Modern Political Victimology
I
The founding myth of modern liberalism, the State of Nature, comes in three main variants: Hobbesian statist, Lockean libertarian, and Rousseauan revolutionary. All three share a common feature that has captured the attention of both enthusiasts and critics of liberalism: they depict human beings as naturally unfettered individuals, free from all subjection and subordination, as well as from any claims made upon them by already existing traditions or institutions. This picture of the self, buffered from any sources of formation and obligation prior to the will of the individual, contributes to the social imagination of a secular public sphere not answerable to any higher truth or authority.
Another feature these myths share has received far less attention. All three are victimologies. They speak with different rhetoric of the ways in which human beings find themselves in the position of victims, and they draw correspondingly different conclusions about the political orders justified by our vulnerability to victimization; but all three use the imagination of that vulnerability as justification for their prescriptions.
We do not, of course, typically use the language of victimhood in the context of these myths. We speak of rights doctrines and the politics that follow from them. This, however, is a mistake. It is not the case that because we have rights to protect we are potential victims of their violation. Rather, the myths cast human beings in the position of victims and deploy the rhetoric of rights to capture this sense of violation in a way that simultaneously points to what we ought to hope for from the modern state. If we want to make sense of the politics of victimhood that seems so rampant in our day and to understand what it means for the fate of liberalism, we need to recognize the ways in which liberalism is premised from its mythic beginnings upon victimhood.
The best place to start is the most obvious. The first modern state of nature myth occurs in Chapter XIII of the book that first gave the rhetoric of rights its uniquely modern role as the privileged language of political order: Hobbes’s Leviathan. To begin with, let us focus on two principal features of this account. In the state of nature, which is to say in the absence of a common superior power to make and enforce laws, the fundamental problem is that men are “apt to invade and destroy one another;” and it is because of continual fear of this invasion, as well as its continual depredations upon the fruits of men’s labors, that men agree to authorize the concentration of violent power in the hands of a sovereign “for their peace and common defence.”
The description of the scenario elicits our sympathy for the weak, which is to say the non-invaders. That sympathy does extend to some of the strong as well, namely those who, out of fear for their security, “by invasion increase their power” sufficiently to resist other strong invaders. Invasion and dominion are thus excusable on the part of potential victims. The same sympathy does not extend, however, to those “taking pleasure in the contemplation of their own power in the acts of conquest,” nor to those who use violence because they want to compel others to recognize their superiority—in other words, the strong who glory in their strength. Since the rationale for establishing the sovereign power is to provide security through overwhelming defensive force, it follows that the parties to the covenant are the ones tired of having to fear victimization. Those who enjoy being strong for the grandeur of it must either be excluded or else continue to be potential perpetrators—unless they can be convinced to recognize themselves also as potential victims who benefit from ceding their strength to the common power.
This may all seem simply right and proper: of course we should sympathize with the innocent victims of the violent predators. In fact, this “of course” reaction is a thoroughly modern one, given its shape and self-evidence in part by these victimological myths. We can see this if we compare the picture we find in Hobbes with two classical accounts of a bellicose state of nature and its contractual resolution, namely the accounts written by Plato and Lucretius, both of which Hobbes clearly knew. Both represent the “conventionalist” view, which contends that standards of justice rest entirely on agreed-upon conventions with no natural basis (and which are usually bolstered in practice by a divine warrant that is purely fictional).
Consider first the argument that Plato (in Republic Book 2) puts into the mouth of his older brother Glaucon, an aristocratic youth living in democratic Athens. Proposing to articulate the view of others, Glaucon sketches a hypothetical condition prior to any agreed-upon standards of mutual forbearance. In this pre-legal state, “when they do injustice to one another and suffer it and taste of both, it seems profitable—to those who are not able to escape the latter and choose the former—to set down a compact among themselves neither to do injustice nor to suffer it. And from there they began to set down their own laws and compacts and to name what the law commands lawful and just. … The man who is able to do it and is truly a man would never set down a compact with anyone not to do injustice and not to suffer it. He’d be mad.” This is exactly the same scenario we find in Hobbes, but with the valence reversed. Glaucon makes explicit that the weak many are driven together by the threat of the strong few; and while the views expressed may not be his own, his sympathies are clearly with these latter, the natural aristoi who grudgingly find it necessary to submit to the democratic will.
In the poetic reconstruction of the course of human prehistory written by the Roman Epicurean Lucretius (in Book 5 of De Rerum Natura), civilization begins when natural selection raises superior men to the status of kings, who then elevate the minds of others. The discovery of wealth and precious metals, however, produces envy and rivalry, leading to rage and excessive revenge. Once again superior minds take charge, this time teaching men to make laws and appoint magistrates. The parties consenting to the agreement are the men vying for supremacy, who have grown tired of the endless and savage vendettas their own actions provoke. The sole inequality at work here is that between cool forethought and passionate short-sightedness. If the violent are also victims, it is primarily of their own folly.
What explains the shift in the Hobbesian version of this tale from the perspective of the stronger to that of the victims? Readers of Nietzsche or of René Girard will have a ready answer: Christianity. For Nietzsche, history has exceeded Glaucon’s wildest nightmares: through the victory of their slave religion, the weak have so thoroughly tamed the strong that they have subdued the disgruntled independence of their minds as well, so that even to themselves most of them can only justify their elevated stature as a form of “servant-leadership” for the benefit of the common herd. For Girard, the Christian Passion narratives have rendered explicit what has always necessarily been hidden over by myth: when violence spirals out of control from rivalry and revenge, community is restored not by the sobriety of lawgivers, but by the concentration of everyone’s rage on an innocent scapegoat, whose undeserved murder must be rendered unrecognizable as such by the bright aura of sacredness, perpetuated through rituals of gratitude to the deliverer. Whether as avatar of the moralism of the resentful losers or as the inescapably innocent victim who dissolves the delusions of scapegoating violence, Jesus is the great game-changer. Thanks to him the narrative has escaped the grasp of the proud and violent.
