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DOI: 10.1177/0191453709104454

2009 35: 705Philosophy Social CriticismChris Thornhill

The autonomy of the political : A socio-theoretical response

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Chris Thornhill

The autonomy of the political

A socio-theoretical response

Abstract This article sets out a series of critical reflections on recent andcontemporary theoretical literature that makes expansive claims for thestatus of the politicalas an autonomous category of social practice in modernsociety, and it argues that such theories usually rest on rather tautologicaland self-supporting constructions of societys politicality. To counter this, thearticle advocates and proposes a social-functional reconstruction of what,precisely, is political in modern society, and it suggests that modern societiesare in fact structurally dependent on their ability to reduce the volume ofsocial exchanges that have to be articulated as specifically political. Inparticular, it asserts that many aspects of the legitimatory grammar ofmodern societies especially rights and constitutions are devices throughwhich societies restrict their political concentration and de-politicize theirprimary functions. On this basis, the article concludes by proposing a morelimited concept of the political that is socio-theoretically adjusted to, andusable in, the evolved form of a modern society.

Key words conflict theory constitutions de-politicization the political power rights sociology of politics

Political autonomy and political emphasis

In recent years it has become widespread for political theory to arguethat what is political in a society possesses a particular autonomy andthat there are certain social contents and exchanges, usually obtainingstructural importance for all society, which can only be explained aspolitical. In recent and current debate, theories that impute this statusto the political often place themselves in the context of a wider revisionof Marxist theory. These theories tend to be committed to the sociallytransformative objectives implicit in Marxism, yet they are suspicious

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of the occasionally reductive construction of political action and polit-ical organization that typifies some lines of Marxist analysis. Moregenerally, though, a concern for the determinacy of the political might

be viewed as a constitutive problem for contemporary political theory,as modern political theory, in its origins, confronted a dramatic expan-sion of the societal themes subject to political regulation and it wasnecessarily engaged with questions about the essence and distinction ofthe political. Through the 20th century and beyond, therefore, politicaltheory has intermittently devoted itself to accounting for the structureof the political and to explaining how the composition of what is polit-ical reflects and comprises, autonomously, a discrete set of contents andconcerns.

Theories that accentuate the autonomy of the political usually havetwo salient characteristics. First, they tend to posit a clear distinctionbetween what is political and what is more generally social. In thisrespect, such theories normally oppose and incorporate a critique ofsociological methods of political analysis, which tend to interpret thepolitical as one group of social facts among others. Second, theoriesascribing autonomy to the political also usually impute a particularsocietal emphasis to the political, and they construe the political eitheras a primary resource in society, whose absence or weakness resonatesin perturbing manner for all society, or as a dimension of society inwhich society obtains a particularly concentrated account of its formand its underlying directive principles. Indeed, such theories tend toassume that, because the political is autonomous, societies converge withparticular intensity around the political, that the political is the endlessobject of social contestation and conflict, and that the wider stabilityand cohesion of societies rely on their ability to contest and articulateemphatically politicized constructions of themselves.

Claims for the autonomy and emphasis of the political run throughmany of the most formative modern political theories and these claims

traverse simply identifiable ideological categories. Max Weber, forexample, expressly detached the analysis of the political from his generalmethod of social or sociological interpretation, and he argued that thepolitical contains and articulates modes of behaviour and direction thatare not found in other spheres of social exchange, and it is specificallycounterpointed against the technical patterns of bureaucratic labour.1

Proceeding from this assumption, he asserted that the political is adominant realm of human practice in society,2 and that societies markedby weak political culture and a weak sense of the political tend to suffer

low levels of political integration and dynamism.3 After Weber, CarlSchmitt also argued that the political is a structurally distinct sphere ofhuman action, and that it possesses clear autonomy against the social.Indeed, Schmitt claimed that societies must generate positive principles

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in which they can condense political accounts of themselves, and that asociety can only construct itself as political by effacing from this self-construction the material, instrumental and pluralistic processes that

make this society social.4 In proposing this argument, Schmitt followedWeber in concluding that the political is an especially emphatic dimen-sion of a society, and that societies that cannot muster concentrated orunequivocal accounts of their politicality are usually weak and vulner-able ones.5 These presuppositions led Schmitt, at different points in histheoretical career, to make two quite divergent claims about the politi-cal. First, he argued, following Weber, that the political is an irreduciblyconflictual aspect of society and that societies demonstrate their politi-cality in the decisions through which they commit themselves, if neces-

sary in exclusionary fashion, to a categorical definition of their necessaryform. Political decisions are thus decisions in which a society condensesa resolute description of itself, and it is central to these decisions thatthey identify as enemies those persons or principles that are antagonis-tic towards or likely to undermine this description.6 In indicating thatthe political is a body of potentially exclusionary principles on whichall society is structurally centred, Schmitt concluded that the politicalmust be a total politics and that a total politics must decisively transmitpolitical principles into all areas of social exchange.7 In this, however,Schmitt clearly differentiated between the total politics of ethical repre-sentation and the total politics of societal domination.8 Strongly favour-ing the former, he argued, giving a second inflection to his concept ofthe political, that the political is not constructed as totalbecause it prac-tically pervades and regulates all realms of social activity. In fact, it isconstructed as total because it represents, in the state, positive legiti-matory principles of order, which are situated above the pluralisticinterests of civil society, and it gives a totalizing or categorical form tocivil society, which cannot be internally distilled or mediated from thepluralistic interests that civil society contains.9 In this second concep-

tion, therefore, Schmitt viewed the political as a corpus of ideal, ethicalor representative principles, to which all societies must refer in order topreserve their underlying integrity and to differentiate their foundingresources from what is simply social.10 In both these constructions, heinsisted that the political is both a discrete and an emphatic or privi-leged resource in society, and that all society existentially depends onthis resource.

The sense of the political as a quality that is both socially discreteand emphatically important for all society also runs through later theories

of the political, which, although perhaps not directly influenced bySchmitt, are shaped by concerns similar to those that guide Schmittsthought. This is evident in Hannah Arendts concern that the rise ofsociety has eradicated that common public world, which she defined

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as the political, and that this has instigated a worldless mentality inhuman beings, rendering them incapable of virtue and authentic action.11

This is apparent in Leo Strauss idea of political society as a place that

is distinct from practices dedicated merely to the administration ofthings, that has to be kept uniquely free for the pursuit of superiordignity and public virtue, and that ultimately serves the full actualiza-tion of humanity.12 In each of these claims, the political is specificallydelineated against the social, and societies marked by an excess of thesocial are construed as deficient societies, eroding the founding humancapacities for free foundation and shared virtue.

