2567. Book Review: The Liberal Defense of Murder

By Philipe Sands, The Guardian, February 20, 2009

This book addresses two issues: why the US uses force, and why some leftists and liberals provide support. Both give rise to speculative responses, and propel the writer into a hazardous exercise. Who can say, after all, the real reason that President Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, or what truly motivated a particular individual to lend support. Beyond instinct or intuition, both issues require mastery of many factors - history, geopolitics, money, psychology, political philosophy, to suggest but a few. To engage in both tasks, as Richard Seymour does with this ambitious book, is to undertake a project that faces considerable hurdles.

Seymour believes that the US has long been engaged in an imperial enterprise, and that its foot soldiers include a great number of liberals and progressives (Nick Cohen and Michael Ignatieff among them). Seymour casts these thinkers and writers as enablers. "Imperialism is not a distant relic, but a living reality," he writes, "and the moralisation of the means of violence has been the task of liberal and progressive intellectuals since they first competed with clerics for moral authority." The charge is deep. It may be sustainable for some of his targets, in some instances, but the generality of the attack undermines its effectiveness.

One reason is that Seymour never grapples with the reality that the US has used force for a multitude of different reasons over the past five decades, and that some instances are justifiable whereas others are not. In short, not every use of force justifies a charge of murder. You need some basic criteria to distinguish between what is just and unjust, lawful and unlawful, murderous or not. Seymour doesn't identify any. On this account, it seems all force is wrong, so that any liberal support may be treated as liberal justification for murder. That doesn't hold up. Iraq I (1990) wasn't Kosovo, which wasn't Sierra Leone, which wasn't Afghanistan, which wasn't Iraq II (2003). There is no seamless link between these military expeditions. The reality is more complex, and requires engagement with a basic question: when can one state use military force against another?

The answer, in law if not morality, was "settled" by the UN charter in 1945, a document that Seymour ignores. Against the backdrop of the second world war, the then world of nation states - less numerous than today, ostensibly more colonial - came together to replace the status quo that basically allowed them to use force whenever they wanted. Under the new rules, military force was lawful in just two circumstances: self-defence (when an armed attack had occurred or was imminent) or where the security council authorised its use (requiring a resolution adopted by a positive vote with no permanent member voting against). That, at least, was the theory. In practice, the scheme had many opponents, not least the neocons who sat in the upper galleries of the Bush administration, drawing inspiration from another bunch of former progressives - men such as Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer - from the 1950s who proceeded to travel another path.

The UN drafters sowed the seeds for a third possible justification for war, the heart of Seymour's critique. For the first time in a multilateral treaty, the charter gave legal force to the notion of fundamental human rights for all. But that commitment was to be balanced with an obligation not to interfere in the domestic affairs of another state. Ever since, the $64m issue has been how to balance these competing commitments. Did the drafters of the charter envisage circumstances in which a huge threat to human rights in one country could justify the use of force? An affirmative answer opens the door to humanitarian intervention. Seymour seems to come down on the side of those who believe human rights violations should not justify force, while many of those he aims at - irrespective of whether or why they supported some or all of Iraq I and II, or Kosovo, or Afghanistan (in 2001) - take the opposite view.

So the book becomes a bit of a rant. In charting the intellectual roots of this apparently open-ended appetite for violence, mayhem and murder, important points of detail are missed - what was the justification for the war? - and the transformed framework of rules and principles is bypassed. Iraq I was explicitly authorised by security council resolution, Iraq II was not. Afghanistan was, at least initially, seen to be justified by the unanimous security council resolution 1373, an act of self-defence. Many will not be pleased by such security council actions, but their existence has important consequences and they cannot be ignored.

Humanitarian intervention has been the subject of longstanding attempts at codification. After Kosovo, which was problematic on many grounds, the Canadian government sponsored an effort to develop new principles, known as the Responsibility to Protect. After 2003, that effort ground to a halt, as Iraq made clear the potential for abuse. Over the long term, the real critique of those who supported the latest Iraq war is that they killed off any hope, for now at least, of garnering support to use force where massive violations of fundamental human rights are taking place. It is not sufficient to label the US as "the chief inheritor of the legacy of violent white supremacy". The more obvious conclusion - if such a claim is to be made - is that those who are on the receiving end of what Seymour perceives as US excess have, through the acts of their own governments, or their failure to object, contributed to their own oppression.

The Liberal Defence of Murder glosses over vastly important issues. Was the post-second world war human rights project intended to create new conditions of colonial domination? Has it contributed to circumstances in which there will be more oppression and misery, rather than less? Have the economic rules promoting globalisation engendered war? A scattershot aim at "liberal and progressive intellectuals" doesn't hit home. Force can be justifiable in some circumstances, in domestic law and in international law. The difficult issue is when, and the answer to that turns on the particularities of each case. The generality of Seymour's conclusion, the broad sweep of his argument and the passion of his attack are overstated, dissipating their force. More nuance and context could have made this potentially important book compelling. It is a shame, as buried in these pages and their footnotes is a great deal of damning material on the apologists of recent illegalities.

