Agnès Louis: Le corps politique: Introduction à la phénoménologie politique

Le corps politique: Introduction à la phénoménologie politique: Arendt, Lefort, Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur Book Cover Le corps politique: Introduction à la phénoménologie politique: Arendt, Lefort, Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur
Agnès Louis
Éditions OUSIA
2020
Paperback 18.00 €
322

Reviewed by: Hans Arentshorst (University of Jyväskylä)

The emergence of totalitarianism in the 20th century not only marked a destructive turning point in modern history, but it also led to a ‘political turn’ in the phenomenological movement. Philosophers with a phenomenological background, such as Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Ricœur, started to apply phenomenological insights to the study of political life in order to understand the emergence of Nazism and communism. This resulted in original and nuanced accounts of both totalitarianism and democracy, which are still relevant today, especially in the face of the growing popularity of nationalist and populist movements.

When it comes to the reception of their work, it is interesting to note that one almost never reads discussions of ‘political phenomenology’ as a coherent movement with its own method and beliefs. Apparently, the work of these philosophers is considered to be too idiosyncratic and incommensurable to be discussed together as part of a single movement. It is here that the originality lies of Le corps politique by Agnès Louis: by analysing the work of Arendt, Lefort, Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur – mainly focusing on similarities and how they complement each other – she provides an account of ‘political phenomenology’ as a coherent movement.

The central concept with which Louis tries to tie together the work of these four philosophers is the body politic, which is somewhat surprising since this is at most a marginal concept in their work. In the introduction to the book, Louis gives a brief historical reconstruction of the use of the concept of ‘body politic’ in political philosophy, followed by an explanation why she thinks this concept is fruitful for framing the movement of political phenomenology.

When people today talk about the political community they live in, they usually refer to it as ‘nation’, ‘country’, or ‘society’, but – as Louis reminds us – it used to be common to speak of the ‘body politic’. By looking at three paradigmatic thinkers of the body politic—Aristotle, John of Salisbury and Thomas Hobbes—Louis shows how the notion of the body politic was accompanied by three central claims about political life. The first claim is that individuals can only truly realize themselves when they are part of a political community; by becoming political, human life takes on a superior form that it otherwise would not take. For example, in Aristotle’s picture ‘mere’ life (focused on reproduction) becomes the good life (focused on the actualization of moral and political capacities), and in Hobbes’s account a violent state of nature becomes a peaceful Leviathan. The notion of the body politic thus expresses the idea that liberation and belonging to a political community go hand in hand.

Secondly, the metaphor of the body politic entails that the form that human life takes in a political community is particular and that therefore there exists a plurality of political bodies. The possibility of a single political body that includes all of humanity is rejected, which we find clearly expressed in Hobbes, who famously rejected the possibility of a universal sovereign.

Thirdly, the notion of the body politic is informed by a certain conception of the body, which reinforces a certain conception of political life. For example, the conception of the body in Aristotle and Salisbury, in which the distinction between body and soul is central, leads to a different picture of political life than Hobbes’s mechanistic conception of the body. Despite these differences, they agree that there is an analogy between bodily life and political life.

Given these three claims, Louis says, it is not surprising that the notion of the body politic became problematic and disappeared in modern democratic societies. First of all, democratic societies give primacy to the individual, and individual freedom is now understood as having the possibility to escape any pregiven identity. The idea that individuals can only liberate and realize themselves by belonging to a political community therefore becomes suspect. Secondly, the understanding of humanity in modern democracies becomes broader and more abstract: humanity now consists of all individuals independent of their political and cultural attachments, which conflicts with the notion of humanity as being divided into a plurality of different body politics, each having their own form of life. As Louis says, the metaphor of the body politic thus seems to be too demanding for us when it comes to the individual, and too limited when it comes to our interpretation of humanity.

In modern political life there thus emerges a permanent tension between freedom and belonging, or freedom and embeddedness. And unfortunately, modern political history has showed a tendency to resolve this tension one-sidedly, either absolutizing the pole of individual freedom (i.e. imagining that the individual can liberate him or herself without belonging to any political community) or absolutizing the pole of communal embeddedness (i.e. the individual belongs to a community where political existence does not lead to any kind of liberation).

It is here, Louis thinks, that phenomenology can make a valuable contribution. In its analysis of embodied subjectivity and the life-world, the phenomenological movement has provided nuanced insights about the way in which freedom and embeddedness are always intertwined in human experience. What would happen if these phenomenological insights be applied to the analysis of political life? This brings us back to the concept of ‘body politic’ and to the third claim mentioned above: that the body politic is always informed by a certain conception of the body. What Louis aims to do in her book is to rehabilitate the notion of ‘body politic’ by connecting it to a phenomenological conception of the body. In this way she wants to explore how phenomenology can help us to better understand the tension in modern political life between freedom and embeddedness.