Whichever of these two interpretations it is set within, the answer is surely correct in its general outlines. But while it tells us something about the broad historical circumstances in which Hobbes conceives his victimology, it sheds very little light on his own reasons for doing so, or on why his resort to the language of rights sets this language on course to become the dominant rhetoric of victimology in the liberal order. To answer that question, we must summon forth from the shadows the true father of modern political victimology: Machiavelli. He is the thinker who, by making victimhood a source of political legitimacy, discovers the alchemical secret that eventually transmutes the Christian Paschal imagination into the democratic moralism and political progressivism Nietzsche so despised. This involves a “secularization” of our psychological and imaginative relationship to violence and victimhood by shifting it into a register other than the one that holds it continually under the light of the Gospel. This secularization, constitutive of liberalism and perhaps of modernity itself, is no mere absent-minded drift from a God-centered world to a disenchanted one; rather, as Girard helps us to see, it is a revolution within religion (or, perhaps better, within Christian civilization), producing a new regime of the sacred.
The direct debt the Hobbesian state of nature owes to Machiavelli is lucidly sketched by Pierre Manent in his Intellectual History of Liberalism. Manent directs our attention particularly to the ninth chapter of The Prince, where Machiavelli considers what the prince’s secure rule should be founded upon. In every city we see two factions, the great and the people, whose diverse “humors” give them two opposed appetites: the great wish to command and oppress, while the people wish to be neither commanded nor oppressed. If the prince founds himself on the great, he will always have trouble from their ambitions and, because he must countenance their appetite for oppression, he will appear unjust to the people. He should instead make himself the people’s protector from oppression, which enables him to maintain a reputation for justice even as he eliminates ambitious potential rivals. In other words, the stable authority of the populist prince rests securely on the people’s fear of victimization and their confidence that he will defend them from it, in part by humbling the proud.
What Machiavelli recommends as a strategy of princely power Hobbes recasts as a myth of legitimacy for the modern state. Two key rhetorical changes make this possible. The first is the abstraction of the “humors” from the civic context to the featureless terrain of myth. The weak become, in Manent’s words, “the people themselves—not as part of the body politic distinct from the elite, but as all those wishing to live free from fear.” This wish to be protected from victimization becomes the legitimating source of the state’s power and authority. The glory-loving predators, who are the problem solved by the state, are an abstract caricature of “the great” of the declining feudal order, the nobility whose political significance the centralizing monarchs had been successfully reducing for centuries in the “democratizing” process that helped shape the modern nation state.
The second rhetorical change is the shift of imaginative perspective from the sovereign’s to the victim’s. The world-historical effects wrought by this change are truly staggering. While Machiavelli may have learned from the Church’s near millennium of stable authority the potential resilience of an edifice built on reassuring the weak and lowly, Hobbes successfully tapped into the moral force of sympathy for the undefended, a sympathy culturally built up over centuries through imaginatively identifying and sorrowing with the suffering Christ. Both thinkers attain the same effect: to snatch out of the Church’s hands the source of its strength and turn it into a resource of a political power independent of the Church. The “low but solid ground” the moderns built upon (a Straussian formula echoed by both Manent and Patrick Deneen) was not only the fear of death and the desire for secure peaceful enjoyments, but also the Christian capacity to see and feel with the lowly victim. But it is the rhetorical power of Hobbes’s mythologizing that effectively reshapes the modern imagination of the human condition.
These two rhetorical moves—treating the humor of the victimized as the default human condition and viewing from this vantage the desire for the sovereign’s protection—explain the shift to the language of rights. Machiavelli, speaking to and about the prince, continues to use the language of virtue, which all previous political writers had treated as the natural justification for ruling. Instead of understanding virtue as a perfected fulfillment of the rational nature of the human being as a choosing agent, however, Machiavelli gradually brings it around to mean whatever characteristics a prince needs to effectively exercise and maintain power. One might say that he views virtue from a standpoint that is neither theoretical nor practical but technological, and that he does the same for victimhood, treating the people as what Heidegger would call a “standing reserve”, a component of the configuration of forces controlled by the prince which give him the power to reshape political realities. But virtue is still the language of the great. When Hobbes shifts the angle of vision to that of the victims seeking protection, he replaces virtue as the organizing political concept with rights, which are what the state protects.
There is, however, something strange to our late-modern ears about the way Hobbes uses this language. A right does not mean for him a claim or entitlement, or something anyone is obligated to respect other than by compulsion. Hobbes consistently uses the term in a way that we would be inclined to say has no moral content. Despite his nod to the medieval language of ius naturale, he divorces rights language from the context of natural law, conscience, virtue and the good of the community in which it had been embedded in the previous four centuries of jurisprudence. For him, to “have a right” merely means to encounter no impediment to doing what one wishes. “Natural right” is unlimited freedom (such as one has potentially in the state of nature) to do anything one deems necessary. In an absolute sense, then, the state would seem authorized not to defend natural rights but to restrict them. From my vantage as a victim, however, the state is guaranteeing me a sphere of rights which, under lawless conditions, the strong would be constricting even more. Conceptually, then, rights under the sovereign power describe only the legalistic logic of a codified and reliably predictable application of protective coercion. Rights are “moralized” only insofar as they name what defines the sphere of protections provided to the victim by the state, which treats everyone equally as a potential victim until proven to be a perpetrator. Whatever moral force rights have comes from victimhood.
