commons, but—the electorate. For he holds the House of
Commons to be merely a trustee of the electors, notwithstanding the
fact that the electors exercise their right of franchise under laws
which Parliament itself enacted and may change. In the United
States he “believes” it to be lodged “in the States’ governments, as
forming an aggregate body;” and he explains that by the government
of a State he does not mean its “ordinary legislature, but the body of
its citizens which appoints its ordinary legislature, and which, the
Union apart, is properly sovereign therein.” Apparently he is led thus
to go back of the House of Commons and the legislatures of our
States to the electorates by which they are chosen, because of his
conception of sovereignty as unlimited. If he stopped short of the
electors, some part of his sovereign body would be subject to
political superiors. If he were to go beyond the electors, to the larger
body of the people—to the women and the children and the men
who cannot vote—he would come upon, not a “determinate,” but an
indeterminate body of persons.
Our own writers, however, having made bold to embrace the
dogma of popular sovereignty with a certain fervor of patriotism,
have no hesitation about taking the additional step. They maintain,
with Lieber, that “according to the views of free men,” sovereignty
“can dwell with society, the nation, only.” Writers like the late Judge
Jameson, of Chicago, declare that they have very definite ideas of
what this means. They think that Mr. Bryce expounded the doctrine
when he wrote his chapter on “Government by Public Opinion.”
“When the true sovereign has spoken,” says Judge Jameson, “at
public meetings, by the press, or by personal argument or
solicitation, the electorate, when it acts, either registers the behests
of the people or ceases betimes further to represent them.” “The
pressure of public opinion consciously brought to bear upon the
electorate,” he declares to be, even when “inarticulate” (whatever
inarticulate pressure may be), “a clear and legitimate exercise of
sovereign power;” and he thinks that Mr. Herbert Spencer meant the
same thing when he declared that “that which, from hour to hour, in
every country, governed despotically or otherwise, produces the
obedience making political action possible, is the accumulated and
organized sentiment felt towards inherited institutions made sacred
by tradition,” inasmuch as Mr. Spencer proceeds to say with all
plainness, “Hence it is undeniable that, taken in its widest
acceptation, the feeling of the community is the sole source of
political power; in those communities, at least, which are not under
foreign domination. It is so at the outset of social life, and it still
continues substantially so.” And yet, if Mr. Spencer means the same
thing that Judge Jameson means, what are we to think of the
present fraternization of France and Russia? If the people be
sovereign in France and the Czar sovereign in Russia, it is doubtless
quite conceivable that one sovereign should love another; but if it be
true, as Judge Jameson makes Mr. Spencer say, that it is the
people, even in Russia, who are after all sovereign, what are we to
think of the fondness of the French sovereign for a government
which is holding the Russian sovereign in subjection? If this be
correct thinking, it puts us into awkward quandaries, troubling our
logic as well as condemning our lives.
Apply this doctrine of our masters in American law to our actual
political conditions, and see how far it simplifies the matter. In the
United States (so runs the orthodox creed) the People is sovereign.
—the verb is singular because the people, under this doctrine,
constitute a unit. And yet it is notorious that they never have acted as
a unit, nor ever can act as a unit under our existing constitution.
They have always acted, and must always act, in state groups. And
in state groups what action do they take? They assent to
constitutional provisions, or refuse to assent to them; and they select
certain persons to act as law-makers, as judges, or as executive
officers of government. Do they choose policies? No. Do they frame
constitutional provisions? Certainly not; they only accept or reject
them. In the only case in which they speak directly concerning
specific provisions of law, they neither command nor originate. They
receive or decline what is offered them. They must wait until they are
asked. They have neither initiative nor opportunity to construct. They
must be consulted concerning government, but they do not conduct
it.
