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POWER AND CONSENT

REDUCTIONISM, DIALECTICS AND CONSENT THEORY

by DOUGLAS NEWDICK


1.0 Introduction

Advocates of consent theory are aware that their theory is controversial to
some degree and naturally enough this leads to a thorough defence of the
theory in any exposition. This is not unusual. What is peculiar is the
quality of that defence; the arguments that are countered are only those
ones which offer the least challenge to the thesis. These advocates of
consent theory defend their theory from counter-arguments that share the
same fundamental presuppositions, ie objections from within the liberal
democratic tradition, more radical criticisms are usually ignored or
relegated to footnotes. While there is something to be said for not trying
to defend one's theoretical basis all the time, much can be learned by
defending particular explanations from criticisms based in different
paradigms. In this essay I will explore some more radical arguments against
consent theory than those it is usually defended from. Specifically I will
attempt to show that the reductionistic and individualistic basis of
consent theory is false and/or obscures more than it reveals and that a
dialectical or non-reductionist picture can make sense of the problems that
have persistently plagued consent theories.


2.0 Why Consent theory?

2.1 
The basic appeal of consent theories of political obligation is that they
are in harmony with the avowed ideals, aims and bases of liberal democratic
theory. For a theory that places high value on freedom and the autonomous
action of individuals the most obvious basis for legitimate political
authority is some form of voluntary, self-assumed obligation. Consent
theory fits the bill. More specifically, some consent theorists think that
any other theory of political obligation is inconsistent with liberal
democratic theory:liberalism assumes that normal adults have the capability
for personal self-determination and that it is, therefore, appropriate to
ascribe to them a right of personal self-determination. This right includes
the right of political self-determination. From this it follows that no one
can authority, including political authority, over any normal adult without
the consent of those under such authority. (Beran, 1987, p 34)

2.2 
Consent theorists appeal to consent to explain political obligation,
because they think that the notion of political obligation is troublesome
and highly contested, whereas the practice of promising giving rise to
obligation is as uncontroversial a notion as one can hope to find.
Therefore if we base our account of political obligation on consent, which
is modeled on the practice of promising, political obligation becomes
non-problematic. Pitkin (1972, pp 74-75) argues that the reason consent
theorists find political obligation troublesome and the practice of
promising not so, springs from their liberal picture of human nature. Thus
contractual theories of the state, including consent theories, flow
naturally from the liberal conception of human nature or the state of
nature.
[the liberal] picture of man in the abstract is of a man fully grown,
complete with his own private needs, interests, feelings, desires, beliefs
and values...Given man as such a separate, self-contained unit, it does
indeed seem strange that he might have obligations not of his own choosing
(ibid)1

2.3
Thus consent theory has strong ties with the methodology and  ontology of
reductionism and individualism, which are essential to liberalism.2
Reductionism is a methodology that attempts to give explanations of the
properties of higher level entities, eg societies or cells, in terms of the
units, eg individuals or molecules, of which they are composed.
Reductionism is the thesis that parts are ontologically prior to the wholes
that they make up, the parts and their properties exist before (either
temporally or logically) the whole (Lewontin, et al, pp 5-6).3
Individualism is the manifestation of reductionism in the domain of
politics and political philosophy. The properties of societies and states
are to be explained by the properties of the individuals that make them up,
and these individuals are ontologically prior to states and societies. 

Consent theory is obviously an example of this methodology; a property of a
complex whole, the state, is to be explained by properties, such as
consent, of the units which make up the whole, ie individuals.4


3.0 Features of Consent Theory


A consent theory of political obligation must have certain features if it
is to be a plausible and consistent consent theory. 

3.1
Firstly the theory must rely on actual consent rather than hypothetical
consent. An appeal to hypothetical consent as the basis for political
obligation seems implausible. The intuitions that lead philosophers to
consent theory (eg that political obligation must be self-assumed) are
inconsistent with hypothetical consent. Hypothetical consent also requires
some extremely implausible metaphysics or psychology. Instead of placing
political obligation on an uncontroversial basis, hypothetical consent
derives it from a highly contentious one.

3.2
A consent theory must make dissent possible. If it comes out of a theory
that all the people under a state's de facto authority have consented to a
political obligation to that state, and there is no possible way of not
consenting, we should be mighty suspicious. It would seem that in these
cases we do not have consent, because consent is supposed to be the
voluntary assumption of obligation and it seems odd to describe an action
that it is impossible not to perform as being voluntary.

