Lee Jones
posted 26 September 2007

Although this book ranges widely, dealing with such figures as Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Kant, Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Noam Chomsky, Paul Berman, Giorgio Agamben, Hardt and Negri and many more, rather than providing a tour de force, Brenkman produces such a confused, scatter-gun approach that it is rarely clear exactly what he is arguing. Although The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy contains some flashes of insight, the combination of political theory and cod International Relations theorising is insufficient to illuminate the political tumults of the so-called 'War on Terror'.

The book's chapters seek to compare recent thought with some 'ideas that animate democratic traditions' - which offers the chance to flag up the degraded, anti-political nature of much public discourse today - but the end result is a mixture of potentially promising but under-developed insights, and outright contradictions between the best points Brenkman draws out from thinkers like Arendt and his own political position on US interventionism.

To take these points in turn, various moments in the book hint at Brenkman's substantive and appealing notion of politics as a relation among individuals and the state, animated by notions of 'civic democracy', which stresses active participation in deliberating policy rather than the degraded, polyarchic form of democracy we see today, with participation reduced to voting and political discourse degenerating into scaremongering. The danger of the latter is directly expressed in US foreign policy which, as Brenkman rightly notes in chapter one, has lacked any sense of clear purpose since the Cold War because of a near-total absence of public participation in the identification of a national interest. He also performs a useful (if fairly standard by now) hatchet job on Giorgio Agamben's use of Schmitt to justify the 'state of exception' aspects of the War on Terror. In chapter three, 'September 11 and Fables of the Left', Brenkman advances some worthwhile critiques of some leftist critics of the Afghanistan War and in chapter five on Iraq he highlights some of the self-serving and incoherent reasons for opposition to that War. Most importantly though, to my mind, he uses Arendt to show how the 'freedom-versus-tyranny' construct of the US neo-cons 'neglects the relation between freedom and self-rule, which is ultimately the relation between freedom and democracy' (p183).

However, this latter point is developed belatedly – in the book's conclusion – and, as I will explore further below, stands in stark contradiction to Brenkman's view on US interventionism. This is symptomatic of his tendency to pepper the text with valid insights rather than sustain a clear argument and draw out its full implications. Two of his apparently most important concepts are the 'ethic of responsibility' and the 'ordeal of universalism'. The first is referred to often, but never defined; rather we are simply told, in a way repetitious of hundreds of weakly liberal critiques of the Iraq war, that the US has a 'responsibility' to work with its allies to 'refashion the written and unwritten rules of international relations' rather than acting unilaterally (pp130-1), or that the US had a 'responsibility' to secure civil order in Iraq (p192), and so on. But, we are entitled to ask, why is the US responsible for these things, and to whom is it responsible? Brenkman's own apparent understanding of political community might seem to imply the American state is responsible to the American people, but conversely the book appears to suggest some duty to an abstract set of moral principles.

Likewise, the 'ordeal of universalism' appears to refer to the sheer difficulty involved in establishing a stable, democratic, accountable political order even in one's own community, let alone via foreign intervention, but this does not translate into a rejection of US interventionism. Brenkman's position is that the invasion of Afghanistan was perfectly justified as an act of self-defence, as is, broadly, the War on Terror, since he argues, in a fairly reactionary 'clash of civilisations' thesis, that Islam's so-called 'geo-civil war' can no longer be 'contained' but must be tackled; conversely the invasion of Iraq was wrong since it distracted from the goal of nation-building in Afghanistan and the hunt for Al-Qaeda. The critique Brenkman advances of the Iraq War is the tired view that Saddam was not a threat, it has distracted attention from real problems, and that the US occupation has been incompetent.

Although he rightly critiques those anti-totalitarians like Paul Berman who seized on Iraq as a way of redeeming US power as 'good' after a long history of its evil manifestations, Brenkman never probes the highly questionable underpinnings of liberal imperialism, and actually welcomes the new age of intervention. He dismisses Perry Anderson's call to remember how US power had helped create Saddam in the first place by positing a decisive rupture between the Cold War and the current era, celebrating the USSR's collapse for unleashing 'other possibilities' (p129). These 'other possibilities' mainly seem to involve untrammelled US interventionism to liberate people too weak to throw off the yoke of tyranny alone, constrained only by pragmatic considerations. On p189, Brenkman claims all peoples are yearning for freedom and democracy, while having earlier claimed that Saddam's oppressive regime meant that 'no Iraqi was going to rise in rebellion ever again' (p108). This renders the Iraqi people as feeble aspirants for freedom who need 'a genuine tutelage in democratic inauguration' from the USA, reducing the critique of US intervention to its failure to provide the necessary security for this patronising, paternalistic project (p178). Just as all Islamist groups are treated as broadly identical (pp165-9), so the breakdown in order in Iraq is interpreted as a universal retreat from the creation of a political order to primitive self-defence: the fact that some groups are actively seeking to expel a foreign invader is completely ignored.

Brenkman's refusal to take seriously the importance of his own supposedly key concepts is reflected in his praise of the 'responsibility to protect', which makes states accountable (responsible) not merely to their own populations but to the 'international community', which may intervene if a state refuses or is unable to protect its citizens. Through a torturous reading of Kant and Hobbes, Brenkman produces the surprising conclusion that Hobbes is the 'unwitting prophet of humanitarian intervention' (p156) since the essence of his theory is 'sovereign is he who protects the multitude'. This completely misses the fact that, in Hobbes and other traditional understandings of sovereignty, the sovereign protects subjects, first, from each other (by negating the 'state of nature') and, second, from the encroachments of other, hostile sovereigns; they do not intervene to bring freedom, democracy and human rights to the subjects of other sovereigns. This is because, more fundamentally, sovereignty springs from a social compact between ruler and ruled (even if this was theorised as a singular event by Hobbes and only developed into a democratic form by later theorists, such as Rousseau), and because, as Brenkman himself acknowledges, there is a direct relationship between freedom and autonomous self-rule.

Ultimately, Brenkman produces an incoherent and dangerously weak critique of the Iraq war. If the problem was the war's lack of legitimacy, the inadequate attention and resources devoted to nation-building and the way Iraq distracted from Afghanistan, then imagine a more competent, powerful US administration able to pursue wars and nation-building effectively on two fronts. Presumably, for Brenkman this would pose no problem whatsoever. He refuses to consider the implications of his own stated views on the relationship between self-rule and freedom and the 'ordeal of universalism' to consider that the Western intervention in Afghanistan – hardly short of formal 'legitimacy' and state-building 'expertise' – may well go exactly the same way as Iraq, for the simple reason that it is not possible for foreign powers to gift freedom and democracy to oppressed peoples in militarised acts of charity.