More recent literature on the political differs from earlier literaturein that, as mentioned above, it is often placed in the broad margins of

radical or socially progressive politics. Nonetheless, more recent litera-ture has also tended to duplicate the two features of earlier accountsof the political, and it has used the claim that the political is a distinctand emphatic resource to trace out a space of radical praxis in modernsociety. In the protracted fragmentation of French Marxism after 1968,for example, Blandine Kriegel broke defiantly with Marxist orthodoxyby repudiating Marxs (alleged) claim that the political has no particu-lar reality and even by arguing that the state is the factual preconditionof social emancipation.13 Kriegel insists on the independence and tran-scendence of the political and she argues that the liberating conse-quences of human agency are specifically neglected and denied by thephilosophy of the social.14 In a related intellectual context, ClaudeLefort amplifies these claims for the primacy of the political over thesocial and he argues throughout his work that the political articulates theunderlying form of society: the political determines the contestation ofsocial space, and it institutes both the intelligible and the representativestructures in which all other facts, and all other social relationships,are located.15 Lefort thus denotes the political as a founding negotiatedproject that precedes and underlies particular social forms, and whose

absence is likely to lead a society to collapse into falsely organic modesof repression.16

In a different line of post-Marxist analysis, Ernesto Laclau has alsopursued a correction of Marxist method by disarticulating the politicalfrom the social. Laclau insists, against the grain of Marxist sociology,that the political is an ontological category in society. The political, heexplains, expresses itself as a subversion and dislocation of the social,17

and the social is a set of contingent relations that are defined and deter-mined by a decisive and antagonistic struggle for hegemony in society,

which, Laclau (following Schmitt) indicates, is necessarily articulatedas political.18 The political is thus a relatively autonomous conflictualdimension of society, which contains intensified and highly unstablepotentials for social disruption, change or transformation. Above all,

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Laclau stresses, societies that eliminate or downplay the political andso fail to permit the construction of a political space in which contestsover dominant social structure can be conducted occlude themselves

against their founding capacities for human freedom.19In most recent debate, however, it is Chantal Mouffe who has claimed

most loudly that there are aspects of social exchange that are distinctively,autonomously and emphatically political. Central to Mouffes argumentis the assertion that every society contains ineliminable conflicts, or anirreducible dimension of antagonism, and that these conflicts are consti-tutive of what is political for that society.20 The political, in this construc-tion, resides in a particular configuration of antagonism and hegemony.A theme in society becomes political when it is asserted as a principle

either of hegemonic or of counter-hegemonic discourse and where,because it is asserted in this manner, it enters a relation of antagonismtowards other themes and towards other actors articulating otherthemes in similar fashion. In defining the political in these terms, Mouffeindicates that there is a clear distinction between the political and thesocial. She qualifies this by stating that there are displacements in thisrelation and that the boundaries of the political are often redrawn asnew social themes become objects of hegemonic assertions and becomerelevant for the power structures of a society.21 However, the politicalcomprises a number of originary hegemonic acts that pre-form thesocial, and the social exists as a set of sedimented practices, which areoriginally subject to political determination.22 Like Laclau, in fact, Mouffecites Heidegger to indicate that the political in society resides ontolog-ically beneath what is simply social and that there are political contentsingrained in the social that can be awakened or repoliticized at any timeas their antagonistic substance is contested in hegemonic discourses.23

As with earlier theories of the political, Mouffe also extends thisanalysis to assert that societies that do not obtain emphatic experiencesof their own politicality are structurally deficient and often unfree soci-

eties. Each society, she argues, owes its underlying form to politicalconflicts, and societies that forget this, or, in liberal-democratic style,presuppose necessary harmony or dictates of reason as their structuralfoundation, are self-deluding. She thus indicates that Schmitt got some-thing right when he suggested that, in a world without final or meta-physical certainties, all political values are formed through decisiveconflict, and that society as a whole can only be stabilized and consol-idated through decisively articulated contests or agonistic struggle.24

Indeed, Mouffe concludes that, in some instances, a society must con-

dense itself into entirely emphatic, and even into ultimately exclusionary,accounts of its political form. Antagonistic principles of legitimacy, shestates, cannot coexist within the same political association and eachmode of collective existence requires a categorical statement of its

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proper and constitutive principles.25 The dimension of conflict inscribedin the political, therefore, culminates in a conflict over societys owndefining self-description.

Why the political?

These descriptions of the political are clearly stationed at very differentpoints in the theoretical landscape, and they assign different social func-tions to those conditions and practices that they determine as political.Despite this, however, these theories have certain structural similarities,and they are informed by overlapping assumptions in their accounts of

why the political should be perceived as an autonomous and emphaticsocial commodity. For this reason, these theories provide a frameworkfor critical inquiry into the construction of the political, and, preciselybecause of their ideological distinctions, they make it possible to examinethe integral problems attached to assumptions about the autonomy andemphasis of societys politics. Across different programmatic positions,these views all converge around the argument that modern societiesand their constituents need more politics: that is, that these societies areinclining inexorably towards a pathological condition of social encroach-ment or de-politicization,26 and that the demise of the political signalsa dreadful depletion of integrally human possibilities. Most importantly,then, each of these theories suggests that a repoliticization of the polit-ical is required and that the emphatic experiences that are tied to thepolitical are of crucial significance for the people who inhabit modernsocieties. The need for political emphasis, therefore, seems to reflect abody of social-diagnostic or even existential desires, and in each of thesetheories the political is allowed to form an imaginary around whichvaguely articulated social apprehensions, experiences of unfreedom andsubjective anxieties are congregated. This article contends, however, that

the lamenting or diagnostic tone implicit in theories of the political hasobstructed analysis of what the political factually is, and the conflationof political analysis with broad reflections on the conditions of humanlife has produced a series of reductions and aporia in accounts of thepolitical, which can only be remedied through a thorough change ofanalytical paradigm.

The first salient problem with these accounts of the political is thattheir two central assertions namely, that the political is socially auton-omous and that, because of this, it is socially emphatic are elaborated

in a conceptually self-serving and tautological style. In delineating thepolitical as autonomous (that is, as not social), these theories all ascribethe autonomy of the political to the fact that, as they claim, the politi-cal possesses a characteristically emphatic quality in a society and that,

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because of this emphasis, other areas of society are determined by thepolitical, they refer to the political as their substructure, or they exper-ience degradation through loss of the political. The political is thus

characterized as autonomous because it is also characterized as anemphatic and privileged resource in society. In imputing particularsocietal emphasis to the political, however, these theories also deducethis societal emphasis from the assumption that the political is alwaysother than what is merely social, and it obtains its emphatic qualitybecause of its otherness to the social. The political is thus characterizedas emphatic because it is also characterized as autonomous. Underlyingthese theories of the political, therefore, is an act of theoretical con-cealment: the political is classified as autonomous (not social) because

it is emphatic, and it is classified as emphatic because it is autonomous(not social). However, exactly what the political is, and why it might beconstrued either as autonomous or as emphatic, does not come clearlyinto view.

To add to this critical observation, furthermore, it might also beargued that theories of the political normally sustain their approachesthrough apre-designation of the political. This means that theories ofthe political habitually construct the political by virtue of a primarydemarcation, in which they identify or isolate certain aspects of sociallife as principally political, and they then organize their analysis ofsociety, and its politics, in a perspective derived from this theoreticalpreconstruction. In this respect, theories of the political normally upholdtheir account of the political as autonomous, not by factually identifyingthe political and effectively explaining its distinction from or emphasisagainst the social, but by stabilizing a category of the political as priorto any analysis of its content or its societal position and so by deducingthe content of the political from strategically or artificially constructedhypostases. This difficulty in accounting for the content of the politicalis evident in all the theories considered above. Indeed, all of these

theories examine the political, not as plausibly or autonomously distinct from the social, but, through hypostatizing pre-designation, asprior to the social.

