Emma Planinc on Palingenesis, Regenerative Politics, and the Limits of Liberalism

Emma Planinc, thank you for joining us and congratulations on your book Regenerative Politics. I want to start by asking you about the assumption at its core: that any normative political vision must be grounded in a theory of human nature. Why, in your opinion, is such a theory necessary? What theory of human nature do you defend and why?

Thank you so much for having me, and for reading the book so thoughtfully and thoroughly.

This is really beginning with the most difficult question. Thanks, too, for asking about this as I take this to be the heart of the book.

There is an historicist answer to this, which I think is the easier way to address the question. I would argue that conceptions of human nature are necessary to politics—full stop—and that it is our job as theorists, philosophers, and historians to uncover what these are and have been. From an historical perspective it is simply impossible to deny that this is the case. We hold certain things to be true about human beings now that are distinct from those in, say, Ancient Greece, and so it is clear that theories of human nature and the human being root the way we think about political ideals and realities. In relation to the argument of the book, then, the historical claim is that modern liberal democratic politics are grounded in a certain conception of human nature that is at the same time denied in practice: that of the self-determining human being.

If I defend an account of human nature in Regenerative Politics, it is one that is distinctively modern—what I call the modern telic account of human nature. This conception sees the human being as defined by its time, place and historical moment (thus meaning it is changeable), but also at the same time not defined by these things: there is an equally important facet of the Enlightenment conception of the human being that entails a belief in a universal nature, something that makes the human species distinct. The combination of these two truths is the self-regenerating human being: a creature that, by nature, is capable of changing itself and its conditions according to assertions of what is held to be universally true about our nature. In the book, I provide an account of this vision of human nature as it emerged in the eighteenth century, and an account of how and why this is the origin of universal rights.

I want to stick on this question for a bit more. You note that your “diagnosis of the dangers and potentialities of modern liberal democracies shares much with” those of some leftist theorists, particularly Chantal Mouffe. However, you argue their projects are weakened by precisely this lack of a universal theory of human nature. Could you explore the implications of this criticism for these rival leftist accounts? What is the difference between yours and their understanding of the political sphere and the individual’s relationship to it?

Yes, clarifying this will be helpful to push a little more on what “human nature” is doing here. There does at first glance appear to be a great affinity between the work of Chantal Mouffe and Claude Lefort and the argument of Regenerative Politics. This is because I argue that for our modern politics to truly do justice to our beliefs that we have individual rights and the right to shape and constitute our political world, our politics must be open to constant regeneration, recreation, and reconstitution. This sounds a lot like agonistic democracy, but regenerative politics couldn’t be farther from it. What I argue in the book is that theorists like Mouffe in fact confine human beings to their political condition. Mouffe describes the political as an “ontological condition” for human beings and denies the existence of a universal human nature. So too is this political condition inherently democratic; and democracy a triumph of the political principle undergirding all of human life.

As I write in the book, however, in this conception “the political and politics become all there is in the world; there is no claim that humans can make against it—only claims that human beings can make through and in it as implicitly democratic, agonistic creatures.” The core of the regenerative vision of the human being is an understanding that you are made and formed by your political and historical context but that this can never exhaust what you are or how you might want to shape the world. The only way to truly think of human beings as having a right to shape the political sphere is to see themselves as always fundamentally outside of it, as capable of remaking or regenerating the conditions of their communal existence—including remaking or rejecting any reliance on concepts like rights themselves. It is always possible that the political world could look otherwise. It could be non-democratic—this is evident both historically and in the present. For human beings to have a legitimate and genuine claim on their political lives, we have to accept that we are perhaps not inherently liberal democratic creatures. Our democracies are made and earned, not immanent.

The only way to truly think of human beings as having a right to shape the political sphere is to see themselves as always fundamentally outside of it, as capable of remaking or regenerating the conditions of their communal existence—including remaking or rejecting any reliance on concepts like rights themselves.

What is a “regenerative politics”? How do you define the term and how does it differ from the hegemonic forms of politics in the liberal world today? More specifically, how would it function differently in practice? Is the change that you are proposing one of norms and the way we think about politics or would it also be manifested into the actual institutions of politics?

I think I made some headway in articulating the distinction of regenerative politics from other forms and theories in my answers thus far, but if I wanted to propose a more generic definition it would be that regenerative politics maintains that all conditions of our political existence are foundationally open to revision, retracting, or remaking. As I have been discussing already, this is rooted in a conception of human nature that is “constituted by a regenerative right to make the conditions of one’s existence and to maintain a liberty from those conditions absolutely.”  The main target in the book is really the liberal conception of the self-evidence of rights, which is being increasingly critiqued and rejected by both the left and the right (political and theoretical). Probably the most practical claim I make in the book itself is that, in a regenerative politics, “no right gained could be invulnerable to loss, even political freedom and equality.” 