2566. Book Review: The Intimacies of Four Continents

By John Holmwood, Theory, Culture and Society, November 4, 2015

Abstract: Lisa Lowe’s book addresses the colonial relationships that connect the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. These relationships of appropriation and dispossession are integral to liberal thought and no matter how much it seeks to present itself as transcending these contexts, liberal thought is continually fractured by them. The book asks its readers to confront the formation of modern political subjectivity and its implication in the very disciplinary subjects through which we claim to know.

This is a challenging book, which should be read by all those interested in the history of capitalism and the formation of the social sciences. It is especially challenging to sociologists who have, for too long, worked with a standard account that serves to establish core concepts of contemporary sociology. According to this standard account, capitalist modernity is a key object of sociological inquiry which focuses on the rise in Europe of the nation state, political democracy and a civil society organised around market exchanges. The colonial conditions of modernity rarely get a look in.

Within sociology, the standard approach has been challenged by Gurminder K Bhambra (2014) and her idea of connected sociologies. Lisa Lowe – professor of English and American studies at Tufts University – develops a similar argument for an expansive understanding of the global social and cultural conditions of what is typically regarded as European modernity. For many of us working in the social sciences, we might be moved to ask at the end of the book; why has our range of engagements with the history of modernity been so limited? And why are the humanities more open to the insights of postcolonial critique than the social sciences?

Lowe’s arguments are compelling, even if her data is unfamiliar. The focus of her book is, “the often obscure connections between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century” (2015: 1). Where do we learn of these phenomena in our histories of sociology? ‘Settler colonialism’, for example, is not one of our ‘forms’ of capitalist modernity, at least not in the standard sociological accounts, and not in what we teach our students. We may have learned to add to the writers deemed to be canonical, but we have yet to disrupt our conceptual canon.

Lowe makes a bold claim and a moral claim and I, for one, am persuaded by both aspects: “the social inequalities of our time are a legacy of these process through which ‘the human’ is ‘freed’ by liberal forms, while other subjects, practices, and geographies are placed at a distance from the ‘human’” (2015: 2). The dispossession of Native Americans through colonial enclosure, the movement of populations through enslavement and indenture – the figure of the ‘slave’ and the ‘coolie’ – are these not all implicated in the protection of our ‘hard-earned’ patrimony in the fences currently erected in the US and in Europe against migrants? We continue to promote our invention of freedom and deny it in the present, just as we denied it in the past. Importantly, we are implicated as liberal subjects – as citizens – but we are also implicated as purveyors of social scientific reason formed in the very concepts that are at issue.

The arguments of the book are more aligned to cultural studies than to studies of social structure, but we should not be insensible to their mutual implication. The chapters set out different ‘journeys’ and the narratives they describe illustrate and illuminate mutual entailments of freedom and subjugation, privilege and degradation, possession and expropriation – these entailments are the ‘intimacies’ of the title. They are geographically extensive and they bring social structures of colonial modernity in their wake.

Lowe sets out four key journeys: the life journey, or autobiography, of formerly enslaved African, Olaudah Equiano, published in London 1789 in the same year as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in Paris; Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and the journeys of colonial commodities that embroider the text and provide key settings, unobtrusive in the background but defining meanings; the journeys of the East India Company to China and Hong Kong establishing trades in opium and indentured labour; the journeys of enslaved Africans and their representation in historical narratives that elide the self-emancipations recorded by C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois.

There is much to enjoy in each of these chapters, especially, the dialectical interweaving of liberal conceptions and their negation, and the careful delineation of context and claim. Ultimately, however, the book is a dissection of liberalism and its fractured and fracturing presence in the modern world. It takes its place alongside, Chakrabarty’s (1989) Provincializing Europe, or Mehta’s (1999) Liberalism and Empire. More than anything, it also sends us back to C.L.R. James (1963 [1938]) and his Black Jacobins, not least because one of the inspirations was his remark that, “Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me” (cited by Lowe 2015: 73). For Lowe, it is Thackeray, rather than Marx, who registers the presence of colonial commodities and their circulation through Victorian households.

Yinko Shonibare’s ship in a bottle which was installed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2010-2012, confronted Nelson’s column celebrating his victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. Lowe chooses it as an illustration of her book and it is fitting. Shonibare’s ship confronts Britain’s colonial and Imperial past, but in looking to the past, it also brings that past into the present where it continues to live. This is precisely the point of Lowe’s book. Our political discourses and our disciplinary discourses are each formed by the past. The promise of freedom remains a promise precisely because it constructs ‘the human’ in a separation from ‘other humanities’ which remain always displaced in a promise that, for them, is unrealised.

References:

Bhambra, Gurminder K. (2014) Connected Sociologies, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1989) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

James, C.L.R. (1963) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage.

Mehta, Uday Singh (1999) Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

John Holmwood is Professor of Sociology in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham.