Universality as a Historical-Political Problem: On the Limits of Buck-Morss’ Conceptualisation of Universality

ABSTRACT

The present article revolves around the notion of universality and its relation to freedom and temporal orientation in contemporary political thought, with a focus on Susan Buck-Morss' notion of universality. The purpose is twofold. Firstly, I discern and critique the historico-political premises of her approach. Secondly, I suggest an alternative historico-political approach to universality addressing the drawbacks of her approach. I present three objections to her approach. Drawing on Arendt's distinction between liberation and the practice of freedom, I first present a critique of the conceptualisation of freedom on which Buck-Morss' approach hinges, arguing that she overemphasises the moment of liberation. Thereafter, I turn to her reflections on historical orientation. My third objection concentrates on Buck-Morss' concept of universality. As a heuristic tool to expound on my critique, I activate the distinction between fictive and ideal universality as suggested by Étienne Balibar. I contend that Arendt's distinction between liberation and the practice of freedom efficiently elucidates the questions at stake in Balibar's discussion, as well as how his distinction points to the limits of Buck-Morss' argumentation. Ultimately, I contend that these critical remarks open up for a more dialectical approach to universality as a historical-political problem.

KEYWORDS:

• Universality
• Buck-Morss
• freedom
• historical-political
• historicity

Introduction

In the wake of the structural changes that took place in the 1970s and onwards – the fall of Bretton Woods, the end of the post-war boom, the successive undermining of socialism as an alternative to capitalism – the widely shared belief in universalist ideals as a progressive, future-oriented force waned. What hitherto had been understood as temporary setbacks to the progress of history, the transformation of the world into an ever more enlightened place, was now increasingly perceived as part and parcel of an inherently flawed progress-oriented meta ideology. The putative civilising missions of the nineteenth century, the totalitarian terror, and the devastating effects of the ravages of capitalism were all considered manifestations of a similar tendency; the belief in “Grand narratives” was vehemently criticised for having totalitarian implications.¹ In order to avoid the ever-present totalitarian lure, many critics claimed, resistance should henceforth confine itself to local campaigns, deconstructing power in whichever guise it may appear.

Yet, all along, several attempts have been made to reappropriate the ideal of universalism. From within a radical tradition, the American political theorist Susan Buck-Morss is one of the most thought-provoking writers on the topic. With her seminal article on Hegel’s Master–Slave dialectic in “Hegel and Haiti” from 2000 as a toehold, she has articulated a notion of universality founded on an intricately intertwined conceptualisation of historical orientation and freedom.² Taking into consideration the atrocities committed in the name of an alleged universal idea of progress throughout the modern epoch, as well as the critique levelled against it, Buck-Morss puts forward a number of pertinent insights as to how we can picture universality in a more persuasive fashion.

In the present article, I will scrutinise Buck-Morss’ historical-political approach to universality. The purpose is twofold. The first aim is to discern and critique the historical-political premises on which her notion of liberation is structured. My interest in her argumentation is in this regard primarily as an exemplar of a more general current in contemporary social thought.³ The shared core that unites such otherwise different thinkers is the claim that the modern ideal of freedom is primarily conceivable as a temporarily limited form of negation. One example of this is the late modern critique of power as voiced (and then innumerable times reproduced in different forms) by Michel Foucault;⁴ another is Jacques Rancière’s vindication of politics as always something transgressive, and as such in contrast to what he refers to as la police of the institutions and rules.⁵ Despite their differences in other respects, both share a notion of freedom as liberation from something. With this critique as a backdrop, my second aim is to sketch the contours of an alternative historical-political approach to universality, addressing both the drawbacks of the outlined notion of freedom, and Buck-Morss’ attempt to fuse this with a conceptualisation of universality into a more comprehensive historical-political approach.

In the reception of Buck-Morss’ study – in early July 2022 it had amassed 1,400 quotations in Google Scholar – most commentators have focused on her historical contributions: her interpretation of the Haitian Revolution and her reading of Hegel, as well as how her contributions fit into the field of postcolonial studies and its applicability to more empirically oriented studies focusing on decolonial struggles.⁶ Some noticeable exceptions do, however, exist.