Weber and Schmitt, for example, both explained the political throughreference to assumptions implicitly derived from a philosophical anthro-pology, and they employed anthropological principles in order to detachcertain elements of human action from their specific social location andto ascribe a specific dignity as political to these elements of action.Weber described the political as an arena of social exchange that expresses

a human predisposition for competitive conflict over power,27 andwhich is focused, naturally, on the quest for a share of power.28 Schmittsubstantially followed this argument, although, as discussed, he addedto this the ethical claim that the political incorporates the integral

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dimensions of human life, situated above what is merely material ortechnical in humanity, and so it has an inherent representative quality.29

In analogy to this, later, Arendt also supported her analyses of the

political through essentially philosophical-anthropological constructions,constructing the political around an account of authentic human life asa specific capacity for freedom that is not determined in all its disposi-tions by material purposes or universal strategies.30 In each of thesetheories of the political, therefore, the distinction of the political fromthe social is established through a characterization of the human being,in prior abstraction from factual social process, as a bearer of certaindominant attributes or propensities, which theory takes upon itself todescribe as founding the political. The emphatic precedence of the polit-

ical over the social is sustained solely by a sequence of prior anthropo-logical postulates, and exactly why these features of human characterneed to be determined as political is left to rest on theorys own precon-struction of the political. In fact, in these anthropological analyses thepolitical is once again derived from a tautology: in each case, the politi-cal is seen as what is ingrained, as political, in human nature, and a societyis seen as possessing an autonomously and emphatically political char-acter because it is a society of human beings, who, through their innateconstitution, are always emphatically political. What is precisely politi-cal in those human dispositions and capacities that, in their politicality,are supposed perennially to underscore and guarantee integrity for societyis thus examined only through highly self-serving conceptual constructs.

More recent theory has been less comfortable with anthropologicalpresuppositions about the political. For example, although influencedby Arendt, Lefort derives his concept of the political from the suspensionof positive anthropological forms, and he defines what is authenticallypolitical in a human society as a condition of agency where all positiveor categorical certitude is suspended and human beings are placed in astate of subjective indeterminacy, in which the foundations of power,

law and knowledge have to be continuously recontested and rearticu-lated.31 Similarly, Laclau clearly detaches his theory from all suspicionof existential hypostasis or philosophical anthropology. In identifyingthe place of political agency as a relation between hegemonic structures,he negates the idea that there is one dominant political agent or one

positive and unifiedconception of human nature underlying all society,and he expressly denies that the content of the political can be distilledfrom monofocal human interests, motivations or modes of organiza-tion.32 It is in fact fundamental to Laclaus political deconstruction of

classical Marxism that he identifies many political subjects and manyforms of agency as constructing sites of the political.33

Despite such anthropological scepticism, however, both Lefort andLaclau follow earlier theories in determining the political through a

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process of predesignation. Lefort sees political agency as a condition ofreflexive liberty and primary freedom which is an inherent characteristicof authentic human life. Laclau, analogously, also explains the political

as a particular shape of agency that is located at decisive moments insocial formation: agency is political in those moments where the indeter-mination of a historical juncture becomes evident, and where a constel-lation for social liberation or hegemonic contestation becomes possible.For Laclau, the political is always a distinctive space of emancipatoryactivity, and this space can be occupied wherever a structural disloca-tion in society creates an opening for effective transformation.34 Thepolitical, therefore, is not expressly derived from any anthropologicalconstruction. However, it is still defined as a particular condition of

being: it is a socio-ontological reality that a subject accepts as its ownas it conflictually participates in the rearticulation of hegemonic claimsand the reshaping of social structures.35 The space of the political isconsequently, if not anthropologically, then surely ontologically pre-designated. In fact, Laclaus work might be seen to hinge on a conver-sion of originally anthropological claims into quasi-ontological analyses.Through this conversion, what is political in a society is once againdetermined as political before any specific construction of its content.

Similar critical observations can be made about Mouffes theory ofthe political. Mouffe argues that the political is a prior element of humanlife. As a dimension of conflict, the political is embedded in all humanactions and dispositions, and because they all have an essential proclivityfor conflict all human beings have an essential proclivity for pursuingacts of hegemonic or counter-hegemonic antagonism: that is, for actingpolitically. Human societies, then, obtain their defining structure fromthis original conflictual or political proclivity of human beings: the inner-most social recesses and habits of human societies bear memories of thearticulations of this proclivity and their organization is constantly shapedand reshaped by its renewed configurations. Like the theories discussed

above, however, this theory constructs what is political in a society bysimply presupposing that the agents that constitute this society, or atleast certain select behavioural tendencies attached to these agents, areoriginally political, and are consequently inclined to manifest themselvespolitically. Mouffes theory thus replicates, in new form, some of theanthropological premises of earlier doctrines and, like these doctrines,it struggles to examine the political in terms that are not either recur-sive or simplificatory, or both.

In each of these cases, in sum, theory that delineates the political as

relatively autonomous against the social and ascribes particular emphasisto the political does not offer an entirely plausible description of whatthe political might be or of why it needs to be construed as autonomous.Indeed, across this range of theories it is tempting to observe that we

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do not find one persuasive account of the political as a category ofautonomous social practice, and each theory has difficulty in providingnon-tautological terms to elucidate the content of the political. In fact,

it might be observed that theories attributing autonomy to the politicalagainst the social usually accomplish this by deducing the political fromhuman attributes or structural relations that are hypostatically deter-mined as prior to or invariable within society, and, in so doing, theysignally fail to examine the political as autonomous. Theory that arguesthat the political is autonomous because it can be distilled from animputed substratum of behavioural features or structural relations doesnot explain the autonomy of politics: it merely circumvents societalanalysis of the political by resorting to reductive and crudely founda-

tional constructions. On this basis, then, it might also be argued that,as they fail plausibly to determine the grounds for the autonomy of thepolitical, theories of the political are also unpersuasive in their assertionthat the political is emphatic through all society or that a demise of thepolitical is acutely experienced in all parts of society. In the theoriesexamined above, the claim for the general emphasis of the politicalrelies on the simple assumption that some aspects of human behaviourare naturally emphatic and that, because these behavioural emphasesare classified as political, the political must also be an emphatic socialresource.