Nor is it otherwise, upon last analysis, in Switzerland, where the
Referendum exists, where, that is, the people vote upon specific
measures of ordinary legislation not only, but where they are also
provided with means of imperative initiative in legislation. By
petitions bearing a certain large number of signatures they can
propose definite legislation, compel action upon the matter of their
petitions by their legislatures, and an ultimate submission of the
question to popular vote. But see what this is, when examined. The
eyes of the community, the men of observation and progress, get up
a petition; that is, an indeterminate body and a minority demand that
certain laws be formulated and put to the vote. The thing is done, but
the measure defeated, let us suppose, at the polls. The eyes of the
community have desired certain things, have offered them to the
slow digestive organs, and they have been rejected. Are the
digestive organs, then, sovereign, and not the initiative parts, the
eyes and the reason? Is it sovereign to stomach a thing, and not
sovereign to purpose a thing?
But turn the chase in another direction, if peradventure we may
yet run the sovereign people to cover. The more absolute democratic
theorists decline to restrict the sovereign body to the electorate, to
those who have formal votes. Voters are simply the agents of the
community, they say. The press and the pulpit, the private argument
and the curtain lecture, command—voters, if they are faithful, obey.
Others, no less democratic, but more precise, seek for a more
determinate body, content themselves with the qualified voters, and
think with relief that all difficulties are removed. The electorate is
sovereign.
But is the electorate a more determinate body than the
population? Does registration afford us any more certain results than
the census yields? Do the electors act in determinate numbers? Is
there a quorum? Have they any choice but to act under the forms
and within the limits assigned by law? Can they command without
invitation, or assent without suggestion? Are not the agencies which
Judge Jameson calls sovereign after all more active, more self-
directed, freer to criticise, to suggest, to insist? The newspapers, the
clergymen, the mass-meeting orators, the urgent friends, the
restless, ambitious wives, the pert and forward children can at any
rate keep on talking in the intervals, when the electors are reduced
to silence, patiently awaiting an opportunity to vote. Certainly, if we
can accept this miscellaneous sovereign of men-women-and-
children, the history of sovereignty is much simplified. This
determinate body of persons, the free population, is always present,
and always has been present, under all constitutions. All that we
have to inquire is, What means had they for expressing their will?
How were their dispositions and judgments made to tell upon the
consciousness of those who framed the laws? True, this sovereign
body has its points of resemblance to the god Baal. Those who call
upon it call in vain, if it be not the season appointed for voting; there
is no voice, nor any that answer, nor any that regardeth. No fire
consumes the sacrifice. Perhaps the People is talking, or is pursuing,
or is in a journey, or peradventure it sleepeth, and must be awaked.
 Surely this is a singular undertaking, this mad pursuit of a
sovereign amidst the obvious phenomena of politics! If laws be
indeed commands, the commands of a determinate person or body
of persons, it ought to be possible to discover this determinate
source of authority without much curious research. And yet it would
seem that it demands ingenious analysis. Look how uneasily Mr.
Sidgwick casts about in the last chapter of his recent “Elements of
Politics,” to find Supreme Political Power—which is his name for
sovereignty. He has been looking forward to this inquiry, not without
nervousness, throughout the chapters which precede. Political power
is exercised, he perceives, through some organ of government; but
he cannot conceive that the power of this organ is its own power. He
engages in a study of dynamics. What moves this organ: whence
does it derive its power? How is it influenced? Is it itself commanded,
overawed, constrained from any quarter? This is a door to the
metaphysics of government. Taking a prince as a simple and normal
organ of government, he analyzes the subjection of princes to their
ministers, to priests, to mistresses, to the violent protests of an
insubordinate people. No influence that the prince can throw off
without losing his own authority, he thinks, can be a sovereign
influence; but any influence which can threaten his power if he
resists is a sovereign influence, the true depository of supreme
political power. Sovereignty thus becomes a catalogue of influences.