The book consists of three parts. In the first part Louis gives a general introduction to some basic aspects of the phenomenological tradition—most notably the phenomenological method and the phenomenological conception of the body—which are necessary for understanding the presentation of political phenomenology in the rest of the book. Louis says the phenomenological method consists of an analysis that is characterized by a respect for phenomena and a sensitivity to the way in which subjective existence is embedded in the world. And even though Husserl and Heidegger were never directly concerned with issues of political philosophy, Louis shows that the phenomenological method can be fruitfully applied to political life in order to do justice to political phenomena by avoiding various forms of reductionism, and to become aware of how subjective existence is embedded in the political world. And indeed, it has been the merit of political phenomenologists like Arendt and Lefort to have done justice to political phenomena in an intellectual climate dominated by Marxism and sociology, in which it was very common to reduce politics to a supposedly more fundamental reality, either economic or sociological. Furthermore, they have contributed to a better understanding of the experience of living in a totalitarian or democratic society, as opposed to positivist approaches that reduce political life to a collection of objective empirical data.

The second aspect of the phenomenological tradition that Louis discusses—its conception of the body—is especially crucial for the argument in the rest of the book. Since Louis wants to introduce a concept of the body politic that is informed by a phenomenological account of the body, she has to explain how to understand this and how it plays a role in the work of Arendt, Lefort, Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur. Louis is aware that this is not an easy task since the four philosophers use the concept of ‘body politic’ in different ways, if they use it at all. Merleau-Ponty and Lefort seem to prefer the notion of ‘flesh’ over the notion of ‘body’ when speaking of modern political life. And although there are passages in Arendt’s work where she uses the notion of body politic, this is not informed by a phenomenological conception of the body. Only Ricœur uses the notion of body politic to refer to modern democracies while at the same time drawing an analogy between political life and embodied subjectivity.

Still, despite this conceptual confusion, Louis thinks that a phenomenological conception of the body politic can function as a helpful focal point for discussing the similarities between Arendt, Lefort, Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur. Louis therefore presents a Husserlian account of the ‘flesh-body’ (corps de chair) in which there is an intertwinement of activity and passivity. On the one hand, the flesh-body plays an active role in human experience: for example, it is the place from which objects and the world can be experienced as a unity, and it plays an active role in the experiencing of others. At the same time, there is a passive side to the flesh-body: it is something given to us at birth and it remains something opaque and strange, something that we can never completely appropriate or control. The flesh-body is thus paradoxical in the sense that it is both active and passive, both personal and impersonal.

Louis sees a parallel between this paradoxical character of the Husserlian flesh-body and the way in which Arendt, Lefort, Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur describe political experience in a healthy political community as an intertwinement of freedom and embeddedness. In their different ways, they all show how freedom (or political action) is embedded in a social, institutional and historical situation that can never be completely known or controlled. So both in the Husserlian account of the flesh-body and in the account of political life by the four political phenomenologists freedom is never absolute, since it is always preceded by something—the flesh-body or social-historical reality—that can never be fully controlled or made fully transparent. Louis’ notion of a ‘phenomenological body politic’ thus refers, simply put, to a political community in which this interdependency between freedom and embeddedness, or activity and passivity, is acknowledged.

In the second part of the book Louis explores the way in which totalitarianism destroys the ‘phenomenological body politic’ by turning to the critical reflections on Nazism and communism by Arendt, Lefort, Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur. Louis starts by discussing Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in which totalitarianism is described as a phenomena that manifests itself as a permanent movement, which aims to realize total domination with the help of terror and ideology. Two visible effects of this permanent movement are central in Arendt’s description: first of all, the atomization of society, whereby the totalitarian Party uses terror and ideology to destroy the common world, thereby isolating individuals and preventing them from forming a meaningful community in which political action is possible. Secondly, since total domination is only possible when it encompasses all humanity, totalitarianism cannot settle for a limited territory nor acknowledge the existence of a plurality of political bodies, but it has to remain a de-territorialized movement. Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism thus shows how totalitarian power refuses to become embedded in any body politic whatsoever.

For Lefort, the main characteristic of totalitarian power is that—in its quest for  complete control and domination—it suppresses all internal division, such as the division between different spheres of human activity (economy, politics, religion, science, art, etc.), the divisions within society (no autonomous associations) and within politics (no diversity of opinion within the Party), the division between the political and the social (since totalitarian power denies any separation between itself and society), and finally the division between the real and the symbolic.

This striving for unity is accompanied by both an organic representation of society as a giant body or organism and a mechanistic conception of society as a machine. Together, they fuse into a conception of society as a mechanical body, which points to the ideal of a society that can be completely known and fabricated. As Louis says, this is the opposite of the flesh-body, which is always characterized by division: there is a part that is intimate and a part that is opaque and strange, and therefore our power to master experience is always limited. It is this limit to power that the totalitarian Party does not acknowledge; it wants to be autonomous without being embedded, thus destroying the phenomenological body politic.

Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur have not provided full-blown theories of totalitarianism, but their work contains interesting critiques of communism. For Merleau-Ponty the main problem of communism is its gradual disconnection – visible both in the Soviet Union and in Sartre’s ‘ultra-bolshevism’ – between the Party (the will) and the social-historical experience of the proletariat (the flesh). As soon as the Party stops understanding itself as being embedded in the proletarian experience, Merleau-Ponty argues, it becomes a will without flesh, thus destroying the emancipatory possibilities of communism.

Ricœur argues that communism is problematic because it is unable to clearly distinguish between social-economic and political reality and to acknowledge the relative autonomy of the latter. This is illustrated by the fact that communism cannot conceive of an evil that is properly political; it reduces all forms of evil to the social-economic evil that results from the inequality of the relations of production. Once a socialist regime is established, all evil should therefore be abolished. But by denying the possibility of political violence, it also becomes impossible to control or limit it; this explains, according to Ricœur, the unleashing of terror in communist states.

In sum, Louis shows in the second part of the book how the four philosophers criticize totalitarian power for running amuck and refusing to be embedded, thereby destroying the phenomenological body politic. Whereas the second part of the book thus provides a ‘negative’ picture of the destruction of the body politic, in the third part Louis tries to extract a ‘positive’, substantial picture of the phenomenological body politic from the work of Arendt, Lefort, Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur. She does this by focusing on three areas where the tension between freedom and embeddedness manifests itself: political action, history, and the symbolic unity of the social.

Louis explores the area of political action by looking at the work of Arendt and Ricœur. Similar to Aristotle, Arendt associates biological life with servitude and determinacy, and political life with freedom and action, that is, our capacity to create something new and to escape from the repetitive patterns of biological life. But, as Louis asks, if freedom is about starting something new and breaking with repetitive patterns, is there still a need for the agent to be embedded in a political community in order to realize freedom?

Arendt’s answer is affirmative: action needs to be embedded, first of all, in what she calls ‘plurality’. In order for action to become an objective reality, the presence of others is needed, which creates a space of visibility in which action can appear, a space of signification where action can become interpreted and meaningful, and it creates the possibility for an action to be fully accomplished, since this requires bringing others to act. Secondly, action needs to be embedded in the physical and juridical reality of the political community, which together create a common space between people where action has a chance to realize itself not just in exceptional circumstances but in a regular manner.

Arendt thus illustrates how in a free political community autonomy and embeddedness are intertwined and – despite her association of ‘the biological’ with servitude – she refers to such a community as a ‘body politic’. However, her concept of body politic remains vague and she does not draw an analogy between the body politic and embodied subjectivity. This is why Louis complements Arendt’s analysis with that of Ricœur, who largely agrees with Arendt but who explicitly draws an analogy between the duality of political action (starting something new and being dependent on others and institutions) and the duality of embodied subjectivity.

A second area where the tension between freedom and embeddedness manifests itself is history. Louis explores this tension by focusing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, who both speak of the ‘flesh of history’ to refer to the complex interdependency of freedom and historical embeddedness. In the last chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty gives his account of freedom, he argues that freedom is effective in human life only insofar as it is  not absolute: the subject is always already embedded in a specific personal history that provides certain options and motivations on which he or she can decide to act or not.  The same goes for collective history: every historical period offers certain options and roles to be taken up, between which individuals can choose and which they can play good or bad.  Merleau-Ponty’s account  of the relation between freedom and history thus rejects the two extremes of absolute freedom (which denies historical embeddedness) and historical necessity (which denies individual freedom).

In his later work, Merleau-Ponty further developed these reflections on historical embeddedness by introducing a specific understanding of the notion of institution. Against Durkheim, who understood institutions as social facts that restrict human behavior, Merleau-Ponty understands an institution as a symbolic matrix that opens up a field of possibilities for giving form and meaning to human co-existence.

Louis then shows how Lefort further developed Merleau-Ponty’s reflections by connecting this understanding of institution as a symbolic matrix to the question of the political. According to Lefort, every society is the result of a political institution of the social, that is, by a process in which form and meaning is given to human relations based on a common understanding of the nature of society. However, this political institution is executed in different ways, as Lefort illustrates by comparing different ‘forms of society’.

For example, in primitive societies, which Lefort also calls ‘societies without history’, the political institution of the social is understood as something that has been done by ancestors, gods or heroes in a distant past, and it is now beyond anybody’s power to change. The nature of society is thus fixed once and for all, and this explains, according to Lefort, why primitive societies suppress all conflict and why they resist all novelty and social transformation: only in this way can society’s identity remain stable and be preserved over time. Democratic societies, however, operate differently: they deny a transcendent foundation of the social and instead allow permanent conflict and debate over the nature of society. This explains the emergence of ideologies in modern democratic societies, such as liberalism, socialism or conservatism, each painting a different picture of the nature of society and each presenting a different program of the changes and transformations that are needed in order to realize such a society.

