 Before introducing our very distinguished guest for this evening, just a reminder about this program, this is the first lecture of this academic year. We started with the series, the globalization lectures last year, or last term actually, in term two of last academic year, which is this calendar year. And after, I mean, the next lectures will take place in the same hall on the 26th of November, with Professor Samir Amin, a very renowned Egyptian economist, and the director of the World Forum in Dakar in Senegal. He will be followed in January, 28th of January, Dr. Ronny Broman, medical doctor, former president of Doctors Without Borders, and he was at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1999, which his organization received. And on the 25th of February, the last lecture of this academic year will be given by Professor, Columbia Professor, New York Columbia Professor Saskia Sasen, a very well-known author on the issues of globalization. Well, I have the very great pleasure of introducing Professor Ellen Maksinswood this evening. As you have probably seen already from the announcement, in case you didn't know about her work, I guess that many among you have already heard about Professor Wood. She is a professor emeritus of political science at York University, where she taught for many, many years, and I think this is the only university where you actually were anchored. Except for visiting here. Yes, but as an anchor. And well, she's the author of many important books, on both the history of political thought and the history of capitalism. You have just three titles on the announcement selected from a long list, but they give an indication of the variety of topics on which Ellen has been working. The origin of capitalism is a contribution to one of the most complex historical debates. The Empire of Capital is also a very important contribution on the actual reality of what we call empire, and the variety of empires throughout history. And the very latest book, which is displayed there, Citizens to Lords, well, from the subtitle you know, you have an idea of what it is, a social history of Western political thought from antiquity to the Middle Ages, and just to say a very few words about that. But before that, just to mention that the work of Professor Maxine Wood has received praise from some of the foremost members of the very famous post war group, I mean of British Marxist historians, people like Christopher Hill, and Herrick Hobsbohm. What she is mainly concerned with in her latest book is the social history of political theory, which is the history of political theory seen through the factors like class and social interest underlying political ideology. And this is an endeavor that she started several years ago with her late husband, Neil Wood. She started focusing initially on early modern English political philosophy. In 1997 for those who are eager to get something on this period, a book called Trumpet of Sedition. And in the meantime, Ellen has been working on ancient Greek political philosophy for initially teaching purposes, which, well, created an important interest, and she felt the need of a comprehensive social history of Western political thought. And this latest book, Citizens to Lords, is just the first installment of a very ambitious and very important project covering, as the title says, the social history of Western political thought. Well, with today's lecture, we'll get, well, what one could tell at least from the subtitle, a synthetic snapshot of the project, the whole project, taking us from where the book that just came out stopped, that is empire from the Polish to the Greek cities to empire, to modern day imperial ideologies, or as she put it in the subtitle for today from Alexander the Great to George II. Thank you, Jean Berre. Thank you. I hope you don't mind that I'm going to sit here. It's terribly embarrassing. I mean, I'm hidden by the damn thing. I'm so small. It happens to me very often, so I hope you won't mind. The second thing I want to say is that Jean Berre's summary of what I'm going to do sounds even more ambitious than what I have in mind. And I am indeed going to start with a story about Alexander the Great, but I just want to reassure you that if my title sounds insanely ambitious, it's not quite as bad as all that, I promise you. I'm not intending to offer a comprehensive conspectus of imperialist ideologies from Alexander to Bush in all steps in between. What I'll be talking about is a very particular ideological strategy. What I'm calling here the imperial paradox, which I'll explain in a moment. It was a strategy that was born in antiquity, so I'll start by talking about its ancient origins, in particular its perfection in imperial Rome and in Roman Christianity, but then I'll take a great leap forward to its contemporary incarnations in certain conceptions of capitalist globalization. Okay, let me explain what I mean by starting with my Alexander story. You may know that Aristotle is supposed to have been his tutor. Well, it's said that Aristotle advised his pupil to distinguish between Greeks and barbarians and to treat them differently. He should deal with Greeks as a leader, but when he's dealing with non-Greeks, that is so-called barbarians, he should behave like a master, something like a master of slaves. Well, the story goes that Alexander refused to do this, did just the opposite. He refused to divide men between Greek friends and barbarian foes. Instead, he simply distinguished between good men and bad, whatever their origin. And as a result, he's been credited with inventing the notion of a cosmopolis, a universal version of the old Greek city-state, the polis. The idea of the cosmopolis, which would be systematically developed by Stoic philosophers, rejected the very particularistic and exclusive attitudes associated with the ancient polis and replaced them with a kind of universal community representing the universal equality and fraternity of humankind. Now, there's obviously something odd here because we all know that Alexander was a ruthless conqueror who built a vast empire on the foundations that were laid by his father Philip. And we don't immediately associate imperial ambitions with a doctrine of human equality and brotherhood. After all, stressing the equality of all human beings is not the most obvious way to justify the subjection of some of them to others. So there's something that needs to be explained, and I probably should