Can we accept these singular processes? If a physicist were to
discard all the separate laws, all the differential analysis of his
science, and were to reduce its entire body of principles to some
general statement of the correlation of forces, he would hardly be
conceived to have done physics a service. If in our study of anatomy
we should turn away from structural adjustment and functional force
to take account of the thousand and one influences which in
individual cases affect the organs from without, we should obviously
be abandoning the science itself. It seems to me that we do a very
like thing if, in studying the structural forces and organic actions of
society, its organs of origination and command, its organs of
execution, its superior and its subordinate authorities, its habitual
modes of structural life, we abandon all attempts at differentiation,
throw all analysis into hotch-potch, and reduce everything to terms of
the general forces which mould and govern society as a whole. We
confuse our thought in our effort to simplify it. We lose, we do not
gain, by putting powers of radically different sorts together into the
same categories, and driving them abreast, as if they pulled
together, in the same propositions.
There is no unlimited power, except the sum of all powers. Our
legal theorists have sought unlimited sovereignty by a process of
summation; have made it consist in the combined forces of the
community. Sovereignty, if it be a definite and separable thing at all,
is not unlimited power; is not identical with the powers of the
community. It is not the general vitality of the organism, but the
specific originative power of certain organs. Sovereigns have always
been subject in greater or less degree to the community; have
always been organs of the State; have never been the State itself.
But they have been sovereigns none the less; they, and not the
community over which they presided.
It is necessary, if there is to be any clear thinking at all upon this
subject, to distinguish very sharply two radically different things;
namely, the powers and processes of governing, on the one hand,
from the relations of the people to those powers and processes, on
the other. Those relations are relations of assent and obedience; and
the degree of assent and obedience marks in every case the limits,
that is, the sphere, of sovereignty. Sovereignty is the daily operative
power of framing and giving efficacy to laws. It is the originative,
directive, governing power. It lives; it plans; it executes. It is the
organic origination by the State of its law and policy; and the
sovereign power is the highest originative organ of the State. It is
none the less sovereign because it must be observant of the
preferences of those whom it governs. The obedience of the subject
has always limited the power of the sovereign. “The Eastern
politicians never do anything,” says Burke, “without the opinion of the
astrologers on the fortunate moment.... Statesmen of a more
judicious prescience look for the fortunate moment too; but they seek
it, not in the conjunctions and oppositions of planets, but in the
conjunctions and oppositions of men and things.” This is the covert
admission of the Austinian definition itself: the sovereign power is
that to which “the bulk of the community is habitually obedient.”
When we discuss, with Mr. Sidgwick, the influences which tell upon
the action of the originative organs of the State, we are not
discussing sovereignty, but the natural and universal limitations of
sovereignty, the structural checks and balances of the organism.
There is no hope for theory if we neglect these obvious distinctions.
At all times and under all systems there have been two sets of
phenomena visible in government: the phenomena of command and
the phenomena of obedience, the phenomena of governing and the
phenomena of being governed. Obedience, moreover, is not always
an automatic or unconscious thing. It is a submission of the will—an
acquiescence which is either the product of choice, of necessity, or
of habit. This has been observed from the first; was observed by
Bodin, from whom we get our word sovereignty, and much of our
conception of the thing, sovereignty. He perceived that the
supremacy of the sovereign—even of the mediæval French
sovereign before his eyes—was in fact limited, the frontiers of
sovereignty being marked by certain antecedent rights, by divers
established prerogatives of property and vested privilege—not a
scientific, but a natural frontier, lying along the old mountains of
habit, the well-known rivers of precedent.
We know that the history of politics has been the history of
liberty; a history of the enlargement of the sphere of independent
individual action at the expense of the sphere of dictatorial authority.
It has revealed a process of differentiation. Certain freedoms of
opinion and utterance, of choice of occupation and of allegiance, of
fair trial and equitable condemnation, have been blocked out as
inviolable territories, lying quite beyond the jurisdiction of political
sovereignty. Beginning with that singular and interesting order of the
classical states of the ancient world, under which the individual was
merged in the community and liberty became identical with a share
in the exercise of the public power, we witness something like a
gradual disintegration, a resolution of the State into its constituent
elements, until at length those who govern and those who are
governed are no longer one and the same, but stand face to face
treating with one another, agreeing upon terms of command and
obedience, as at Runnymede. Conditions of submission have been
contested, and, as liberty has gained upon authority, have been
jealously formulated. The procedure and the prerogatives of
authority have been agreed upon; liberty has encroached upon
sovereignty and set bounds to it. The process is old; only some of its
results are new. What both political philosophers and political
revolutionists have sought for time out of mind has been a final
definition for that part of the Austinian conception which concerns the
habitual obedience of the community. These definitions, in their
practical shape as institutions, we now call constitutions. At last
peoples have become conscious of their relations to the highest
powers of the State, and have sought to give permanence and
certainty to those relations by setting the conditions of their
subordination fast in stubborn practices or in the solemn covenants
of written documents. A constitution government has always had; but
not until this latest age these deliberate formulations of principle and
practice which determine the whole organization and action of the
State, the domain of authority, the neutral territory of liberty, the
postulates of obedience.
Constitutions are definitive rather than creative. They sum up
experiences. They register consents. Assuredly Mr. Spencer is right
when he declares that that which in every country, under whatever
system governed, “produces the obedience making political action
possible, is the accumulated and organized sentiment of the
community towards inherited institutions,” and that “the feeling of the
community is the sole source of political power.” But this does not
mean what Judge Jameson reads into it, that sovereignty and the
feeling of the community are one and the same thing; that the
conditions of sovereignty and the exercise of sovereignty are
identical. Sovereignty has at all times and under all systems of
government been dependent upon the temper and disposition of the
people. The will of the community, the inclinations and desires of the
body politic as a whole, are always, in the last analysis, the
foundation, as they are also in many instances the direct and
immediate source, of law. But these preferences of the general body
are exercised by way of approval or disapproval, acquiescence or
resistance; they are not agencies of initial choice. The sanctioning
judgments of a people are passive, dormant, waiting to have things
put to them, unable themselves to suggest anything, because
without organs of utterance or suggestion. I cannot predicate
sovereignty of my physical parts, but must ascribe it to my will,
notwithstanding the fact that my physical parts must assent to the
purposes of my will, and that my will is dependent upon their
obedience. The organism unquestionably dominates the organs; but
there are organs, nevertheless, organs of origination, which direct
and rule with a sovereign presidency.
A written constitution adopted by popular vote affords, perhaps,
some of the nicest tests of theory. Here we have the most specific
form of popular assent. In such a document the powers of the
government are explicitly set forth and specifically lodged; and the
means by which they may be differently constituted or bestowed are
definitively determined. Now we know that these documents are the
result of experience, the outcome of a contest of forces, the fruits of
struggle. Nations have taken knowledge of despotism. They have
seen authority abused and have refused to submit; have perceived
justice to be arbitrary and hidden away in secret tribunals, and have
insisted that it be made uniform and open; have seen ministers
chosen from among favorites, and have demanded that they be
taken from among representatives of the people; have found
legislation regardful of classes, and have clamored to have laws
made by men selected without regard to class; have felt obedience
irksome because government was disordered in form and confused
in respect of responsibility, and have insisted that responsibility be
fixed and forms of order and publicity observed. Sometimes only a
steady practice has accomplished all this; sometimes documentary
securities have been demanded. These documentary securities are
written constitutions.
It is easy, as it is also impressive, to believe that a written
constitution proceeds from the people, and constitutes their
sovereign behest concerning government. But of course it does not.
It proceeds always either from some ordinary or from some
extraordinary organ of the state; its provisions are the fruit of the
debated determinations of a comparatively small deliberative body,
acting usually under some form of legal commission. It is accepted
as a whole and without discrimination by the diffused, undeliberative
body of voters.
What confuses our view is the fact that these formal
documentary statements of the kinds and degrees of obedience to
which the people assent, the methods of power to which they submit,
the sort of responsibility upon which they insist, have become, from
the very necessity of their nature, a distinct and superior sort of
precise and positive law. We seek the sovereign who utters them.
