Introduction

In Max Weber’s The Profession and Vocation of Politics, he speaks at the outset of the many things which “politics” might mean. He says the term is “extraordinarily broad… embracing every kind of independent leadership activity,” from banks to trade unions to even small communities. Yet, so as to limit the focus of his lecture, he declares that “our reflections this evening… shall use the term only to mean the leadership, or the exercise of influence on the leadership, of a political association, which today means a state”.¹ It seems that to philosophers of political realism, only the second part of this quotation—that politics means exercising influence on the state—was properly heeded; that it was only meant to be the reflection of that evening, and not exhaustive of politics, was lost on them. That evening has stretched on for over 100 years, the sun refusing to set on what I shall term “methodological statism”, a method of political theory which posits the state as, in some sense, the most important locus of political inquiry. Despite its name, the entrenched methodological statism of political realism makes it anything but realistic, reducing the scope of politics under the guise of attempting to describe it. My aim here is to interrogate and dismantle this methodological statism. To that end, I will proceed in three parts. First, I will define methodological statism and show how it manifests in contemporary political realism. Second, I will discuss the politics of Thomas Hobbes, demonstrating how his basic methodological presuppositions have persisted into modern realism. Third and finally, I will show how methodological statism came to dominate political theory, and articulate a methodologically anarchist alternative.

Part 1: Defining Political Realism and Methodological Statism

The problem of defining methodological statism is that it is less a strict set of propositions and moreso a trend within political realism, which is itself a loosely defined trend within political philosophy. If political realism is a “community stew”, as the political realist William Galston puts it, we might be skeptical that all political realism can really be said to exhibit this trend.² Galston helpfully provides an overview of realism that attempts to unite the various elements into a somewhat cohesive movement. He first provides a negative definition: the uniting theme of political realism is “the belief that high liberalism represents a desire to evade, displace, or escape from politics”.³ “High liberalism” refers to political philosophy in the wake of John Rawls, its exemplary case. For Rawls, all political questions are ultimately questions of justice in the same sense that questions about systems of thought are questions of truth; that is to say, just as “[a] theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust”.⁴

It is this reduction of politics to other concerns that political realists are against. For the realist, politics should not be reduced to another discipline, but instead considered in itself. According to realists, the mistake made by Rawls is in thinking that political conflict is eliminable through a reduction to a universal principle (which Rawls took justice to be, in analogy to truth). By contrast, “Realists see political conflict as ubiquitous, perennial, ineradicable, and they regard political moralists as being far too sanguine about the possibility of achieving either normative or practical consensus”.⁵ From this premise, Galston supplies a positive definition of political realism using four “building blocks”:

[1] the injunction to take politics seriously as a particular field of human endeavor; [2] the proposition that civil order is the sine qua non for every other political good; [3] the emphasis on the evaluation and comparison of institutions and regime-types, not only principles; [4] and the call for a more complex moral and political psychology.⁶

There is much to be said of each building block, but it is the second that is of most interest to us. The primacy of “civil order” stems from the aforementioned conflict-orientation of realism, for if conflict cannot be reduced to a universal principle, “it is natural to see the ordering and channeling of conflict as the core of politics from which the rest radiates”.⁷

The importance of “ordering”, and how “natural” it seems to the realist, is the germ which brings forth the ineliminable role of the state. Andrew Sabl’s chapter on “Realist Disobedience” offers a concrete example of this, and it is here where we can finally start to trace an outline of methodological statism as an orientation. Sabl attempts to articulate a civil disobedience which contrasts with liberal, democratic, spiritual, and anarchistic visions. In keeping with the conflict-orientation of realism, he claims that a realist political disobedience “is a plausible and praiseworthy political method only to the extent that it creates power”.⁸ But his statism is laid bare as it becomes clear that by ‘creating power’, he really means the “re-coordination” of state power by “challeng[ing] a deeply unjust allocation of rights and social burdens without threatening the state’s basic functions of protecting personal security”.⁹ This, he says, is to prevent the risk of courting anarchy, and indeed he seems to have nothing but contempt for anarchists. He voices skepticism about the relevance of anarchism to civil disobedience and political realism more generally:

Finally, regarding anarchists: because we wonder what concrete proposals anarchists would substitute for the police who prevent private violence, the bureaucrats who enforce environmental regulation, and the compulsory taxation that funds schools, trains, and hospitals, realists would admit that state authority and legal obligation are not absolute but would question rather sharply the seriousness of theories who deny their importance altogether.¹⁰

This is a clear example of what Jason Byas and Billy Christmas call the Policy Framework, a conception whereby politics “is always an exercise in attempting to change states or influencing their actions”.¹¹ Byas and Christmas intended this argument to apply to the very high liberals to whom realists are so opposed, but in a damning ironic twist, the criticism is just as applicable to political realism. Sabl invokes the state as being necessary for some aspect of justice, yet “conspicuously left out is an argument for why it is the state that should be uniquely concerned or charged with fostering this aspect of justice”.¹² Sabl goes a step further than this, calling it unserious to even consider such things.