say straightaway that I can't take seriously the arguments of postmodernism and related fashions, which seem to suggest that even ideas, any idea of universal equality, like all forms of universalism are intrinsically oppressive and imperialist. I don't have time to go into that here, but let me stress that the kind of universalism we're talking about here is in principle egalitarian, and there's nothing at all self-evident about the ideological strategy of defending imperial domination by invoking universal equality. It's a paradoxical strategy, even contradictory, and it depends on some pretty fancy footwork, which has been plausible only in very particular historical circumstances. Above all, it depends on a kind of dualism, which I want to talk about here. What I have in mind is a dualism that allows universal community and equality to exist in some abstract moral sphere while inequality and domination in the real world go on as before. Well, in the history of Western political theory, especially from the early modern period, it became fairly common to defend the right to rule while acknowledging and even stressing the universal freedom and equality of men, and, of course, it generally has been men. What makes Western political theory particularly interesting and even puzzling is that it invented a defense of domination combined with and even based on a notion of equality, which specifically denies any natural division between ruler and ruled, or any justification of domination in terms of natural inequality. You only have to think of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. I mean, here's someone who defends an absolutist monarchy on the grounds of a very radical notion of natural equality and a denial, a very emphatic denial that there's any natural division between ruler and ruled. And he makes his argument for absolute power by invoking the very flexible idea of consent, korej and equal individuals. Now, I don't deny that his is the most supremely paradoxical version of this argument, but he certainly wasn't alone in combining equality with domination. And this is a staple of Western political thought. But let me be very clear about this, because ideas of equality and universal human community aren't exclusive to the culture of what, for lack of a better term, we call the West. And neither is it unusual for such ideas to coexist more or less happily with inequality and domination. I mean, you can find ideas of natural equality in ancient Chinese philosophy, for instance, and these were in no way a challenge to imperial power. And the juxtaposition of empire with ideas of a universal community isn't exclusively Western either. And you can see it in Islam, and even while it was often expressed in an admirable toleration towards non-Muslims, it also coexisted very comfortably with an expanding Arab Muslim empire. But what we get in the Western canon is something distinctive. We're not just talking about the peaceful coexistence of these contradictory ideas. What we're talking about is the systematic mobilization of egalitarian doctrines and ideas of universal brotherhood in the justification of both class and imperial domination. The point is that Western political theory at least at certain seminal moments in its history confronted a very specific problem. It had to find ways of explaining and justifying domination on the basis of natural equality. Or to put it another way, it had to find ways of systematically explaining and justifying domination full stop. In other words, relations of domination couldn't simply be taken as given either on the basis of tradition or divine mandate or whatever. The notion of natural equality became a troublesome issue when and because it was coupled with a fundamental challenge to the very idea of rule and domination. As long as the principle of domination is more or less unchallenged on its own terms whether you regard it as the mandate of heaven or even simply on the basis of tradition or maybe hereditary principles, the principles of royal bloodlines or descent from the prophet or whatever, it can be perfectly compatible with ideas of fundamental human equality. But once the principle of domination itself is thrown into serious question, it's a very different matter. When people invoke natural equality to question authority, some pretty clever thinking is required to overcome that threat and to turn egalitarian ideas against themselves. Now, this strategy would come fully into its own only centuries later, but its history begins in ancient Greece. In ancient so-called high civilizations, the state was typically organized in one form or another as a means of appropriating surplus labor either directly or through taxation, and even when property was well developed, office in the state was likely to be the primary means of acquiring great wealth and something like this form of state on a small scale existed in Bronze Age Greece too, but it gave way to a new and very different form of political organization, the polis. In the classical Greece, and especially in Athenian democracy, a loosely organized property class never had a powerful state at its disposal. Landlords were more dependent on their property as a source of wealth, not on office or judicial privilege, and they were compelled to rely on various political accommodations with lower classes in order to protect their property and maintain social order. And the result was a new kind of civic community, a community of citizens. Of course, social and economic inequalities did continue to exist, but that's just the point. Landlords and peasants, for example, belonged to the same body of citizens, sharing the same civic identity. So the ancient Greek polis was governed by this community of citizens and the principal relation, the principal political relation, wasn't between rulers and subjects, but among citizens. What we're talking about, then, is a social order where the appropriating class did not have unambiguous dominance, where it depended on political accommodations with subordinate classes, and where relations of domination weren't political and economic at the same time. Something like this would later also be true up to a point in Republican Rome. Anyway, this produced a whole new political sphere, and it created a wholly new dynamic in political relations, in relations among classes. In this new political sphere, deep social divisions, and class conflicts in particular, played themselves out in