But they are not the utterances of a sovereign. They are the
covenants of a community. Time out of mind communities have
made covenants with their sovereigns. When despotism in France
was ‘tempered by epigram,’ the sharp tongues of the wits spoke,
after a sort, the constitution of the country,—a positive law whose
sanction was ridicule. But the wits were not sovereign; the salons did
not conduct government. Our written constitutions are only very
formal statements of the standards to which the people, upon whom
government depends for support, will hold those who exercise the
sovereign power.
I do not, of course, deny the power of the people. Ultimately they
condition the action of those who govern; and it is salutary that it
should be so. It is wise also, if it be not indispensable, that the extent
and manner of their control should be explicitly set forth and
definitively agreed upon in documents of unmistakable tenor. I say
simply that such control is no new thing. It is only the precise
formulation of it that is new.
If it seem to be after all a question of words, a little closer
scrutiny will disclose the fact that it is much more than that. Mr.
Ritchie, of Oxford University, in an able article on “The Conception of
Sovereignty,” contributed to the Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science (January, 1891), perceiving some part of
the distinction that I have pointed out, and wishing to realize it in his
thought, proposes to distinguish three several kinds of sovereigns:
viz. a nominal sovereign—the English queen, for example; a legal
sovereign—the law-making body; and a political sovereign—the
voters, whom we might call the sovereign of appeal. But why not
confine ourselves to substantives, if we may, and avoid the
quicksands of adjectives? Sovereignty is something quite definite; so
also is power; so also is control. Sovereignty is the highest political
power in the state, lodged in active organs, for the purposes of
governing. Sovereign power is a positive thing; control a negative
thing. Power belongs to government, is lodged in organs of initiative;
control belongs to the community, is lodged with the voters. To call
these two things by the same name is simply to impoverish language
by making one word serve for a variety of meanings.
It is never easy to point out in our complex modern governments
the exact organs in which sovereignty is lodged. On the whole,
however, it is always safe to ascribe sovereignty to the highest
originative or law-making body of the state,—the body by whose
determinations both the tasks to be carried out by the Administration
and the rules to be applied by the courts are fixed and warranted.
Even where the courts utter authoritative interpretations of what we
call the fundamental law—the law that is embodied in constitutions—
they are rather the organs through which the limitations of
sovereignty are determined than organs of sovereignty itself. They
declare the principles of that higher, constituent law which is set
above sovereignty, which expresses the restrictions set about the
exercise of sovereign authority. Such restrictions exist in all states,
but they are given definite formulation only in some. As for the
Executive, that is the agent, not the organ, of sovereignty.
But, even if it be comparatively easy thus to fix upon the organs
of sovereignty in a unitary state, what shall we say of a federal state?
How apply our analysis to that? One is tempted to declare, with Dr.
Merkel, of Strassburg, that federal states give direct contradiction of
fact to prevailing theories respecting the necessity for unity of power,
indivisibility of sovereignty. Here, as he says, we have organs and
authorities in possession of powers exclusively their own, for the
furtherance of functions necessary to the ends of the state as a
whole, existing side by side with organs also in full possession of
powers exclusively their own, for the furtherance of the local and
special functions of the member states. We know, moreover, that
these two sets of organs are in fact co-ordinate; that the powers of
the states were not derived from the federal authority, were even
antecedent to the powers of the federal government, and historically
quite independent of them. And yet no one who ponders either the
life or the formal structure of a federal state can fail to perceive that
there is, after all, an essential unity in it, the virtual creation of a
central sovereignty. The constituent act—the manner in which the
government was created—can, I conceive, have nothing to do with
our analysis in this matter. The way in which the federal state came
into existence is immaterial to the question of sovereignty within it
after it has been created. Originative life and action, the
characteristic attributes of sovereignty, come after that. Character
and choice are postponed to birth, sovereignty to the creation of the
body politic. The constituent act creates a thing capable of exercising
sovereignty. After the creative law has done its part, by whatever
process, then the functions of independent life begin. Thereafter, in
all federal states, even the amendment of the fundamental law
becomes an organic act, depending, practically without exception,
upon the initiative of the chief originative organ of the federal state.