3.3
It should also be the case that political obligation is owed by an
individual to the state if and only if that individual has consented. That
is to say that it cannot be the case that individual X owes political
obligation to the state in virtue of an action performed by individual Y,
such as is the case in theories of original consent or majority consent. If
this is not the case then we have abandoned one of the main reasons for
choosing consent in the first place, ie that political obligation be
self-assumed.5

3.4
A consent theorist should not assume that any or some states are
legitimate, and build their theory upon this assumption. To do this is to
beg the question, because the point of the exercise is to see whether and
to what extent existing states are legitimate.

3.5
Beran's (1987) membership version of consent theory appears to meet these
conditions, and at the least comes closer to meeting them than any other
consent theory I have encountered. Therefore I will use it as my model for
purposes of discussion.


4.0 Problems for Consent Theory

Traditionally there have been a family of related arguments that consent
theories have had problems dealing with. They are all centrally concerned
with the question: When does the form of consent not give rise to
obligation? In Beran's language, what are the conditions that prevent
consent from coming off?
4.1
In the most obvious and uncontroversial example, it is obvious that an
action cannot count as consent if the consenter was threatened with
physical violence if they did not comply. Similarly if you consent because
I am likely (and able) to make life hell for you if you don't, then the
consent does not "come off".

4.2
According to Beran (1987, p 6) "An attempt to promise comes off only if the
attempted act is free, informed and competent." He then lists some
defeating conditions that if present prevent a promise from coming off. The
problematic examples come in here, firstly one might wonder whether these
are all of the necessary conditions and secondly it is less than clear as
to what counts as "free".

4.3
A problem for consent theory is the case of the happy slave. We assume that
a state that has the consent of its citizens is a legitimate political
authority, yet what if the citizenry includes a class of slaves, and these
slaves have apparently happily consented to be slaves? They have not been
coerced into this position nor have they been coerced into consenting.
Perhaps they have been brought up in the expectation of being slaves and
are content with their lot. Is the fact of their consent (freely, fully
informed and competently given) a sufficient condition for the legitimacy
of their state? Many liberals (not to mention others) would like to say
that it is not. How could consent theory deal with this problem?6

4.4
Beran (ibid) addresses criticism from Woozley, who argues that the high
cost of emigration, both economic and personal, coupled with the likelihood
that potential emigrants will have nowhere to go, makes people unfree to
dissent, therefore the citizens are not consenting freely (quoted in ibid
pp 95-108)

Woozley's argument seems to take this form:
1. Consent must be free.
2. For an action to be free, one must be free to do X and free to do not-X.
3. The high cost of emigration means that one is not free to dissent.
Therefore, 4. Membership does not count as consent.

Beran seems to be making two plausible replies to this argument, both
involve a rejection of premise 2.  Under one interpretation he is stating
that for an action X to be free one merely needs to be free to do X, one
does not need to be free to do not-X. Under another interpretation Beran's
position is that freedom is not being prevented from satisfying one's
desires. Thus if one does not desire to do X then being prevented from
doing X does not make one unfree.7 Both of these replies are fraught with
problems. 

The first interpretation runs the risk of violating the constraint 3.2, but
even if it does not there are other problems. The main point worth making
here is that one should avoid conflating "free to choose X" with "choosing
X freely". The first is compatible with a high degree of constraint, the
second is not. The statement that "A is free to X" considers only A's
relation to the action X, not to not-X or any other action. When talking
about consent, we are interested in A's relation to other courses of
action. The fact that consent is free in this sense is surely far less
important than the fact that the citizens are unfree in respect to other
actions. What becomes interesting then is the options which one is unfree
to choose, why one is unfree to choose them and the source(s) of that
unfreedom.

With the second interpretation of Beran we run into the problem Berlin
(1958) calls "the retreat to the inner citadel". If freedom is not having
one's desires frustrated, then the best, surest, option is to reduce one's
desires. This is surely bizarre. Similarly, there are the problems of
socialisation and/or brainwashing. We should say that someone who has been
conditioned, whose desires have been tampered with (say by Skinnerian or
Clockwork Orange style techniques), has had their freedom reduced, but we
cannot if we identify freedom with the lack of frustration of desires. If
we believe that such brain-washing interfere with freedom or consent, what
are we to say about socialisation pressures that might bring about the same
results?


