ABSTRACT
Here, the political refers neither to a particular political condition or set of institutions (e.g., liberal democracy or the parliamentary system) nor to the existential fact of struggle (although this is always implicated) but to the very grounds on which such conditions, institutions, or struggles arise and are formulated. The political is not, therefore, a relational concept in the way “relational” is typically used by geographers.7 Nor is it merely the realm of the clash of interests, nor of agonistic confrontation and collective or individual self-actualization. Rather, it defines a relation tout court; that is, the relationship between the dominant and the dominated. The political is definitely not the arena in which hegemony imposes its interests and the subaltern resists but the grounds on which the relation between the dominant and dominated takes form. (Grounds is thus an apposite term because, as geographers know, implicit in any mode of the political is a spatiotemporal context in which it unfolds and helps shape.)
On this point, we find the writings of Poulantzas especially important. In a discussion of hegemony, Poulantzas ([1965] 2008) makes the crucial decision to found his analysis in the historical separation (or “regionalization”) of the political and the effect this process has had on modern state formation. Although an early work, already in this essay Poulantzas emphasizes a point most often associated with his influential later debate with Ralph Miliband, namely, “the state crystallizes the relations of production and class relations. The modern political state does not translate the ‘interests’ of the dominant classes at the political level [as is often suggested in economistic or instrumentalist accounts], but [rather] the relationship between those interests and the interests of the dominated classes-which means that it precisely constitutes the ‘political’ expression of the interests of the dominant classes” ([1965] 2008, 80). For Poulantzas, the “specifically political character of the capitalist state” does not lie in the state’s domination by capital but is in fact constituted
in the very “separation between state and civil society” (83). This legitimacy of this separation is thus both founded on and represents a seemingly natural result of “the characteristic of universality assumed by a particular set of values” (83). What are these values? They are “the ‘universal’ values of formal abstract liberty and equality”:
In societies based on expanded reproduction and generalized commodity exchange [i.e., capitalist societies], we observe a process of privatization and autonomization of men as producers. Natural human relations, founded on a hierarchy involving the socio-economic subordination of producers (witness slave and feudal states), are replaced by “social” relations between “autonomized” individuals, located in the exchange process. Marx and Lenin underscore this evolution of natural relations into social relations . . . that underlies the constitution of commodityvalue and labor-value and exploitation in capitalist, exchange-based society. . . . This appearance of social relations in the capitalist system of production in fact presupposes, as a necessary precondition, the characteristic atomization of civil society and goes hand in hand with the advent of specifically political relations. (Poulantzas [1965] 2008, 83)8
Any politics assumes and asserts a historical and geographical terrain to which it lays claim. As the “specifically political character” of the capitalist nation-state is constituted in the separation of the state and civil society, these are the grounds on which the legitimacy of the nation-state rests. Its hegemony in the contemporary political imagination underwrites our assertion that if climate Leviathan is to emerge, it will do so as a transformation of the existing form of sovereignty, enabling the world’s most powerful states to engage in planetary management. Yet we now recognize this claim sidesteps a crucial and difficult question that Leviathan must answer: How could we get from the present Westphalian world to planetary management? And might we get there in a way that preserves the territorial nation-state?