This question about practice is important and is what people most want to talk about out of the book, which also means that the answer I provided above and in the book is unsatisfactory. So, I have two more answers to this.

First, the book is perhaps not practicable but is instead a way for liberals in particular to face the incommensurability of the self-determinative ethos with the liberal political project. This is different from saying, for example (as many have done), that there is a potential incommensurability between liberalism and democracy, which is also true. This is where my argument about the importance of human nature plays a role. This is not the conflict of one political vision with another, but with modern liberal democratic politics as a whole with its own promise to facilitate our self-determinative nature—which, I argue, it does not and cannot do when it proclaims rights to be self-evident and thus impervious to change. So here the first answer is critical and not practical. The argument of the book can serve as a heuristic, or a call for liberals to really examine themselves and their own principles.

Second, though, this is not wholly satisfactory, even to me, and even if I think this is in large part what the book is doing. To frame the practical consequences, I am going to invoke one of the central figures of the book, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is from Rousseau that I draw the regenerative claim that human beings have the “first right” to absolutely remake their political conventions. While we might be tempted to think that this is something that is accomplishable through elections or legal mechanisms, Rousseau does not believe this is the case. In the Social Contract, he claims that, in order for any state to maintain its legitimacy, the sovereign (that is, the active citizenry) must assemble as regularly as possible to re-legitimize the state. Again, one would assume that this takes the form of an election. Not so. What the sovereign is legitimizing in these assemblies is not the Government, understood as the members or representatives, but the form or constitution of the regime itself—that is, whether it is a democracy, an aristocracy, a monarchy, etc. He claims that every assembly ought to begin with two motions, which are to be voted on in sequence. The first, “whether it pleases the sovereign to retain the present form of Government” and the second, “whether it please the People to leave its administration [entrusted] to those who are currently charged with it.”  This means, he writes, that “there is no fundamental law in the State that cannot be revoked, not even the social pact.”  

Rousseau claims that, in the Social Contract, he is talking specifically about a type of law he calls political or fundamental law. Of this type of law he writes: a people is “always master of changing its laws, even the best of them; for if it pleases it to harm itself, who has the right to prevent it from doing so?”  Rousseau’s emphasis in the Social Contract is on what would make a political system legitimate for individuals who wish to remain masters of themselves. I take the project of Regenerative Politics to be largely the same: to show people what would be required for a genuine accommodation of a vision of the human being as self-determining. Like Rousseau, I think this would involve a commitment to the persistent potential for remaking or rejecting the fabric of our collective political life, even if that means rejecting democratic politics all together. It would involve something like a regular referendum on whether the American people (for example) accept the form of the United States, its Constitution, its Declaration of Independence, and its Bill of Rights. Like Rousseau, I can see of course that this comes with a great deal of risk, but without it I do believe we are not living in a regime that facilitates any capacity for people to genuinely determine themselves politically.

That answer brings us nicely to the question of the French Revolution! As you note, many liberal thinkers became weary of these arguments as they associated them with the violence of the Terror, a threat you acknowledge hangs over your conception of regenerative politics as well. How should we understand and contend with that risk? What is the alternative?

I began to speak about the risks involved in an abstract sense in the answer to the previous question, and you are right to push on the fact that the pressing historical and present question concerns the reality of those risks. As I argue in the book, I don’t think that a regenerative politics has any necessary connection to violence. Here too I will turn back to Rousseau to think this through. In his account of legitimacy in the Social Contract, Rousseau concedes that a condition in which a people were permanently, actively sovereign would be dangerous. This would be a democratic or popular government. No government, he writes, “tends so strongly and so constantly to change its form, [nor is there] any that requires greater vigilance and courage to maintain its own form. It is in this constitution above all that a Citizen must arm himself with force and steadfastness, and every day of his life say from the bottom of his heart what a virtuous Palatine said in the Diet of Poland: I prefer a perilous freedom to quiet servitude.” What Rousseau is seeking to do, as far as I see it, is preserve the capacity to legitimize the state and its laws without all of the peril.

This involves a lot of practical considerations for him, which include the size of the state, the proper separation of the legislative from the executive power, and so on, but basically speaking it is possible, according to Rousseau, to have a foundation of what I call regenerative self-determination through consistent re-legitimizing without making everything subject to regeneration at every moment, which would be unstable and unsustainable. What is required for this less perilous version, however, is a people that loves its laws and its state. The risk of retracting or remaking persists in every moment of re-legitimation, but it won’t happen if there is an active political life on the part of the citizens—if they see their own good reflected in that of their country.

