May 19, 2008

Authority, Legitimacy, and Austin Bramwell's Fig Leaf Fallacy

By: James Poulos

Naked?

In his American Conservative review of Matt Yglesias’ new book, Heads in the Sand, Austin Bramwell contends that, “[i]n the end,”

it is unclear whether Yglesias seeks anything more than an internationalist fig leaf for the policies he happens to prefer.

So what if he does? As my long trail of blog crumbs reveals, I have deep sympathies with both the paleocon and the neocon approach to foreign policy but reserve grave objections about both. Bramwell, himself, engagingly mocks the “way of the distinguished commentator on foreign affairs,” which is “to reduce all problems to a single solution — realism, neoconservatism, internationalism, isolationism — while assuming that one’s opponents do the same.” In the spirit of breaking that habit, I wish to offer a defense of the fig leaf, and assert in so doing that the admirably incisive Mr. Bramwell has fallen prey to what we should call the fig leaf fallacy. This creates bigger problems than it may first appear.

The fig leaf fallacy holds that a person wearing nothing but a fig leaf is really actually naked, and the main principle of my defense of the fig leaf is that someone sporting naught but leaf really actually isn’t. “Hypocrisy,” you say; “that leopard-print thong is only ‘clothing’ for those who have fetishized nakedness down to the gonads, the better to be naked for all practical purposes without ‘really’ being nude!”

To which I reply with the following paradox: (a), nakedness — in fact — means wearing nothing, not wearing mostly nothing or almost nothing. Yet, (b), nudity is also what academics call a ‘social construction’ — that is, whether someone is considered to be nude is probably closely linked to whether or not they are naked but has no necessary connection to precisely how naked they really are. So Miley Cyrus may reveal her bare back while clad in a sheet and who knows what else, and this is taken to be a ‘topless’ photo. As a factual matter, this is correct insofar as she isn’t wearing any clothing above the waist. But as a practical matter, it’s patently absurd to call a photo of somebody’s naked back a topless photo.

The gap between what is factually or empirically so and what is considered or taken to be so (in this case, nakedness) is a gap that has obsessed philosophers, sociologists, and cultural anthopologists with good reason. It causes us to realize a number of important things: (1) it’s oftentimes beside the point that facts are facts when it comes to solving, or even considering, human problems; (2) nonetheless, just as often, if not moreso, we aren’t therefore empowered to ignore facts in considering how to consider our problems; and (3) we can’t jump out of our cultural or perspectival skins in order to gain a ‘view from nowhere’ on the tangle of prejudices, commitments, habits, memories, and traditions that inform our many layers of shared and unshared semi-factual judgments.

Nettlesome problems like these led social theorists to try to develop a way of talking about how human beings set about coping with such conundrums. The most important modern social theorist to do so was Max Weber. For Weber, human beings made sense of the world and their behavior in it by developing regulatory codes about when and how to act. Over time, these sets of rules became ritualized, institutionalized, and routinized. Though based on a thin factual substrate, institutionalized rules stood or fell according to the relative strength of contending social judgments about them. People in society, under a variety of more or less diverse influences, developed attitudes about whether institutionalized rules — and the people who followed and violated them — were legitimate or illegitimate. In interlocking religious, cultural, economic, and political contexts, people deliberated upon those attitudes, formed judgments based upon them, and acted on them.

Keen on escaping the bounds of situated prejudice while still being able to be scientific, good Weberians therefore take as empirical a perspective as possible on legitimacy itself, seeking to define it in the abstract as an ideal-typical relational structure. Thus, legitimacy “defined in the empirical, Weberian sense” means that

an institution is legitimate if and only if the opinion has become widespread that it is right (for whatever reason or lack thereof) to obey it.

So it is legitimate to distinguish the wearing of fig leaves from being naked if and only if people agree in sufficiently large number and intensity that this distinction is the proper judgment about nakedness. But wait. Whose definition of Weberian legitimacy have I just quoted? It’s Austin Bramwell’s; and curiously enough it’s the linchpin of his definition of conservatism:

Conservatism is the defense of legitimacy wherever it happens to exist. “Legitimacy” here is defined in the empirical, Weberian sense: that is, an institution is legitimate if and only if the opinion has become widespread that it is right (for whatever reason or lack thereof) to obey it. The conservative, in short, cultivates obedience to existing institutions.

Yet the conservative, like everyone else, faces an unavoidable crisis when existing institutions fail. The perfect example of institutional failure is what happened to the UN Security Council between the unanimous passage of Resolution 1441 and the inability of the Security Council to pass a Resolution enforcing 1441. As it pains everyone to recall, Resolution 1441 [.pdf] set out three main rulings:

(1) It recalled that “the Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations;”

(2) It decided that “that Iraq has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant resolutions;” and

(3) It decided “to afford Iraq, by this resolution, a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations under relevant resolutions of the Council.”