In the afterword of In Defense of Lost Causes, Slavoj Žižek addresses the famous dilemma of violence in insurrectionary movements: how do violent insurgents, “apparently justified by moral sentiment”, avoid setting “the stage for new brutalities that are repugnant to that sentiment”?⁷ Here, as he puts it, “we encounter Buck-Morss’ liberal limit: if we posit the problem in her terms … one should be extremely careful and, as a rule, aim to avoid or postpone any direct revolutionary explosion”.⁸ Against Buck-Morss’ hostility to violence, Žižek suggests that we distinguish between two types of violence: “radical emancipatory violence against the ex-oppressors and the violence which serves the continuation and/or establishment of hierarchical relations of exploitation and domination”.⁹ In spite of the conspicuous differences between the present approach and Žižek’s, both studies nevertheless share an interest in the distinction between emancipatory actions and actions serving to reproduce or contributing to the establishment of new institutions (although from profoundly different points of view).

Another influential commentator is Sibylle Fischer, who, in her review of the book, presents a critique that moves much closer to the core of the objections that I elaborate below. With regard to Buck-Morss’ notion of freedom, Fischer asks if this ideal is in fact not a “metaphysical fantasy”, suspiciously reminiscent of the “imaginary subject of classical liberalism: an abstract human subject, unmarked by gender, race, and culture, which then becomes the subject of certain entitlements”.¹⁰ Recalling Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the condition of statelessness and her critique of human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Fischer adds that it was precisely the condition of bare life that the Jews in Nazi Europe were reduced to before being eliminated, whence the paradoxical nature of “human” rights as always – where efficient – protected and upheld by a territorial state.¹¹

Thus, both Žižek and Fischer object to Buck-Morss’ alleged liberalism, albeit by focusing on different aspects of her work: where Žižek highlights the implicit anti-revolutionary stance of her critique of violence, Fischer zeroes in on the abstract notion of man on which her conceptualisation of freedom is premised. As we will see, my objections do not target Buck-Morss’ alleged liberalism, which, in Fischer’s case, seems to hinge on reducing liberalism to the sociologically and historically restrained (and ontologically dubious) Anglo-Saxon tradition, leaving out a great many more heterodox liberal thinkers.¹² My objections are rather directed against what I take to be some surprisingly undialectical strands in the thought of an otherwise authoritative thinker on dialectics.¹³

The argument is structured into five parts and revolves around three themes in Buck-Morss’ approach: freedom, historical orientation, and universality. In the first section, I present what I take to be the central elements of her historical-political approach to universality. In the second section, drawing on Arendt’s distinction between liberation and the practice of freedom, I present a critique of the conceptualisation of freedom on which Buck-Morss’ approach hinges. In the third section, I turn to her reflections on historical orientation. Thereafter, I elaborate on my preceding objections by relating them to Buck-Morss’ concept of universality. As a heuristic tool to expound on my critique, I activate the distinction between fictive and ideal universality as suggested by Étienne Balibar. Drawing on his distinction, I delineate how the discerned difference between liberation and the practice of freedom ties in with the concept of universality. I argue that the former efficiently elucidates the questions at stake in Balibar’s discussion, as well as how his distinction points to the limits of Buck-Morss’ argumentation, and why a more dialectical approach is called for. In the fifth section, I summarise my findings.

Universal History

Universal history, writes Buck-Morss, “emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture […] in the discontinuities”.¹⁴ It takes place on the fringes of cultures and of “systems”.¹⁵ The gist of her argument is directed against the various forms of process-oriented approaches to history.¹⁶ Whether they appear in the guise of vulgar Marxism, Whig-history, the Ruse of history etc., they all share an idea of man as subjected to history, and “particular actions [as] meaningful only when subsumed within some overarching concept as it historically unfolds”.¹⁷

Yet, as much as Buck-Morss criticises preceding forms of teleological philosophies of history, she does not seem to disapprove of progressive historical narratives per se. Universal history, as she sees it, does indeed seem to imply a form of linear movement as well: what makes “progress possible in history”¹⁸ is, in her eyes, our capacity of “empathic identification” with other persons in a “raw, free and vulnerable state”.¹⁹ Hereby, she continues, it is possible to foment “subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source of enthusiasm and hope”.²⁰ It is thus out of the non-identification with collective bodies, the dissolution of the plethora of culturally bound but intersecting narratives uniting and separating individuals, that a truly “universal, moral sentiment” can take form, and through which we can confront historical problems in what she refers to as a syncretising approach.²¹