political terms, not just in overt struggles for power, but in the daily transactions of normal everyday politics. This also meant that probably for the first time in history, especially in Greek democracy, there could be a significant tension between economic inequality and political equality. So that's the context in which notions of equality presented a wholly new problem for those wanting to justify domination, and I've argued elsewhere that much of ancient Greek philosophy, in particular Plato's, was motivated by the need to deal with those problems, but I'm not going to go into that here. Here is the effects of this distinctive separation of civic equality and class inequality. More particularly, I want to talk about the consequences of thinking about the social world in these terms. The creation of a wholly new civic sphere and a new identity, the identity of citizenship, set apart from the social realities of inequality and domination. In the first instance, I think this was a good thing, which had real advantages for the lower classes. For one thing, their civic identity spared them the kinds of dependent conditions that have characterized most forms of economic exploitation throughout history before the advent of capitalism, conditions like serfdom, debt bondage, compulsory labor for the state, and so on. And it's certainly true that this created new theoretical problems but it also opened up new possibilities which weren't quite so positive. The notion of civic equality effectively turned the world upside down. I mean, before it had always been clear that the state represented domination. But now the state itself, in fact the state above all, supposedly represented equality, the equality of the civic community. In spite of all existing social inequalities, the idea of equality was expressed in the political identity of citizenship. This meant that relations of domination could be disguised in completely new ways. If only they could be clothed in the mantle of citizenship and civic equality. And that's where we come to Alexander the Great. By the time he set out on his massive imperial venture, the culture of the polis was firmly rooted in the Greek world. And it's not surprising that imperial ideology would draw on it and try to meet it on its own terms. Alexander and his successors employed the rhetoric of the polis in various ways, but for our purposes here the interesting thing is this idea of the cosmopolis. If Alexander really did embrace this idea, he clearly intended it to transfer political loyalties to the universal polis, in this case the empire. By absorbing and adapting rhetorically the principal themes that had emerged from the life of the polis, its notion of citizenship, law of freedom equality, and so on. So we already have the rudiments of the dualism I'm talking about. In the real world of everyday life some are rich and some are poor and all of them are imperial subjects, but on the elevated plane of the cosmopolis they're all brothers and sisters under the skin. But it was the Roman Empire that really perfected this imperial paradox. When Rome was still a republic in the process of imperial expansion the Romans justified it as the result of legitimate conquests by the city state of Rome. But eventually the republic became inadequate to deal with the expanding empire and a new kind of state developed an empire with an emperor and that demanded some pretty significant adjustments in the ideology of empire. The old republican idea rooted in the Roman city state was replaced by a more cosmopolitan idea. The notion of a single world empire ruled by one absolute ruler no longer centered just in Rome. So the Romans found their own ways of converting the old principles of the polis into imperial ideas and the most obvious conversion was in the conception of citizenship. I mean, citizenship of the Roman Empire extended far beyond the borders of metropolitan Rome and inevitably that meant that citizenship couldn't mean what it once did. It became an increasingly passive identity, the identity of imperial subjects. The really interesting conceptual adjustments occurred in the law and here they were truly innovative. I mean, take the most basic distinction in the Roman law. That's the distinction between private law and public law. Private law was by far the main concern of the Romans and private property was right at the heart of it. What's significant from our point of view is that especially as the empire develops, the duality of public and private turns into a very distinctive idea. The division between two modes of control even two spheres of power, the power of property and the power of the state. On the one hand, there's the power of dominium, property which is much more clearly defined and exclusive than it had ever been as conceived by the Greeks or anybody else as far as I know. On the other hand, there's the imperium which first was a term used to designate military command and also the command of civil magistrates and then eventually applied to rule by the emperor. So the idea of two distinct spheres of power was deeply embedded in the Roman view of the world rooted in its very distinctive property relations and a unique partnership between a powerful state and strong private property of a kind that didn't exist anywhere else in any high civilization that I know about. Now this duality had massive implications. For instance, the Romans had inherited the idea of natural law from early Stoic philosophers the idea of a universal cosmic order governed by principles of natural reasons which are supposed to be common to all human beings and in early Stoicism that idea certainly had or could have pretty egalitarian implications but in later Roman adaptations and in, for example, in the writings of Cicero who was influenced by Stoic philosophy the idea was developed in a way that neatly combined a notion of universal moral equality with an explicit commitment to social and political inequality and domination. The Roman elaboration of natural law owed a lot to the duality of state and property impurium and dominium you can see how it works for instance in the way that the philosopher Seneca, I hope you forgive me for quoting a philosophy, but in the way that Seneca explicated Stoic doctrine he starts by demonstrating how all things can be considered common and at the same time remain individual and private property. And to make this point a significant analogy with the rights of the emperor he