Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics by Bonnie Honig

Author:Bonnie Honig [Honig, Bonnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 9780801480720
Google: xLV_DQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 2156564
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 1993-01-15T12:25:59+00:00

The Practice of Punishment

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche envisions a society so powerful that it does not need to punish: “A society might attain such a consciousness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury possible to it—letting those who harm it go unpunished. ‘What are my parasites to me?’ it might say. ‘May they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that’” Nietzsche’s imagined society does without punishment not because its laws are “right” or because its citizens become increasingly obedient but because it overcomes justice (the insistence on right) with mercy, a kind of magnanimity that is “beyond the law.”43 The scenario is not merely naive. That it initially strikes the reader that way is one of the most telling points of the reflection. The image of a society so powerful that it does not need to punish is meant not to make us yearn unrealistically for the realization of the ideal, but to invite us to reflect critically on why and how societies punish, to think about punishment (its gravity, its sites, and its frequency) as a measure of societal need rather than individual deviance, as a signal of social weakness rather than administrative resolve.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls also envisions a society that does not need to punish.44 But if Rawls’ ideal society does without punishment, that is not because it is powerful enough to afford magnanimity but because its institutionalization of justice makes magnanimity unnecessary: criminality does not surface in a well-ordered regime. Rawls wagers that citizens governed by relatively just institutions will acquire a “corresponding sense of justice.”45 Well-ordered institutions engender well-ordered selves, and this secures the regime’s stability.46 Gradually, the citizens’ felt need to reenter the original position disappears. The disruptions of dissonance and resistance, both inter- and intrasubjective, diminish.

Hence Rawls’s wager that his scheme will pass the formal tests of stability and congruence. The “strains of commitment” will not be too burdensome in justice as fairness, and the institutional order will be congruent with the members’ conceptions of the good.47 But the wager is premised on the assumption that the institutions of justice as fairness fit and express the (core) self without remainder. As Rawls puts it, the original position, by bracketing the contingent attributes and worldly features that set people at odds, and the difference principle, by refusing to distribute scarce resources as moral rewards for contingently distributed natural talents, give “expression [to] our nature as free and equal rational beings.”48 This expressivism is what underlies Rawls’s belief that justice as fairness does not ask too much of its subjects.

But Rawls’s expressivist ground is insecure. His identification of a human (moral) nature with a free and equal rationality soon gives way to the admission that some beings are free and equally rational but others are oddly irrational, even immoral, even when raised in a just regime. His identification of the core of the self with freedom and reason is soon tempered by the admission that there are some selves whose core constitution is anything but rational.

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