The syncretising approach is opposed to the x and y approach implicit in what Buck-Morss sees as the dominant synthesising outlook.²² Thus, alongside Hayden White’s dictum of the foundational role of the narrative, the “content of the form”, Buck-Morss adds a normative evaluative criterion, according to which the most inclusive, syncretic perspective is to be preferred over others.²³ What is more, she argues that historiography must not be envisioned “outside of time, but only in the thick of human action”, and therefore has deep political implications; history, in this sense, always remains to be written anew.²⁴ Erected on a “moving ground”, it should, in accordance with her “politics of scholarship”, endeavour to achieve a radical neutrality, where no borders should be allowed to thwart the universal human perspective.²⁵ Thus, with humanity as her point of reference, she advocates a single, yet historically changing, truth, as in contrast to this or that state, ethnic group, class etc.²⁶

The approach to the past endorsed by Buck-Morss is to tackle it from within a normative-temporal outlook where the past is subjected to a present-future premised upon a presupposed direction. The purpose is to disentangle humanity from its exclusionary collective identities, and rewrite history with humanity as a point of reference, the only perspective from which we can speak of a progress in history: “liberation from exclusionary loyalties of collective identities is precisely what makes progress possible in history”.²⁷ This should be contrasted to those – explicitly or implicitly – appealing to this or that specific group. Instead, she advocates an “empathic identification” with, as we have seen, other persons in their shared bare humanity. It is a form of history writing that stresses how freedom emerges in “rupture and discontinuity” at the expense of continuity, in the brief moments when an established order is made obsolete or dismantled.²⁸ She hereby, as I will elaborate on below, emphasises one form of universality at the expense of another: the moment of rupture, of liberation, where the universalisable ideal of freedom is instantiated in the brief moment of rupture, at the expense of the institutionally based practice of freedom.²⁹

Emancipation and the Practice of Freedom

In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt highlights one of the crucial challenges to modern revolutions with their stated aim of creating something new. The foundational paradox on which the spirit of novelty is founded, and on which the modern conception of revolution feeds, is that, due to its sacralisation of novelty, it saps the very foundation of that to which it has given birth. By inhibiting the construction of an institutional framework through which its foundational ideal of freedom can be protected and advanced, it undermines the preconditions for its survival.³⁰ The modern revolutionary tradition is in this regard founded on a contradiction, as its very impetus is in tension with what Arendt refers to as a world, i.e. a physical and discursive political community that connects individuals and stretches “our life-span into past and future alike”.³¹

Deliberation and decision-making therefore need to be made with a view to how they can be expected to constructively strengthen the institutions that maintain a society’s cohesion over time.³² To avoid having freedom reduced to the instantaneous freedom of the present generation, an institutional framework is required that can serve as a mediator between different generations. Freedom conceived of as a practice, in contrast to the notion of liberation, thus requires for its existence inter- as well as intra-generational political dialogues.³³ It is by and through the mediating institutions of which the public sphere consists, that is, our world, to speak with Arendt, that we best equip ourselves to create expectations regarding the future informed by our condition of existing downstream.³⁴ For such action to be possible, we need institutions that can mediate forms of collective life: an institutional framework for members to give themselves a purposeful direction, and serve as, as the French philosopher Marcel Gauchet puts it, a “mediation of the political community with itself”.³⁵

Examples of such institutions are the different levels through which power in modern states is exercised, the educational system and other forms of cultural institutions, the various instances of representative democracy, civil and military services, to mention just some of the more important examples. In other words, strong institutions and the practice of freedom must be understood as mutually dependent. Yet, while a society structured around freedom as its guiding principle hinges on robust institutions, the reverse is also true: institutions in their turn depend on a democratic “spirit” in order to minimise the risks of having institutions invaded by political actors attempting to instrumentalise them.³⁶ Only then will a political community be able to maintain a dialogue with a past that incessantly haunts and interpolates it.

The conceptualisation of freedom as a practice is to be understood as an answer to the much more common notion of freedom as emancipation/liberation.³⁷ The latter always serves to realise some politically external aim, such as bringing about a meritocratic society, the free movement of persons and capital over borders, a classless society, and so on. Freedom is here understood in the vocabulary of homo faber, where politics is conceived of as a means serving to achieve some desired end.³⁸ The main problem with reducing freedom to emancipation is that, as a principle, it is self-annihilating, as liberation driven to its negative extreme entails the dissolution of society.