5.0 Consent and Power

5.1
These problems are all getting at the same issue: How free does the act of
consent have to be to count as an instance of consent? All commentators
agree that if one is coerced into consenting by threat of sanctions, then
the consent does not come off. These cases roughly follow this schema:

1. A wants B to do X.
2. A threatens B with harm unless B does X.
3. B does X because of the threat.

(Beran, 1987, p 100)

5.2
There is an interesting parallel here with the notion of power:

A causes B to do something that B would otherwise not do.

(Lukes, 1974)
Therefore it is obvious that coercion is a case of the exercise of power
(not surprisingly). Most of Beran's other defeating conditions (Beran,
1987, p 6) involve the successful exercise of power by someone over the
consenter (eg "undue influence", "deception" (ibid)). We should note that
in the cases that are problematic for Beran and other consent theorists
(such as outlined in 4. above), it seems that what makes us unlikely to
think that consent has come off is the exercise of power over the
consenter. The question then becomes how prevalent is the exercise of power
in society?

5.3
Lukes (1974) offers some analytical tools that might help us answer this
question. His discussion of two-dimensional power and three-dimensional
power offer some insight as to how pervasive may be: 
is it not the...most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to
whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions,
cognitions, and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in
the existing order of things...because they can see or imagine no
alternative to it...? (Lukes, 1974, p 24)

5.4
Herman and Chomsky (1988) give a concrete example of a structural
arrangement that has these effects. They argue that the structure of the
mass media in the USA results in a vast amount of political information
never reaching the public, and a large number of political options are
never presented to the public. Therefore the public are political actors
who are largely acting from a position of ignorance. 

5.5
Here I think the reductionism of liberalism defeats us because of its
concentration upon the individual, and seeing consent as a property of the
individual. The structural elements of power within which individuals make
their decisions are invisible to individualism. Autonomy, freedom etc. are
(reified) properties of individual agents, in the individualistic
framework. However this ignores the power structures that constrain
decision making (and belief/desire  and knowledge formation) by agents. If
the institutions of state and society are set up in such a way as to
preclude certain options from ever being aired or taught in the public
arena (as Herman and Chomsky (1988) have shown to be the case in the USA,
at least), then those options are unavailable to the populace and we can no
longer give an account of freedom or autonomy that looks to the individual
alone.


6.0 Consent, Reductionism and Dialectics
6.1
In opposition to liberalism's reductionistic account of society, I think a
dialectical account is inherently more plausible and gives a better
understanding of the problems associated with consent theory.

Reductionist explanation attempts to derive the properties of wholes from
intrinsic properties of parts, properties that exist apart from and before
the parts are assembled into complex structures...Dialectical explanations,
on the contrary, do not abstract properties of parts in isolation from
their associations in wholes but see the properties of parts as arising out
of their associations. That is, according to the dialectical view, the
properties of parts and wholes codetermine each other. (Lewontin, et al,
1984, p 11)

Therefore individuals and society codetermine each other in an ongoing
process. "The properties of individual human beings do not exist in
isolation but arise as a consequence of social life, yet the nature of that
social life is a consequence of our being human" (ibid).

6.2
Consent, as a behaviour, is an outcome of a dialectical process between
individual and society. The process involves the wants, desires and beliefs
of the individual, the power structures of society which restrict and shape
their formation, and the power structures which restrict available options.

6.3
The liberal picture assumes that one can make a disjunctive list of the
defeating conditions for promises, and that if none of the conditions on
the list are present then the action is free. However as a
three-dimensional account of power and/or a dialectic account shows, all
such  actions (decisions, promises, consent) are made within a power
structure and are influenced by that structure.

6.4
Liberalism reifies consent, it is labelled as a unitary behaviour with a
unitary cause. What a dialectic account shows us is that it is ridiculous
to talk of a general cause of that behaviour, because the putative cause of
that behaviour will depend upon where you look and your purposes in doing
so. One's choosing X over Y is caused by the making of a decision, it could
also be caused by someone obscuring option Z. Which of these causes gets
called the cause of choosing X depends on one's viewpoint and one's purpose
in searching for causes.8 A dialectic account sees consent as the result in
an ongoing process.