Confederations are here out of the question. They are, of course,
associations of sovereigns. In the federal state self-determination
with respect to their law as a whole has been lost by the member
states. They cannot extend, they cannot even determine, their own
powers conclusively without appeal to the federal authorities. They
are unquestionably subject to a political superior. They are fused,
subordinated, dominated. Though they do not exercise their powers
by virtue of delegation, though their powers are indeed inherent and
in a very important sense independent, they are yet inferior to a body
whose own powers are in reality self-determined, however much that
self-determination may be hedged about and clogged by the forms of
the fundamental federal law. They are still states, because their
powers are original and inherent, not derivative; because their
political rights are not also legal duties; and because they can apply
to their commands the full imperative sanctions of law. But their
sphere is limited by the presiding and sovereign powers of a state
superordinated to them, the extent of whose authority is determined,
under constitutional forms and guarantees, by itself. They have
dominion; but it has sovereignty. For with the federal state lie the
highest powers of originative legal determination, the ultimate
authority to warrant change and sanction jurisdiction.
Our thought is embarrassed throughout such an analysis by the
very fact which invalidates the Austinian conception and makes a
fresh analysis necessary. Very little law literally originates in
command, though its formulation and enforcement must
unquestionably be effected through the commanding authorities of
the state. It is their function to direct, to lead, rather than to
command. They originate forms, but they do not discover principles.
In a very profound sense law proceeds from the community. It is the
result of its undeliberate as well as of its deliberate developments, of
its struggles, class against class, interest against interest, and of its
compromises and adjustments of opinion. It follows, slowly, its
ethical judgments, more promptly its material necessities. But law
issues thus from the body of the community only in vague and
inchoate form. It must be taken out of the sphere of voluntary and
uncertain action and made precise and invariable. It becomes
positive law by receiving definition and being backed by an active
and recognized power within the state. The sovereign organ of a
state is, therefore, very properly said to be its law-making organ. It
transmutes selected tendencies into stiff and urgent rules. It
exercises a sovereign choice in so doing. It determines which
tendencies shall be accepted, which checked and denied efficacy. It
forms the purposes of the state, avoiding revolution if it form them
wisely and with a true insight. This is sovereignty:—to sit at the helm
and steer, marking out such free courses for the stanch craft as wind
and weather will permit. This is the only sort of sovereignty that can
be exercised in human affairs. But the pilot is sovereign, and not the
weather.
 IV
CHARACTER OF DEMOCRACY IN THE
UNITED STATES

Everything apprises us of the fact that we are not the same

nation now that we were when the government was formed. In
looking back to that time, the impression is inevitable that we started
with sundry wrong ideas about ourselves. We deemed ourselves
rank democrats, whereas we were in fact only progressive
Englishmen. Turn the leaves of that sage manual of constitutional
interpretation and advocacy, the Federalist, and note the perverse
tendency of its writers to refer to Greece and Rome for precedents,
—that Greece and Rome which haunted all our earlier and even
some of our more mature years. Recall, too, that familiar story of
Daniel Webster which tells of his coming home exhausted from an
interview with the first President-elect Harrison, whose Secretary of
State he was to be, and explaining that he had been obliged in the
course of the conference, which concerned the inaugural address
about to be delivered, to kill nine Roman consuls whom it had been
the intention of the good conqueror of Tippecanoe publicly to take
into office with him. The truth is that we long imagined ourselves
related in some unexplained way to all ancient republicans.
Strangely enough, too, we at the same time accepted the quite
incompatible theory that we were related also to the French
philosophical radicals. We claimed kinship with democrats
everywhere,—with all democrats. We can now scarcely realize the
atmosphere of such thoughts. We are no longer wont to refer to the
ancients or to the French for sanction of what we do. We have had
abundant experience of our own by which to reckon.