Political movements, theories, reforms, etc. that serve the aim of preparing the ground for a political community in which freedom can be practised, or extending or strengthening political freedom within an existing political form, are of a different kind.³⁹ An example of the former type is the council system as practised in the American Revolution, the early experiences of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the German Revolution of 1918–19.⁴⁰ But it might just as easily aim at extending the political freedom within a political community against restraints imposed by monopoly-like private enterprises over the community, or include identifiable groups that, for example on account of their social conditions, are deprived of efficient participation in the practice of freedom.⁴¹

Moreover, when assessing whether a phenomenon primarily ought to be conceived of in terms of freedom as a practice or a manifestation of emancipation, it is crucial to consider how practices interact with the discursive level, and not fall into the idealist trap of overemphasising the discursive level. Politics, in contrast to the application of brute force, is always composed of action and discursive justification. Needless to say, I do not pretend that it is always an easy task to settle whether a phenomenon is best understood as a manifestation of one or the other.⁴² As many revolutions testify to, liberation and the practice of freedom are often closely related.

Thus, my objection to Buck-Morss’ approach must not be understood as a wholesale rejection of emancipatory politics per se. My critique is rather directed against the instrumentalist understanding of the notion of emancipation of which her thought is exemplary, as well as the politically dubious historical assumptions on which it is founded.

Freedom and Historicity

The form of historical orientation that Buck-Morss advocates is an attempt to, speaking with the German theoretician of history Jörn Rüsen, articulate it against “established forms of life and shapes of identity by resisting demands of commitment”.⁴³ Time, in accordance with this way of approaching it, “acquires historical sense by changing its meaning”, giving it a “feature of rupture and discontinuity”.⁴⁴ And by liberating us from the “exclusionary loyalties” inherited from the past, we make progress towards the presupposed ideal of an emancipated humanity.⁴⁵ As outlined, it is a form of history writing that emphasises how freedom emerges from “rupture and discontinuity”.⁴⁶ There are, as far as I can see, at least two problems with this form of historical orientation.

Firstly, the form of historical orientation vindicated by Buck-Morss leaves us poorly equipped to at least evaluate in which ways the past continues to structure our present – including aspects of the past that we would wish to have been otherwise. If history is to be submitted to the paramount aim of liberating individuals from their “exclusionary loyalties of collective identities”, then clearly, in light of the cultural embeddedness of humankind so far, our usage of history becomes a practice made against a past from which we wish to distance ourselves.⁴⁷ In this sense, it appears to occlude what Rüsen refers to as the “dormant” element of traditions. He hereby refers to the strands of continuity that pervade us in the form of unconscious elements in our culturally rooted mental life.⁴⁸ By explicating and transforming these undercurrents into a disputable object, we create better conditions for a more reflexive relationship to the traditions structuring our society – independently of what we happen to think of them.⁴⁹ Put differently: overlooking the “force of inertia”, and denying our condition of existing downstream will not make the active undercurrents in our bodies vanish; rather it will only cause them to reappear, as the repressed tends to do, sometimes in very unpleasant guises.⁵⁰ We are therefore, I maintain, better off confronting them than acting as if they had not existed.⁵¹

A second objection is that Buck-Morss’ approach deprives us of the possibilities to learn from the past. By this, I do not have in mind the type of ready-made insights that rhetoricians in an unmediated form have extracted from past deeds to serve as exempla for men of action in the present, as exemplified in the ancient idea of history as a magistra vitae.⁵² Nor am I envisaging it in some conservative fashion, where the past by default takes the form of an arbiter over the present, that it is always the magistra vis-à-vis the present. What I have in mind is rather a more open-ended fashion of interacting with the past, where we seriously ponder in which respects past events and actions might shed light on the present by taking the historical differences into consideration. By approaching the past with a – vis-à-vis the present – less biased gaze, we are better equipped to confront our past in its particularity, and hereby, in virtue of its difference, it can indirectly serve as a source of inspiration for action. Thus, instead of envisioning this as a dynamic where the past directly reflects its light over the present, we ought to think of it as a continuous dialogue between our shifting present and past.

