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and periphery, centers and margins, we should see it as a network.
This network of power covers the world. Power moves through
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On Tyranny
that network, linking distant sites, able to operate in many places
at once. There is no center. Attack what was once a center, Wash-
ington or New York, and watch. The government does not fall.
Power is decentralized, diffused. The president is in Miami, the
vice president is underground, and if they were to die, there
would be others to take their places. Power operates like a grid.
Should one part of the grid fail, power can flow to (and from)
other parts. The federal government lapses, and the states come
forward. This form of power may be at its most developed its
most ordinary in the United States, but it describes a world be-
yond the United States, and beyond American control. Attack al
Qaeda in Afghanistan and find cells in Hamburg, bomb the caves
of Tora Bora and nightclubs are bombed in Bali.
Sovereignty moves in this form as well. Once, when there were
kings, sovereignty was incarnate in the body of a man. Later, sov-
ereignty pooled in governmental bodies, concentrated at the
center of power, flowing outward from that center. Democracy
reverses the flow. Sovereignty comes from the people, dispersed
or assembled, and it moves not simply toward a single center but
throughout the system in a constant flow. Sovereignty, authority,
power move from the people to the center to the capital, to the
head of state, to the Constitution and they also move to more
local authorities: to states, counties, and towns, to school boards
and local committees.
In the American republic, neither power nor sovereignty flows
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On Tyranny
to a single center. Power flows from the people to Washington,
but it also flows from the people to the state capitols at Harris-
burg, Springfield, Albany, Sacramento. Authority flows to states
and municipalities, to county courts and school boards as well as
to the federal government. There is no center of power and au-
thority here. Instead, there is a structure. Power and authority
do not flow through the structure toward a center: power and au-
thority animate the whole, from the township and school board
to the Supreme Court, Congress, and the presidency. Sover-
eignty moves through the people, igniting the whole. Rousseau
wrote, long before the founding of America, that the term  citi-
zen united subject and sovereign in a single word, subjection
and sovereignty in a single citizen. The United States made that
recognition live; Whitman made it poetry.
One s-Self I sing, a simple separate person
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
Democracy, in Whitman s American view, was a state of pro-
found uniformity, in the strict sense. The American democracy
appeared wildly diverse.  I hear American singing, the varied car-
ols I hear : the sounds of mason and carpenter, boatman and
shoemaker, and, later, philosopher and president, prostitute and
criminal. The surface of the democracy was shifting and varied,
as various as the world it reflected, but beneath this surface diver-
sity, there was a deep likeness. For Whitman, the American
democracy was the world s future:
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On Tyranny
Any period one nation must lead
One land must be the promise and reliance of the future
These states are the amplest poem.
Here is not a nation but a teeming nation of nations.
The American democracy could accommodate all these because,
fundamentally, at bottom, people were alike. They might be rep-
resented as leaves of grass, that  uniform hieroglyphic.
Whitman s poetic conception ( I am, he said,  the most ven-
erable mother ) united difference and uniformity in a common
political vision. Whitman saw the wild diversity of individuals
their occupations, talents, sins, virtues, cities, states rooted in a
single humanity. For Whitman, this wild diversity was a source
of pleasure, uniformity reason for hope. The European philoso-
phers saw matters differently than did the American poet. For
them, difference was the source of conflict, and uniformity a
future to fear.
In the 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War, Leo Strauss and
Alexandre Kojève, a French civil servant and scholar of Hegel,
read a neglected dialogue of Xenophon, Hiero; or, the Tyrant. In
the course of their reading, and their debate with each other,
they took up the question of the end of history, and the emer-
gence of the  universal and homogenous state. The specter of a
world governed under a single authority, all differences erased,
haunted the world between the wars. The League of Nations is
remembered now for its lack of power, its weakness, its ineffi-
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On Tyranny
ciency. Strauss and Kojève saw in the League and other multi-
national institutions the threat of an imperial totalitarianism:
absorbing all. Nationals and peoples would disappear, the rich [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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