This moral force, compounded primarily of fear and sympathy, remains fundamentally passive. The tradition of political philosophy, by contrast, had always recognized that the passions central to political life were the assertive ones associated with the spirited part of the soul—the thumos in Plato, which the Latin-speaking medievals called the irascible. Pride, love of honor, courage, self-command, anger, ambition, loyalty: these were the lifeblood of the feudal nobility that the Hobbesian modern state eradicates, or of the Greek and Roman republican citizens depicted in the classical literature Hobbes considered a source of disorder and rebellion. In the Hobbesian mythic imagination, the taming of “the great” and the scouring of pride from the moral landscape leaves a gaping psychological vacuum. It is the genius of Locke to find a place for these passions in the modern bourgeois order. He does so precisely by transforming the language of rights, thereby introducing a different form of victimology.
II
Locke crosses the immense distance from the Hobbesian use of rights language to his own in the space of a single sentence, the first one in his Second Treatise of Government that speaks of universal individual rights. In the state of nature, he tells us, in order that “all men may be restrained from invading others’ rights, and from doing hurt to one another, and the law of nature be observed, which willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind, the execution of the law of nature is in that state put into every man’s hand, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree as may hinder its violation.” Here again, as in Hobbes, we start from the objectionable presence in our mythic landscape of those who would invade the “rights” of others; but when passed through the filter of Locke’s “law of nature” the individual victim’s violated “right” emerges from the other end as a principle of morally justified action to which everyone has a natural claim. What is this law of nature, and how has it worked this wonder?
Although Locke adorns his discussion with echoes of a traditional discourse of natural law, there is a logical bedrock to his “law of nature” doctrine that requires none of these props. Leo Strauss has rightly discerned that, like Hobbes and unlike traditional natural law, Locke needs no practical principle other than self-preservation to ground his law of nature; and Strauss helpfully describes the mechanism that generates Locke’s practical conclusions as a kind of “tacit compact.” To see how this works, it is helpful to separate out the two core features of the law of nature condensed into the sentence we have just cited, as Locke himself goes on to do. These we might call the principle of non-harm and the principle of justified retaliation. First: “reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Second: “the law of nature would, as all other laws that concern men in this world, be in vain, if there were no body that, in the state of nature, had a power to execute that law, and thereby preserve the innocent and restrain offenders; and if any one in the state of nature may punish another for any evil he has done, every one may do so.” Let us consider the operative logic of these two principles.
I am a victim of theft by threat of violence, and I resent it. I reason (tacitly assuming a shared human nature) that others are like myself and would have the same sentiment if similarly victimized. I conclude that they will see the sense of my retaliation and sympathize with it, since the offender has shown himself a potential threat to any property owner. Thus reason, when I consult it, teaches me that the will to security of life and property (“peace and preservation”) pervades all humankind. It also gives me confidence that my act of punishment will meet with approbation: it will bear the aspect of a “right” to preserve the innocent victims (reflecting the self-preserving self-interest of others) and to destroy invading offenders (reflecting also the sympathetic anger of my fellow potential victims). If I simply reverse the perspective and imagine myself in the perpetrator’s position, subject to punishment by everyone, self-interest will lead me to infer the principle of non-harm. This is the gist of the law of nature.
This law of nature is, however, too weak to regulate human communities effectively. Much as in the latter half of the Lucretius narrative, Locke’s state of nature, with the right of punishment in everyone’s hands, is susceptible to spinning out of control from rage and excessive revenge, requiring the institution of law and its enforcement. Locke, however, does not give any explicit role to superior minds in bringing about this solution. He here relies even more tacitly on the tacit compact—which is to say that, like Hobbes, he relies on the coinciding self-interested wills of those wishing to be free from victimization to give birth and, above all, legitimacy to the state. For both authors it is the shared victim-consciousness of these free and equal individuals that enables them to constitute themselves as “the people” and perform their mythic act of founding, and it is the rhetoric of rights that makes the victimhood myth politically and psychologically operational.
On the other hand, the rhetorical appeal of Locke’s account (though submerged nearly to the point of invisibility) is precisely to the spirited part of the soul absent from the Hobbesian sense of rights. Personal violation makes me angry; it offends my pride. It drives me to retaliate, to kill. Even where there are civil laws, if a private person threatens me with force and implicitly puts my life at risk, those who can imagine themselves as victims like me will consider my killing in self-defense justified, both from sympathetic outrage and from self-interest. Locke’s argument for the natural right to property relies on the same rhetorical appeal. Hume rightly observed that, by Locke’s own epistemology, the idea that my labor “adds” something of myself to the product and makes it mine is metaphysical nonsense. But according to the logic of spiritedness, if I have picked it, grown it, made it, or built it, I have earned it and will be outraged if it is taken from me, as would anyone else.
This infusion of rights with a spirit of resistance to victimization gives them the now familiar moral zeal they lacked in Hobbes. It makes rights something to be claimed and asserted, even against governing authorities. In this respect, Locke’s language resonates with the invocation of rights in Magna Carta and the 1628 Petition of Right. These earlier rights, however, were understood to be freedoms, privileges, and protections that had been promised by previous monarchs and inherited by Englishmen based on their various ranks of status. Though including all free men, their assertion was necessarily led and voiced by “the great.” Locke’s logic and rhetoric of victim-consciousness democratizes the assertion of rights.
The tonality and complexity of Lockean rights-rhetoric is perfectly expressed in the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. As a potential victim on high alert against violation, the rights-bearing individual is irascible and testy. This undertone of reactive defensiveness is given a virile face by a projected posture of readiness for retaliatory violence. That threat of defensive violence is lent a certain air of noble grandeur by taking its stance against an overreaching government. Without abandoning victimological legitimation of the state, Locke provides the victims with a face-saving self-assertion reminiscent of the classical spirit of republican liberty, while differing from it by being more an attitude than a constant practice—unless, as Tocqueville argued, it is given substance in the school of local self-government. Without habits of active liberty, its wariness of encroachment is divorced from concrete practical experience and judgement, rendering its suspicions susceptible to conspiracy theories and its prickly defensiveness prone to histrionics.