Now, against the backdrop of these two objections, I will elaborate on my critique by zeroing in on the notion of universality on which Buck-Morss’ approach rests and sketch the contours of a conceptualisation of universality that can address the objections to Buck-Morss’ approach set out above. I will highlight how her account overemphasises one aspect of our universally shared condition at the expense of another.⁵³ As a heuristic device to showcase the point I wish to make here, I will activate Étienne Balibar’s distinction between fictive and ideal universality.⁵⁴

The Dialectics of Universality

The first form of universality of relevance to this paper is what Balibar refers to as universality as fiction.⁵⁵ This definition stems from its character of being a construction, its trait of being non-natural.⁵⁶ It is characterised by its attempt to find a point of convergence between the individual distancing herself from natural communities, and in parallel taking part in the very political form, which in the first instance made the distance possible; a point which is to be found in the modern constitutional, and later liberal-democratic, state.⁵⁷ This is an order in which, as Balibar puts it, the individual is envisioned:

as a relatively autonomous entity; not one which is absolutely free from particular identities and memberships, but one which is never reducible to them, which ideally and also practically in the day-to-day working of basic institutions […] transcends the limitations and qualifications of particular identities and memberships. This is precisely what should be understood as (fictive) universality: not the idea that the common nature of individuals is given or already there, but, rather, the fact that it is produced inasmuch as particular identities are relativized, and become mediations for the realization of a superior and more abstract goal.⁵⁸

Its universalist core, argues Balibar, derives from and is dependent upon its capacity to serve as a vehicle for the individual to practise her potential freedom through public institutions.⁵⁹ As such, it contrasts with the second, idealistic form of universality.

Two particularly salient traits of the latter form of universality are the following: (i) history here is viewed as a process of emancipation; and (ii) it is premised on an unconditional universality, conceivable as an idealised negativity.⁶⁰ The historical guise in which this has appeared, serving as an insurrectional energy and generating impulses to expand what was initially the prerogatives of a very small group, is what Balibar refers to as the principle of égaliberté. As a hybrid between equality and liberty, it has served as the internal spectre of the modern territorial state, within which it was first instantiated. As such, it stands in permanent conflict with the institutions on which its articulation is dependent: it is as such “the enemy of institutional stability”.⁶¹

This impulse, driven by égaliberté, overlaps neatly with Buck-Morss’ rupture-oriented conceptualisation of universality.⁶² Several formulations in Buck-Morss’ approach testify to how closely her (normative) position is tied to the idealistic form of universality in Balibar’s discussion. Examples of this include her claim that the purpose of writing history is to liberate humankind “from exclusionary loyalties”, which in turn is closely intertwined with her idea of such writing as an excavation without boundaries, since “universal humanity is visible at the edges”.⁶³ Equally telling is her idea of the perception of a “concrete meaning of freedom” as realised “every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power”.⁶⁴

As an empirical observation, I have no quarrels with it. As outlined above, my objection is directed at the impasse on which it is founded as a historical-political ideal, as a norm to follow. The crux of the problem is the thoroughly negating form in which freedom is understood here, defined as a liberation from something, and hence always limited to a brief moment in time: a negated now where the individual, in an act of liberation, frees herself from intra-human bonds and qualifying characteristics. This is the state through which we can appeal “to universal, moral sentiment, the source of enthusiasm and hope”.⁶⁵ Hereby, due to her emphasis on “subterranean solidarities” with persons in their pre-political nakedness, Buck-Morss’ argumentation does not pay due attention to the institutionally dependent structures through which political subjectivities take shape. When emancipatory action is singled out as the only truly universal form of freedom, it not only overlooks the ways in which the temporally stretched out practices also instantiate freedom. It also overlooks the interplay between the institutional forms through which the practice of freedom by definition is mediated – what Balibar refers to as fictive universality – and the moments of rupture represented by the idealistic form of universality. It forecloses how virtually all influential protest movements have been made possible through the reflexivity instigated in the citizens via the institutions by which the modern state is constituted, as indicated by Balibar’s distinction: “‘fictive’ universality could never exist without a latent reference to ‘ideal universality’ – it is its non-deconstructible ‘spectre’”.⁶⁶ By downplaying this fundamental aspect of the realisation of human freedom, Buck-Morss’ stance is not only insufficiently dialectical, but politically self-defeating.

