Mark Lilla, writing in the New York Review of Books, suggests that conservatives are not united and defined by a conviction that “the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will.” (I applaud him for that.) Alex Gourevitch seems somewhat more sympathetic to the proposition, or, more charitably, he takes it seriously. Gourevitch’s reply to Lilla lands some blows. And interestingly, Gourevitch embraces a more expansive conception of the left than is common in mainstream political discourse. Whereas most American liberals would strenuously deny that there are meaningful continuities between the Bolshevik Revolution and what we might refer to as the expansion of social citizenship rights in the United States, Gourevitch seems inclined to see both as movements for equal freedom, a term that I assume he’ll expand upon in a forthcoming review essay.

Whether or not one embraces the substance of Gourevitch’s intervention — I profited from his discussion of French sociological liberalism and British Hegelian liberalism — he really is an original, incisive thinker, as evidenced by his excellent 2008 essay in N+1 on environmentalism and the politics of fear.

While many have of course accused environmentalists of using scare tactics, the new environmentalism surrounding global warming is a politics of fear in a deeper sense. The fast and easy use of the slogan “politics of fear” has not contributed very much to our understanding of it. As various analysts have pointed out, the politics of fear is better understood in relation to what we might call the security paradigm, rather than mere hysteria and manipulation. A widely circulated essay by Kanishka Jayasuriya, posted on the Social Science Research Council website, warned not long after 9/11 that the “most serious danger” of the war on terror was that “under the appealing cloak of ‘security’, a debilitating form of ‘anti politics’ that marginalizes the constructive conflicts…debate and discussion” would emerge. Jayasuriya did not make the pundit’s point that the cloak of security is anti-political because it recasts opposition as unpatriotic. Rather, his concern was that, as over the longer span, “The language of security . . . permeates every sphere of life – ranging from finance to the environment,” the consequence of “securitization” is to displace controversial and expansive democratic discussions of “power and redistribution,” and make purely symbolic their real grounding principles of liberty and equality.
The claim that universal risks—especially environmental ones—transcend conflicts of national, religious and class interest, is now part of mainstream political sociology. The paradigmatic “supra-national and non-class-specific global hazards“ that the popular German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, identified as defining features of our time in his book Risk Society are the unintended environmental effects of industrialization-like pollution. Moreover, with Friedman and Gore, Beck believes these global hazards promise “a new type of social and political dynamism” that transcends all social differences.
This global, environmental risk-consciousness is an innovation in the politics of fear because it differs in important ways from the security concerns of other recent periods of fear-laden politics, the 1930s and 1950s, in Depression and Cold War. Security in these periods was mainly institutional-associated with economic crisis, war, and anti-state subversion. As the historian Ernest May has suggested, “national security” has meant “preserving the United States as a free nation, with its fundamental institutions and values intact.”
The referent of security today is importantly different-the relevant object to be secured is not the “fundamental institutions and values” of society but physical or biological existence. In the analysis of Giorgio Agamben [see “Apocalypse Deferred,” n+1 No. 3], the defining question of politics has become “which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life.” By bare life he means the life of the individual conceived as a natural, physical creature with needs, wants and desires that can be known through the human sciences and administered by the state. This stands in opposition to the citizen who can exercise his self-determining capacities and assert his rights only within a specific institutional framework.

Indeed, one could argue that it is the rise of a technocratic biopolitics (or bio-antipolitics) — the assertion of control over the “lower orders” through successive public health and moral panics, with the underlying maladies actually exacerbated by the exercise of control (see Taubes on how a questionable scientific consensus has given rise to the real epidemic of “diabesity” and Whitaker on how the rise of psychopharmaceuticals may have fueled the extraordinary increase in the number of disabled mentally ill, who become clients of a captive-captor industry and of an expanding social services bureaucracy) — that has sparked folk resistance from the right.

To his credit, Gourevitch is not the kind of thinker who equates the expansion of technocratic authority, and an increase in the resources consumed by those who wield technocratic authority, with the cause of equal freedom. For that he deserves no small credit.