A short history of the political

In expressing this critique, this article does not oppose the fundamen-tal theoretical claim that the political is an autonomous category ofsocial exchange. However, it argues, against hypostatic or quasi-anthro-pological constructions, that there are other, more effective, methods forexamining the specificity of the political and that the tautologies and

aporia in theories of the political are commonly caused by the mannerin which such theories examine the social. Indeed, this article argues thattheories of the political habitually rely on anthropological or hypostaticpreconditions precisely because they disarticulate the political from thesocial, or from the sociological, and that theory plausibly accountingfor the political, and for its autonomy, must find ways of reintegratingthe social, or the sociological, in its analyses. In consequence, it claimsthat political theory that reopens itself to sociology, or specifically tohistorical sociology, might observe that there are certain quite clear

socio-historical processes underlying the structure of the political inmodern societies, and that it is possible to employ socio-historical orsocio-theoretical perspectives to demonstrate how modern societies distilthe political, or something political, as an autonomous element of their

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functional fabric. Moreover, it also claims that modern societies tendto evolve political structures in relatively generalizable manner and thatit is possible to give a quite circumscribed account of the function,

examination and status of the political in such societies. This article thusproposes a change of methodological paradigm in the construction ofthe political, moving from the hypostatic to the socio-theoretical, andit suggests that this adjustment might alter both the manner in whichtheory accounts for the political and the claims made for the role andemphasis of the political in society. Following this change of paradigm,this article argues that it only makes sense to talk of the political if it isunderstood, not as a body of behavioural residues or structural relations,but as a term under which a society itself interprets and articulates its

processes, or some of its processes, as political. The concept of the polit-ical, thus, can be given meaning only through an analysis of societysown description of its political functions.

Examined historically, the formation of what is recognized as politi-cal in modern societies began as a process in which certain resources ofsocial power were gradually abstracted from the highly diffuse familial,local and ecclesiastical forms of feudal society and incrementally investedin formally structured institutions. Central to the emergence of the politi-cal was a consolidation of power as specifically political power, and anorganization of certain social exchanges as necessarily determined byand responsive to such power. The institutions that developed to transmitpolitical power, crucially, acquired two capacities that determined themas political: first, they were able to apply power in increasingly gener-alized form across regional, sectoral or patrimonial boundaries; second,they were able positively to authorize and implement their own decisionsand to generate iterable templates to explain their decisions withoutconstant rearticulation of why these decisions warranted complianceand without the repeated validation of these decisions by particular agree-ments.36 The initial distinction of what was political from what was not

political, therefore, depended on the abstraction of power as a general-ized social quantity that could be mobilized in a form not specificallyor exclusively determined by the immediate objective relations to whichit was applied. For this reason, the emergence of something determinableas political in society also depended on the specific capacity of politicalactors to use law as a positive medium for the general transmission ofpower.37 That is to say that, in the earliest formation of the political, lawprovided politics with a technically consistent form that could commu-nicate power by referring to written, or at least reasonably consistent,

patterns of legitimacy which it, as law, already contained and pre-supposed.38 Law thus permitted politics to mobilize these legitimatorypatterns in order to transmit its power across variations of place andtime. As a consequence of these features, law offered to politics the

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inestimable benefit that it was able to avert the need for an incessantcontestation or recontestation of the motives for powers applicationand it enabled politics to transplant and replicate throughout society

the preconditions for the authorized use of power. Fundamental to theformation of the political, therefore, was a process of schematic legalborrowing, in which political actors (later to become states) appropri-ated the legal apparatus of the papal Church, often (although not always)including the principles of Roman law,39 with which the Church hadalready begun to organize and legitimize itself as a hierarchically centredand relatively autonomous institutional agent.40 These legal forms offeredprinciples that were at once relatively stable and iterable, and theyallowed political actors to consolidate and explain their authority as

positively autonomous and increasingly dominant centres of power.41

One crucial point in this short analysis is that political theory iscorrect to identify the political as an autonomous category of societalpractice. From their very first inception, modern societies began to acquirespecifically political resources, and their continued evolution dependedon their ability increasingly to abstract these resources as autonomous.It is in fact fundamental to emerging modern societies that they learnedto identify those social themes to which power needed to be applied ingeneralized form, that they consolidated political vocabularies andreferences that enabled them to make and transmit political decisions,and that, by means of these references, they could gradually establishprocedures for communicating political power which were formally dis-tinct from procedures used for communicating decisions in other partsof society. Indeed, underlying the emergence of modern society and itsmodes of political transmission it is possible to identify a broaderdynamic of socio-functional differentiation, in which all different realmsof social practice gradually condensed around specific functions andevolved explanations of their functions in accordance with positive, rela-tively independent, and increasingly self-authorizing patterns.42 For this

reason, it is arguable that the autonomy of the political is a necessaryand formative fact for modern societies. The first indications of some-thing distinctively political in society refracted, through law, a processin which the political separated itself, in increasing autonomy, fromother social functions, and devised ways of explaining and legitimizingitself which required a dramatically decreasing level of interpenetrationwith the discursive forms specific to other parts of society.

Attached to this general account of the autonomy of the political,however, are two further points, which run counter to more common

claims about the political. First, in emerging modern societies the polit-ical was formed as autonomous, not as a specific group of behaviouralemphases or a particular set of liberating practices, but as a store of termsin which the political actors of a society could explain their functions

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as political and designate these functions as different from other socialfunctions. The political, therefore, did not evolve as autonomous becauseit is separate or in some way ontologically distinct from the social: it

evolved as the self-construction of one body of societal facts in relationto others. The political, even in its earliest abstraction, was formed asan amalgam of terms in which a society provided a construction of itspolitics (of its need to generalize a certain type of power) and generatedreproducible formulae for explaining its politics in categories distinguish-able as political. The political, therefore, originally evolved as irreduciblysocial, and it was in fact first constructed as political precisely becauseit was an element of the social. Second, then, even in the very earliestformation of the political as an autonomous societal category the politi-

cal was dialectically linked to a process of social de-politicization. Thatis to say that political power was able to articulate itself as such specifi-cally because it learned to transmit and explain itself by self-detachmentfrom other areas of social exchange and by self-authorization throughlegal media, which could be generalized across place and time withouttheir recurrent emphasis or localized politicization. In many social con-texts the formation of centralized political institutions, supported byincrementally unified laws, was in fact driven by a concerted endeavour(often promoted by those likely to be subject to governmental powerand uniform laws) to defuse particular social conflicts, to obviate theneed for a disruption of society caused by private judgement or partic-ularized contests over law-finding, and so to pursue the abstraction ofpolitical power as an explicit strategy of societal (self-)pacification.43 Inother words, therefore, political actors first began to act and auton-omously to explain themselves as political actors because they obtainedrelatively iterable and positive legal formulae, which rendered it possiblefor political decisions to be made in a manner that required less and lessintegration of other social contents into the political system, and soinvolved a possible minimum of particularized societal politicization.

The very earliest period of political formation was thus marked bythe fact that societies gradually accounted for power and its applicationas political, that they obtained legal means to apply political power, andthat they restricted or at least conferred a predictable structure on theirown residual politicality. This period, then, was followed by an era ofconcentrated state building (usually described as early modernity) inwhich societies began more clearly to circumscribe a limited group ofthemes as political, to form institutions dedicated consistently and auton-omously to the administration of these themes, and to produce a clear

and replicable corpus of principles in reference to which political insti-tutions could elucidate their reactions to those themes described as polit-ical. Historical sociologies of European states have usually claimed thatearly modern European history was characterized by the arrogation of

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exclusive jurisdictional powers by a small number of political actors andthus by an undivided concentration of political authority and powers ofextraction in territorial states.44 This is indubitably accurate. However,

it would be a mistake to view the composition of the political at thishistorical juncture as driven solely by a logic of societal convergence orby a fully coercive colonization of society by omnipotent political actors.On the contrary, in fact, this process of political evolution was alsoshaped by a widening societal recognition that, through the increasingdifferentiation of society, political power had irreversibly dislocateditself from other social relationships, and that power was now distilledaround quite specific and concentrated exchanges, which required bothdistinct institutional organization and distinctively positivized that is,

distinctively political authorizations for itself. Emergent states, there-fore, can be seen as early articulations of a societys autonomous con-struction of its politicality, and the nascence of states in early modernEurope reflected an expanding awareness that, as a relatively differen-tiated resource, political power needed, not only a positive judicial struc-ture and a coherent body of laws, but an administrative apparatus thatcould apply power in a relatively consistent and conventionalized manner.Far from solely tracing a process in which political actors annexed otherspheres of society, however, the emergence of states also expressed andreinforced the autonomy of societys politics as a resource that was distinc-tively limited against parts of society and other types of social exchange.