Therefore, in order to “make sense out of the temporal unfolding of collective, human life”, we need to complete her one-sided emphasis with a conceptualisation of the meaning of practising freedom.⁶⁷ By focusing on freedom as something that is exclusively realised against power – the “concrete meaning of freedom” as realised “every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power” – it incapacitates our potential for realising freedom through the exercise of power, via joint action.⁶⁸ The strength of Balibar’s distinction is that it points to the dialectical interaction between historically inscribed practices of freedom and fleeting moments of transgression. In opposition to Buck-Morss, whose focus is exclusively on the rupture-oriented moment, Balibar’s distinction has the advantage of stressing how, in the fictive form, “particular identities are relativized, and become mediations for the realization of a superior and more abstract goal”.⁶⁹ His distinction must therefore not be understood in such a way that the fictive form is reducible to a necessary precondition for those rare liberatory moments, but rather as a practice that in itself mediates and instantiates universalisable practices of freedom.

Concluding Remarks

Since the dawn of modern society, critics have ripped apart the idea of possessive individualism for its allegedly being an airy-fairy assumption, a paradigmatic manifestation of the ideological effects of capitalism: an individual stripped of all characteristic traits is an illusion. Sibylle Fischer is in good company. What is less clear in the history of progressivist thought – in this regard the conservative and reactionary critiques of the abstract individual are far clearer on where they stand – is exactly which notion of our human condition provides the basis for the assumption of emancipation, so influential in modern progressivist thought.

My main objection to Buck-Morss’ ideal of an expanding idea of universality is that it does not convincingly address the temporally stretched out dimension of practising politics. It overlooks the intricate interplay between institutionally mediated forms of the universal and the moments of rupture which on occasion transgress and bring about renegotiations regarding the spatio-temporal settings of the institutionally mediated practices of freedom. By overemphasising the pre-political bonds of solidarity that bring humans together in their bare existence, Buck-Morss’ account renders us poorly equipped to reflect on the different means by which we can make explicit the conditions under which any given political order or individual is becoming, and as such is never perfectly in charge of itself. Despite Buck-Morss’ many substantial contributions to our comprehension of dialectics and critical theory, the main flaw with her contribution to the conceptualisation of universality is precisely its lack of dialectics.

Given the bleak history of invocations of universality being used to justify brutality in the present with allusions to a brighter future, the strong emphasis on fleeting moments in the present is understandable. Yet, by exclusively focusing on the dangers associated with future-oriented vindications of the universal, and in its place highlighting how the only truly universalisable phenomena are those (rare) moments of rupture in which we break out of particularistic identities and unite in a raw state of unmediated humanity, Buck-Morss’ approach overlooks the historical-political dead-ends emerging out of a society that limits itself to the confines of the present. Reified visions of the future are not the only historical-political threat that a renewed conceptualisation of the universal must attend to. Equally important is the numbing effect of a society in which the immediate present takes centre stage.⁷⁰ In order to “make sense out of the temporal unfolding of collective, human life”, we need to take into consideration how freedom is also made possible through time, in joint action.⁷¹

By conceptualising freedom as a practice that is stretched out over time, along the lines of what Balibar refers to as the fictive dimension of universality, the practice-oriented form of freedom outlined above is better equipped to address the problems arising from both fetishised visions of the future and the more recent tendency in late modernity to circumscribe politics to the confines of an immediate present. Freedom conceived of neither as an end to be realised in a distant future nor as momentary negation, but as a practice emerging through the interplay between the two poles through which the dialectic of universality is instantiated. On the one hand, the institutionally mediated practices through which individuals are enabled to overcome “the limitations and qualifications of particular identities and memberships”, and on the other, actions transgressing the confines of existing political lines of demarcation.⁷² To achieve a fuller, more dynamic and dialectical conceptualisation of a universalisable notion of freedom, it is essential to take into account the temporal dimension and how freedom is instantiated not only through ideal universality, against the past, but also through the windows of opportunity that are opened via the fictive form of universality, where freedom takes shape through a given society's mediation of itself between the past into the future.

Acknowledgements

I express my gratitude to Carl Wilén for providing insightful comments and valuable suggestions during the finalisation of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics.