says all things are Caesar's by right of his authority that is by right of his imperium yet at the same time the sense in which everything is his by right of imperium must be distinguished from the way things belong to him as his own personal property by right of inheritance by his dominium. This is a point that has even more significant implications. He goes on to apply his doctrine to the gods and he elaborates his distinction between two forms of ownership or power in connection with the gods. He says while it is true that all things belong to the gods all things are not consecrated to the gods and only in the case of the things that religion has assigned to a divinity is it possible to discover in the reach of sacred law? So there's a sense in which all things and all power belong to the gods but there's another sense in which they don't. So here you have a way of thinking about property and spheres of authority that made it possible to insist on one universal cosmic logos a universal common natural law the equality of all human beings and even a supreme divine authority and at the same time still declare the sanctity of private property the legitimacy of social inequality and the absolute authority of earthly governments. Now it was only a short step from there to Roman Christianity. It was Roman Christianity that truly perfected this dualistic strategy and I'm using the term Roman Christianity with deliberate intent. What I'm talking about is not Christianity in its original form when it was still what we might call a tribal religion still deeply rooted in Judaism and not the self-proclaimed universal church that it would become. I'm talking about the fundamental transformations in Christian doctrine which happened very early at the hands of Saint Paul had culminated in the work of Saint Augustine. Pauline Christianity in my view is a ideology of empire. We don't need to accept the extreme interpretation that he was a conscious and deliberate ideologue of empire it's enough just to acknowledge that he was very much a product of imperial Rome and that like it or not his doctrinal innovations were far more congenial to Roman imperial powers than were the old tribal religion or other forms of Christianity. Saint Paul's Christianity is a distinctive kind of universalism. This universalism allows the supreme omnipotent authority of one God to coexist with the more or less absolute temporal powers of emperors and kings and it also allows the equality of all humanity before God to coexist with the most extreme social inequalities and rigid earthly hierarchies in a very Roman approach. The Bible itself attributes to Jesus actually to Jesus the principle that we should render unto Caesar the things which are Caesars and unto God the things that are Gods but at Saint Paul really turned this into a defense of obedience to earthly powers. It was Paul who began the process of translating into systematic Christian theology the doctrine of universal divinity and the spiritual equality of all human beings before God combined with the earthly inequalities of property, social hierarchy and absolute political authority. He establishes his universalistic principles by dissociating Christianity from Jewish law. He replaces the particularism of an essentially tribal religion with transcendent moral doctrine that applies equally to human beings. Greeks are Romans, no less than Jews and slaves no less than masters. The righteousness of God manifests itself apart from any law. So far so good but Paul's universalism turns out to be a two edged sword. On the one hand it asserts the equal moral equality of the equal moral value of all human beings. On the other hand it leaves unchallenged in fact supports the social inequalities of the temporal sphere. Paul insists that these conditions should be accepted by good Christians and even slavery is consistent with his universalistic doctrine even if he enjoins masters to treat their slaves well. I mean his Christianity certainly obliges him to challenge the actual divinity of the emperor but he can still insist that earthly governments are ordained by divine providence and he clearly asserts the authority of the secular state. It's worth considering by the way that this kind of dualistic strategy would not be available to Islam. It wasn't available to Judaism either but it wouldn't be available to Islam because that strategy which came so easily to Roman Christianity is excluded by the fundamental Islamic doctrine and this single divinely revealed system of law which encompasses the whole range of human practice secular and religious at the same time. Anyway, Paul's dualistic message to Roman elites and prosperous classes was decidedly more reassuring than were the teachings of the early Christians some of whom denied not only the divinity of Caesar but even his divinely sanctioned authority and some of them preached in egalitarianism that wasn't just confined to the moral or spiritual sphere. They repudiated materialistic values they called upon their fellows to give up their wealth to the community and so on. Paul represents a really striking contrast to that kind of Christianity. Even his essential doctrine of salvation by faith rather than by works had clear advantages for those who stood to lose from a strict adherence to the gospel, the rich and powerful. Now the whole Pauline structure of dual authority depended on the concept of sin and whatever else this emphasis on sin was meant to do it certainly conformed to the requirements of Roman hegemony and the authority of Caesar because it means that earthly government and obedience to them are necessary according to this version of Christianity because and only because human beings are sinful by nature. Now it's true that for Paul Christ represents salvation from the universal taint of sin but in this life if not the next there's no way of escaping human sinfulness and that makes Caesar's authority an unavoidable necessity. Now the principle that human sinfulness legitimates earthly authorities would reach its full development in Augustine and he really took it to new extremes with a particularly unforgiving doctrine of predestination but with Augustine we're in a different stage of Roman imperialism the later empire is going through bad times Rome had been sacked by Alaric the Visigoth and this is after the conversion of the emperor Constantine so it's a Christian empire that's suffering these evils so among the Roman elites there's