Unlike primitive societies, democratic societies thus embrace both conflict and transformation, and in this way, Lefort says, they become truly historical societies. In democratic societies we find ourselves embedded in a historical situation that presents several options for transforming society (liberal, socialist, progressive, conservative, etc.), and democratic politics consists in debating which option makes the most sense to pursue based on past experiences (failures, successes, unintended consequences, etc.). Lefort thus paints a similar picture to Merleau-Ponty of the connection between freedom and historical embeddedness – or of the ‘flesh of history’ – but he gives it a political twist by showing that it is only in democratic forms of society that a healthy balance can be realized between the two.

The third aspect of the phenomenological body politic that Louis discusses concerns the enigma that democratic societies can be both divided and united at the same time. Democratic societies are divided into relatively autonomous spheres of action, such as the economy, politics, religion, science, art, etc., each with their own norms. This raises the question why life in democratic societies can still be experienced as a unity, which Louis tries to answer by turning to the work of Merleau-Ponty, Lefort and Ricœur.

As Louis says, an important concern in Merleau-Ponty’s body of work has been to show the unity that penetrates the variety of domains of experience. However, in doing so, he has always resisted reductionist solutions – either materialist, sociological or idealist – that reduce the social world to an economic principle, a social fact, or a determined idea. Such explanations of social life remain abstract and cannot do justice to the variety of experiences, nor to their internal coherence. Instead, Merleau-Ponty conceives of social life as a totality, which he sometimes calls ‘civilization’; even though society is divided into different social spheres, these spheres communicate and interact because they are all informed by a specific understanding of the human, that is, a background understanding that pervades social life in all its dimensions.

As Louis shows, it is again Lefort who gives a political twist to Merleau-Ponty’s reflections by arguing that the specific understanding of the human that penetrates a society is of a political nature, and that it is closely related to the way in which power is organized in a society. Louis illustrates this by comparing Lefort’s accounts of the Ancient Regime and of democratic societies. According to Lefort, the society of the Ancient Regime was pervaded by a corporatist and mystical understanding (i.e. individuals had their place in corporations and this organization of society had a religious foundation), which went hand in hand with a form of government where the King was both the highest corporation and his authority had a sacred quality. Democratic societies, on the other hand, are informed by an understanding of man as articulated in the Declaration of Human Rights – as both autonomous and indeterminate – and this is accompanied by a paradoxical organization of power, which appears to be both emerging from society (the people are sovereign, which secures autonomy) but at the same time as being external to society (nobody can legitimately appropriate and embody power, which secures indeterminacy). A democratic regime thus secures a specific understanding of the human as both autonomous and indeterminate, initiating a permanent process of attempting to give substance to the human. In this sense, a democratic society is divided and symbolically united.

Louis’ discussion of Ricœur revolves around his critical analysis of Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice. In this book, Walzer argues – pace John Rawls – that a theory of distributive justice should take into account the plurality of goods that have to be distributed. However, Ricœur thinks that Walzer, in discussing this plurality of goods, does not emphasize enough that citizenship and political power cannot be discussed as goods to distributed like other goods. Citizenship, according to Ricœur, is a general condition for having access to social goods, whereas political power (or the state) is the central instance of distribution. In other words, the division of society into different spheres of distributive justice is only conceivable within a political community, or body politic, in which citizenship and the state are already instituted. Ricoeur conceives the nation-state to be the concrete form of the body politic within which complex justice can be established. The nation-state can both guarantee the autonomy of the different spheres of justice, but it can also prevent their complete dissociation: it is because citizens in the end feel themselves members of a nation-state that their pursuit of a plurality of goods in different social spheres does not lead to a radical dissociation.

Despite their differences, Louis thinks that the accounts of Merleau-Ponty, Lefort and Ricœur can be understood as a plea for the securing of a phenomenological body politic in which a healthy balance can be realized between the autonomy of social spheres and their embeddedness in the symbolic unity of a political community. The phenomenological body politic thus serves as an antidote to both totalitarian unity (in which the diversity of social life is abolished by the reign of ideology) and radical dissociation (where a particular social sphere, such as the capitalist economy, emancipates itself completely from all political frameworks).

In sum, Louis uses the third part of the book to extract insights from the work of Arendt, Lefort, Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur about the intertwinement of freedom and embeddedness in different areas of political life, and she ties these insights together with the help of the metaphor of the phenomenological body politic. In this way, Louis gives a convincing presentation of ‘political phenomenology’ as a coherent movement that wants to do justice to political phenomena and defend democratic political life as the privileged place for establishing a healthy balance between freedom and embeddedness (or, put more abstractly, between indeterminacy and determinacy). This account of political phenomenology is similar to the one given by Robert Legros (1996, 548), whose work seems to have been an important influence on Louis’ thinking.

In the final pages of the book Louis tells us that political phenomenology does not tell us which political position we should adopt, but it can help us to avoid the two pathologies of ‘absolute freedom’ and ‘stagnant embeddedness’. Even if we avoid these pathologies, Louis says, there is still plenty of room for political maneuvering – from a flexible conservatism to a radical reformism – and, depending on our situation, we have to decide if we need to secure more freedom or more embeddedness.