2 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti.

3 This more ample approach can be contrasted with strictly methodologically related discussions, regarding whether or not history should be analysed as an end in itself and not as means for our present purposes, as exemplified in, e.g. Quentin Skinner’s work, see: Skinner, Visions of Politics. For contemporary comparative studies regarding these questions, to mention just a few examples: Green, “Political Theory as Both”, Floyd and Stears, Political Philosophy versus History?; Frazer, “The Ethics of Interpretation”.

4 Compare, for example: Foucault, Power/Knowledge,” 126; Foucault, La naissance.

5 Rancière, La mésentente; Rancière, La haine; Rancière, Aux bordes du politique.

6 See, for example: Scott, “Antinomies of Slavery”; Stephanson, “The Philosophers Island”; Heller, “Hegel, Haiti and Revolution”; Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory.

7 Buck-Morss, quoted in: Žižek, In Defense, 470.

8 Ibid., 471.

9 Ibid.

10 Fischer, “History and Catastrophe”.

11 Ibid.

12 In what Larry Siedentop has referred to as a distinct French liberal tradition, the same critique can be found among thinkers who consider themselves to be working in and promoting a liberal tradition, but a historically and sociologically better-informed liberal tradition. See Siedentop, “Two Liberal Traditions”.

13 See, e.g. Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics; Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing. Fischer is, to be sure, not the only one to criticise Buck-Morss’ alleged undialectical notion of universalism. For a thought-provoking and controversial Fanon-inspired critique of Buck-Morss’ notion of universality, see, e.g. Ciccariello-Maher, “‘So Much the Worse”.

14 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, 133.

15 Ibid., 79, 151.

16 Compare Arendt’s definition of ideology in: Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 606ff, and the number of essays in which she addresses the process-oriented approach to history, see e.g. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 75; Arendt, Between Past and Future, 41–90.

17 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, 111.

18 Ibid., 150.

19 Ibid., 133.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 133.

22 Ibid., 150. Compare also the introductory page of both essays in the same book. The choice of “moral” rather than “political” is, I believe, symptomatic of her position; where the moral addresses the interaction between individuals precisely on the level of individuals, politics concerns man as taking form and acting within some political form, implying different ways of conceiving boundaries both spatially and temporally.

23 White, The Content.

24 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, 109.

25 Ibid., 150.

26 Ibid., 151.

27 Ibid., 149–50.

28 Rüsen, “Tradition”, 54.

29 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, 133.

30 For a deeply Arendt-inspired study on the Montesquieuian notion of spirit, see Näsström, The Spirit of Democracy.

31 Arendt, Human Condition, 55. Her idea of the world can be compared with Cornelius Castoriadis’ formulation: “A society cannot exist without being something for itself, which does not represent itself as being something – which is a consequence, part, and dimension of what it should articulate as ‘something’” (my translation). See Castoriadis, La montée de l’insignifiance, 3, 22. See also Castoriadis, Figures du pensable, 196ff.

32 Arendt elaborated on this distinction in the recently published manuscript from 1966–67: Arendt, “The Freedom”, published in Thinking Without a Bannister.

33 Wedin, The Aporia of Equality, 77. Compare also what has been referred to as her communicative and narrative model of action by Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib respectively: Passerin d’Entrèves. The Political Philosophy; Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism.

34 In light of the purpose of this article – to draw attention to how we might conceive of universality as a historical-political problem – more specific questions regarding which institutions, the possibilities and drawbacks of realising this ideal within the confines of the political form that has dominated modernity (namely the territorial state) fall beyond the scope of this study.

35 “mediation de la communauté politique avec elle-même”, Gauchet, La démocratie, 384.

36 Näsström, The Spirit of Democracy.

37 There has been an increased interest lately in the relation between the two. Recent publications that are indicative of this interest in this aspect of Arendt’s thought include Näsström, The Spirit of Democracy, and Hiruta (ed.), Arendt on Freedom.

38 Arguably, a number of political movements can be considered to serve both emancipation (as a means) and the higher aim of extending and strengthening the practice of politics. In this sense, we could distinguish between two ideal-typical forms of emancipatory politics. However, the points I wish to make in the present article do not hinge on this distinction, and in order to keep my argumentation as direct and free from digressions as possible, I will not elaborate further on this aspect.