In parallel to the institutional consolidation and regional centraliza-tion of the political in states, the early modern era of European historyalso witnessed the emergence of a theoretical canon that allowed thepolitical to accentuate its status as an autonomous realm of social life.Naturally, theoretical abstractions arising from this process of politicalevolution were subject to extreme national variations. Nonetheless,across the borders between emergent states political thinkers in earlymodern Europe appear to have apprehended the emerging autonomy of

politics as a clear and general pattern in their social environments, andthey habitually devoted their mental energies to elucidating how thepolitical could be accounted for in fully positive and autonomous terms.It was for this reason, for instance, that Marsilius of Padua, the greatharbinger of early modern politics, first insisted on civil justice and thecommon benefit as the final criteria to determine the necessity of lawin its last and most proper sense.45 It was for this reason, then, thatMartin Luther asserted that in the world the authorities have a duty topreserve external peace,46 and, as long as they accomplish this, they

command what they want, and the subjects accept it.47 It was for thisreason, later, that Thomas Hobbes used a theory of the social contractto propose an entirely positive analysis of the autonomy of the bodypolitic, which ascribed largely unlimited authority to political authority

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and in fact allowed this authority to pass laws not as Counsell, butas Command without any external source or derivation.48 And it wasfor this reason, still later, that Christian Thomasius definitively severed

the thread between law and religion to claim that law is a science whosesole purpose is to show the ways and means to further external politi-cal peace and order.49 Across national divisions, in sum, early moderncontroversies about the political were settled by the acceptance that asociety possesses something categorically political and that what is politi-cal in a society is distinct and abstracted from its other resources. Thesecontroversies coincided in the verdict that the political incorporates anaggregate of social functions focused on themes that have generalizedimplications across society and cannot be fully resolved by local or

sectoral institutions, and that, in responding to these themes, institutionsneed autonomous, positive and generalized (that is, locally and objec-tively unspecified) explanations to facilitate their use of power. In conse-quence of this, the political gradually emerged as a mode of autonomoustheoretical self-reflection in most European societies, as all societiesincreasingly presupposed relatively generalized or at least consistentlyiterable conceptual preconditions to designate some social themes aspolitical and to support, authorize, simplify and accelerate the applica-tion of power to themes of this kind.50

By the middle of the 17th century, therefore, the political had becomea constantly co-implied substructure in the social communications ofmost European societies, and reference could be made to the political,and the powers and justifications that it contained, whenever a societyneeded to articulate responses to social themes likely to acquire gener-alized resonance. By this stage, moreover, it might also be argued thatthe political had developed techniques that allowed it to presuppose orpreserve an account of its own autonomy, and that societies constantlyrelied on the presence of abstracted political functions and autonomouspolitical validity claims to perpetuate their everyday realities. It is there-

fore surely no coincidence that this period in European history also sawthe consolidation of distinctive concepts of political legitimacy, whichusually utilized (very flexibly defined) principles of natural right to justifygeneral forms and particular acts of government. Early concepts of legiti-macy formed a repository of terms in which early political actors (nowclose to being states) could enunciate accounts of their functions andstore a volume of justifications for their actions in easily available andconveniently transferable theoretical memories.51 The concept of legiti-macy, in other words, although widely perceived as a dominant locus of

theoretical politicization in early modern Europe, evolved as a variabletemplate in which societies could simplify accounts of their politics andso finally consolidate their political functions as fully autonomous. Infact, the concept of legitimacy enabled what was political in a society

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to refer to a constructed description of itself that concentrated the politi-cal as autonomous but that also preserved the political as relativelyimmune to broader societal politicization.

It is important to note, however, that, precisely at the point inEuropean history where a relatively autonomous concept of the politi-cal had begun to stabilize and fully generalize itself in society, this conceptwas unsettled and refigured by a wider process of social transformation.This occurred in the period usually known as the Enlightenment, in whichEuropean societies experienced an increasingly widespread and acceler-ated dynamic of socio-functional evolution and differentiation, in whichother spheres of social practice (especially the economy, the sciences,medicine and the arts) also rapidly approached a condition of full func-

tional autonomy.52

This meant that the evolving political system wassuddenly forced to account for its autonomy by reflecting on how whatis political in a society could explain itself in a societal constellationdefined by an increasingly pluralistic functional fabric and on howpolitical contents could be legitimized across the boundaries betweensocial spheres which were increasingly structured by dramatically diver-gent imperatives and interests. As a result of this, it transpired that thepolitical could only stabilize its autonomy and legitimacy, and indeedperpetuate itself as political, by providing precise formulae to mark itsboundaries and to sensibilize itself towards other realms of social practice.In the longer period of Enlightenment, therefore, the general autonomyand legitimacy of the political became dependent on acts of self-limiting,and the political came to require both a self-explanation and a mode oftransmission that acknowledged, sanctioned and protected the basicautonomy of other, equally autonomous, social spheres.

At this juncture, then, the formation and articulation of the politicalas an autonomous social category entered a third and decisive period.During the Enlightenment, the political, in its autonomy, became struc-turally dependent upon the constitutional inscription of formal rights,53

and rights became crucial preconditions for the modern form of thepolitical. Rights acted as preconditions for the political in three distinctways. First, in identifying persons as bearers of uniform subjective rightsstates were able to generalize the conditions under which they appliedpower to social agents in different social spheres and they could avoidstimulating controversies over the application of power across ranks,locations and functional distinctions. As a result of this, rights helpedstates both to facilitate their own operations and to externalize a legiti-matory account of themselves as respecting and protecting the dignity

and freedom of particular social agents and, in consequence, they allowedstates to propose themselves as entitled to integrate the addressees oftheir power in relatively pacified manner. Both practically and theoreti-cally, therefore, rights permitted states to consolidate generally structured

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interfaces between themselves and other parts of society and, at the sametime, to condense a self-construction of the political that could be usedto accompany, justify and diffusely de-emphasize the application of power.