Lockean victimology thus provides a somewhat volatile principle of legitimacy, since the individual looks to the state to prevent victimization but is equally suspicious of the state as a power capable of victimizing. Libertarians have subsequently sought to tone down the potentially violent volatility of Lockean prickliness in two ways. First, they have tried to provide clear criteria for the scope of the life, liberty and property that ought to be protected. This remains difficult, however, not only because of the inherently unstable boundaries of negative liberty, but also because according to Locke the individual’s property includes a “property in his own person,” a self-ownership that opens the door to expressive individualism as something the state or others can encroach upon. Witness James Madison: “the praise of affording a just security to property should be sparingly bestowed on a government which, however scrupulously guarding the possessions of individuals, does not protect them in the enjoyment and communication of their opinions, in which they have an equal, and in the estimation of some, a more valuable property.” As First Amendment jurisprudence has unavoidably recognized, there are myriad ways to communicate one’s opinions.
The second way libertarianism has sought to domesticate the Lockean spirit is by abandoning the principle of legitimacy, arguing for the liberal order on the basis of a pure logic of utility. This argument rests largely upon economic liberalism’s great gamble, the promise of a “rising tide” of prosperity in which everyone benefits—an argument also already present in Locke’s observation that the English day laborer enjoys more comforts of life than the chieftain of an American tribe. Not only does this tactic avoid the philosophical instability and revolutionary potential inherent to the concept of political legitimacy, but by the same token it allows classical liberals to damp down (even further than Locke already does) the implicit victimological foundations of his politics of rights. This is why the working-class gun lovers energized by Donald Trump, who are feisty Lockean victimologists, have little respect and less patience for the more libertarian old guard Republican leadership.
While ruling-class libertarians are somewhat wary of the directly political manifestations of Lockean spiritedness, they of course embrace its economic expression in the value-producing exercise of labor. Those who transform the relatively worthless raw materials provided by nature into plentiful commodities can take pride in being the principal agents of prosperity and material progress. Indeed, according to Locke, God gave the world “to the use of the industrious and rational (and labor was to be his title to it), not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.” Accordingly, the libertarian wants to protect the economically productive from the tendency of modern governments to expropriate them on behalf of the undeserving, leading ultimately to the curious notion of taxation as victimization. In Lockean myth, the weak victim and the strong invader have metamorphosed into the maker and the taker.
Thus Lockean liberalism unites two related but distinguishable victimologies, both of them channeling the spirited part of the soul, one primarily toward economic liberty and the other more toward political liberty. Ruling-class libertarian Lockeanism produces a meritocracy of brains and economic ambition: rational entrepreneurs and capitalists resistant to government regulation. Working-class Lockeanism has a more bodily understanding of productive labor and freedom of movement, accompanied by patriotic pride in the capacity for violent self-defense. Both bristle at taxes on what they’ve earned, the one by driving economic growth and the other by toil. The two can harmonize in their resistance to restrictive government overreach and redistribution of wealth, but only as long as the liberal gamble continues to pay off and the nation’s rising tide seems to be lifting the boats of all its citizens. In the United States since the end of the Cold War, globalization and profiteering have widened the gap between the two, effectively alienating the working-class Lockeans not only from the governing elite but to a considerable degree from the governing institutions of the liberal state. The potential for turning this irascible wariness of victimization against the liberal state and its oligarchic elite was well understood by Rousseau, who radicalized it in his state of nature myth.
III
Rousseau’s state of nature myth, much more than those of Hobbes and Locke, takes the form of a historical narrative. This history of human nature begins in an original wholeness and simplicity, the loss of which generates all human misery. Rousseau also announces (in The Social Contract) the possibility of redeeming that history and attaining a higher form of wholeness. In other words, Rousseau appropriates the whole template of Christian salvation history, enclosing it within an immanent frame. The victimology he develops within this frame bears a powerfully deceptive resemblance to the Christian one, and its primary effect is to de-legitimate Lockean liberalism.
In his Second Discourse Rousseau complains that Hobbes and Locke had projected the passions of civilized men (such as pride, aggression, acquisitiveness, and envy) onto the pre-civilized psyche. Human consciousness in Rousseau’s state of nature is limited primarily to simple feelings: the urge of basic needs, the sentiment of well-being when these are satisfied, and a spontaneous compassion for the immediately perceivable suffering of another. Natural man is innocent of all malice and even of forethought, or in other words is naturally good and contented. Gradually becoming aware of his inventive superiority over the rest of nature, however, natural man eventually attains self-consciousness and thus develops what Rousseau calls amour-propre: a capacity for self-regard that becomes a desire for self-esteem and the esteem of others. By making us sociable, and thus also dependent upon others for our opinion of ourselves, amour-propre is the source of our spirited passions. Unsatisfied amour-propre destroys our original wholeness and becomes a fertile cause of discontent.
