The Telos Student Seminars provide a forum for students around the world to engage with critical theory by discussing a common set of paired texts from Telos—one current essay and one pertinent essay from our archives. The following reports from our first Telos Student Seminars in Budapest, Hungary, and Haifa, Israel, compare Paul Kahn’s “Law and Representation: Observations from an American Constitutionalist” (Telos 195, Summer 2021) and Paul Piccone’s “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism” (Telos 89, Fall 1991). The Hungarian seminar turned its attention to the relevance of political theology in the context of Viktor Orbán’s dismantling of liberal democratic institutions, while the Haifa seminar explored whether the essays by Kahn and Piccone “suggest a liberal, populist, or conservative solution to the crisis of the liberal state.” For more details about the Telos Student Seminars, including summaries of the two essays under discussion, click here.
From Budapest, Hungary
Political Theology in the Hungarian Context
Participants: Zoltan Balazs (Professor), David Bukovinszki (MA student), Csendike Somogyvari (PhD student), Szilard Toth (PhD student), Anna Ujlaki (PhD student)
From a Hungarian perspective, there are two conflicting paths to address the problems considered in the articles by Paul Piccone (1991) and Paul Kahn (2021). On the one hand, it is possible to draw a line between the context of the essays and the social, political, and historical context of contemporary Hungary, which has its own unique problems—and then to claim that the central tenets of Piccone and Kahn are invalid for us. Hungary is a post-Soviet state in which liberal democratic ideas are not devaluing, in the sense that they have never been genuinely reinforced after the regime change in 1989. From 2010, the Orbán regime has dismantled democratic liberal institutions step-by-step and created a new constitution, in 2011, partly to foster its interest in patronage and partly as a form of symbolic politics, to claim a sharp shift from earlier regimes. The thus-emerging order shows the signs of what political scientists have recently called a hybrid regime. In connection to authoritarian signs, a specificity of the Hungarian case is that the government and Viktor Orbán himself embody the strongest populist rhetoric among political actors.
On the other hand, it is possible to find ideas and arguments by Piccone and Kahn that seem incredibly relevant for our case. For us, this path has seemed to be more helpful.
The first striking question for us has been the aim of both of the articles. Both of them embody a disillusionment of politics (or the political?), therefore they appear more than mere scientific articles: they seem to be political manifestos at the same time. To explicate this observation about what we assumed as the political aim of Piccone and Kahn during our discussion, two further comments need to be addressed.
We have identified two fundamental elements of the articles. The first is a problem of legitimacy, and the other is a dimension of political theology. The underlying legitimacy problem of the articles points to a long-standing debate about who or what legitimizes political power. Understood in this framing, the main issue for Piccone seems to be that legitimacy must come from the people, which is—Piccone seems to argue—more complicated without polarized counterparts, the role that communism fulfilled for American liberalism. Interpreting Kahn’s argument as a problem of legitimacy, the underlying idea is that legitimacy must be at the same time a bottom-up and a top-down phenomenon. What we suggest by this is that while the final source of the legitimacy of the Constitution must be the people itself, as Kahn argues—hence, we and only we should be its authors—this ground represents more than a mere aggregation of wills. And here enters the political-theological dimension. The dimension is strikingly expressed in Kahn’s analogy between the Bible and the Constitution, and between God’s mind and the human mind, yet it also is implicit in some notions of Piccone, such as “the impending doom” of liberalism, or “fervent believers” of liberalism’s “eternal validity.”
It is possible both to sympathize and to disagree with the political-theological approach to contemporary issues. The authors’ political-theological and manifesto-type approaches teach an important lesson, which has relevance in the Hungarian case as well. The discussion of our group has led to the problem of the desire of the people to have a sacramental or a mythical element in the political sphere, which would rise above everyday political battles and would strengthen the idea that, however heterogeneous our worldviews are, we are in the same vessel when it comes to the task of defining our common, general will. The problem for the people of Hungary would be the following. First, who are “we” exactly, whose general will must be revealed? Hungarian citizens? The Hungarian nation? Do Hungarians living beyond our borders belong among “us,” since the parts of the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary have been allocated to neighboring countries after the Treaty of Trianon in 1920? And what common fiction would link them into a unity? Orbán seems to have an appeal and spell over so many Hungarians as Trump has over many Americans. Both have their followers who seem to have an almost supernatural belief in them as God-sent saviors, while others see them as no less supernatural evildoers or perpetrators. If this parallel is defensible, then the common identity question is strikingly similar in both countries.
Importantly, in terms of cultural and social values, the understanding of history, and language, Hungary is a much more homogeneous society than the U.S. The most robust but still not unbridgeable social cleavage is the rural–urban one. Thus, the undeniably strong enmities between government and opposition seem to have political roots. Whereas the current government has done everything it could to present itself as the true and single representative of the nation (the people), it could do so partly by disowning and alienating large segments of the population, making the political objective of unifying the nation ultimately unattainable. In the end, the fundamental paradox, also touched upon by Kahn (the Supreme Court is the mouthpiece of the law, hence the will of the people; however, the political representation of pluralism demolishes the unity and makes the Court a political body), reappears. Without a credible political authority, the essentially antagonistic nature of politics destroys the people. However, as Piccone reminds us, a political authority without a proper challenger is apt to become dull and feeble. The liberal consensus might have worked well until the fall of Communism, providing the West with a comfortable sense of superiority. The rise of illiberal democracies forces liberals to fight, once again, a political war, which they may or may not win, yet the problem of in whose name the war is to be fought (the ultimate authority—the people?) looms large. Will there be a liberal populism? We wonder.