In the context of a rapidly evolving and functionally pluralized society,therefore, rights became the distinctively modern reference which thepolitical employed to perpetuate its autonomy. Second, rights also actedto place clear limits on the place of the political in society and to restrictwhat was political against other emergent spheres of social practice.54

For example, by defining freedoms of ownership, contract, movementand expression as subject to constitutional protection, rights acted towithdraw certain activities (i.e. economic activities requiring freedom ofownership, contract or movement, or scientific issues requiring freedom

of expression) from emphatic or obdurate political control. In perform-ing this role, rights had the function that they enabled states to concen-trate their own self-explanation and legitimacy around specific groupsof clearly political themes, they provided criteria by which statescould identify and preselect those themes to which their power shouldbe applied, and they allowed states to avoid being overburdened (andperhaps de-legitimized) by the requirement that they address an exces-sively high volume of excessively politicized issues.55 Rights, thus, rapidlyacquired the function that they placed boundaries around what wasconstructed as political and they objectivized the limits of the politicalin relation to themes in society that could not effectively be politicized.In this respect, third, rights also acted, not only to preserve the politicalas an autonomous group of functions, but proportionately to locate thepolitical in society, to obstruct the expansion of the political directivesbeyond the limits of the political, and so to support and maintain societyas a whole in its emergent condition of differentiation.

At this stage in social evolution, therefore, societies clearly requiredautonomous accounts of the political: that is, they needed positive formsto allow them to respond and apply power to matters of socially gener-

alized significance. Simultaneously, however, other spheres of socialpractice also obtained highly refined capacities for self-regulation, andsocietys need for dramatically totalized political decisions became increas-ingly scarce. Moreover, in a condition of increasing social plurality otherspheres of social practice could not be easily or advantageously regu-lated by political decisions, and the legitimacy of a political system couldeasily be undermined in cases where it sought coercively to determineexchanges in areas not immediately sensitive to political power. At thispoint in modern history, then, rights and constitutions served, at one

and the same time, both to generalize and to limit the political, and toreflect the fact that, in a pluralistically evolving society, the politicalcould only preserve its autonomy (and legitimacy) by stating this interms that were simultaneously general and limited.56 Indeed, it might

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be suggested, as a speculative thesis, that the reason why modern statesbegan to develop constitutions, and why these constitutions instituteda formal rights regime that transformed rights from honoured privileges

and immunities of social groups into universal/subjective rights ofparticular persons, was that states could utilize rights to underwrite theautonomy of their power and to ensure that their power was applied asefficiently and as unemphatically as possible to the many increasinglypluralistic social environments by which they were surrounded.57 Conse-quently, if the emergence of the political during the first formation ofmodern societies was marked by a twofold or even dialectical process,in which, at one and the same time, the political was crystallized asautonomous and de-emphasized in relation to other areas of society, this

telos of political construction culminated in the formation of constitu-tions and constitutional rights. Natural rights, constitutional rights andhuman rights evolved, during the period of Enlightenment, as institu-tions through which political actors could both simplify their own justi-ficatory accounts of themselves and reduce the emphasis of their relationwith other spheres and modes of social practice, and so produce prac-tical and theoretical conditions under which they could pursue thoseobjectives delineated as political.

This emerging function of rights was clearly reflected in both thetheoretical and the practical aspects of state building and political evolu-tion during the Enlightenment. Political theories of this era were normallyin agreement that politics as a whole must be positively accounted foras a distinct and generalized focus of accountability in society: theyagreed that politics was formed by substantive and generalizable agree-ments (often called social contracts) that provided positively demonstra-ble principles to authorize political power. However, they also agreed,by and large, that political power was necessarily curtailed, and it waslimited at once by proprietary rights, procedural rights and (rudimen-tary) rights of subjective or personal autonomy.58 In this respect, the main

theories of the Enlightenment appropriated and rearticulated earlier ideasof natural law to insist on the inviolability of subjective and proprietaryrights of particular persons, usually to be defended by constitutions.59

Moreover, theorists at this time also normally agreed that respect forrights should be guaranteed through the dismemberment of the stateinto executive and sub-executive competences, and the growth of thejudicial power, enshrined in a written or informal constitution, wasalmost universally perceived as a necessary principle of legitimate polit-ical administration.60 In the revolutionary upheavals of this period, then,

institutional actors also began to accept relatively constrained constructsof the political and they increasingly employed constitutions and consti-tutional rights to consolidate their functions through an immunization oftheir societal boundaries. At this time, for instance, states began to insist

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on the autonomy of religion in relation to the political: they achievedthis by prescribing tolerance as a civic necessity and by granting rightsof freedom of belief and protection for religious minorities. States began

to insist on the autonomy of the economy in relation to the political:they achieved this by extending the consensual element in monetarypolicy,61 instituting rights of fiscal consent,62 and even transformingmandatory taxpayers into rights-bearing citizens.63 Additionally, statesalso began to insist on the integrity of the law in relation to the political:they achieved this by sanctioning judicial neutrality and by institutingpermanent constitutional documents to protect the law from constantvariation and from either legislative or executive encroachment. Theseprocesses acted to preserve the differentiation and autonomy of all parts

of society. In all these processes, however, states specifically used theascription of rights to conserve their own power, and their legitimatoryaccounts of their own power, as specifically and autonomously political.

On these grounds, it can be concluded that in modern societies thepolitical is necessarily autonomous. In fact, it can be viewed as a struc-tural precondition of modern societies that the political forms itself as afully distinct sphere of practice and legitimization. However, the politi-cal is not autonomous because, in some ancient Aristotelian manner, itexpresses distinctive human features, emphatic structural relationships,or sites of reflexive or discursive liberty. The political is a resource distilledfrom a many-layered evolutionary trajectory: this process involves, first,the increasing articulation of a set of themes that require generalizedresolutions and a number of institutions capable of meeting this require-ment; second, the increasing structural divergence of different dimen-sions of modern society; third, the increasing ability of political actorsto reduce the manifest emphasis of their communications with othersocial sectors. At the fulcrum of this evolutionary trajectory is the forma-tion of constitutional rights. Fundamental to a modern societys abilityto account for itself as possessing something autonomously political is

the fact that states have learned to filter social themes, and to controltheir responses to social themes, through the formalization of rights. Inmodern societies the political explains itself as autonomous (and legiti-mate) by using rights to limit the probability that themes originatingin the economy, law, religion, or the arts will become disruptive orpolitically exceptional, and, in the same process, to ensure that its ownresponses to such themes are commensurately measured to the pluralityand differentiation of contemporary social life-contexts.64 The autonomyof the political, therefore, is always a curtailed or equivalent autonomy,

and in a modern society the political, structured around rights, alwayspresupposes its own reflexive de-politicization.

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The political and its autonomy reconsidered

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

process that external forces, usually guided by ethically inflected or polit-ically intensified social programmes, have imposed upon the state, oftento restrict the states manifest political authority.65 However, this articleargues that the granting of rights by states is not, or at least not pri-marily, the outcome of voluntaristic political conflicts or socio-politicalopposition to the state. Instead, the historical process of rights allocationcan equally be viewed as an internal evolutionary function that stateshave elaborated in order specifically to preserve their autonomy as polit-ical actors: that is, to remainpolitical.