As we shall see, the charge that anarchists deny the importance of the state is false. For now, though, it suffices to note this as a representative example of methodological statism, and to develop a definition from it. While the Policy Framework offered by Byas and Christmas is a good starting point, I’m after something more specific. Provisionally, I will say that methodological statism not only treats all politics as an attempt to influence the state (as with the Policy Framework), but also espouses a particular view of the state’s position and proper function in society, or rather, its place outside and above society. This tendency will be further revealed in my examination of Thomas Hobbes in comparison to contemporary realism.

Part 2: The Specter of Hobbes

Just as “[a] basic Hobbesianism underlies the policy framework,” so too does it haunt political realism.¹³ While many of Hobbes’ elaborations have been rejected by political realists, his core idea, the position and necessity of a sovereign state, has been relatively constant since Leviathan. Hobbes’ analysis begins with what he calls the state of nature, “a condition of war of everyone against everyone” where “there can be no security to any man… of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live”.¹⁴ As each man endeavors to his own self-preservation, reason will compel him that he should seek peace, but also that in a state of war, he shall use any means whatsoever to preserve himself.¹⁵ How, then, can durable peace be established?

What’s necessary for durable peace is the ability to make covenants (contracts which are fulfilled non-simultaneously). In a state of war, covenants are impossible because “he that performeth first has no assurance the other will perform after, because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle men's… passions, without the fear of some coercive power”.¹⁶ Thus, the first covenant must always be that which establishes this coercive power, namely, the sovereign covenant. This covenant is made between a “multitude of men” to some person or assembly outside the covenant, authorizing “all the actions and judgments of that man or assembly of men, in the same manner as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves and be protected against other men”.¹⁷ That the sovereign sits outside the covenant is crucial to understand; the sovereign merely acts as the enforcer of the covenant, and has not actually made covenant with the multitude of men or any individual therein. Nothing the sovereign may do can violate the covenant, nor can his role ever be given up.

What I have written thus far suffices as analogy to political realism. The two important things that make Hobbes methodologically statist are his views of the state’s role and his view of the state’s position. To its role, Hobbes tasks that it is to provide a kind of basic security. What makes the sovereign appropriate for this role is its position: outside the covenant. To once again borrow from Byas and Christmas, it is “an assumption that any social order requires an orderer external to the agents being ordered”.¹⁸ Both of these criteria are echoed in Sabl’s conception of realism. Recall how Sable says that a civil protest should not disrupt the basic functions of the state, all but explicitly stating that it is only the state that could provide necessary infrastructure, law enforcement, etc. That people might be able to organize these things on their own is offhandedly dismissed. In Sabl's view, the state is presumed as necessary and separated from those to whom it allocates rights, able to be influenced but not ousted.

Now, I must acknowledge that the connection to Hobbes is denied by many realists. As noted by Galston, “realist liberals argue, [in concordance] with Locke, that Hobbes’s ‘solution’ to the problem of conflict recapitulates the problem”.¹⁹ Indeed, one may argue that in trying to articulate a conception of “realist resistance”, Sabl is acting in defiance of Hobbes, who did not believe it was possible for the sovereign to be unjust. The main point of departure here is the realist conception of legitimacy, or the Basic Legitimation Demand (BLD) articulated by Bernard Williams.²⁰ While for realists there is in some sense a requirement for the sovereign to be legitimate, this question never arises in Hobbes, as the sovereign power is the precondition for there to be any kind of justice or legitimacy in the first place. However, these differences are not as deep as they may appear. The concept of the BLD is like the sovereign covenant in that it is seen as the precondition for there to be such a thing as politics in the first place. The sovereign covenant is seen by Hobbes as the only means by which one can escape the state of war. Realists simply modify this to say that a state which does not meet the demand of basic legitimacy is “another version of the problem” to which politics is meant to answer.²¹ In either case, the position and necessity of the state does not actually change, it is merely abstracted away from any particular sovereign and made about sovereignty in concept. It may be perfectly legitimate to question a state’s actions under a realist framework, or even its makeup, but never its existence or necessity. The leviathan looms, and though we may try to negotiate or tame it, we may never slay it.

Part 3: The Origins and Future of Methodological Statism

There is a danger in political realists not simply describing the political world, but limiting what is possible. On this reading, Sabl and his realist ilk are engaged in a kind of rhetoric which attempts to constrain that which social movements aspire to, or in Sabl’s own words, to find a way of resisting “without courting such risks” as revolution.²² This rhetoric is what the economist Albert O. Hirschman called the perversity thesis, which casts “any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order [as] only serv[ing] to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy”.²³ Under the guise of “realism,” such philosophies entrench their assumptions against challenges from anarchists, both political and methodological, who seek to expand the possibilities of realistic political action. Yet, truth is an absolute defense against defamation; it is not as if every perversity thesis is inaccurate. It is worth asking: does the historical record bear out in favor of methodological statism? If not, why has it appeared as such to so many a political realist and high liberal alike? How should our analytic practices change as a result?