I want to conclude with three critical remarks. The first remark concerns Louis’ silence about the differences between Arendt and Lefort. This silence is partly understandable since she wants to focus mainly on similarities so that she can present political phenomenology as a coherent movement, but I think the differences between Arendt and Lefort are of such a fundamental nature that they cannot be ignored. For example, whereas Arendt makes a rigid distinction between ‘the social’ (as a sphere of determinacy and the biological) and ‘the political’ (as a sphere of freedom), for Lefort the social and the political are closely intertwined: the political refers for him to the complex process in which the social gets symbolically instituted.

And indeed, as Wim Weymans (2012) has argued, Arendt’s lack of attention to the symbolic dimension of democratic life is at the heart of many differences between Arendt and Lefort. Whereas Arendt has a tendency to interpret political phenomena in a concrete-empirical way, Lefort interprets them in the light of their symbolic dimension, which explains for example their different evaluation of human rights. Lefort considers human rights as emancipating because of their symbolic dimension: the fact that they are indeterminate and can never be fully realized in social reality creates a permanent possibility for citizens to criticize the existing state of society. Arendt instead perceives human rights as problematic because, in concrete reality, they are not protected by a particular state. One could list more differences between Arendt and Lefort (for example concerning equality, representation, or ideology) but I think this suffices to show that these differences are not unimportant but touch on central aspects of a political phenomenology: how to understand ‘the political’ and how to perceive and interpret political phenomena.

The second remark is related to the phenomenological metaphor of the body politic. Although I think Louis shows convincingly that there is an analogy between political life and embodied subjectivity when it comes to the tension between freedom and embeddedness, in the end this is just one of the tensions in modern political life. As soon as one analyses modern democracies more closely and concretely – as it has been done for example by some of Lefort’s students, such as Pierre Rosanvallon – then there emerge many other structural tensions, such as the tension between liberalism and democracy, the individual and the citizen, reason and will, expertise and opinion, representation and participation, juridical generality and identity, self-responsibility and solidarity, etc. All these tensions structure our democratic experience but, one could argue, they are of a much more incommensurable or ‘tragic’ nature than the tension between freedom and embeddedness. It remains to be seen if the phenomenological metaphor of the body politic can also help to illuminate these ‘tragic’ tensions in our democratic experience or if we would need other metaphors and imaginaries for that.

Thirdly, although Louis’ book convincingly shows that political phenomenology deserves a place in the landscape of contemporary political philosophy, one would still like to hear more about how it relates to other approaches. For example, political phenomenologists are not the only ones who have studied the relation between freedom and embeddedness; there has been a long tradition of Hegelian scholars who have reflected on this problem by rethinking Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit (e.g. Honneth 2014). And although Louis justly characterizes Heidegger’s phenomenology as apolitical, there has been a growing interest lately in ‘political ontology’ (e.g. Marchart 2007), which takes its inspiration largely from Heidegger. By comparing political phenomenology to these closely related approaches, I think its specific contribution to contemporary political philosophy could become even more clear.

References

Honneth, Axel. 2014. Freedom’s Right. The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. New  York: Columbia University Press.

Legros, Robert. 1996. “Phénoménologie politique.” In Dictionnaire de philosophie politique, edited by Philippe Raynaud and Stéphane Rials, 544-551. Paris: PUF.

Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-Foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy,  Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Weymans, Wim. 2012. “Defending Democracy’s Symbolic Dimension: A Lefortian Critique of  Arendt’s Marxist Assumptions.” Constellations 19 (1): 63-80.

Eva Reyes-Gacitúa, Antonio Calcagno (Eds.): Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State: Sociality, Nationhood, Ethics

Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State: Sociality, Nationhood, Ethics Book Cover Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State: Sociality, Nationhood, Ethics
Contributions To Phenomenology, Vol. 110
Eva Reyes-Gacitúa, Antonio Calcagno (Eds.)
Springer
2020
Hardback 103,99 €
XIII, 148

Reviewed by: Jorge Varela (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University)

The forgetfulness towards Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State is telling about the fate of phenomenology. Over the past century its political concerns were mostly overlooked. The noticeable return to political phenomenology since the post-cold war period has had the peculiar character of neglecting most of the preceding political phenomenologies from the past. So, the publication of Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State: Sociality, Nationhood, Ethics, edited by Eva Reyes-Gacitúa and Antonio Calcagno has the value of calling attention to one of the earliest texts on political phenomenology. While there a few occasional analysis of Stein’s contribution on the state to Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, the essay is far from being a canonical text in phenomenology, regardless of its unique object in the early period of the phenomenological movement.

The encompassing nature of the book edited by Calcagno and Reyes-Gacitúa reflects its genesis. It results from the 2016 symposium by the Edith Stein Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies held in Chile, a centre that convenes annually to contribute for the expansion of scholarship on Stein’s work. 4 years ago, they attempted to introduce most of the content of Stein’s exploration into the state. The book has two parts, the first offers 8 chapters in an exhaustive presentation of the contents of Stein’s book, the 5 following chapters explore the usefulness of the book to approach current topics that were less salient in the 1920s.