a growing tendency to blame all these evils on the abandonment of old Roman traditions on the abandonment of Roman paganism and so on and Augustine sets out to exonerate Christianity from the evils facing Rome he tries to explain those evils while at the same time demonstrating that Christianity doesn't represent a threat to the earthly authority of the empire and this obviously requires something very different from a conception of the Roman empire as the fulfillment of God's purpose or something like that in fact Augustine repudiates the whole notion of Rome's Christian mission and the consequence is an even more emphatic doctrine of unconditional obedience to imperial authority in other words a Christian empire is in effect no less sinful than a pagan empire and neither one of them can you have true justice in this life Augustine's most famous doctrine is the idea of two cities the earthly city and the city of God now this is a complex idea that's hard to get a handle on but certain things about it are clear it owes a lot to earlier Roman and Christian dualisms but it's nothing so simple as a distinction between earthly and heavenly realms or secular and spiritual authority the city of God represents the saintly in fact pious and just the earthly designates the impure and pious and unjust and damned but though the two of them are antithetical they are inseparable from each other and all institutions in this world suffer from this conflict so until the end of history when the city of God will finally triumph the earthly city will be dominant and history will remain a tragic spectacle in which harmony and justice can never prevail so every person and all institutions the holy no less than the transparently unholy have to submit to earthly powers and the best we can expect from those powers is not a just or rightful order but a measure of security maybe physical comfort, some relief from the disorder that inevitably follows from the law of human beings who populate this earthly world of course at the root of this pessimism is the notion of humanity's fallen condition and the power of sin and like Paul, Augustine concluded from this that Caesar's earthly power although it doesn't fulfill any divine mission was nevertheless providentially ordained by God but he takes that doctrine much further because unlike Paul the empire already converted to Christianity and he systematically spells out the reasons for obeying a pagan emperor like Julian the Apostate no less than Constantine the Christian if anything the burden of Augustine's argument is virtually all on the side of obedience to imperial authority in fact he does something more he effectively kills the ancient civic idea what I mean by this is that in the classical idea of citizenship some kind of equality was still dangerously rooted in the earthly world now it's true that the idea had been substantially diluted by the Romans but Augustine was taking no chances the equality of human beings before God may have been an essential principle of Christianity but Augustine made sure that this Christian principle was safely and decisively relegated to a sphere beyond this earth leaving secular imperial authority completely unchallenged the old greek principles of political community presupposed some kind of human capacity for self-government so those civic principles could best be challenged by denying any such capacity for civic virtue or self-rule or denying the very existence of a civic domain and nothing could do that more emphatically than the doctrine of original sin so that was pretty much that the strategy of invoking democracy equality or even just citizenship in support of domination had always been a pretty risky business even though there were moments when it could be useful it had limited utility in capitalist societies whose economic powers were so closely bound up with legal, political and military status before the advent of capitalism dominant classes had much to lose by invoking democracy or equality even just rhetorically and once the ancient civil ideal had been completely expunged by western feudalism ideologies of domination tended to be pretty explicit about their inegalitarian foundations but with capitalism the ideological possibilities and the needs of dominant classes changed radically for the first time in history the rhetoric of democracy could become the preferred and systematic ideological strategy of domination, both class domination and imperialism that's what I want to talk about now you'll be relieved to hear we've left the ancient world and we're making our great leap forward and we're gonna even talk about the early days of capitalist imperialism what I'm gonna talk about is the kind of capitalist imperialism that doesn't need to impose direct colonial rule on the whole because it can impose its powerful economic pressures what I like to call market imperatives on the whole world now this fully developed capitalist empire which depends above all it's basically the story of US imperialism the US has preferred on the whole to avoid colonial entanglements and to maintain so called informal empire and up to now it's been more or less successful in imposing market forces and manipulating them to the advantage of US capital now we all know that this hasn't been possible without huge military power but that military power has generally been used for the old imperial purpose of capturing and ruling colonial territories it's job has been much more diffuse than that more open ended basically to police the global system to make it safe for the movements of capital so this new imperialism is something very different from any earlier variety and it has its own ideological requirements in older forms of imperial rule like the ones we were just talking about the economic power of the empire was more or less co-extensive with its military dominance and its political hegemony so the task of imperial ideology was above all to assert the empire's political legitimacy and the obligation to obey imperial authority but in today's so called new imperialism the ideological task is more complicated the economic power of imperial capital doesn't depend on direct political or military rule in general and its global reach doesn't coincide with its political hegemony so justifying and defending the new imperialism doesn't just depend on asserting the legitimacy of imperial authorities and the need to obey them the new imperialism depends on the imposition and