Vienna Lectures on Legal Philosophy, Volume 1 by Christoph Bezemek Michael Potacs Alexander Somek

Vienna Lectures on Legal Philosophy, Volume 1 by Christoph Bezemek Michael Potacs Alexander Somek

Author:Christoph Bezemek,Michael Potacs,Alexander Somek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-06-15T00:00:00+00:00


A.The Global Emergency Imaginary

Much of present-day global political consciousness tends to rest on what the sociologist Craig Calhoun aptly describes as an ‘emergency imaginary’,15 according to which a host of political challenges are conceived forthwith as sudden, abnormal, unforeseen and probably unpredictable emergencies, each demanding expeditious top-down surgical responses. The global emergency imaginary is prevalent not only in familiar discussions of (so-called) natural and environmental disasters,16 but also in the economy, health policy (eg SARS or Ebola), counterterrorism and ‘humanitarian’ or other ‘complex emergencies’, typically involving refugees and displaced persons. Everywhere we turn, in short, we encounter ubiquitous political talk of major crises or emergencies. Though Schmitt might have been surprised by the cross-border sources and repercussions of many of the (alleged) emergencies at hand, the underlying imaginary rests implicitly on an intuition he clearly shared, ie that dire crises are both irrepressible and commonplace, and that ours increasingly seems to be an era in which the ‘exception’ becomes the ‘norm’.17

As Calhoun rightly points out, however, we need to acknowledge the emergency imaginary’s potential dangers. It misleadingly assumes a more-or-less well-functioning global system, accidentally disrupted by an operational aberration; it downplays the degree to which many ‘emergencies’ represent predictable consequences of endemic structural trends in the global political economy; conveniently, it shifts responsibility away from their longstanding structural roots, and also from the privileged social and political players who benefit disproportionately from the global status quo; similarly, it downplays how the powerful and privileged disproportionately shape crisis discourse.18 Finally, it favours top-down political managerialism over the arduous (grassroots) political action necessary to keep many ‘emergencies’ from transpiring in the first place.

Calhoun hardly denies the existence of serious or even dire political challenges or global ‘crises’,19 yet he correctly underscores the necessity not only of critically interrogating the emergency imaginary, but also the need to do so by recourse to critical social theory. The global emergency imaginary is a political and social construct, with very real consequences for people, and one that is shaped and created within a specific political context, where the playing field is generally characterised by vast inequalities in power and privilege. Our analysis needs to make sense of such social ‘facts’. Unlike Schmitt, Calhoun smartly refuses to view the proliferation of emergencies and emergency rhetoric as quasi-ontological, as essential to ‘the political’ and thus irrepressible.20 Nor does he follow Schmitt in misleadingly emphasising the alleged pathologies of liberal jurisprudence, in the process attributing pathologies to liberal and democratic views of law whose primary sources probably lay elsewhere.21 To Calhoun’s credit, he intuits that a proper diagnosis of the emergency imaginary will necessarily call on critical-minded social sciences as well as political and legal theory.



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