As the essay was written between 1919 and 1921, and published in 1925, one wonders why did it take so long for any attention to be devoted to it? The editor’s introduction offers three reasons, 1) Stein is mostly associated with phenomenology or with Christian philosophy, and the State is not seen as a particular concern, 2) research on Stein’s wider works has only recently started and this book is part of her earlier unexplored texts, 3) for its association with the German intellectual mood of the interwar years (viii-ix). Strangely, the first two points assume that her readership would be constituted of specialists on Stein, without the inclusion of intellectual historians or other readers of phenomenology. The third point directs us into a more interesting dimension. On the one hand, the editors claim that the entire inter-war period is tainted by the involvement of Germany in the two most violent processes of the preceding century. More importantly, the intellectual explorations that have similarities with what lead the extremist policies of the period, were pushed aside, and ignored. This may make some sense as a fault of Stein’s support for World War I, before she started to write the essay on the state, but she was not a supporter of the Nazi regime. Indeed, she died in a concentration camp. Thus, the similarities between her work and some of the rising totalitarian ideas should be explored to understand the multiplicity of voices, and the specific differences of the period. What remains most surprising is that the editors did not mention Martin Heidegger’s collaboration with the Nazi regime. Heidegger isn’t even mentioned in the book, and his political choices are likely to have served as a greater deterrent for the development of political phenomenology. The specific reasons for overlooking An investigation Concerning the State seem insufficient to explain such a long delay between publication and its recent critical reception.

The opening chapter of part I by Mariano Crespo offers an allusion to the earliest works of political phenomenology that precede Stein’s contribution. Crespo’s attempts to provide prior explorations in the two most clear phenomenological influences for Stein, Husserl, and Reinach serve to emphasize the relevance of Stein’s endeavor. It becomes obvious that Husserl’s late emphasis on intersubjectivity and Reinach’s take on law inform Stein but both fall short of arriving at the political as their object. At the same time, the influence of Reinach is well presented and his apriorism constitutes a driving force for Stein’s considerations, a topic that is recurrent across the edited book. Stein replaces Reinach’s term apriori law for pure law and uses it to distance her approach from the concrete forms positive law assumes, while also avoiding the pitfalls of natural law and the apriori contents it offers. As Crespo states “a priori theory of law is nothing more than a theory of the ‘formal norms of legality’” (10). What applies for this first presentation applies for the entirety of the Stein’s perspective and for the chapters that are contained in this book.

Rather than analysing the concrete appearance of the state, the book chapters follow the ways Stein approaches the conditions of possibility of the state: Law (“Certain Legal Presuppositions About the Idea of Law in Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State”, by Marcelo Gidi SJ), Community (“People and State in Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State” by Marcela Aranda), Ethics (“Sovereignty and the Ethical Demands of the State, by Luis Mariano de la Maza). Aranda presents how Stein takes the People to be a special form of community, Gidi approaches the specific function of Law in Stein edifice, and de la Maza analyses the Ethical realm, particularly in its relation to Stein’s Aristotelian conception of autonomy, in opposition to modern conceptions of sovereignty.

Stein’s personal trajectory, and mostly her conversion to Catholicism, ended up by determining the audience for her writings as she seems to be more popular among catholic intellectuals than phenomenologists, some statements about her life assume a particularly important role. The text on the state was written before her 1922 conversion, and both the editors and de la Maza suggest that it is related with her affiliation with the German Democratic Party. De la Maza suggests there may be a “tension between the interests and personal involvement of Stein with the social and political reality of her time in Germany and the philosophical intent to address the subject of the state in the most objective and neutral way possible” (63-64). While it is difficult to argue that any thinker can develop a thought totally bracketing their own time, these assertions require explanation beyond mere biographical assertions. So, rather than suggesting that her adherence to the German Democratic Party was an influence on her thought on the state, they should have elaborated on how is such an influence felt, mostly when Stein leaves the state open to any ideological actualization. Or, perhaps more productively, they should have explored how Stein’s emphasis on the appearance of the state as either a community or a law creating entity, are the result of the increased bureaucratization of early 20th century state or of an increased perception of a rupture between community and authority. The diverse conceptions of the latter point drove much of the political instability of the interwar period, with competing understandings, from nationalism to Marxism, taking it as a point of dispute.

Likewise, Eva Reyes-Gacitúa’s “Woman and the State in Edith Stein’s thought” offers an important consideration on Stein’s thought on the necessity for an increased role of women in politics, accentuating particularly the contribution women may bring to a reform pedagogical culture. The relevance of women and any other fringe group remains highly relevant to this day, and the way their contribution can be valued and promoted should remain a central concern for conceptualizations of the state and politics. But her positions should also be viewed in relation to the period’s increased involvement of women, and catholic women in particular, in the public sphere to promote specific topics usually associated with education and family. Stein likely outpaces many of these proposals for the centrality of the civic dimension in her thought on women, but it is still remains part of this greater awareness of women’s activity. Reyes-Gacitúa’s chapter occupies a strange place in he edited book, as the Stein’s concern about women is posterior to the essay on the state, and she fails to make a relevant connection between Stein’s two explorations.