maintenance of capitalist economic imperatives and this economic order which is now a truly global order needs its own justification at the same time global capital certainly does need political support and military support the trouble is that for now and I would say for the foreseeable future that political support has to take the form of territorial states and it doesn't remotely coincide with the global reach of capital so the new imperialist ideology doesn't only have to find ways of justifying the global economy it also has to legitimate what are plainly the actions of territorial states including military actions so the new imperialism in other words really has two distinct ideological requirements and these requirements are sometimes in conflict with each other separately and then consider how or even whether they can be reconciled in the new imperial ideology the new economic imperialism really came into its own I would say only in the latter part of the 20th century so this strategy this ideological strategy is still in the process of development and it may have been recently overtaken by events and then the ideologs may be sent scurring back to the drawing board we can at least look at its general outline as it now stands ok so how does the new imperial ideology legitimate the global economic order well the new imperialism like the ancient one invokes some kind of universal order which is supposed to transcend all earthly particularities all differences of time and place but this time we're not talking anymore about the old kind of dualism in which the earthly realities of inequality and domination coexist with a mythical cosmopolis or a Christian brotherhood of equals before God or whatever this time for the first time there's what you might call a real material historical universality capitalism has set in motion a new kind of historical dynamic with a totalizing logic of the modern expression unlike anything the world has ever seen before now for the first time we can really talk about a truly universal history universal both in the sense that it's global and in the sense that one overwhelming systemic logic reaches into every corner of our lives what I'm talking about is the systemic imperatives of capitalism the unprecedented capacity to draw all life into the orbit of the self expansion of capital, commodification competition and profit maximization well that brings us to another sense in which capitalism is uniquely universalistic it can certainly make use of non economic identities and differences differences of race, gender and so on but the relation between capital and labor doesn't ultimately depend on differences of extra economic non economic status from the point of view of capital all that really matters is the commodification of labor power which means reducing all human beings to the universal identity of abstract labor and even in the relation between capital and labor there's a formal equality of a kind that's never existed before a contractual relation between judicial equals supposedly which means that some kind of equality exists at the very base of capitalism so if the universality we're talking about belongs to this earth is it still possible to invoke some kind of dualism like the one I've been talking about to justify earthly inequalities domination and imperialism while still professing to believe in a universal community and natural equality I mean if we've more or less lost the option of relegating the universal community and equality to some extra terrestrial sphere what now? How do the imperial idilocks today make it work when it all has to happen in this world? Well, the new strategy doesn't rely on a transcendent eternal supernatural sphere Instead it offers us a kind of a new kind of natural order But it's a natural order that's no less universal in binding than the cosmic order ordained by God What we get is the global capitalist economy conceived as an impersonal natural phenomenon We get in other words conventional notions of globalization The idea is that globalization in the current capitalist even U.S. dominated sense is the result of two natural processes the impersonal natural laws of the market and inevitable technological progress Now we're given to understand that if only we don't place artificial barriers in their way the laws of the market will embrace the whole world with the help of the new information technologies and so on and there's no point fighting these natural forces I mean of course we could try to resist them but we will do so at our peril But here we run into a new problem what you might call a new imperial paradox It's all very well to talk about a universal economic order but maintaining that order maintaining global economic imperatives does after all depend on political and military supports The objective of this new empire first and foremost is free access for capital and U.S. capital in particular to anywhere in the world So global capital needs an orderly system an orderly global system and in the absence of a truly global political order it has to rely on territorial states So how do the proponents of the new imperialism describe and justify this political and military aspect of the global empire For one thing their strategy is not so much to justify imperial domination as to deny its existence altogether and up to a point it does it in pretty much the same way that capital can deny class domination just as citizenship tends to mask class domination and capitalism legal state sovereignty in global capitalism tends to mask imperial domination but obviously that's not enough in a world of more or less sovereign states it takes something more to justify the new imperialism by the dominance of global capital and the power of the U.S. state in particular this is where the idea of democracy comes in big time to be mobilized in defense of imperial expansion now this is a favorite strategy of the informal American empire the fact that its claim to its mission is to spread democracy of course that's been a favorite specialty of George W. Bush and we all know all too well what it means but the association of democracy with imperial ambitions isn't just the madness of George W it's a deeply rooted American idea Bush Jr. certainly isn't the first U.S. president to justify imperialist interventions on the grounds of a mission to defend and spread democracy and lots of Americans firmly believe that this is their country's manifest destiny so you might