But after Iraq continued to remain in material breach of its Security Council obligations, adding in fact further infractions, France promised point blank to veto any coercive enforcement of 1441 of any kind. Judging by the basic principles of the philosophy of law, France decided thus that it had no longer considered legitimate a resolution which it already bindingly recognized as legitimate — which, indeed, it had voted for. Plainly this threw the legitimacy of the Security Council itself, and therefore a serious portion of international law, into crisis, which the US and its allies exacerbated by insisting on going along with coercive enforcement. Since the crisis was unresolvable because there was neither a higher power nor a higher authority that could resolve the crisis, the Security Council experienced a profound episode of institutional failure.

What, at this point, would a conservative according to Bramwell’s Weberian definition do? Bramwell concedes that “in times of crisis, it is more difficult to identify the ‘true’ conservatives,” and with a definition like that, it is no wonder. (Bramwell can insist that both Burke and Lincoln are conservatives for the same reason. Paging Alasdair MacIntyre.) The problem is that when legitimate institutions — such as the United States of America — fail, neither conservatives nor anyone else can defend their legitimacy. They can only recreate it after the fact. This is true on Bramwell’s own Weberian account. If an institution is no longer legitimate if there is not enough agreement on its legitimacy to keep it from failing, then conservatives (or anyone else) can either choose to defend an illegitimate institution or a legitimacy which no longer applies to any legitimate institution. The cruel catch is that, on the Weberian model, only institutions can be legitimate. For Weber, adherents to sets of rules are, first, attracted by charismatic persons; second, imitate them; and, third, set about institutionalizing their charisma, which lives on bureaucratically after the founding charismatic is gone. But for Weber, charisma is an amoral magical power. ‘Good’ people have it. ‘Evil’ people have it. A berserker biting his shield in a deranged fury has it. Jesus has it. The founder of the Mormons, Weber says, might have it, but might just be a fraud. One can see the problems with this analysis. Because Weber understands charisma to always be radically outside any authority — when in fact this is unquestionably false and, in Jewish and Christian teaching, almost the precise opposite of the truth, Weber denies that charisma has any legitimacy before it is institutionalized. No institution, no legitimacy.

A conservative equipped with Bramwell’s Weberian rulebook, then, is left utterly out in the cold when legitimate institutions fail. A conservative — or anyone else — bumbling along with one of Matt Yglesias’ fig leaves, however, can at least take refuge among the shards convention, hoping to shore them up against our ruin. The coalition of the willing that invaded Iraq, the NATO coalition that bombed Serbia, and Lincoln’s Grand Army of the Republic all advanced an interpretation of legitimacy, which had its logic to it under the circumstances but also fell significantly short of ‘real’ legitimacy. The real argument about all three of these military bodies, and the wars they fought, is whether, in the absence of true legitimacy, they were justified by power or by authority. On Weber’s account — and, so it seems, on Bramwell’s — authority is derived from legitimacy. This is the inimical reverse of the account of MacIntyre, Rieff, Walzer, and Taylor, among social theorists; Jesus, Augustine, and Aquinas among theologists; and Abraham Lincoln, among politicians, all for whom legitimacy can only derive from authority. If legitimacy does not derive from authority, it can derive only from power — coercive or charismatic. This should be a repugnant doctrine for conservatives. I am not sure Bramwell fully persuades that he has escaped its pull.

Nor, for that matter, has Matt, which admittedly is Bramwell’s point. But the argument we need to be having about conservatism, liberalism, and legitimacy is one that must recognize the importance of legitimate fig leaves. The inability to differentiate between legitimate (or real) and illegitimate (or imaginary) fig leaves is very close to the inability to differentiate between truthful statements and lies. Indeed, our inability — as a nation, a culture, a civilization — to settle on a shared judgment about the legitimacy of the Iraq invasion raises a deeper point about our crisis of authority behind it. Lincoln insisted, rightly, that the authority under which he went to war was immutable. But he recognized that the legitimacy which his act of war destroyed could never be recovered, only replaced — not in a ‘reawakening’ but in a ‘new birth’ of freedom. For that new birth to be a live birth, more than Weberian charisma, the charisma of power, is needed. The charisma of true authority is required.

I haven’t read Matt’s book yet, but I recognize what he is up to. It’s more than trying to slap a comfortable patina of ‘legitimacy’ on a menu of mere preferences. It’s an attempt to persuade us that liberal internationalism (for want of a better phrase) is truly authoritative. Authority, after all, is the true fig leaf that covers our nakedness when our legitimacy fails. (I mean that theologically, too.)

I don’t know if Matt has succeeded in his task with Heads in the Sand, but I do think he’s confronting the right question. And I am certain that conservatives must approach Weberian legitimacy, and the dangerous doctrine that authority derives from power which it entails, with great caution. The motto that emerges from Weber’s famous lectures on politics and science as vocations urges us all to follow our personal daemons, capturing precisely the sort of attitude that ought to worry critics of the Iraq war — whatever their partisanship.

(Photo courtesy Flickrer groenling.)