POWER AND CONSENT REDUCTIONISM, DIALECTICS AND CONSENT THEORY by DOUGLAS NEWDICK 1.0 Introduction Advocates of consent theory are aware that their theory is controversial to some degree and naturally enough this leads to a thorough defence of the theory in any exposition. This is not unusual. What is peculiar is the quality of that defence; the arguments that are countered are only those ones which offer the least challenge to the thesis. These advocates of consent theory defend their theory from counter-arguments that share the same fundamental presuppositions, ie objections from within the liberal democratic tradition, more radical criticisms are usually ignored or relegated to footnotes. While there is something to be said for not trying to defend one's theoretical basis all the time, much can be learned by defending particular explanations from criticisms based in different paradigms. In this essay I will explore some more radical arguments against consent theory than those it is usually defended from. Specifically I will attempt to show that the reductionistic and individualistic basis of consent theory is false and/or obscures more than it reveals and that a dialectical or non-reductionist picture can make sense of the problems that have persistently plagued consent theories. 2.0 Why Consent theory? 2.1 The basic appeal of consent theories of political obligation is that they are in harmony with the avowed ideals, aims and bases of liberal democratic theory. For a theory that places high value on freedom and the autonomous action of individuals the most obvious basis for legitimate political authority is some form of voluntary, self-assumed obligation. Consent theory fits the bill. More specifically, some consent theorists think that any other theory of political obligation is inconsistent with liberal democratic theory:liberalism assumes that normal adults have the capability for personal self-determination and that it is, therefore, appropriate to ascribe to them a right of personal self-determination. This right includes the right of political self-determination. From this it follows that no one can authority, including political authority, over any normal adult without the consent of those under such authority. (Beran, 1987, p 34) 2.2 Consent theorists appeal to consent to explain political obligation, because they think that the notion of political obligation is troublesome and highly contested, whereas the practice of promising giving rise to obligation is as uncontroversial a notion as one can hope to find. Therefore if we base our account of political obligation on consent, which is modeled on the practice of promising, political obligation becomes non-problematic. Pitkin (1972, pp 74-75) argues that the reason consent theorists find political obligation troublesome and the practice of promising not so, springs from their liberal picture of human nature. Thus contractual theories of the state, including consent theories, flow naturally from the liberal conception of human nature or the state of nature. [the liberal] picture of man in the abstract is of a man fully grown, complete with his own private needs, interests, feelings, desires, beliefs and values...Given man as such a separate, self-contained unit, it does indeed seem strange that he might have obligations not of his own choosing (ibid)1 2.3 Thus consent theory has strong ties with the methodology and ontology of reductionism and individualism, which are essential to liberalism.2 Reductionism is a methodology that attempts to give explanations of the properties of higher level entities, eg societies or cells, in terms of the units, eg individuals or molecules, of which they are composed. Reductionism is the thesis that parts are ontologically prior to the wholes that they make up, the parts and their properties exist before (either temporally or logically) the whole (Lewontin, et al, pp 5-6).3 Individualism is the manifestation of reductionism in the domain of politics and political philosophy. The properties of societies and states are to be explained by the properties of the individuals that make them up, and these individuals are ontologically prior to states and societies. Consent theory is obviously an example of this methodology; a property of a complex whole, the state, is to be explained by properties, such as consent, of the units which make up the whole, ie individuals.4 3.0 Features of Consent Theory A consent theory of political obligation must have certain features if it is to be a plausible and consistent consent theory. 3.1 Firstly the theory must rely on actual consent rather than hypothetical consent. An appeal to hypothetical consent as the basis for political obligation seems implausible. The intuitions that lead philosophers to consent theory (eg that political obligation must be self-assumed) are inconsistent with hypothetical consent. Hypothetical consent also requires some extremely implausible metaphysics or psychology. Instead of placing political obligation on an uncontroversial basis, hypothetical consent derives it from a highly contentious one. 3.2 A consent theory must make dissent possible. If it comes out of a theory that all the people under a state's de facto authority have consented to a political obligation to that state, and there is no possible way of not consenting, we should be mighty suspicious. It would seem that in these cases we do not have consent, because consent is supposed to be the voluntary assumption of obligation and it seems odd to describe an action that it is impossible not to perform as being voluntary. 