want to ask why not just George Bush but even decent and intelligent people sometimes seem to find this plausible how could they allow themselves to believe that freedom, equality and universal human dignity is a convincing justification of imperialism as it happens this ideological strategy seems more convincing than ever before and not just for positive reasons as I said in ancient Greece and for that matter in the pre-capitalist world generally it was a risky strategy because political equality or democratic political power represented a real challenge to exploitative power because it depended on direct coercive force but capitalist exploitation doesn't depend on direct political coercion it depends on economic compulsions so it's made political equality less significant less of a challenge to appropriating classes it's turned democracy into less of a threat to dominant elites for centuries the ancient Greek conception of democracy had been anathema to dominant elites very late in history this was still the case and democracy continued to be a dirty word until the modern age but today everyone claims to be a democrat and even the most rabid imperialist can claim to be on a mission to spread democracy throughout the world so you have to ask what's the difference between then and now why is it possible to do this it's true that ancient and modern democracy have in common the fact that mass and elite share a civic identity and that ordinary working people are citizens it's true that both ancient and modern democracy separate political identity from class or status and that citizenship doesn't depend on class but the great difference between then and now is that Athenian democracy wasn't and couldn't be class neutral in the same way that modern democracy is in a way the whole point of modern democracy is its class neutrality but what this means is not only that people are citizens regardless of their class or status it also means that their citizenship makes little difference to their class it doesn't substantially affect relations between rich and poor elite and mass exploiters and exploited now I don't mean to deny that there are vast differences between say neoliberal capitalism and say social democracy but the fact remains that in capitalism political equality doesn't by itself affect the power of economic exploitation in ancient Greece where there was no capitalist type economic exploitation political rights had immediately far reaching effects on the relations between rich and poor and that's why Aristotle for instance defined democracy not just as ruled by the majority but as ruled by the poor capital can dispense with direct non economic powers so its exploitative powers can coexist with liberal democracy in a way that was never true before I'm not saying that liberal democracy is the necessary or natural state form of capitalism but it can coexist with capitalism in a way that by definition it could never have done with any other system well I've talked and written a lot about this ad nauseam in fact I've talked about how both capital and labor can have democratic rights in the political sphere without completely transforming the relation between them in a separate economic sphere and how much of human life is determined in that economic sphere out of reach of democratic accountability what I want to emphasize here is that the formal separation of the economic and the political in capitalism which goes far beyond the ancient distinction between social inequality and civic equality has given a whole new meaning to the old dualism which permits equality in one sphere to exist with inequality and domination in another I mean capitalism can coexist with the ideology of freedom and equality in a way that no other system can and what this means is that democracy itself has a holy new meaning something that was never available to say alexander the great I mean the new imperialists have a far less threatening conception of democracy to work with something very well suited to class domination and imperial expansion this idea of democracy would never have been possible without the capitalist separation of political and economic spheres but it also owes a lot to the reinvention of the concept of democracy in the US very early in its history as the founding fathers of the US constitution who redefined effectively redefined the meaning of democracy and you can actually watch it happening in the constitutional debates you can watch the federalists first at the so-called founding fathers first attacking democracy understood in its original meaning and then making a clever rhetorical switch just renaining what they used to call a republic now they're calling it suddenly they're calling it democracy and it wasn't just a matter of replacing direct democracy with the representative variety there's absolutely no mistaking their efforts to preserve elite rule in this new kind of democracy one obvious example which is making its way into the news these days one example of their thinking on this score though it's far from the only one is the method of electing presidents the method of electing senators too was indirect but just the other day the guardian referred to the method of electing the president of the United States as something akin to the Vatican's College of Cardinals and believe me the founding fathers made it quite clear that what they had in mind was a property of elite so that democratic citizenship would be subordinate to a hierarchy of economic interests well if capitalism has created a separate economic sphere we might say that the US idea of democracy has created a political sphere to go with it a political sphere to suit the capitalist division of labor between political and economic power and today of course things have gone a lot further than what the founding fathers had in mind today the US model of democracy combines the formal sovereignty of the people with the substantive rule of capital and democracy as it's now understood in the US involves a very delicate conceptual balancing act between popular sovereignty that is government of buying for the people and the dominance of capital the subordination of politics to capitalist markets and the imperatives of profit now people like myself who grew up in the United States are pretty well primed to accept this tricky combination they're well prepared to view class power as having nothing to do with either power or class they're educated to see property as the