How can we agree to disagree? Summary

Nationalism, India, and the political theory of political identity: Part IV

§ Summary of Part One

There are, it’s fair to say, a number of differences between the three theories of peoplehood laid out in this series thus far. To summarise, we can make the following points of comparison:

1. First, fundamental unit: each thinker presents a different basic vision of the world that defines how they approach the organisation of politics. For Schmitt, the fundamental unit is the fighting collectivity, the absolute moment of division into friends and enemies that must possess the possibility of making people fight for it; for Rawls, the fundamental unit is the reasonable self, capable of living with other individuals on the condition that they respect the publicly reasonable rules of justice; and for Laclau, the fundamental unit is the subject-position, a product of articulation that exists neither prior to nor separable from his social condition, and in a relation of power to other subject-positions.

2. Second, limits of association: in varying degrees, but consistent with the basic requirement of the boundary problem – that all peoples must have a limit somewhere – each thinker has conditions of limiting membership of the people. For Schmitt, it is not a normative commitment, but simply the strongest, most intense form of collectivity at any given moment; for Rawls, the line is drawn to exclude those individuals who cannot or will not conform to a reasonable public conception of justice; and for Laclau, somewhat similar to Schmitt, the requirements of membership are not predetermined, but neither are they arbitrary, instead they are dependent on historical and articulated forms of power.

3. Third, and finally, the inverse of association – disassociation. All three thinkers offer conditions of membership of the people, and in the process mark a condition for non-inclusion; for Schmitt, this is not a moral condition, but it is the condition of such radical disagreement that there is no shared identity between the enemies – they must be ‘existentially alien’. For Rawls, anyone who is unreasonable and cannot live by and conform with public conceptions of justice are not to be included in the people. And for Laclau, anyone who falls outside the articulated horizon of exclusion.

For these thinkers, disagreement that can be negotiated, must be predicated upon some prior agreement; there must be a shared political world within which disagreement can be negotiated. If there is not, then disagreement is not only inevitable, but it is unavoidable.

Negotiating Disagreement

All three thinkers we have examined, in their own ways, determine a condition for inclusion and exclusion from the people. This requires, in some capacity, a recognition of such fundamental disagreements that there is no possibility for, or no desirable form of, agreement between us.

This does not mean, however, that we should give up the possibility of negotiating disagreement inside of our peoples, in whatever way they may be constituted. This final post, building on the theoretical presumptions of the first series, is concerned with what we might call the technicalities of our question: in other words, now that we have frameworks for understanding who ‘we’ are, we now need to address that second problem, to which the question itself is directed, and attempt to answer how ‘we’ can agree to disagree.

Before we do so, it is important to recognise that disagreement is a necessary and ineliminable fact of life. We disagree about a great many things, from the trivial examples of which football team is best, to the quite important, such as whether Britain should be a member of the European Union. But everyone lives their lives to a significant degree differently to their neighbours, their friends and their families, and whilst there are trivial reasons for doing so, often the reasons for this difference can be substantially different life plans, normative commitments, moral reasons, and so on. What do we do when these plans clash, as they will eventually do? And why is this a concern for the State? After all, this module is concerned with the politics of development, so we have to presume at least some ‘politics’ is involved somewhere.

The State has to ensure that the conditions for its survival – the unity, whether tight or loose, of the people it governs.

This is a matter for the State because life plans vary between individuals, but they also vary between groups. Whether we are Schmittians, Rawlsians or Laclauians, we recognise that there are what we might call ‘low level’ disagreements – between neighbours on a street, for instance – and there are ‘higher level’ disagreements, between perhaps classes. And even for Schmitt, these may not be intense enough to become the foundation of the political, thereby relegating themselves to mere politics.