3.3 It should also be the case that political obligation is owed by an individual to the state if and only if that individual has consented. That is to say that it cannot be the case that individual X owes political obligation to the state in virtue of an action performed by individual Y, such as is the case in theories of original consent or majority consent. If this is not the case then we have abandoned one of the main reasons for choosing consent in the first place, ie that political obligation be self-assumed.5 3.4 A consent theorist should not assume that any or some states are legitimate, and build their theory upon this assumption. To do this is to beg the question, because the point of the exercise is to see whether and to what extent existing states are legitimate. 3.5 Beran's (1987) membership version of consent theory appears to meet these conditions, and at the least comes closer to meeting them than any other consent theory I have encountered. Therefore I will use it as my model for purposes of discussion. 4.0 Problems for Consent Theory Traditionally there have been a family of related arguments that consent theories have had problems dealing with. They are all centrally concerned with the question: When does the form of consent not give rise to obligation? In Beran's language, what are the conditions that prevent consent from coming off? 4.1 In the most obvious and uncontroversial example, it is obvious that an action cannot count as consent if the consenter was threatened with physical violence if they did not comply. Similarly if you consent because I am likely (and able) to make life hell for you if you don't, then the consent does not "come off". 4.2 According to Beran (1987, p 6) "An attempt to promise comes off only if the attempted act is free, informed and competent." He then lists some defeating conditions that if present prevent a promise from coming off. The problematic examples come in here, firstly one might wonder whether these are all of the necessary conditions and secondly it is less than clear as to what counts as "free". 4.3 A problem for consent theory is the case of the happy slave. We assume that a state that has the consent of its citizens is a legitimate political authority, yet what if the citizenry includes a class of slaves, and these slaves have apparently happily consented to be slaves? They have not been coerced into this position nor have they been coerced into consenting. Perhaps they have been brought up in the expectation of being slaves and are content with their lot. Is the fact of their consent (freely, fully informed and competently given) a sufficient condition for the legitimacy of their state? Many liberals (not to mention others) would like to say that it is not. How could consent theory deal with this problem?6 4.4 Beran (ibid) addresses criticism from Woozley, who argues that the high cost of emigration, both economic and personal, coupled with the likelihood that potential emigrants will have nowhere to go, makes people unfree to dissent, therefore the citizens are not consenting freely (quoted in ibid pp 95-108) Woozley's argument seems to take this form: 1. Consent must be free. 2. For an action to be free, one must be free to do X and free to do not-X. 3. The high cost of emigration means that one is not free to dissent. Therefore, 4. Membership does not count as consent. Beran seems to be making two plausible replies to this argument, both involve a rejection of premise 2. Under one interpretation he is stating that for an action X to be free one merely needs to be free to do X, one does not need to be free to do not-X. Under another interpretation Beran's position is that freedom is not being prevented from satisfying one's desires. Thus if one does not desire to do X then being prevented from doing X does not make one unfree.7 Both of these replies are fraught with problems. The first interpretation runs the risk of violating the constraint 3.2, but even if it does not there are other problems. The main point worth making here is that one should avoid conflating "free to choose X" with "choosing X freely". The first is compatible with a high degree of constraint, the second is not. The statement that "A is free to X" considers only A's relation to the action X, not to not-X or any other action. When talking about consent, we are interested in A's relation to other courses of action. The fact that consent is free in this sense is surely far less important than the fact that the citizens are unfree in respect to other actions. What becomes interesting then is the options which one is unfree to choose, why one is unfree to choose them and the source(s) of that unfreedom. With the second interpretation of Beran we run into the problem Berlin (1958) calls "the retreat to the inner citadel". If freedom is not having one's desires frustrated, then the best, surest, option is to reduce one's desires. This is surely bizarre. Similarly, there are the problems of socialisation and/or brainwashing. We should say that someone who has been conditioned, whose desires have been tampered with (say by Skinnerian or Clockwork Orange style techniques), has had their freedom reduced, but we cannot if we identify freedom with the lack of frustration of desires. If we believe that such brain-washing interfere with freedom or consent, what are we to say about socialisation pressures that might bring about the same results? 