most fundamental human right and the market as the true realm of freedom and they're taught to view the state as just a necessary evil to sustain the right of property and the free market and the limited conception of equality which doesn't affect the fundamental relations of capital or even the most extreme disparities of wealth of course there are other deeply rooted radical and activist traditions in the USA and we can only hope that we are seeing the revival of them now but the dominant official version is still extremely powerful so most Americans are not automatically programmed to notice the contradictions between imperialism and democracy and to question the idea that their national mission is to define democracy for the whole world and to lead all nations to democratic liberty and we can trace the roots of that idea as I said back to the beginnings of the republic but it probably got its first really explicit formulation with Woodrow Wilson there was a pretty good article in the London Review of Books which argued Wilson's rhetorical achievement which distinguished him sharply from traditional European practitioners of Realpolitik was to present America's strategic and political interests as moral imperatives and its foreign interventions as necessary acts of international responsibility European leaders periodically stressed their civilizing mission but no one before Wilson endowed national exceptionalism with such a modern democracy well at the time that rhetoric gave hope to many people throughout the world who were engaged in anti-colonial struggles and of course their hopes proved to be badly misplaced but even today pretty clever people even people ostensibly on the left have bought into this ideological strategy I mean just take, if I may say so Negri and Hart's Empire I mean they talk about today's US dominated empire in terms that would have been entirely congenial to the architects of open door so called open door imperialism and you know a US dominated empire which is essentially a benign expression of democracy it's open, expansive and inclusive tendencies and so on now what makes the so called spread of democracy a viable strategy for neoliberal imperialism is the fact that this version of democracy puts formal political rights in place of any social rights and it puts a great many aspects of social life out of reach of democratic accountability and you can see how it works as an imperial strategy even just by looking at what happened in Iraq I mean before the first election in occupied Iraq the parameters of democratic politics were set by Paul Bremer's economic directives and his privatization which was clearly intended to leave a very constricted public space for the operation of democracy you could even say that this is the effect and maybe for you know to a large extent the purpose of neoliberal globalization in general I mean if globalization is supposed to be preparing the ground for democracy throughout the world as leaders of advanced capitalist countries like to tell us it's also making sure that much of economic and social life will be beyond the reach of democratic power and ever more vulnerable to the power of capital but there's one further wrinkle and I am coming to a conclusion here one further wrinkle in the new imperial paradox in a sense what's happened is a reversal of the old imperial dualism it's not a question now of a universalistic civic domain or a community moral equals juxtaposed with the particularities of social and economic inequality and domination this time it's the economic sphere itself that has a universalizing force but this global economic domain coexists with and even depends on a political sphere of multiple and diverse territorial states and to make the paradox more paradoxical much as global capital depends on territorial states it of course constantly seeks to break free of the limits imposed by states and territorial boundaries and it also wants to ensure that no local or national forces will emerge to oppose the compulsions of capital either in the imperial homeland or in subordinate economies so an absolutely central principle in the new imperialist strategy is to deny the importance of the territorial state in some standard conceptions of globalization they leave us with the implication that and well they say so the more global the economy the less relevant and effective the territorial state becomes that there's an inverse relation between the globalizing power of capital and the importance of the state that the state is indispensable in this ideological strategy something better left unsaid but what emphatically does need saying in it is that the state not only shouldn't but can't interfere with the natural laws of the global economy the market imperatives of global capitalism and of course in the face of those natural laws oppositional politics is absolutely pointless so it's not enough I guess it's not a question just of reinventing the Alexander's cosmopolis what we have to do is abolish the idea of politics altogether and I'm tempted to describe this new ideological strategy this view of globalization as the new Augustinianism a new way of denying the civic domain and the possibility of political action now this state denying strategy hasn't been an easy trick to pull off after all whatever else we can say about the existing globalization it's clearly been an imperial project led by one unmistakably powerful state and of course it's hard to reconcile this denial of the state and the civic domain with the project of spreading democracy but once you identify democracy with markets once you identify democratic freedoms with market imperatives the contradictions are a little bit less glaring but here is the final little irony a lot of minds seem to have been changed recently about the state in the global economy and they've been changed not by displays of imperial power but on the contrary by a rather dramatic display of economic weakness the recent events in the financial crisis have apparently convinced even some of the most rabid state deniers that global capital is desperately dependent on the state but for me it's not just a question of bailouts for capital or rediscovering the virtues of regulated markets what it also means and this is something I've been saying for years what it also means is that there are real possibilities of political action not to support but to resist the domination of global capital but that's a whole other story