Though History inflicts this suffering on humanity, it also provides a solution. In the tribal village, amour-propre is relatively stable and unproblematic: one earns regard as an excellent hunter or storyteller, and conflicts of esteem are easily resolved on unmistakable grounds. Rousseau accordingly judges this stage of social development “the happiest and most durable epoch,” implying that it is precisely the satisfaction of amour-propre, if attainable, that provides something more than mere simple-hearted contentment: happiness with who one is in relation to others. But History, alas, is not done with us. The discovery of agriculture and metalworking, and so also specialization of labor and trade, introduce civilization, along with inequality of wealth and status. Both original wholeness and tribal happiness are thus destroyed by the misguided “progress” of a society that accidentally precipitates us into a life of conflict with our neighbors and heightened division and dissatisfaction within ourselves, or what has come to be called alienation. As Freud will amplify, we are all the discontented victims of civilization itself. Far from legitimating the legal order that ends the state of nature, this universal victimization seems to sow the seeds of permanent (if mostly unconscious) resentment toward the demands of “society” and our civil condition.
For a polity to attain legitimacy it must transform civilized and divided man into the wholly devoted republican citizen. This regime satisfies amour-propre by eliminating all personal dependence: all citizens participate in “the general will” by adhering to the impersonal rule of law; all enjoy the liberty of active self-government, each obeying only laws that he has willingly given himself; and all are equal, each gaining the same rights over others that he concedes them over himself. The citizen thus gains wholeness by becoming one with the laws: the citizen’s will, as citizen, is the impersonal general will. This involves a drastic transformation. The true lawgiver, says Rousseau, must be capable of changing human nature. In the citizen’s zealous devotion to the regime, all natural compassion is smothered. This is exemplified in the Spartan citizen, both male and female, fully devoted to the virtue—especially martial virtue—required for sustaining republican self-government. According to Rousseau, liberty is the “noblest” human faculty, and only the citizens of republics attain “virtue and happiness.” This is the civil fulfillment of amour-propre comparable to that found in tribal life, and its re-harmonizing of the psyche gives the legal order its legitimacy, eliminating all sense of social or civilizational victimization.
Rousseau’s immanentization of the salvation history narrative involves a reversal of its polarities of guilt and responsibility. In the Christian narrative, however much we may be prone to shift the blame for our deficient and unhappy condition onto others, the original sin is ours and continues to disrupt our lives in community, and the eschatological resolution does not ultimately depend on us, but on Christ’s saving action. For Rousseau, the fall from wholeness comes upon us by the blind accidents of history; but since our nature is malleable (or “perfectible”) and no original sin prevents us from improving it, nothing hinders us from achieving our imaginable wholeness except the dead weight of past social orders and insufficient commitment to the not-yet-achieved redemptive regime. Rousseau’s is thus a revolutionary victimology. To generate commitment to the arduous struggle to redeem history, however, it is not quite sufficient to combine unease under the distortions of civilization with the promise of wholeness in the new democratic regime. Another form of victimhood is necessary, and Rousseau’s myth provides this as well.
In Rousseau’s telling, civil society comes about when the inequality of wealth produces haves and have-nots, each of whom makes rights claims against the others. The rich make the Lockean claim that they deserve what they’ve built up. The poor, after trying in vain to elicit the deadened compassion of their acquisitive neighbors by appealing piteously to the right of self-preservation, must resort to snatching their hoarded goods, but not without an appeal to the right of the stronger. In other words, rights-claims emerge when disparities of wealth destroy the amity of our more primitive condition, and they are nothing more than the emotive rationalizations and ideological tools of the conflicting parties in the economic struggle.
Finally, the rational and industrious, since their possessions are vulnerable, have the foresight to concoct the great historical scam: they propose to end the state of war by agreeing to articles of peace and union, in order (in the rich man’s words) “to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure for everyone the possession of what belongs to him.” These are the specious terms of the Hobbesian covenant, the purpose of which is to protect the Lockean accumulation of the wealthy. What Rousseau’s myth provides, then, is a counternarrative to the myth of Lockean liberalism, exposing it as what his disciple Marx would call ideological mystification. What these earlier myths present as the figure of the “victim” of theft and violence (an innocent victim in the Hobbesian myth, a meritorious one in the Lockean) Rousseau exposes as the mask under which they conceal the rich man seeking to secure his wealth by co-opting the poor; and their bogey of the violent predator and taker is shown to function as a slanderous portrait of the poor man driven to desperation. The Hobbesian-Lockean claim to victimhood that “legitimates” the original contract is a con job perpetrated by the wealthy, and Rousseau wants us to be indignant on behalf of the swindled and vilified poor, who are the truest victims of the establishment of political and legal order.
Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Rousseau’s socio-economic victimological rhetoric is its “third party” character. It arouses our indignation against the wealthy on behalf of the poor. We are thus invited to re-activate the natural compassion that civilized life has smothered in us, gaining a kind of therapeutic sentimental authenticity. Our amour-propre is thereby doubly gratified, as we satisfy ourselves that our heart is in the right place (with the innocent victim) and our thumos is tethered to a just cause, a cause whose ultimate aim is to redeem the fraudulent travesty that is human history thus far. Best of all, being on “the right side of History” (that is, protesting against the past because it has victimized us all in distorting our natural goodness, and the oppressed even more) only really requires us to feel correctly, and maybe to express our support for victims; action is optional. Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx will insist that this progress of History has its own solution in store for the problems it generates, thus giving birth to the full-blown mythology of progressivism. Rousseau was under no such illusion.
If providential History will not oblige us by delivering the redemptive order, with the result that both kinds of victims remain among us (the universal victims of civilization and the particular victims of inequitable civil order), then Rousseau’s victimology serves mainly to de-legitimate all actual regimes. So The Social Contract attests: “Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” Or perhaps it is better to say that there is only one kind of regime this victimology could serve to legitimate (or at least to de-legitimate all alternatives), namely a revolutionary regime officially devoted to eliminating the specified victimhood but never thoroughly attaining its aim.
