Putinism, a senile manifestation of totalitarianism
The Notepad of Michael the Great
Vladimir Putin's grandfather continues undaunted to move the pieces despite the checkmate suffered by his eight-year-old grandson. And to the young Vladimir who asks him why he did not respect the rules, he replies: “What rules? A real man sets the rules for himself ”. True or false, this story told by the Russian leader himself is a metaphor for the conception of power that guided him in his rise to the top of the Kremlin. It is an episode, one among many, told by Giorgio Dell'Arti in a biography of the "new tsar" who as a child dreamed of becoming an agent of the KGB, and who built his myth of leader able to redeem a nation disappointed and humiliated by the collapse of its ancient power (Putin's wars. Unauthorized story of a life, Theseus' ship, March 2022).
I don't know if the author will agree, but his History recalls the literary model inaugurated in the first century AD by Plutarch, in which the biography becomes a representation of the vices and virtues of rulers and leaders. "I don't write about works of history, but about lives", says the scholar of Chaeronea in the preface to the biographies of Alexander and Caesar. "Often – he adds – a short fact, a sentence, a joke, reveal the character of the individual more than battles do ". A taste for the anecdotal detail that will be demolished by Benedetto Croce, according to whom "The individual is thought and judged only in the work that is his and at the same time not his, that he does and that goes beyond him" (History as thought and action). In fact, despite the voices in favor of the biographical genre such as that of Jakob Burckardt, who even celebrates it as one of the most important discoveries of the Italian Renaissance, in Europe it will experience an appreciable flowering only in the terminal decades of the "short century", thanks to the disintegration of Soviet empire, the end of the bipolar world, the crisis of mass ideologies, the travails of the post-communist transition.
The ancient certainties on the teleological dimension of history are crumbling, already severely tested by the Shoah and by the risk of a nuclear war. More cautious and disenchanted attitudes emerge, less ambitious and less totalizing forms of understanding historical events. The biographical genre thus acquires a renewed vitality. In 1986 Pierre Bourdieau denounced the scientific absurdity constituted by the clear opposition between the individual and society (L'illusion biographique). In 1989 Jacques Le Goff, in the periodical “Le Débat”, defines biography as an “indispensable tool for analyzing social structures and collective behaviors”. In the same year, an issue of the “Annales” opens with an intervention by Giovanni Levi on the usefulness of biography in the social sciences. Moreover, the same founders of the magazine, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, were rather cautious in the face of the prevaricating claims of the “history of structures” (institutional, economic, demographic) on the “history of men”. Not fortuitously, a superb biography of Luther (1928) is due to Febvre.
This change of climate is reflected in an exemplary way in the intellectual path of Ian Kershaw, one of the leading scholars of the Third Reich. The English historian, with a structuralist background, arrives at the drafting of a biography of Hitler, published in 1998, driven by the irrepressible need – as he declares in the preface – to "deepen the reflection on the man who was the indispensable fulcrum and inspirational center" of the regime Nazi. Using the Weberian concept of charisma to explain both the absolute authority of the dictator and the gregarianism of the German people, the professor at the University of Sheffield outlines a profile of the Führer which – as he himself admits – is ultimately resolved in the "history of his power".
So let's go back to a central point addressed by Dell'Arti: why does Putin's power have (at least so far) consensus? Perhaps Carl Schmitt would have answered like this: “in some cases out of trust, in others out of fear, sometimes out of hope, sometimes out of desperation” (Dialogue on power). According to the Plettenberg jurist, men need protection, and they seek this protection in power. The link between protection and obedience is therefore for him the only explanation of power. Whoever does not have the power to protect someone does not even have the right to demand obedience. Conversely, “those who seek protection and obtain it have no right to deny their obedience”. Power has an internal logic that goes beyond those who exercise it: “it is stronger than any will to power, stronger than any human goodness and, fortunately, any human evil”. Power, in short, has no identity, but produces identity, the one for which the servant and master confront each other in the Hegelian Phenomenology of the Spirit.
When Schmitt conceived his pamphlet (1954), power was already identified by Martin Heiddeger with the "cage of technology", with the ability to reduce men to "small officials" of the global apparatus. However, Schmitt's thought differs considerably from that of the philosopher of Being and Time, of whom he was a good friend. The extended title of the Dialogue reads, in fact, on access to those who hold it. The problem of power is that of how it is possible to get in touch with it. Starting from the affirmation that "every direct power is immediately subjected to indirect influences", his conclusion is that "there is no power without this antechamber, without this corridor" (in 1890 Bismarck resigned when Emperor William refused the prior consent of the chancellor on his guests at court). In short, the essence of power is only foreshadowed, but not explicitly stated.