To this day, Stein’s continued influence comes less from her collaboration in phenomenological circles than from her spiritual quest that led to her conversion to Catholicism. Even though the book was written just prior to her conversion, it certainly represented a step in the journey that led to it, even if just as an exploration of the fields in which a mystical experience was supposed to remain absent. The significance of this element is felt throughout the recently published edited book and particularly explored in Juan Francisco Pinilla’s “Religion, Mysticism, and the State”. This chapter advances a challenging quest: to explore the mystical dimension of the state, particularly through the connections between the early book by Stein on the state and her later mystical writings, this despite of Stein’s refusal of a spiritual dimension in the life of the state. Pinilla’s parallelism between the two periods of Stein thought brings them together through a politico-theological perspective that clearly deserves further exploration in an analysis of Stein’s early forcible rejection of a religious enmeshment into the state.

Calcagno’s “The Challenges Posed by the Community of Law-Givers and Law-Followers in Edith Stein’s Idea of the State” that appears at the end of Part I is the most challenging and interesting chapter of the entire book. The chapter brings together much of the content of the preceding chapters, while also attempting to challenge and overcome Stein’s proposals. Calcagno’s analysis starts by approaching community, and the related concepts masses and society, in Stein’s works. This section is followed by an analysis of Stein’s approach to the state, and the chapter is concluded by a proposed alternative. By focusing on the centrality of sociality in Stein’s approach to the state, Calcagno attempts to avoid an excessive emphasis on philosophy of law to prioritize the sociological dimension of her proposal. Calcagno’s aim is to claim that “the intimacy and intensity that typify Steinian community pose a challenge for her understanding of the state”. Overall, his claim is that the value of Stein’s analysis lies outside of political theory, and that her conceptual apparatus is inadequate for an understanding of the state. It is surprising that the most interesting chapter in the book is an opposition to the relevance of this Stein’s book.

Calcagno’s discussion of sociality in Edith Stein pays attention to her relation to contemporary sociology and the emphasis on the mass or crowd, society, and community. Soon after completing her An Investigation Concerning the State she published her essay on the Individual and Community. Calcagno, just like Steiner, passes quickly through the notion of the masses as it seems of little relevance to the state for her, a position that Arendt would later regret to be false in the rise of totalitarian regimes. Calcagno also adds a dismissive note to the conceptual apparatus supporting an analysis of the masses by defining it as “marked either by imitation or what Stein and others call psychic contagion”. In the end, the analysis of the support of the state gets reduced to the two opposing social bonds that were central for Tönnies, society and community. Fundamentally, the distinction ends up by being supported by the individual’s relation to the form of sociality. In a community the individual assumes an objective character and it is guided by the attempt to achieve a certain goal, it is “an overextending desire for complete unification that cannot be practically achieved within material and historical circumstances” (88). Stein is explicit that it is community that is best suited as a foundation for law and the state. This very definition of community already pushes it to the constitution of the state. But is this a fair assessment of the value of her analysis of the relation between community and the state? It partly is, and Calcagno’s knowledge of Stein’s work is hardly reproachable, but there is an interpretative overstretch that deserves further exploration.

Calcagno’s interpretation of Steinian community is not exclusively based on her book on the State, but he gets most of his support from the 1922 text on the “Individual and Community”. While this is a common practice, it should be noted that Stein presents the community that feeds the state as a special type of community, unlike for example the family, and it should be noted that this difference makes the state community less intense than the smaller forms of community. Furthermore, the later text is closer to Stein’s conversion to Catholicism, and the limitations of earthly community are more explicit for her, but in her case that points towards a mystical experience that includes a relation to a dimension that supersedes sociality. Stein does assumes that there is a spiritual dimension to the state, but as Calcagno recognizes, it is because the state “appertains to the realm of freedom and motivation” (91). It can hardly be claimed that in the 1921 text she would accept that this could be brought back into a religious experience. So, the overlap of these two works to dismiss the political relevance of the earlier text require much more sustenance than what was done by Calcagno.

At the end of the chapter Calcagno uses the earlier analysis to support a liberal society as a more viable source for the state than community. Calcagno’s criticisms of Stein are generally informative, but his inclination towards society as a better support for the state is based on dubious assessments of Stein’s perspective. First, Calcagno seems to read Stein’s analysis of the state as a set of positive normative proposals. While there is no doubt there are several normative considerations guiding her inquiry, the inadequacy of this view is revealed by Calcagno’s puzzlement at the lack of explorations of specific political ideologies (84). Hers is not intended to be an ideology of the state, but a phenomenology of the state independently of the ideology that is to be deployed. Second, Calcagno is correct to claim that “her philosophical view of the underlying sociality required for statehood runs certain risks” (92), that is, the risk of totalitarianism that incidentally followed the writing of Stein’s book. But by reducing the hazards to an authoritarian personality becoming the leader of the community, Calcagno misses the point that the difference between society and community as support of a state that becomes totalitarian is the difference between a bureaucratic and a nationalist totalitarian state. Third, when Calcagno views society as a better means to achieve unity, he misses the point that this claim can only be done through profound reconceptualization, as he attributes a function to society that it necessarily is not able to sustain. While Stein clearly fetishizes the unity associated with community at a political level, Calcagno’s depoliticized fragments hardly seem to be ready for the task he proposes.