The revolutionary regime does not in fact need to fully attain the projected harmonization of man, nor ever to eliminate inequality and third-party victimhood; its relentless official devotion to both impossibilities will sustain its legitimacy. Its devotees will act or agitate in the name of compassion while, as citizen-soldiers of the cause, they harden themselves against actually feeling compassion. The commitment of the revolutionaries to the future egalitarian regime, the only truly legitimate regime, gives them a kind of anticipatory legitimacy as political actors, and authorizes them to denounce all who are not so committed as supporters of an illegitimate regime. The victims of the non-revolutionary regime’s inequities serve the negative role of de-legitimating that regime, and the third-party compassion of the revolutionary “allies” simultaneously reinforces their virtual legitimacy and insulates them from the taint of the illegitimate regime, regardless of whether they continue to benefit from it. They, the conscious and committed, are the redeemed. The core elements of Rousseau’s revolutionary victimology—the spirited moral stance of protest and resistance, the self-exoneration through commitment and compassion, and the heaping of all guilt onto the evil reactionary oppressors—serve to gratify amour-propre more powerfully than actually governing ever could. The revolutionaries are the virtuous redeemers not only of themselves and the oppressed, but of human nature as such and History itself.
If we call to mind the image of the Leviathan on the title page of Hobbes’s work—a giant crowned man wielding the instruments of military and religious authority, whose body is composed of smaller individuals—we can envision Rousseau’s maneuver as plucking these individuals out of the body in which they are absorbed and reinstating them as victims for our attention. Their victimhood, no longer the binding force that unites them into one body, becomes a reproach to the repressive force of that body. The compassion accompanying their visibility bears a resemblance to the Christian charity for the weak and oppressed cultivated by the remembrance of the Passion, thus giving birth to the sentimental Christianity of the nineteenth century. For many (including the liberal Protestants and progressive Catholics who are its heirs), it remains the essence of what is understood to be Christianity today.
If we call to mind the two forms of victimology generated by the Lockean myth, those of the propertied ruling class and of the deserving working class, Rousseau’s re-imagined state of nature serves to explode Locke’s papering over of the lurking tension between them. If we look at liberalism in classical terms, we see that it seeks to yoke oligarchy and democracy together into a stable unity that appears as neither. This beneficent system of natural liberty—with its providential overtones of God’s gift of the exploitable earth to the rational and industrious and the hidden hand that scatters around the bounty of the rising tide of prosperity—promises rewards to all alike if they will cooperate in protecting this system’s natural operation from an overbearing government. Rousseau radicalizes the difference between the two by using the yearning for wholeness and self-satisfaction to portray a redefined democracy as the only legitimate regime, and liberal-economistic oligarchy as the most mendacious charade for duping and co-opting its victims. The target of spirited resistance is not the government, but the system.
As we have noted, however, Rousseau’s myth harbors its own dual victimology. The victimization of the sentiments of our natural self, submerged from view in the civilizing process of History and further eclipsed by the intensity of the socio-economic conflict, comes to light as potentially remediable when Rousseau takes a closer look at childhood. As natural man is originally good and is deformed by the blind progress of History, so the newborn child is wholly innocent but subsequently deformed by thoughtless socialization into a corrupt order of human relations. Rousseau’s Emile sketches a developmental psychology that sets the agenda for a holistic education seeking to preserve natural goodness, independence, and compassion. At the same time, by attributing all distortions of human wholeness to the failure to provide such remedial formation, it opens the door for a therapeutic culture to attend to the victims of social distortion and of parenting that fails to be perfect (i.e. all parenting).
This developmental anthropology conveys most forcefully the point (which remained at best ambiguous in Hobbes and Locke) that there is no original sin to set limits either on the solution of social ills or on the cultivation of human wholeness. At the same time, the demands of sentimental restoration are as impossible to meet as those of political legitimacy. The possibilities of remaking both human beings and the social structures responsible for deforming them are therefore, in the strict sense, limitless: therapy must be as endless as revolution. But since there is at least potentially an agenda laid out for both kinds of remaking, what ends up being truly limitless in practice is the blame that can be assigned to those who do not “do enough”—blame always to be assigned to third parties who perversely remain content with their inadequate level of consciousness of the problems or of commitment to the solutions. Therapeutic victimhood, however, differs from socio-economic victimhood in that I can always claim victimhood for myself. Indeed, the various revisions Rousseau made over the years to his autobiographical Confessions show precisely how diametrically opposed it is to Augustine’s admission before God of his own evasions of accepting responsibility for his sins: Rousseau consistently assigns less and less blame to “pauvre Jean-Jacques” and portrays himself ever more thoroughly as a victim of others. The fact that we are all damaged children leads the Augustinian to prayer and the Rousseauan to accusation.
In America in the second half of the twentieth century, therapeutic victimology succeeded in taking hold as spectacularly as revolutionary victimology had generally failed. It has been a source of perpetual frustration to Marxist organizers and ideologists that Rousseauan victimology has no real appeal to the working class. They are often ready to sympathize with those who struggle against impediments to earning a decent living by their labor, but not to reward them for their economic victim status, and are generally satisfied if collective bargaining secures better compensation and eases the resentments on which revolutionary zealots place their hopes. It was the genius of Adorno and Marcuse to transfer all the victimological eggs from the Marxist political-revolutionary into the Freudian-psychotherapeutic basket, and thus to find a receptive audience among the relatively prosperous and privileged postwar youth.
Adorno in particular, in The Authoritarian Personality, re-categorized the political opposition against progressive ideology as a psychological resistance based on pathologies contracted in childhood. When he propagated his views in America, he showed unerring rhetorical instinct by revising his description of the healthy alternative from the “revolutionary personality” to the “democratic personality.” According to Plato’s political psychology, it is precisely the secure children of the oligarchs who grow restless with the rules of acquisitive delayed gratification and restraint of the passions, becoming the democratic souls who treat all desires as equally valid and liberate them from the censure of moral law and shame. This sentimental-revolutionary youth movement brought about the great papering-over of the tension between the two Rousseauan victimologies, enabling them to coexist within the liberal order alongside the two Lockean victimologies in a free and prosperous American society. Thus were set in motion several generations of an American left occupied primarily with personal moral and sentimental liberation while harboring sympathies for vague ideas of revolution and general enthusiasm about commitment exhibited by others.