5.0 Consent and Power 5.1 These problems are all getting at the same issue: How free does the act of consent have to be to count as an instance of consent? All commentators agree that if one is coerced into consenting by threat of sanctions, then the consent does not come off. These cases roughly follow this schema: 1. A wants B to do X. 2. A threatens B with harm unless B does X. 3. B does X because of the threat. (Beran, 1987, p 100) 5.2 There is an interesting parallel here with the notion of power: A causes B to do something that B would otherwise not do. (Lukes, 1974) Therefore it is obvious that coercion is a case of the exercise of power (not surprisingly). Most of Beran's other defeating conditions (Beran, 1987, p 6) involve the successful exercise of power by someone over the consenter (eg "undue influence", "deception" (ibid)). We should note that in the cases that are problematic for Beran and other consent theorists (such as outlined in 4. above), it seems that what makes us unlikely to think that consent has come off is the exercise of power over the consenter. The question then becomes how prevalent is the exercise of power in society? 5.3 Lukes (1974) offers some analytical tools that might help us answer this question. His discussion of two-dimensional power and three-dimensional power offer some insight as to how pervasive may be: is it not the...most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions, and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things...because they can see or imagine no alternative to it...? (Lukes, 1974, p 24) 5.4 Herman and Chomsky (1988) give a concrete example of a structural arrangement that has these effects. They argue that the structure of the mass media in the USA results in a vast amount of political information never reaching the public, and a large number of political options are never presented to the public. Therefore the public are political actors who are largely acting from a position of ignorance. 5.5 Here I think the reductionism of liberalism defeats us because of its concentration upon the individual, and seeing consent as a property of the individual. The structural elements of power within which individuals make their decisions are invisible to individualism. Autonomy, freedom etc. are (reified) properties of individual agents, in the individualistic framework. However this ignores the power structures that constrain decision making (and belief/desire and knowledge formation) by agents. If the institutions of state and society are set up in such a way as to preclude certain options from ever being aired or taught in the public arena (as Herman and Chomsky (1988) have shown to be the case in the USA, at least), then those options are unavailable to the populace and we can no longer give an account of freedom or autonomy that looks to the individual alone. 6.0 Consent, Reductionism and Dialectics 6.1 In opposition to liberalism's reductionistic account of society, I think a dialectical account is inherently more plausible and gives a better understanding of the problems associated with consent theory. Reductionist explanation attempts to derive the properties of wholes from intrinsic properties of parts, properties that exist apart from and before the parts are assembled into complex structures...Dialectical explanations, on the contrary, do not abstract properties of parts in isolation from their associations in wholes but see the properties of parts as arising out of their associations. That is, according to the dialectical view, the properties of parts and wholes codetermine each other. (Lewontin, et al, 1984, p 11) Therefore individuals and society codetermine each other in an ongoing process. "The properties of individual human beings do not exist in isolation but arise as a consequence of social life, yet the nature of that social life is a consequence of our being human" (ibid). 6.2 Consent, as a behaviour, is an outcome of a dialectical process between individual and society. The process involves the wants, desires and beliefs of the individual, the power structures of society which restrict and shape their formation, and the power structures which restrict available options. 6.3 The liberal picture assumes that one can make a disjunctive list of the defeating conditions for promises, and that if none of the conditions on the list are present then the action is free. However as a three-dimensional account of power and/or a dialectic account shows, all such actions (decisions, promises, consent) are made within a power structure and are influenced by that structure. 