As discussed, states of the Enlightenment first used rights to protecttheir own growing political autonomy: in allocating basic civil rights andproprietary rights emergent modern states were able to concentrate theirpower in consistently circumscribed and legitimized parameters. Yet itcan also be argued thatpolitical rights had an analogous function. Afterthe earliest wave of constitutional formation, the allocation of constitu-tionally enshrined rights of political inclusion and participation to some,and then (gradually) to most, social agents can also be interpreted as amechanism that states evolved for their own internal functional reasons.In applying political rights to designate social agents as entitled to playa role in endorsing or even establishing state power, states created asecondary apparatus by means of which, against the background of arapidly evolving social reality, they could reaffirm and restabilize thepreconditions of their autonomy. In conferring political rights on socialagents, states developed a technique through which they were able toextract the addressees of their power from their different and increasinglypluralized life-contexts and to transpose a construction of these agentsinto their own manifest, yet also relatively manufactured and control-lable, external periphery. By examining agents in this periphery as rights-

holders or fully entitled citizens, states were able to include these agents(and their rights) in their own self-explanation as legitimate and so,through this construction, to articulate and substantiate positive, evidentand iterable explanations for their decisions and laws. The principle ofpolitical citizenship thus became a factual institution in which states couldobjectively externalize the grounds of their legitimacy and even give ademonstrable or experiential structure to justificatory principles that had,at earlier stages in the states evolution, possessed a largely inchoate orimplicit conceptual status. Primarily, therefore, the early rights of citizen-

ship served externally to underscore the autonomy and the positivepoliticality of the state, and through the conferring of these rights states,far from suffering a diminution of power, obtained clear practical benefitsand a concrete reinforcement of their power. As the young Karl Marx

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apprehended, the fact that citizens were allotted shared political rightsallowed states to pre-structure the conditions in which social themeswere channelled into the political arena, to harden the periphery of the

political order against emergent or unpredictable issues, and so, again,consistently to de-emphasize the relation between politics and other socialfunctions.66 Like earlier private or civil rights, therefore, political rightsalso acted as material filters by means of which states could stabilize theirrelations to other spheres of society, generate fluid and de-politicizedpremises for their actions, and articulate their legitimacy without func-tionally compromising their autonomy.

In addition to this, in fact, this theory of rights can also be expandedto include the allocation of material rights or social rights. Analysis of

social rights usually assumes that recent history (albeit with certainlapses) has witnessed an edifying thickening of the rights offered by thestate, so that citizens are now integrated in the political system, not onlyas bearers of civil and political rights, but also as claimants to materialdignity.67 Against this classical view, however, the construction of socialrights around principles of welfare might also be seen as a formal self-articulation of autonomous political functions in which the politicalsystem, in a hypertrophically complex society, uses rights to stabilize theterms of sustainable interaction between itself and the economy. Indeed,social rights might also be seen as devices that states utilize to controlthe parameters of political and economic exchanges, and, in enshriningentitlements to allocable resources, to palliate and control the residualpoliticality of precarious social themes. In earlier periods of societal evo-lution, therefore, the inscription of civil, proprietary and political rightsin the states constitution created manifest and generalized formulae tosustain the autonomy and legitimacy of the political system. Contem-porary political systems now deploy social rights in order, in one andthe same act, both to include and to exclude social themes as politicaland to generalize and to limit their own power. Even the imputation of

social rights by modern states can thus be conceived as a necessary andconstitutive self-restriction of the political.

If this historical-theoretical account of the political is accepted, it canbe concluded that what is political in a society evolves as autonomousbecause in a modern society the primary function of the political systemis to act as an agent of social filtration and societal de-politicization.The political system fulfils its de-politicizing function in three function-ally and historically overlapping ways. First, it uses proprietary civil andpolitical rights to generalize its relation to its social environments and,

by these means, it ensures that the foundations for its policies and deci-sions are positively secure and need not be repeatedly renegotiated.Second, it applies legal titles (usually through civil and political rights)to matters acquiring problematic importance in other spheres of society

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and it limits the extent to which these can be or need to be politicized.Third, it applies rights to trace the threshold of politicality in the relationbetween politics and other areas of society (especially the economy), and

it marks out formulae for the simultaneous political inclusion and exclu-sion of socio-economic themes. In all of these processes, therefore, rightsare used by the political system to restrict the degree to which socialthemes become political, and to preserve the political system as an auton-omous and legitimate, but also relatively limited, political agent: as anagent, in fact, whose autonomy, legitimacy and politicality depend on itsself-limitation. The political system then uses the aggregate of legitima-tory benefits accruing to it through its use of rights to fulfil a (relativelylimited) range of functions, which are underpinned and legitimized by

its self-explanation as political. In a modern society, therefore, the polit-ical is indeed autonomous. Yet its autonomy is largely founded in thedual capacity of the political system to subject nascent social conflictsto legal filtration and to ensure that its own political power is notemphatically applied or challenged.

What remains of the political?

The concept of the political outlined here suggests that, although thepolitical surely possesses a certain autonomy in modern society, the polit-ical is specifically not the outgrowth of emphatic behavioural or struc-tural features of a society. While other theories accounting for thepolitical as autonomous suggest that the political is a positive reality inwhich a society provides a description of its fundamental character, thistheory argues that, in many ways, the opposite is the case. What ispolitical in a modern society is concentrated around rights. Like all legit-imatory expressions of a societys politicality, rights might be perceivedas a normative structure in which a society gives a generalized explana-

tion of itself and of the ways in which it responds to those social concernsthat require generalized resolution. Yet rights possess this status preciselybecause they are the forms in which a society elects to defuse or to de-politicize these concerns, and they in fact serve as institutions by meansof which a society can avoid producing or confronting a socially con-densed or fully political account of itself. Rights permit societies to escapethe difficult and de-stabilizing experience of its convergence around cate-gorical political conflicts or emphatic political decisions. In other words,what is political in a modern society sustains its autonomy and legiti-

macy precisely in that moment that it de-politicizes itself, and a societysdescription of its politics is always likely to recede behind the principles(usually enshrined as rights) through which it protects itself against polit-ical emphasis, concentration and self-confrontation. In a modern society,

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therefore, the political is not positively or substantially constituted. Thepolitical is an ongoing process of societys own de-politicization, andwhat is political can be extracted and deciphered, almost ex negativo,

only from the conditions of this process.Following this analysis, if theory insists that the political is auton-

omous and if it demands that in contemporary society the politicalshould be emphatically contested and negotiated, the terrain for this re-emphasis of the political ought to be reconsidered. On the accountoffered here, what is autonomously political in a modern society is theset of processes by means of which a society stabilizes its conflicts throughrights. In consequence, political contests in society can only, ultimately,be conflicts over rights: rights are the formulae in which in modern

society social themes can assume political relevance and demand polit-ical inclusion. As such, however, political contests are only, at a mostessential level, contests over the sustainable conditions of social de-politicization: they are contests that require the political system to re-formulate the conditions of its autonomy by capping new social themeswith legal titles rights and by integrating these into the external formin which it explains and underwrites its relation to other spheres ofsocial exchange. In most instances, it should be stated, political contestsare likely to occur through the internal or judicial dynamics of the fabricof rights that the political system has already evolved. That is to saythat political contents are normally expressed where a political systemis made to identify contradictions between different elements in theclusters of rights which its constitution contains and where a politicalsystem is obliged to expand one right in such a cluster in order to liberate,extend, qualify, or obstruct the application of one other right or a numberof other rights. A primary example of this, at the level of political rights,is the historical contest through which rights of civil equality were,because of their inner tensions, gradually amplified, first, to includeformal rights of political equality, and then to incorporate all social

sectors in effective enfranchisement.68 A further example of this, at thelevel of social or material rights, is the classical conflict in early consti-tutions between inviolable rights of property ownership and rights ofhuman dignity, a conflict eventually (in part) resolved through the formalor informal acceptance that rights of dignity include rights to a share innational wealth and so countervail or at least qualify formal rights ofownership. At a more contemporary level, this might also be identifiedin current debates about environmental rights, in which some rightsof ownership are increasingly seen as conflicting with general rights of

personal dignity or with specific social rights,69 and the tension in therelation between these rights makes (as far as is possible) their re-equilibration, through some guarantee of environmentally founded rights,probable, or even foreseeable. Such contests over rights might be seen