The end of the Cold War and the subsequent decline of economic optimism led to a widening of the gap between the two forms of Rousseauan victimology, just as it did for the two Lockean forms. While the ultimately antiliberal spirit of total citizen commitment could be admired in its communist form (thanks in part to its official and vociferous professions of third-party victim compassion), the actual practical outcomes of that commitment when politically successful were rarely attractive to denizens of liberal states. In what Francis Fukuyama dubbed “the end of history” the actual states that represented the achievement of communist revolution collapsed, apparently leaving global bourgeois bohemian liberationism as the viable future of the left. But here too the elite leadership of the neoliberals has been repudiated by an alienated and spirited faction, in this case a new form of revolutionary commitment: identity politics.
IV
The identity politics of the left enables its representatives to feel an even greater sense of revolutionary legitimacy. While the committed still use third-party victimhood to delegitimate the system, they can also identify with the victimization of the group to which they belong and speak as one of them. This remains possible even when (as usually is the case) the committed are those who suffer less severely from the victimization and also gain disproportionately from the success of agitation. There is the sense of participating in a kind of “general will” of the oppressed group in their ongoing protest against domination, and thus the satisfaction of amour-propre provided by commitment to a vaguely imagined legitimate regime.
Since, however, these future regimes do not need to have any clear shape even in the imagination, and thus no practical potential to generate new political institutions, up to a point they can fulfill their psychological role within and under the umbrella of the persisting administrative state, even pressing it into the service of their agenda. Their adherents have thus felt little need to envision an actual alternative political regime, just as working class Lockean patriots have felt less need to venerate the constitutional order as an alternative to a Soviet system that has disappeared. Thus the global triumph of liberal order in the great conflict of the twentieth century has generated, in the twenty-first, two spirited and illiberal dissent movements from out of the Lockean and Rousseauan factions that had previously worked out their conflicts inside the national frameworks of liberal order.
In certain ways, over time these two factions have come to resemble one another. Each views the government as an enabler of the threat that looms largest for them, be that white supremacy or cultural Marxism. Each recognizes the legitimacy of a different polity than the one we share. The Lockean patriots cherish a manly republic that existed in the pre-progressive past, while the Rousseauan revolutionaries profess allegiance to a perfect democracy that will exist in the post-oppressive future. Groups on “the right” have increasingly embraced markers of group identity in response to the self-assertion of the identity groups on “the left”, so that it has become possible to speak of identity politics on both sides.
Both are also prone to paranoia. In the delirium induced by this paranoia, fear of victimization serves those on each extreme as justification for exempting themselves from the authority of the state and the formalities of liberal institutions and civilities. The more mainstream progressives and populists may remain satisfied with the rhetorical warfare of denunciation, but this only contributes further to the erosion of legitimacy, because each faction speaks as if a government that includes the other is already a government in crisis. And indeed, though usually treated as fringe extremist tendencies, these two factions and their conflict with the mainstream political parties may well represent the potentially uncontrollable breakdown of the legitimacy of the modern liberal state.
According to Max Weber’s classic formulation, the distinctive characteristic of the modern state is its successful holding of a monopoly on legitimate physical coercion or violence. Identity politics rejects the legitimacy of this state monopoly. Groups on the left primarily deny the state’s legitimacy, on the ground that its violence has historically supported the oppression of the marginalized. Groups on the right primarily reject the state’s claim to its monopoly on violence: they insist that the right to bear arms is the essential guarantee of freedom, since only citizen militias can preserve republican liberty from overreaching encroachments by the armed state.
Charlottesville in 2017 became a call to arms for both extremes, and ultimately increased their similarities. “Right wing militias” have gained notoriety and numbers, and groups on the left have responded with increasing militancy, some taking up the stance of armed resistance. The Proud Boys and the Three Percenters now have their counterparts in the Socialist Rifle Association and the Trigger Warning Queer & Trans Gun Club.
Whatever one may think of the appeal of guns, we should not be surprised that a crisis of legitimacy results in their rise to prominence. Guns are the instruments of violence that make the modern state possible in the first place. In the small republics of the ancient world, to be a citizen was to be a warrior and fight hand-to-hand, and this active defense of the city earned a role in self-government. In the feudal world, different ranks had distinct arms, different military functions and responsibilities, and correspondingly different reciprocal social obligations. Guns make possible large conscript armies composed of any of a nation’s subjects.
Guns can be purchased by a tax-collecting central authority and then put into the hands of any drafted or hired subject, to be paid for service by the same central authority. In this way, fielding large armies of well-drilled riflemen became the effective way of making war beginning in the early seventeenth century. European monarchs successfully monopolized these fiscal-administrative-military operations and thereby made the feudal order obsolete, bringing about what Tocqueville called democratic social conditions as well as the now self-evident distinction between society and the state. Early America developed differently. European settlers landed with guns in hand, and democratic social conditions amongst themselves were mostly a given. Not until the 1930’s, when America seemed to be developing more decidedly into a modern centralized state, did the federal government attempt to regulate firearm possession.