The emphasis Calcagno places on the role of sociality as the basis of the state is the best analysis of the implications of Stein’s work offered in the entire book. All the other elements, including her philosophy of law, remain void without a critical assessment of this point. For Stein, the question is how all the components of the state are experienced, and Calcagno offers a rich introduction to Stein’s ground-breaking dislocation of the support for the state to a careful analysis of sociality.

Part II of the book presents several explorations on the current usefulness of Stein’s approach to the state. These chapters analyse several of the dimensions that current researchers should be able to bring out of analysis of historical texts, how can we bring it to our day?

In “Bioethics and Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State” Alberto Rojas Osorio explores how Stein’s understanding of the role of the individual contributes for an assessment on how to deal with bioethical issues raised in contemporary society. The overview of the history of bioethics and the relation of humans to non-humans is brought out as being relevant beyond the field of medical research and it is enlightening and of significant relevance for many contemporary debates on posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, etc. Focusing on Stein’s presentation of sociality as relating to a common world of values, the author offers a reading on how Stein’s approach can be relocated to a bioethical concern. Clemens Franken’s “The Issue of the State’s Power and its Abuse in the Literature of Gertrud von le Fort in Light of Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State” presents a parallelism between Stein and the literary productions of her contemporary von le Fort. This chapter’s interest arises mostly due to the way Franken is able to approach the two authors despite of their different ideological positions and literary genres. They obviously also had much in common, and despite von le Fort’s focus on literary production, she was also very interested in philosophy. And perhaps more importantly, both converted to Catholicism. It is this latter point that makes the most akin, as Franken shows that both authors supported a view of the individual’s appurtenance to community as breeding an acceptance of obedience, an aspect that became relevant in the contemporary development of personalism. Franken’s chapter is not only important for the relation between the two thinkers, as it also offers an insightful intellectual history of their period. The Last chapter of the book is written by a Chilean politician reflecting on the relevance of Stein’s book for an assessment of current political reform in Chile. Soledad Alvear’s “The Current Process of the Constituent Assembly and the Relevance of Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State” embraces Stein’s encompassing theory of the state as allowing for a continued concern with the community to which it is directed.

Unlike the other chapters of Part II, Fredy Parra’s “The Justification of the Modern State in Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State: A Political Theological View” and María Esther Gómez de Pedro’s “Forms of the State: An Approach to the Work of Edith Stein Based on its Aristotelian Influences” approach topics that are not alien to Stein. Parra approaches the state from a perspective that hadn’t yet been developed at Stein’s time, political theology, and he brings to discussion authors that were all born in the decade that succeeded the production of Stein’s book. Parra’s chapter introduces Stein’s analysis of the state, emphasizing how the final form of her study remains unable to hinder the seizure of the state by undesirable values. Parra brings Ratzinger and Metz to explore the current predicaments of the state, as they result from his assessment of Stein. De Pedro focusses on the centrality of the bearers of the state in Stein’s understanding of the relation between community and the state. She also extends Stein’s analysis by further presenting how a greater focus on Aristotelian virtues could add to Stein’s view, claiming a political continuum between Aristotle, Aquinas and Stein.

Edited books are always a strange endeavor, and anyone who ventures into this field should always be lauded, but the current one presents a further challenge, it didn’t start as a book. In the beginning it was a conference. Perhaps more in the present day than ever before, the bringing together of researchers into a common physical space to present, explore, and criticize on common topics is of greater relevance in the production of renewed reassessments of the legacy that the world and intellectual tradition have legated us than most publications that arrive to us. So, the present book serves as a testimony to events that are becoming scarce and that threaten to consolidate the digitalization that was already impending. At the same time, the conference was performed by a group that was mostly starting to enter into Edith Stein’s book, and this led to presentations that privileged breadth of content rather than critical analysis. So, while the book covers most topics advanced by Stein, they bring limited novelty to what Stein wrote to start with. Furthermore, most contributions had to be translated from Spanish into English to be included in the book, but that left some problematic choices. For example, it is a poor choice to retain references to the Spanish translation of a German text in an English language text, as most readers won’t find these references helpful.

Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State: Sociality, Nationhood, Ethics serves as remembrance of the relevance of books that remained undervalued. Stein brought fresh light into the problematic of the state by directly focusing on aspects that remain pertinent and unresolved to this day.

Thomas Bedorf, Steffen Herrmann (Eds.): Political Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Episteme, Routledge, 2019

Political Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Episteme Book Cover Political Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Episteme
Routledge Research in Phenomenology
Thomas Bedorf, Steffen Herrmann (Eds.)
Routledge
2019
Hardback £96.00
362