6.4 Liberalism reifies consent, it is labelled as a unitary behaviour with a unitary cause. What a dialectic account shows us is that it is ridiculous to talk of a general cause of that behaviour, because the putative cause of that behaviour will depend upon where you look and your purposes in doing so. One's choosing X over Y is caused by the making of a decision, it could also be caused by someone obscuring option Z. Which of these causes gets called the cause of choosing X depends on one's viewpoint and one's purpose in searching for causes.8 A dialectic account sees consent as the result in an ongoing process. The consent of the happy slave and the consent of the brain-washed, can be seen as the result of a dialectic process where the power structures constrain and influence the decisions of the individual to an extreme. 6.5 >From this discussion it can be seen that individualism is false or at least severely misleading. A non-reductionistic, dialectical, account of society, power and consent is a more powerful and much more revealing way of looking at these issues. Therefore the individualist consent theory can be seen to rest on a false presupposition. 7.0 Conclusion The consent theorists project fails because they do not realise the extent to which our decisions are influenced (or caused) by power structures, and because their reductionistic picture of the nature of society and the individual is false. If I am correct, then the entire liberal project of finding a basis or justification for legitimate political authority is untenable. The question then must be asked: Why do liberals attempt to derive authority in this way? NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY Beran, H., 1987, The Consent Theory of Political Obligation, Croom Helm. Berlin, I., 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University Press. Cohen, G. A., 1979, "Capitalism, Freedom and the Proletariat" in Ryan, A. (ed.), The Idea of Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford. -----, 1988, History, Labour and Freedom, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Crosthwaite, J., 1987, "Feminist Criticisms of Liberalism", in Political Science, Vol 39(2). Greenawalt, K., 1987, "Promissory Obligation: The Theme of Social Contract", reprinted in Raz (1990). Herman, E., and Chomsky, N., 1988, Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon Books, New York. Herzog, D., 1989, Happy Slaves, University of Chicago Press. Hirschmann, N., 1989, "Freedom, Recognition, and Obligation: A Feminist Approach to Political Theory", in American Political Science Review, Vol 83(4). Horton, J., 1992, Political Obligation, Humanities Press International. Lewontin, R., et al, 1984, Not In Our Genes, Pantheon, New York. Lukes, S., 1973, Individualism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. -----, 1974, Power: A Radical View, Macmillan Press. Pitkin, H., 1972, "Obligation and Consent", in Laslett, P., et al, 1972, Philosophy, Politics and Society, Fourth Series, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Raz, J. (ed), 1990, Authority, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Simmons, A. J., 1979, Moral Principles and Political Obligations, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Wolff, R. P., 1976, In Defense of Anarchism, Harper & Row. 1 Note also Greenawalt (1987, p 269): "social contract theory [including consent theory] is a reflection of a liberal conception of human nature that emphasizes freedom and autonomy." 2 A number of authors have argued this. See Crosthwaite (1987), Hirschmann (1989), Lukes (1973). Many Marxists regard reductionism and individualism as important components of bourgeois ideology, and they also regard liberalism as a manifestation of bourgeois ideology in the political/social domain. See, eg Lewontin, et al (1984), Cohen (1988). 3 Lewontin, et al, continue: "and there is a chain of causation that runs from the units to the whole." (ibid p 6) The discussion of reductionism is in the context of biology and psychology, but (and this is part of their point) could apply equally well to any part of bourgeois intellectual studies. With consent theory a "hypothetical" chain of causation runs from the individuals to society and the state (rather than a posited actual causation as in biological determinism) making the reductionist label even more accurate. 4 Similar to the case of biological determinism, consent theory involves the reification of certain behaviours of individuals, ie the behaviours are treated as objects located in the biology of individuals. Also the properties of the whole are also reified, such as authority. The fallacy in reification is in the assumption that if there is a term for a property, that property exists, or that what is measured exists. 5 See Simmons (1979:71). Note also Greenawalt (1987) "neither the unanimous agreement of those originally subject to the legal order nor the agreement of most of one's fellow citizens can obligate an individual who has not agreed." (p 275) 6 The consent theorist could of course OutSmart the objection by claiming that in this hypothetical case the happy slave has consented and the state is legitimate. They might add that, however, this hypothetical case is wildly implausible and thus is not a serious problem. 7 There is another response that Beran seems to make that relies upon a conflation of unfree with coerced. I regard this as highly implausible. 8 Compare the account of tuberculosis as caused by a bacillus, with the account of tuberculosis caused by the appalling conditions of rampant capitalism. (Lewontin, et al, 1984)