I want to end with two questions about the growing radical right-wing movements in Europe and North America, which is what we often focus on here. You note that today’s far right does “[embrace] regenerative politics” but “only as a temporary means to a far more sinister end.” Could you explain this more? “Palingenesis” was a central ideological concern of older fascist groups; was their regenerative politics also only rhetorical or do they represent a more contemporary manifestation of the dark side of palingenesis?

I don’t think that the invocation of palingenesis or regeneration in these cases is merely rhetorical, but it is being leveraged. In the conclusion of the book, I am concerned about the fact that far-right actors are employing the term regeneration to call for a remaking of the political order, but only in the interest of foreclosing any future regenerative movements for human beings. That is, they are calling for movement and change against the stagnation of the liberal democratic order and its universalizing tyranny only in order to impose another stagnant order of their own. Broadly speaking, this seems to be what is meant by “metapolitics”: the permanent transformation of the human soul that will occur through political transformation. Any movement, in my view, and any conception of the political that wants to put a stop to the capacity for its people to remake or re-found its own collective order ought to be highly suspect from the perspective of the preservation of human freedom and self-determination.

A major commitment of my position in the book, however, is to take seriously the claims of political actors who want to reject the primary tenets of liberalism. From the perspective of legitimacy, as I have been describing it here, it is the right of every human being to determine themself in relation to the political order, and the liberal democratic regime forecloses many avenues of self-making. As Rousseau claims, “the People” maintains an absolute right to reject any law, even if those laws are good. To deny that this is the case is to deny the very ground of how political systems are or ought to be legitimated. Disagreements about politics extend much further and go much deeper than who we ought to elect to the Senate, or whether Democrats or Republicans ought to control the House.

Disagreements about politics extend much further and go much deeper than who we ought to elect to the Senate, or whether Democrats or Republicans ought to control the House.

My primary concern in the book is to reinvigorate an investment in our politics, making people see that the things that we value must be re-founded, re-made, and re-chosen if they are going to sustain themselves over time.  We want to be clear about the commitments that we hold, and hold fast and with intention to the ones we want to preserve. We have to be even more committed to a regenerative politics—in the sense of remaining open to genuine reconstitution—than the darker forces calling for political remaking are if we want liberal democratic regimes to survive.

You use the term “illiberalism” throughout the book. How would you define it? You mostly mention it when discussing liberal critiques of regenerative theoretical projects; do you think there is some use in the term, or do you see it mostly as just a pejorative used against a particular kind of critic of liberalism?

I am going to pull from Marlene Laruelle’s really outstanding introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism to begin my answer to this question. In the sense that you have drawn out of my book, I certainly use it most in what Laruelle calls an “entangled” way; that is, illiberalism is invoked in an historically contextual manner as an opposition to liberalism. Laruelle claims that this “can target core principles of liberalism and the Enlightenment, or may instead challenge only some concrete manifestations of liberalism in politics and society.” She argues, however, that despite this dialectical emergence of illiberalism from liberalism, “it is not mere negation and has substantive content of its own.” This content is varied and plural, and Laruelle accounts for the many types of content in her introduction with remarkable clarity.

To close our conversation, I am going to take a different spin on your question. I am convinced by Laruelle’s account that it is very difficult to come up with one definition of illiberalism, but in the course of answering your questions it has become more apparent to me that what I am really arguing is that there always going to be an “illiberal” core to a liberal democracy, if it is going to be legitimate. Put another way, for liberal democracies to sustain themselves over time, they must allow for the possibility that their legal and political orders are illegitimate, and that they need to be rethought, re-founded, or regenerated. Citizens of liberal democracies must always be both in and outside of their political order: made by it, and also capable of remaking it from its foundations. This is the vision of human nature that forms the core of a regenerative politics, in which the human being has an absolute claim by nature to remake the conditions of its political life.

Put in these new and different terms, this vision is one in which everyone would be both liberal and illiberal. It is only because we are capable of seeing ourselves as not liberal that we may in fact be capable of reinvigorating the liberal democratic ideal in a renewed commitment to its principles, maintenance, and idea of what is good. As I conclude the book, “though there is risk, there is a world to win of free and equal human beings—for as long as we can make and keep it.”  As I see it, Regenerative Politics is a hopeful book even if, like Rousseau, I also see that the barriers to the instantiation of a truly regenerative politics might be insurmountable.

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Emma Planinc is an Associate Professor of Political Science in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, Regenerative Politics, was published by Columbia University Press. She is currently working on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.