 “Hardly any fact in history,” says Mr. Bagehot, writing about the
middle of the century, “is so incredible as that forty and a few years
ago England was ruled by Mr. Perceval. It seems almost the same
as being ruled by the Record newspaper.” (Mr. Bagehot would now
probably say the Standard newspaper.) “He had the same poorness
of thought, the same petty conservatism, the same dark and narrow
superstition.” “The mere fact of such a premier being endured shows
how deeply the whole national spirit and interest was absorbed in the
contest with Napoleon, how little we understood the sort of man who
should regulate its conduct,—‘in the crisis of Europe,’ as Sydney
Smith said, ‘he safely brought the Curates’ Salaries Improvement Bill
to a hearing;’ and it still more shows the horror of all innovation
which the recent events of French history had impressed on our
wealthy and comfortable classes. They were afraid of catching
revolution, as old women of catching cold. Sir Archibald Alison to this
day holds that revolution is an infectious disease, beginning no one
knows how, and going on no one knows where. There is but one rule
of escape, explains the great historian: ‘Stay still; don’t move; do
what you have been accustomed to do; and consult your
grandmother on everything.’”
Almost equally incredible to us is the ardor of revolution that
filled the world in those first days of our national life,—the fact that
one of the rulers of the world’s mind in that generation was
Rousseau, the apostle of all that is fanciful, unreal, and misleading in
politics. To be ruled by him was like taking an account of life from Mr.
Rider Haggard. And yet there is still much sympathy in this timid
world for the dull people who felt safe in the hands of Mr. Perceval,
and, happily, much sympathy also, though little justification, for such
as caught a generous elevation of spirit from the speculative
enthusiasm of Rousseau.
For us who stand in the dusty matter-of-fact world of to-day,
there is a touch of pathos in recollections of the ardor for democratic
liberty that filled the air of Europe and America a century ago with
such quickening influences. We may sometimes catch ourselves
regretting that the inoculations of experience have closed our
systems against the infections of hopeful revolution.
 “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! O times
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress, to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favored spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself)
The budding rose above the rose full blown.”

Such was the inspiration which not Wordsworth alone, but

Coleridge also, and many another generous spirit whom we love,
caught in that day of hope.
It is common to say, in explanation of our regret that the dawn
and youth of democracy’s day are past, that our principles are cooler
now and more circumspect, with the coolness and circumspection of
advanced years. It seems to some that our enthusiasms have
become tamer and more decorous because our sinews have
hardened; that as experience has grown idealism has declined. But
to speak thus is to speak with the old self-deception as to the
character of our politics. If we are suffering disappointment, it is the
disappointment of an awakening: we were dreaming. For we never
had any business hearkening to Rousseau or consorting with Europe
in revolutionary sentiment. The government which we founded one
hundred years ago was no type of an experiment in advanced
democracy, as we allowed Europe and even ourselves to suppose; it
was simply an adaptation of English constitutional government. If we
suffered Europe to study our institutions as instances in point
touching experimentation in politics, she was the more deceived. If
we began the first century of our national existence under a similar
impression ourselves, there is the greater reason why we should
start out upon a new century of national life with more accurate
conceptions.
To this end it is important that the following, among other things,
should be kept prominently in mind:—
(1.) That there are certain influences astir in this century which
make for democracy the world over, and that these influences owe
their origin in part to the radical thought of the last century; but that it
was not such forces that made us democratic, nor are we
responsible for them.
(2.) That, so far from owing our governments to these general
influences, we began, not by carrying out any theory, but by simply
carrying out a history,—inventing nothing, only establishing a
specialized species of English government; that we founded, not
democracy, but constitutional government in America.
(3.) That the government which we thus set up in a perfectly
normal manner has nevertheless changed greatly under our hands,
by reason both of growth and of the operation of the general
democratic forces,—the European, or rather worldwide, democratic
forces of which I have spoken.
(4.) That two things, the great size to which our governmental
organism has attained, and, still more, this recent exposure of its
character and purposes to the common democratic forces of the age
of steam and electricity, have created new problems of organization,
which it behooves us to meet in the old spirit, but with new
measures.