From Haifa, Israel
Erasing the People-Elite Divide: Anti-Populism in Piccone and Kahn
Executive organizer, moderator: Peli Meir, PhD student, Department of Political Science, University of Haifa
Seminar participants: Asaf Yakir (PhD student), Lilach Ben-zvi (PhD student), Ayal Yechezkel (PhD student), and Eyal Kanfi (PhD student)
The seminar I moderated focused on one prominent topic that materialized during our reflections on the questions suggested by Telos: Do the articles by Paul Piccone and Paul Kahn suggest a liberal, populist, or conservative solution to the crisis of the liberal state? In this text I present the main contentions that arose in this discussion.
The first question we addressed was whether Piccone and Kahn are populists, because in their papers, they both suggest a solution related to The People: Piccone suggests giving The People their sovereignty back by allowing every geographical-cultural area within the central state to have its own cultural-political autonomy.[1] Similarly, Kahn suggests that we need to reinvent the identity of The People by using widely accepted social myths.[2] Both authors value the cultural-communal sense of belonging to The People, and they oppose the liberal attempt to fracture society into atomized individuals while culturally and politically homogenizing them within a thin, liberal political ideology.
Having reached this consensus on the similarity of their approach, we discussed the fact that while both authors suggest populist alternatives to the status quo, their solutions differ. Kahn claims the solution should be managed from outside of The People and, accordingly, the Court should make use of myths that it finds widely accepted in society when judging individual cases.[3] In contrast, Piccone claims that The People should construct their own cultural-political norms, which can only occur when every social group in society has extensive regional political autonomy.[4] Kahn is advocating for a top-down solution that empowers the liberal elite to make political decisions, while Piccone argues for a bottom-up approach that empowers The People.
In contrast, one seminar participant argued that it is not entirely clear that Kahn favors imposing a top-down narrative on society. In fact, it seems both Kahn and Piccone claim that society should evolve organically, and not be engineered into accepting the narrative of liberal ideology.[5] On the other hand, Kahn’s whole theory is based on the belief that the original meaning of the constitution should be interpreted anew, according to the cultural and societal norms accepted today—an idea usually attributed to liberalism. For example, today we would interpret the human rights mentioned in the American constitution to include black citizens, while this interpretation would be questioned in the original meaning.
Another participant then suggested that Kahn wishes to find a compromise between liberalism and conservatism. He seeks to keep the conservative values of community and trust in the judgment of past generations, while allowing for these values to be interpreted according to political progress in society. Furthermore, Kahn not only strived to bridge conservatism and liberalism but also added populism to the mix; Kahn argues that the judges of the Supreme Court should ensure using popular myths that The People created when judging cases. He ventures to break the populist dichotomy between The People and the elite, represented here by the judges,[6] by subjecting the judges to The People. Piccone, in contrast, completely rejects this idea of elite accountability to The People and breaks the People-elite dichotomy in a different way: by ditching the elite altogether and giving The People complete political sovereignty over themselves. Therefore, we conclude that both authors, despite their divergent approaches, attempt to weaken the role of the elitist central bureaucratic state in political life and strengthen the people’s role in it.
This dichotomy between the elite and The People is usually interpreted as stemming from the Schmittian friend-enemy dichotomy.[7] By pointing to this dichotomy, Schmitt famously claims that the political life of nations is active only when the tension between “the friend” and “the enemy” stays intact. The friend-enemy dichotomy is manifested in the populist dichotomy in the following way: the friend is The People, and the enemy is the elite. For example, Trump rhetorically attacks the elite publicly in the name of The People. Therefore, the endeavor by Piccone and Kahn to erase the People-elite dichotomy is, essentially, an effort to eliminate the Schmittian dichotomy of politics, and Schmittian politics by extension. Kahn does this by connecting both parties in a thread of accountability, and Piccone does it by removing one party—the elite—from politics.
What does this all mean? It means that both authors are anti-Schmittian, but while Kahn believes in the politics of compromise and peace, in which friend and enemy can be bridged and reconciled, Piccone does not believe in this kind of peaceful politics, and the solution he seems to suggest for the populist crisis of the liberal state is to jettison the enemy altogether. In other words, Kahn tries to reconcile the liberal elite with populism and conservatism, while Piccone dismisses liberalism altogether. Here we have the left-right divide on the crisis of liberalism: reconciling enemy and friend or erasing the enemy altogether, respectively.
Therefore, according to Piccone and Kahn, the necessary condition for the human emancipation within our historical moment is the cancellation of its version of Schmittian politics—the people-elite dichotomy. Furthermore, the variance between the authors’ theories arguably encompasses an important political question in this historical moment: Should the dichotomy be broken by giving complete sovereignty to The People or by reaching a compromise between both parties?
1. See Paul Piccone, “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism,” Telos 89 (Fall 1991): 12.
2. See Paul Kahn, “Law and Representation: Observations from an American Constitutionalist,” Telos 195 (2021): 17–18.
3. Ibid.
4. See Piccone, “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism,” pp. 12–14.
5. Ibid.
6. See Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 3.
7. See Pierre Ostiguy, Francisco Panizza, and Benjamin Moffit, eds., Populism in Global Perspective: A Performative and Discursive Approach (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 40–41.
