{"id":17917,"date":"2016-02-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2739"},"modified":"2016-02-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-24T00:00:00","slug":"economy-of-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/02\/economy-of-force\/","title":{"rendered":"Economy of Force"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Patricia Owens summarizes her recent Economy of Force<\/a> in a symposium at The Disorder of Things<\/a>. Her book is a history of modern counterinsurgency, but that history has much broader implications for the history of political thought and scholarship on international relations. As Owens puts it, \u201cThe book is a study of oikonomia <\/em>in the use of force, from oikos<\/em>, ancient Greek for household. But it also makes a larger claim, that household governance underlies the relatively recent rise of distinctly social forms of government and thought more broadly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Households are \u201chierarchical\u201d and arrange members in specific spatial configuration. The household has not been the same throughout history, but it is the space in which \u201cthe life processes of members \u2013 real, vulnerable bodies needing food, water, shelter \u2013 are administered and the household itself is maintained.\u201d One key point of her argument is that political and social thought has long assumed the household model for government of nations and even for international relations. This produced an inherently hierarchical, conservative orientation in political theory and practice.<\/p>\n

Her history is partly the history of the formation of \u201cthe social\u201d: \u201cthe founding myth of liberalism was that the rise and expansion of commercial \u2018societies\u2019 destroyed large-scale household rule, at least where \u2018contract societies\u2019 were established; notwithstanding the ever-present need to revert to forms of liberal despotism when non-compliant subjects require domestication. Nonetheless, through the eighteenth-century, \u2018society\u2019 would largely replace \u2018household\u2019 as the central object of intervention and thought in the core of the major European empires.\u201d Owens doesn\u2019t buy this: Her book \u201coffers a re-narration of this discourse of modern \u2018society\u2019, showing the continuing significance and often-colonial genealogies of households through close readings of several traditions of social and political thought.\u201d <\/p>\n

In short, \u201cmodern capitalist imperial states as initiating a scaling up and transformation of \u2013 rather than negation of \u2013 large-scale forms of household rule.\u201d \u201cCivil society\u201d became a large form of household, comprised of the oikonomia <\/em>once associated with the household and the nuclear family, now stripped of its economic functions.<\/p>\n

Counter-insurgency develops within this household model of government. Restless members of the national house have to be domesticated and kept under control. It is \u201cgood housekeeping\u201d to control colonized populations, and similar housekeeping is sometimes needed to get undomesticated members of the household under control. Owens observes that counterinsurgency is often described today as \u201carmed social work,\u201d and she thinks the analogy apt. But for her it cuts in the other direction: Social work is a form of counter-insurgency. Owens writes, \u201cthrough the nineteenth-century, the social realm underwent a major structural transformation, with state and non-state \u2018social policy\u2019 interventions specifically targeted at populations in revolt, especially women, workers, and colonial natives.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was the Social Question of the day: \u201chow to manage the welfare of newly organized and radicalized workers, women and natives such that capitalism and imperialism were not overthrown. Alongside violent repression, administering the life processes and risks of certain populations in revolt was the other primary method for addressing their demands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Owens believes that the history and theory of household governance has been obscured by the blinders of liberal theory, the \u201cnear pervasive sociomania, or sociolatry, afflicting the human sciences, and international theory as well. Virtually the entire field takes the concepts of \u2018social\u2019 and \u2018society\u2019 to be timeless and universally applicable, as if they had no history.\u201d<\/p>\n

She claims that counterinsurgency is the conduct of oikonomia <\/em>\u2013 not of politics \u2013 by other means. And she thinks that politics is actually the solution to the dilemmas she outlines. Traditional political thought won\u2019t serve, since it is a discourse about \u201chousehold administration.\u201d But this isn\u2019t the only possible politics: \u201cpolitics might . . . refer to the actions of plural equals freely debating and acting on their common affairs in a manner that was essentially non-violent and unpredictable, that is, not subject to the calculations of oikonomia<\/em>. Politics would include the non-hierarchical administration of life processes, but politics as such would not be reducible to oikonomia<\/em>.\u201d For Owens, \u201cresistance to domestication would be the object of political theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is much to ponder, much to disagree with, here. Owens is right to highlight the importance of the household as a model of governance. She thinks that liberalism\u2019s claim to offer a non-domestic, contractual model of government obscures more than it reveals. There may be something to that, but the divergence of Locke from Fulmer\u2019s patriarchal model isn\u2019t chimerical. Once you find the legal resources to behead the royal head of the national house, it seems you have moved into a new paradigm.<\/p>\n

As Andrew Davenport says in his essay in the same symposium, Owens sets up a binary of household v. politics, but doesn\u2019t explain what she means by politics until late in the game and then only briefly. The set-up of Owens argument implies that much political thought has not been about politics at all, but about something else \u2013 household management. Davenport suggests sardonically that there is \u201csomething at least quixotic about a way of doing so that results in much of the canon of political theory being summarily declared \u2018not properly political.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

<\/span>One might add that the notion of a politics of plural equals without hierarchy is a utopian dream that has never been realized and probably cannot be. Perhaps family is so much a part of what makes us human that we inevitably gravitate to hierarchies of fathers, brothers, sisters, son, daughters, however we might kick against the goads.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t read Owens\u2019s book, but from her summary it seems she pays little or no attention to theological questions. A dash of Milbank would enrich her account and perhaps correct some of her missteps.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Patricia Owens summarizes her recent Economy of Force in a symposium at The Disorder of Things. Her book is a history of modern counterinsurgency, but that history has much broader implications for the history of political thought and scholarship on international relations. As Owens puts it, \u201cThe book is a study of oikonomia in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1500,859],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-counter-insurgency","category-political-theory"],"yoast_head":"\nEconomy of Force<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Patricia Owens summarizes her recent Economy of Force in a symposium at The Disorder of Things. 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