39 For interesting analyses of how the idea of liberation in various ways is intertwined with the practice of politics, see the contributions in Hiruta (ed.), Arendt on Freedom.

40 For a closer analysis of council democracies, see Ask Popp-Madsen, Visions of Council Democracy.

41 In some respects, this discussion ties in with Arendt’s controversial distinction between the political and the “social”. Where the former is realised through action with freedom as its paramount aim, the latter represents public practices, institutions, etc. pervaded by a private logic, i.e., treated as if they formed part of the private sphere. For assessments of the limits and potentialities of the social in Arendt’s thought, see: Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob; Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism; Wedin and Wilén, “Ancient Equality”; Wedin, The Aporia of Equality. The most cogent reflection on the notion of Arendt herself is to be found in: Arendt, Hannah Arendt, 301ff.

42 Cf. Hiruta, Arendt on Freedom.

43 Rüsen, “Tradition”, 54

44 Ibid.

45 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, 149.

46 Rüsen, “Tradition”, 54.

47 Needless to say, for her, this assumption is not unique, but a feature that characterises the modern temporal orientation more generally.

48 Rüsen, “Tradition”, 59. However, varieties of this argument have been made by others as well. For example, the French historian Henri Irénée Marrou speaks of a moment of catharsis through the “liberation of our sociological unconscious” in the confrontation with our origins and draws a parallel to the psychoanalytical tradition: see Marrou, De la connaissance historique, 263.

49 Rüsen, “Tradition”, 59.

50 Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 39.

51 This critique ties in with some of the historical-theoretical remarks made by Charles Taylor in an examination of the normative underpinnings of Foucault’s thought: Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth”, 178ff.

52 For more detailed accounts of the persistent relevance of the tradition of the historia magistra, pace Koselleck’s influential reflections in “Historia Magistra Vitae” (in Koselleck, Futures Past), and how some have attempted to reconcile it with modern ideas of history, see, e.g. Bouton, “Learning from History”, Forchtner, “Historia Magistra Vitae”.

53 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, 133.

54 Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality”.

55 The first and most general form of universality in Balibar’s distinction is what he refers to as real universality. It coincides neatly with what is commonly referred to as globalisation. This is of minor analytical importance and will be left out of my discussion here. One of the salient traits of this real universality is the phenomenon of internal exclusion: the idea is that the lines of demarcation between centre and periphery have become even more ambiguous than in the heyday of imperialism. Thus, in the real universalism that has unfolded throughout the post-war period, the definite peripheral status of ex-colonies has been replaced by a global, post-national elite and a parallel global underclass.

56 Balibar makes no secret of the inspiration he takes from Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

57 Which, clearly, historically is closely intertwined with the idea of nation, but which nevertheless, equally undeniably, it is not identical with.

58 Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality”, 157.

59 Ibid., 160.

60 Ibid., 165.

61 “Le moment insurrectionnel associé au principe de l’égaliberté n’est pas seulement fondateur, il est aussi l’ennemi de la stabilité des institutions. Et si nous admettons qu’il représente, à travers ses réalisations plus ou moins complètes, l’universel au sein du champ politique, il nous faudra bien convenir qu’il n’existe dans l’histoire rien de tel qu’une appropriation de l’universel, ou une installation permanente dans le « règne » de l’universel […]”. Balibar, La préposition d’égaliberté, 12.

62 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, 151.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., 75.

65 Ibid., 133.

66 Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality”, 164.

67 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, 109. Although I would prefer “envisage” rather than “make sense”, as the latter opens up for a misreading with regard to the term sense, which seems to invite bad historicist interpretations.

68 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, 75. The distinction between resistance and the affirmative exercise is deeply indebted to Marcel Gauchet’s reflections in the closing volume of his suite on the advent of democratic society: Gauchet, L’avènement de la démocratie IV.

69 Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality”, 157.

70 For analyses regarding the notion of presentism and its political impact, see: François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité; Assmann, “Transformations of the Modern”; Harvey; The Condition of Postmodernity; Rosa and Scheuerman, High-Speed Society; Jameson, The Cultural Turn; Gauchet, L’avènement IV; Lübbe, “The Contraction”; Wedin, 2018.

71 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, 109.

72 Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality”, 157.