Bessner Daniel - The Decisionist Imagination : Sovereignty, Social Science, and Democracy in the 20th Century

THE DECISIONIST IMAGINATION

Sovereignty, Social Science, and Democracy in the 20th Century

Edited by

Daniel Bessner and Nicolas Guilhot

First published in 2019 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

2019 Daniel Bessner and Nicolas Guilhot

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bessner, Daniel, 1984- editor. | Guilhot, Nicolas, 1970- editor.

Title: The decisionist imagination : sovereignty, social science, and

democracy in the 20th century / edited by Daniel Bessner and Nicolas

Guilhot.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018018022 (print) | LCCN 2018041090 (ebook) | ISBN

9781785339165 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339158 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Political science--Methodology. | Political science--Decision making.

Classification: LCC JA71 (ebook) | LCC JA71 .D448 2019 (print) | DDC

320.01/9--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018022

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-915-8 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78533-916-5 ebook

Contents

Daniel Bessner and Nicolas Guilhot

Stephen Wertheim

Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti and Ian Zuckerman

Kari Palonen

Nomi Claire Lazar

Philip Mirowski

S. M. Amadae

Egl Rindzeviit

Jenny Andersson

Angle Christin

Daniel Bessner and Nicolas Guilhot

Figures and Tables

Figure

Tables

Acknowledgments

The editors want to thank all the contributors for their input during the workshops that led to this volume. We are also indebted to Hunter Heyck, Anna Kronlund, and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins for their suggestions and comments at different stages of the discussion.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Communitys Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/20072013) Grant Agreement no. [284231].

Introduction

Daniel Bessner and Nicolas Guilhot

All masters of decision are dangerous.

Kenneth Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics

In 1940, a reader of the American Political Science Review would have been hard-pressed to find a single article in the journal that discussed decision-making. A decade later, the same reader may have come across a couple of pieces on the subject, though these were most likely reviews of Herbert Simons Administrative Behavior. By 1960, however, a political scientist could expect to discover a treatment of decision-making in every single issue of the disciplines flagship journal, including reviews of Richard Snyder, H. W. Bruck, and Burton Sapins Decision-Making as an Approach to the Study of International Politics; papers on the decision process at national conventions; articles on judicial decision-making; and explorations of the relationship between decision-making and mass communication. Eventually, our aging reader would have been introduced to the formalism of various types of rational choice theory. Between 1940 and 1960, decision-making had migrated from the margins to the center of political science. This trend, moreover, was not merely statistical; on the contrary, it shaped the disciplines self-image. In 1962, rational choice theorist William Riker asserted, in no uncertain terms, that the subject studied by political scientists is decision-making.

The turn to decision-making Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, the analysis of political decisions contributed to the emergence of rational choice, one of the most influential methodological innovations of the postwar social sciences.

Figure 0.1: Decision making in US political science journals, 19002000. Source: JStor data for research. Figure created by the authors.

Despite the enormity of this transformation, neither social scientists nor historians have analyzed it as a consistent phenomenon. As yet, there has been no attempt to connect the prewar history of decisionism as an important paradigm in political and legal theory with decision theory in the postwar social sciences; there has likewise been no attempt to explore the rise of rational choice in its various guises as a form of political theory. Bridging this divide is the primary goal of this volume.

In the last decades, legal and political theorists have devoted an enormous amount of energy to examining the thought of Carl Schmitt, with whom the notion of decisionism is associated. For Schmitt, decisionism was only one aspect of the analysis of law that placed the emphasis not on legal norms or on the underlying social order from which they stemmed, but on the decision that created law in the first place.

While the resurgence of interest in Schmitt has resulted in significant intellectual gains, it has also come at a steep price. Namely, decisionism has become conflated with its most famous proponent, which obscures the fact that thinking about politics in terms of decision was historically a concern of scholars across the political and disciplinary spectrums. In addition to Schmitt, a number of contemporaneous German political theorists like Carl Friedrich, jurists like Karl Loewenstein, and sociologists like Karl Mannheim adopted decisionistic perspectives on politics. By this, we mean that they saw politics as essentially grounded in sovereign, decisive authority, and not in the regularity and rationality of law or in the deliberative mechanisms of parliaments. For these thinkers, decisionism underlined a foundational dimension of politics that could not be countenanced by positive legal science: politics started where reason, or rationality, lost its grip. To take one example, for Mannheim politics did not refer to the routine affairs of state, which he called administration, but to a sphere of unique events that was irrational because it was not organized or codified according to rules. In the rationalized sphere of routinized procedures, Mannheim affirmed, everything is a matter of applying preexisting rules or following predetermined courses of action. The modes of behavior executed within this rational framework are merely reproductive, and they entail no personal decision whatsoever. Conduct, he continued, does not begin until we reach the area where rationalization has not yet penetrated, and where we are forced to make decisions in situations which have as yet not been subjected to regulation.