James C. Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance offers an answer to all three of these questions. Scott outlines how there is both an “elite-dominated public transcript” that “tends to naturalize domination,” but also a “hidden transcript” which allows subordinates to articulate “the ideological basis of many revolts”.²⁴ This public transcript is the recording surface of a power struggle between dominant and dominated groups, one where the dominant “attempt to portray social action in the public transcript as, metaphorically, a parade”, that is to say, as “authorized gatherings of subordinates”.²⁵ In taking this public transcript as the total extent of this power struggle, “we risk mistaking what may be a tactic for the whole story”²⁶; or to borrow a phrase from Deleuze a Guattari, the public transcript, as a recording surface of power struggle, “falls back on (se rabat sur)” that which produced it, just as capital falls back on that productive power (labor) which produces it.²⁷ My contention is that methodological statism arises from this falling back. The public transcript, rather than being an effect of posturing on the part of the dominants and resistance on the part subordinates, is taken to be the very substance and divine presupposition of politics. Thus, no matter what the truth may be, politics will always seem as if it is nothing more than an attempt by subordinates to influence the dominant, or more specifically, an attempt to influence the state.

As Scott persuasively argues, this is far from the reality of resistance. As previously mentioned, the elite-dominated public transcript stands in contrast to the hidden transcript of subordinates.²⁸ This transcript is a discourse which exists “off stage” so to speak, made possible by “social spaces insulated from control and surveillance from above”.²⁹ We should, of course, be careful not to let this “hidden transcript” fall back on that which produces it, but this is far less likely because by nature it is not visible to others, including we anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists who attempt to observe it from the outside. Nonetheless, it is important to stress that Scott does not take the hidden transcript to be sufficient in and of itself for a revolt, but instead as the natural concomitant of everyday resistances to power. His discussion of forest poaching in early eighteenth-century England is especially revealing in this respect:

Popular poaching on such a vast scale could hardly be mounted without a lively backstage transcript of values, understandings, and popular outrage to sustain it. But that hidden transcript must largely be inferred from practice–a quiet practice at that. Once in a while an event indicates something of what might lie beneath the surface of public discourse, for example, a threatening anonymous letter to a gameskeeper when he continued to abridge popular custom or the fact that the prosecution couldn't find anyone with a radius of five miles to testify against a local blacksmith accused of breaking down a dam recently built to create a fish pond. More rarely still, when there was nothing further to lose by a public declaration of rights, the normative content of the hidden transcript might spring to view. Thus two convicted "deer-stealers," shortly to be hanged, ventured to claim that “deer were wild beasts, and that the poor, as well as the rich, might lawfully use them.”³⁰

If political action is as the methodological statists would have it (i.e, always an attempt to influence the state) then how can cases like this be accounted for? How can they account for the fact that “the yeomen and cottagers… were out in the forests day after day exercising those rights as best they could,” in such a manner that it would not be noticed by the state?³¹ The simple fact is that they cannot.

Political realism as a model of politics is thus untenable. Far from being a neutral description of politics, it remakes politics in the image of the public transcript. In its place, then, I propose that we adopt the methodological anarchist framework of Byas and Christmas. Contrary to what Sabl says of anarchists, that they “deny [the] importance altogether” of state authority, Byas and Christmas explain that methodological anarchism merely means conceiving of the state “as just one relevant institution in society among many”.³² A similar kind of methodological anarchism is expressed in what Scott calls the “anarchist squint,” the idea that “if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state… certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle”.³³ As I have shown, Scott’s work is quite instructive in how we can free scholarship from the grip of political realism and its methodological statism. The subject of political theory should not merely be the recording surface of struggle, but how that recording surface is produced; the micropolitics which give rise to both the public and hidden transcripts; how to affect conditions such that we allow for these hidden transcripts to form and for popular resistance to take hold. This last point is of particular salience in a world of ever-increasing surveillance, where every website, forum, tweet, and video is scraped by OpenAI for indexing and training or by the government for ‘counter-terrorism’; and what isn’t already readily available online is being digitized through Ring® doorbells and flock cameras. To a realist, the creation of unseen spaces could only ever be useful if it were used to plan a parade. To the methodological anarchist, these spaces are valuable in and of themselves, and allow for the production of a discourse apart from the state, that which actually creates power rather than simply re-coordinating it.

A wealth of theoretical and empirical concerns stand against political realism. This malignant Hobbesianism which has grown on political realism reveals it to be nothing more than a reactionary force, one which produces only that resistance which is legible to power. A methodologically anarchist approach is a simple but vital shift. Rather than supposing that the state is outside and above society, it instead contextualizes the state as embedded within specific political practices, many of which will not interface with it or will, on the contrary, actively shirk it. The writings of Byas, Christmas, and Scott provide a far more viable path forward, one which we must take up if we are to create political scholarship that increases our power to act.