I.
First, then, for the forces which are bringing in democratic
temper and method the world over. It is matter of familiar knowledge
what these forces are, but it will be profitable to our thought to pass
them once more in review. They are freedom of thought and the
diffusion of enlightenment among the people. Steam and electricity
have co-operated with systematic popular education to accomplish
this diffusion. The progress of popular education and the progress of
democracy have been inseparable. The publication of their great
encyclopædia by Diderot and his associates in France in the last
century, was the sure sign of the change that was setting in.
Learning was turning its face away from the studious few towards
the curious many. The intellectual movement of the modern time was
emerging from the narrow courses of scholastic thought, and
beginning to spread itself abroad over the extended, if shallow, levels
of the common mind. The serious forces of democracy will be found,
upon analysis, to reside, not in the disturbing doctrines of eloquent
revolutionary writers, not in the turbulent discontent of the
pauperized and oppressed, so much as in the educational forces of
the last hundred and fifty years, which have elevated the masses in
many countries to a plane of understanding and of orderly, intelligent
purpose more nearly on a level with the average man of the classes
that have hitherto been permitted to govern. The movements
towards democracy which have mastered all the other political
tendencies of our day are not older than the middle of the last
century; and that is just the age of the now ascendant movement
toward systematic popular education.
Yet organized popular education is only one of the quickening
influences that have been producing the general enlightenment
which is everywhere becoming the promise of general liberty. Rather,
it is only part of a great whole, vastly larger than itself. Schools are
but separated seed-beds, in which the staple thoughts of the steady
and stay-at-home people are prepared and nursed. Not much of the
world, moreover, goes to school in the school house. But through the
mighty influences of commerce and the press the world itself has
become a school. The air is alive with the multitudinous voices of
information. Steady trade winds of intercommunication have sprung
up which carry the seeds of education and enlightenment,
wheresoever planted, to every quarter of the globe. No scrap of new
thought can escape being borne away from its place of birth by these
all-absorbing currents. No idea can be kept exclusively at home, but
is taken up by the trader, the reporter, the traveller, the missionary,
the explorer, and is given to all the world, in the newspaper, the
novel, the memoir, the poem, the treatise, till every community may
know, not only itself, but all the world as well, for the small price of
learning to read and keeping its ears open. All the world, so far as its
news and its most insistent thoughts are concerned, is fast being
made every man’s neighbor.
Carlyle unquestionably touched one of the obvious truths
concerning modern democracy when he declared it to be the result
of printing. In the newspaper press a whole population is made critic
of all human affairs; democracy is “virtually extant,” and “democracy
virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.” Looked at in
the large, the newspaper press is a type of democracy, bringing all
men without distinction under comment made by any man without
distinction; every topic is reduced to a common standard of news;
everything is noted and argued about by everybody. Nothing could
give surer promise of popular power than the activity and alertness
of thought which are made through such agencies to accompany the
training of the public schools. The activity may often be misdirected
or unwholesome, may sometimes be only feverish and mischievous,
a grievous product of narrow information and hasty conclusion; but it
is none the less a stirring and potent activity. It at least marks the
initial stages of effective thought. It makes men conscious of the
existence and interest of affairs lying outside the dull round of their
own daily lives. It gives them nations, instead of neighborhoods, to
look upon and think about. They catch glimpses of the international
connections of their trades, of the universal application of law, of the
endless variety of life, of diversities of race, of a world teeming with
men like themselves, and yet full of strange customs, puzzled by dim
omens, stained by crime, ringing with voices familiar and unfamiliar.
And all this a man can nowadays get without stirring from home,
by merely spelling out the print that covers every piece of paper
about him. If men are thrown, for any reason, into the swift and easy
currents of travel, they find themselves brought daily face to face
with persons native of every clime, with practices suggestive of
whole histories, with a thousand things which challenge curiosity,
inevitably provoking inquiries such as enlarge knowledge of life and
shake the mind imperatively loose from old preconceptions.