The condition of the Schimittian man in the face of power resembles that of the peasant in Kafka's novel "Vor dem Gesetz" (published in 1915 and then inserted in the novel The Trial), who waits in vain to be able to cross the door of the law ("Gesetz ”), Because a guardian – by whom he is subjugated – prevents him from doing so. Similarly, for the theorist of the "state of exception" there is always an "antichambre" in front of the door of power, which must first be accessed in order to cross it. This means that we never see the face of power, but only its image reflected in the mirror of history, of the struggle for its conquest. On the other hand, the idea that true power lies "elsewhere", that it is invisible and remote even if it is very influential, is still widespread today.
What, then, is power? Voltaire used to say that it consists "in making others act at my level". For Max Weber it exists whenever I have the opportunity to affirm my will against the will of others. According to Bertrand de Jouvenel, "To command and be obeyed: without this there is no power, with this no other attribute is needed for it to exist … The thing without which it cannot be: that essence is command" (The sovereignty). These are just a few names from the very long list of scholars who consider violence as the most flagrant manifestation of power. Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves, on the other hand, defines it as a type of “milder violence”, as an “institutionalized force” (The doctrine of the State). For her part, Hannah Arendt attributed the paternity of the concepts centered on the "command of man over man" to the concept of absolute power, coeval with the birth of the nation-state and theorized by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. "Today we should add – he prophetically noted in 1969 – the most recent and perhaps most formidable form of domination: bureaucracy or the domination of an intricate system of offices in which no one, neither the best, nor the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could […] be defined as domination by Nobody ”(On violence).
If power does not need justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities, it cannot, however, do without legitimation: violence can be justifiable, but it will never be legitimized. This assumption leads the Hanoverian philosopher to establish a decisive difference between totalitarian domination, based on terror, and tyrannies founded with violence. Because the former turns not only against its enemies but also against its friends, fearing even the power of its supporters. And the height of terror is reached when the "police state" begins to devour its children, when "the executioners of yesterday become the victims of today". It is therefore insufficient – he concludes – to state that power and violence are not the same thing. Power and violence are opposites; where one governs, the other is absent. This implies that “it is not correct to think of the opposite of violence in terms of non-violence; speaking of non-violent power is in fact redundant […]. If Gandhi's non-violent practice had clashed with Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, pre-war Japan, instead of the British Empire, its outcome would probably have been not decolonization, but massacre ”. In summary: power is certainly part of the essence of all governments, but violence is not. Violence is by nature instrumental, while power is "an end in itself".
However, there are also other vocabularies of power, which do not speak only of man's innate instinct for domination and his specular, congenital inclination to obedience. There is the vocabulary of women, above all of those women who have been able to sharpen their weapons – beauty, intelligence, seduction, cunning – to question male arbitrariness in politics, culture, art. Then there is the vocabulary of that liberal tradition which, starting from the Scottish moralists – David Hume, Adam Smith and, before that, their teacher Francis Hutcheson – and from the notion of "sympathy", saw its ideal fulfillment in the Austrian School of economics. But it is due to an Italian scholar, Bruno Leoni, one of the most original liberal treatment of the concept of power. His masterpiece, Freedom and the Law (1961) marks a sort of Copernican revolution in the endless debate on the origin and roots of power, which overturns the old primacy of the conflictual element and replaces it with the primacy of the cooperative element. For Leoni, individuals incessantly exchange goods (economics), claims (law), powers (politics), and from these exchanges the institutional arrangements in which state sovereignty is articulated are formed "from below".
Even "the archaeologist of knowledge" Michel Foucault harbored the same dissatisfaction with the theories of power that privilege his coercive side. For the historian of insanity, crime, sexuality, it was necessary to get rid of the "Leviathan model": "Power relations are both those that the apparatus of the state exercise over individuals, and those that the father of the family exercises over his wife and over the children, the power exercised by the doctor, the power exercised by the notable […] There is therefore no single source from which all these power relations would arise as if by emanation […] "(Power, a magnificent beast, 1977).
A few decades before Leoni and Foucault, commenting on the death of Lenin, Antonio Gramsci had entrusted his reflections on power to the weekly “New Order” (1 March 1924). They place at the antipodes of the liberal democratic tradition: “Every state is a dictatorship. Each State cannot fail to have a government, made up of a small number of men, who in turn organize themselves around one with greater ability and greater clairvoyance. As long as a state is needed, as long as it is historically necessary to govern men, whatever the ruling class, the problem will arise of having leaders, of having a leader “. The then secretary of the Communist Party thus clearly theorized the need for a charismatic leadership, nor did he fail to criticize the position of "those socialists [who claim to want] the dictatorship of the proletariat, but do not want the dictatorship of the leaders, [ …] that the command is customized ". On the other hand, it is no coincidence that all totalitarian experiences – right and left – were based on an absolute personality cult, which firmly needed the adoration of the masses and megalomania of the leader. After all, "Putinism" is only one of his latest epiphanies, grotesque as well as tragic.
*The paper
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/il-putinismo-manifestazione-senile-del-totalitarismo/ on Sat, 08 Oct 2022 05:42:45 +0000.