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as articulations of the political in a society because they attach to ques-tions that force the political system to address and include new themesand to restructure the boundaries of the political. Most particularly,

however, such contests are political because they oblige the politicalsystem to articulate new strategies for simplifying its relation to otherparts of society, to effect a renewed exclusion of certain themes fromemphatic politicization, and to use new concepts that is, new, or newlyformalized, rights to mark those themes subject to such exclusion.70

Essentially, therefore, if the political entails conflict, it is a conflict overthe terms of social de-politicization.

This article consequently concludes that the claim that a societydisplays the political, as distinct from the social, through emphatic

positive exchanges or primary descriptions of its structural orientationsbadly misarticulates the status and the content of the political in society.Likewise, theory that demands more politics, or that views a repoliti-cization of the political in society as a path to greater human freedom,is also deeply misguided in its analysis. In fact, the difficulties that theoryencounters in attempting to provide a substantial foundation for thepolitical are linked to the fact that the political is not a substantialresource, and, although it possesses relative autonomy, this autonomyis socially neutral, and it is not formally distinct from the autonomy ofmedicine, the arts, the law, the economy, or education. The political isin fact a group of strategies for social de-politicization, which are, inmodern society, necessarily attached to rights. These strategies have noprimary ontological or anthropological basis, and they can be compre-hended only through a wider sociological reconstruction of a societysevolution, its functional specification, and its need for effective differen-tiation. Theorists who claim autonomy for the political, in short, mightproductively revise their attitudes to sociological theory, and to under-stand the political they might benefit from observing it (in purely socio-logical terms) as a construct of society itself, or in fact as a form in

which a society communicates about itself and its functions. Moreover,theorists who claim autonomy for the political might accept that,precisely because the political is autonomous, it refers to a very discreteset of societal exchanges, and that societies do not lightly allow theirpolitical accounts of themselves to be confronted or challenged. Rights,once again, trace the contours of societys politics, but they have thespecific function that they make it difficult for the content of politics tobe directly addressed or emphasized.

The implications of this construction of the political are dialectical.

It implies at one level that a society can only allow its politics to beapproached through contests over rights and that any theory or activityplacing emphasis on the political must express itself through anattempted reconfiguration of societys rights. At the same time, however,

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it also indicates that rights help societies to de-politicize themselves andthat their primary function is to preserve societies from an undifferen-tiated excess of the political. For this reason, this article concludes that,

precisely because the political is an autonomous realm within society,not all societal contents can be emphatically or even meaningfully politi-cized, and the assumption that every conflictual exchange is a politicalcontest, or that the political has a necessary conflictual structure, isillusory, nave and theoretically unsustainable. It is fictitious to associatewhat is political in society with what is positively emphatic in society:this association contradicts the entire logic of modern societal forma-tion.71 Despite this, however, the relatively modest account of societyspolitics that is proposed here still allows a space for the political, and

it invites theories or activities accounting for themselves as political toreflect on and even position themselves and their strategies as techniquesof possible societal de-politicization. Nonetheless, the account of politicsgiven here suggests that theories or activities proposing themselves aspolitical ought perhaps to understand their own politicality within thewider horizon of a societys politicality and to sense that their politicalstrategies are not likely to be effective or successful if they are not pro-portioned to the broader processes in which a society is able to consti-tute and articulate itself (or some of its exchanges) as political.

Department of Politics, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK

Notes

I would like to thank my Glasgow colleague, Chris Berry, and my Londoncolleague, Samantha Ashenden, for showing great generosity in reading earlierdrafts of this article and for providing illuminating and stimulating criticalcommentary on some of its themes. I have tried to respond to their criticismsin the final version.

1 See Jeffrey Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, vol. III, The ClassicalAttempt at Theoretical Synthesis: Max Weber (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1983), p. 76.

2 Max Weber, Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland,in Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr,1922), pp. 30643 (340).

3 ibid., p. 309.

4 Carl Schmitt, Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentaris-mus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1923), p. 22; Carl Schmitt, Der Hterder Verfassung(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1931), p. 90.

5 Schmitt, Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage, p. 13.

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6 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,1932), p. 29.

7 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1922),

p. 7.8 On the centrality of concept of representation for Schmitt, see ReinhardMehring, Pathetisches Denken. Carl Schmitts Denkweg am LeitfadenHegels: Katholische Grundstellung und anti-marxistische Hegelstrategie(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), p. 55.

9 See Carl Schmitt, Weiterentwicklung des totalen Staats in Deutschland,in C. Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufstze aus den Jahren 19241954.Materialien zu einer Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958),pp. 35966; Schmitt, Der Hter der Verfassung, p. 79.

10 Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1928), p. 209.

11 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress, 1958), p. 257.12 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press, 1953), pp. 1336.13 Blandine Kriegel, Ltat et les Esclaves: Rflexion pour lhistoire des tats

(Paris: Payot, 1989), p. 32.14 ibid., p. 64.15 Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1986), p. 20.16 ibid., p. 29.17 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (London:

Verso, 1999), p. 61.18 See Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of PoliticalOntology (London: Verso, 1999), p. 172.

19 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2001),p. 186.

20 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 9. See alsoGlen Newey, After Politics: The Rejection of Politics in ContemporaryLiberal Philosophy (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2001), p. 209.

21 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 18.22 ibid., p. 17.23 ibid.24 ibid., p. 21.25 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), p. 131.26 See, especially, Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, pp. 8895; Zizek, The

Ticklish Subject, p. 188. This idea has also found its way into the theoryof international relations. In my view, the theory of international relationshas not been greatly improved by this. See Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralismand International Relations: Bringing the Political back in (London: LynneRienner, 1999), p. 139.

27 Weber, Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland, p. 341.28 Max Weber, Politik als Beruf, in Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften,

pp. 50560 (506).29 Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, p. 209.30 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 176.31 Lefort, Essais, p. 30.

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32 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 181.33 ibid., p. 161.34 Laclau, New Reflections, pp. 501.

35 ibid., p. 20.36 See Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe,9001300, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 39; John W.Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of FrenchRoyal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley and London: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1986), p. 42.

37 My theory of legal positivization as a key to understanding the genesis ofmodern society and modern politics is strongly influenced by NiklasLuhmann. For an account of this fundamental aspect of Luhmanns work,see Niklas Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main

thornhill - the autonomy of the political

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