ABSTRACT
The work so far has presented a number of modern lines of inheritance of the problem of war. Each has framed the figure of war within a differing relation to the concept of right and through this has produced divergent accounts of the concept of war. Yet, through the juridical, moral and ethical ordering of war, the idea that war is an act carried out by a sovereign state, and that the problem of war is primarily one of inter-state relations, has remained relatively central. For Hobbes, the sovereign state appeared as the juridical mechanism through which social peace could be secured from the conditions of widespread social violence and civil war. While the radical demand of freedom expressed by Rousseau and the French Revolution threatened to overturn the oppressive state and opened onto a cosmopolitan demand for human freedom, for Kant, the juridical figure of the state remained the central moral actor who, in a world of inter-state relations, was charged with the task of ending war and establishing an inter-state federation. For Hegel, the juridical figure of the state remained in a central position and was imbued with ethical legitimacy as the institution through which freedom was realized in modernity. Through such an account, the concept of war as state war assumed renewed legitimacy and was portrayed as playing a significant role in the realization of human freedom in history. While these approaches to the ordering of war have placed the state and the
concept of state war in a privileged position, each account can be thought to contain a counter-discourse theoretically upsetting the state’s monopoly upon the legitimacy of violence. In Hobbes, this could be seen in the role civil war played in the production of the concept of war: a role which could not be completely suppressed and which threatened to re-emerge and upset the stability of the conceptualization of war as state war. In Kant, such a counterdiscourse was more open and was expressed in the form of a universal moral and cosmopolitan demand for freedom and justice which placed all state-based political action under moral critique. In Hegel, the constitution of modern life through the relations of private property within the sphere of civil society
limited the complete and universal realization of freedom within the ethical life of the state. Further, an individual state’s independence was shown to be heavily dependent upon an inter-state relation of recognition and often violent moments of misrecognition contained within this. This chapter focuses upon how a number of elements of this counter-discourse
have been inherited by a loose tradition or set of traditions that re-frame the problem of war. Drawing attention to aspects of the thinking of Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin, the chapter demonstrates how the concept of war as state war is challenged, and perhaps even undone, by what might be thought of as the political ordering or the political disordering of war. The use of such a term does not imply that the previous forms of war’s ordering were in any way apolitical. On the contrary, each tradition ordered the concept of war around differing visions of political community and each set out differing conceptions of the role that violence played in the constitution of the political. What arises, however, in the tradition of the political (dis)ordering of war, is an explicit emphasis upon the political nature of the previous traditions of war’s ordering. The tradition of the political (dis)ordering of war exposes and challenges the particular political conceptions that reside underneath juridical, moral and ethical traditions in their ordering of the legitimacy of violence. Against this, the tradition sets up rival accounts of the political and re-orders the concept of legitimate violence to this purpose. The chapter begins by discussing Marx’s critique of the Hegelian state and
of how Marx’s idea of class conflict is taken up by Lenin and later by Schmitt to develop an account of war as political conflict. The political ordering of war challenges the traditional Westphalian ordering of the boundaries of the legitimacy of violence around the state and turns the notion of war back into a global intra-state civil war in which politics and political ideas are militarized. By bringing a modern concept of war back to its ‘origin’ within civil war, the tradition of the political ordering of war draws links between the founding violence of states and that of partisan, revolutionary and terrorist violence which challenge the state and attempt to found new political-legal orders. When state war is viewed simply as just another form of political violence, then the violence of the partisan, revolutionary and terrorist does not appear as anything new or obscene, but merely as a continuation and development of a certain approach to politics within modernity. However, rather than reducing legal violence to political violence, this chapter develops an account which shows how a distinction between legal and political violence can be retained. A notion of the rightness of war can be better understood when comprehended in light of an ongoing, dynamic relation between legal and political violence.