Guns figure prominently on the title page of Hobbes’ Leviathan, written after the first half-century of effective use of firearms on the battlefield. The imaginative portrait of the human condition in Hobbes’ state-of-nature myth bears the marks of the accompanying social transformation, which is one of the reasons this work of political philosophy is among the earliest to describe a human world immediately recognizable for us as moderns. Hobbes is the first to explicitly assert a natural equality of all men. But what this comes down to is that we are equally capable of killing each other, since even strong men can be ambushed or have to sleep some time. This is not a thought that comes naturally in a medieval world with its differentiated orders that includes a dominant warrior class. When Hobbes prescribes the creation of a state that concentrates and monopolizes violent force and eliminates the kinds of independent status characteristic of the feudal system, he is, at least in part, prescribing how the modern ruler should respond to this prospect of a more equalized and less socially differentiated potential for exercising and suffering violence.
This state-monopolized violence, made possible and necessary by guns, requires a principle of legitimacy. As we have seen, in the Hobbesian account, the ultimate principle of that legitimacy is a shared condition of victimhood. As we have also seen, the Hobbesian myth constitutes “the people” as a group of victims united by their desire for protection. It thus grounds the legitimacy of the state on a shared need for passive security. The Lockean and Rousseauan myths use victimhood to give legitimacy to political actions in opposition to the state, understood as necessary correctives to illegitimate forms of state power. In their extreme versions, these victimologies end up, in the minds of their adherents, redefining “the people” as those who are victimized by the state in specific ways—in other words, identity politics groups with their own sources of legitimacy.
“Power to the people,” an old slogan of leftist victimology, admirably expresses the effect of identity politics. If “the people” is constituted by a group of individuals with a shared desire to be shielded from victimization, and if this shared desire gives legitimacy to political authority and the monopolization of violence, then those who share a strong sense of common victimhood will see themselves as “the people” who are the source of true legitimacy. The Lockean victimology of the “right” and the Rousseauan victimology of the “left” thus form the basis of different peoples. The Lockeans are the “real Americans” who remain faithful in spirit to the revolutionary resistance against overreaching rulers and to the original legitimation by “the people” of a constitution of limited government. The Rousseauans claim solidarity with those at whose expense “the Establishment” has feathered its own nest.
When Nikole Hannah-Jones claimed that the war for independence was motivated by the anxiety to protect slavery, her historiography may have been demonstrably bad, but her victimology was astutely targeted. It sought to flip the status of the Founders, the self-declared victims of colonial oppression, to the oppressor side of the balance, and thus to delegitimate their original claim to be “the people” who form the basis of the legitimacy of the state. While this mythmaking was enthusiastically received by Rousseauan victimologists, it only served to strengthen the sense of political identity of the Lockean patriots and to fuel their resistance to victimization by the progressive elite.
The increasing polarization of politics in America and elsewhere is not just a matter of nasty rhetoric and drastically divergent policies. Those who define themselves as members of groups oppressed by “the government” or “the system” withdraw themselves from the common pool of the one “people” whose shared protection from violent victimization provides legitimacy for the state’s monopoly on violence. The growth of sub-groups identifying themselves as the genuine legitimacy-granting “people” diminishes the legitimacy of the state and of the violence it wields to deter mutual victimization. Each group thus feels more justified in using violence to protect itself from alleged state-supported victimization. Chants of “Defund the Police” accompany the smashing and burning of law enforcement vehicles; chants of “Stop the Steal” goad a lynch mob to breach the Capitol and assault officers while telling them they’re fighting on the wrong side. While the worry that these antithetical groups will break out into a civil war seems exaggerated, it is entirely plausible that ongoing violence from both sides will continue to undermine the sense of legitimacy of the state—especially if (as seems probable) that violence surrounds elections.
The top half of the title page of Leviathan depicts the sovereign power as a giant warrior-priest-king whose body incorporates all the tiny bodies of the vulnerable individuals who make him up. They are united into one body by the victim-consciousness that makes them the people and by their willingness to grant a monopoly of violence to the sovereign to ward off the prospect of victimization. This is a grim parody of the incorporation into the body of Christ enacted in the sacramental liturgy through the sacrifice of the wholly innocent victim. There we are reminded that, while we are susceptible to victimization, we are never wholly innocent, and that we need continually to give and receive forgiveness. This should allow us to be more amicable neighbors to one another in the polity, which is a distant second best form of community.
This incorporation into the state—described by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as “the coldest of all cold monsters”—can only provide a twisted likeness of the communion with our Creator mediated through our Redeemer. The secularized victimology that underwrites that unsatisfying political incorporation must inevitably be turned against itself, taking forms that promise beguiling imitations of the liberation and personal dignity only found in the divinely instituted incorporation. The peace of the earthly city is always tenuous because, at bottom, it is always divided against itself. It cannot make good use of the weapons it takes out of the hands of the church, precisely because they were not made to be weapons.
There is a longer and more complicated story to tell about how this crisis came upon us, and why now, and what it says about the fate of liberalism. The point here is to suggest that the secular victimology of identity politics represents a crisis of the attempt to found the legitimacy of the modern state and its monopoly of violence upon secularized victimology in the first place—and that we should expect the unraveling of that project to be violent. It is at bottom, I believe, a crisis of the notion of legitimacy itself as a secular principle. Can we have a sustainable principle of political legitimacy that is not in some way explicitly subordinate to the God who offers Himself as the innocent lamb slain for us? We seem to be foundering on this question, which identity politics purports to answer in the affirmative, while it drives us toward dissolution. Let us hope we can find our way toward a more satisfactory answer, for if not, God help us, we are truly at sea.
Mark Shiffman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Patrick’s Seminary and University in Menlo Park, California. He is the translator of Aristotle’s De Anima (Focus Books) and Descartes’s Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Saint Augustine’s Press, forthcoming).
NB: I will soon offer in my blog an Italian translation of this article (Italian version). I thank the author for the permission to publish his article in my blog. Roberto Graziotto
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