The consent of the happy slave and the consent of the brain-washed, can be
seen as the result of a dialectic process where the power structures
constrain and influence the decisions of the individual to an extreme.

6.5
>From this discussion it can be seen that individualism is false or at least
severely misleading. A non-reductionistic, dialectical, account of society,
power and consent is a more powerful and much more revealing way of looking
at these issues. Therefore the individualist consent theory can be seen to
rest on a false presupposition.


7.0 Conclusion

The consent theorists project fails because they do not realise the extent
to which our decisions are influenced (or caused) by power structures, and
because their reductionistic picture of the nature of society and the
individual is false. If I am correct, then the entire liberal project of
finding a basis or justification for legitimate political authority is
untenable. The question then must be asked: Why do liberals attempt to
derive authority in this way?



NOTES



BIBLIOGRAPHY


Beran, H., 1987, The Consent Theory of Political Obligation, Croom Helm.

Berlin, I., 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University Press.

Cohen, G. A., 1979, "Capitalism, Freedom and the Proletariat" in Ryan, A.
(ed.), The Idea of Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

-----, 1988, History, Labour and Freedom, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Crosthwaite, J., 1987, "Feminist Criticisms of Liberalism", in Political
Science, Vol 39(2).

Greenawalt, K., 1987, "Promissory Obligation: The Theme of Social
Contract", reprinted in Raz (1990).

Herman, E., and Chomsky, N., 1988, Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon Books,
New York.

Herzog, D., 1989, Happy Slaves, University of Chicago Press.

Hirschmann, N., 1989, "Freedom, Recognition, and Obligation: A Feminist
Approach to Political Theory", in American Political Science Review, Vol
83(4).

Horton, J., 1992, Political Obligation, Humanities Press International.

Lewontin, R., et al, 1984, Not In Our Genes, Pantheon, New York.

Lukes, S., 1973, Individualism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

-----, 1974, Power: A Radical View, Macmillan Press.

Pitkin, H., 1972, "Obligation and Consent", in Laslett, P., et al, 1972,
Philosophy, Politics and Society, Fourth Series, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Raz, J. (ed), 1990, Authority, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Simmons, A. J., 1979, Moral Principles and Political Obligations, Princeton
University Press, Princeton.

Wolff, R. P., 1976, In Defense of Anarchism, Harper & Row.
1 Note also Greenawalt (1987, p 269): "social contract theory [including
consent theory] is a reflection of a liberal conception of human nature
that emphasizes freedom and autonomy."
2 A number of authors have argued this. See Crosthwaite (1987), Hirschmann
(1989), Lukes (1973). Many Marxists regard reductionism and individualism
as important components of bourgeois ideology, and they also regard
liberalism as a manifestation of bourgeois ideology in the political/social
domain. See, eg Lewontin, et al (1984), Cohen (1988).
3 Lewontin, et al, continue: "and there is a chain of causation that runs
from the units to the whole." (ibid p 6)
The discussion of reductionism is in the context of biology and psychology,
but (and this is part of their point) could apply equally well to any part
of bourgeois intellectual studies. With consent theory a "hypothetical"
chain of causation runs from the individuals to society and the state
(rather than a posited actual causation as in biological determinism)
making the reductionist label even more accurate.
4 Similar to the case of biological determinism, consent theory involves
the reification of certain behaviours of individuals, ie the behaviours are
treated as objects located in the biology of individuals. Also the
properties of the whole are also reified, such as authority. The fallacy in
reification is in the assumption that if there is a term for a property,
that property exists, or that what is measured exists.
5 See Simmons (1979:71). Note also Greenawalt (1987) "neither the unanimous
agreement of those originally subject to the legal order nor the agreement
of most of one's fellow citizens can obligate an individual who has not
agreed." (p 275)
6 The consent theorist could of course OutSmart the objection by claiming
that in this hypothetical case the happy slave has consented and the state
is legitimate. They might add that, however, this hypothetical case is
wildly implausible and thus is not a serious problem.
7 There is another response that Beran seems to make that relies upon a
conflation of unfree with coerced. I regard this as highly implausible.
8 Compare the account of tuberculosis as caused by a bacillus, with the
account of tuberculosis caused by the appalling conditions of rampant
capitalism. (Lewontin, et al, 1984)