Cedric J. Robinson - The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership

THE TERMS OF ORDER

The Terms of Order

Political Science and the Myth of Leadership

Cedric J. Robinson

Foreword by Erica R. Edwards

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

1980 Cedric J. Robinson
Foreword 2016 Erica R. Edwards
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Designed and set in Swift Neue LT and Futura by Rebecca Evans.
Manufactured in the United States of America. The University of North
Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robinson, Cedric J., author. | Edwards, Erica R. (Erica Renee), writer of foreword.

Title: The terms of order : political science and the myth of leadership / Cedric J. Robinson ; foreword by Erica R. Edwards.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041085 | ISBN 9781469628219 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469628226 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Political science. | Political leadership.

Classification: LCC JA71 .R59 2016 | DDC 320.01--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041085

Originally published 1980 by State University of New York

For Winston (Cap) Whiteside, grandson of slaves

a man of extraordinary courage and profound understanding

my grandfather and my first teacher .

Men who do not know what is true of things take care to hold fast to what is certain, so that, if they cannot satisfy their intellects by knowledge ( sciencza ), their wills at least may reston consciousness ( conscienza ).Punishments were called paradeigmata by the Greeks in the same sense in which the Latins called them exempla ; that is, exemplary chastisements. GIAMBATTISTA VICO

Contents

Foreword

In 1985 Philadelphia police bombed the Osage Avenue residence of MOVE, a Black radical organization originally known as the Christian Movement for Life, and killed eleven of its members. This was after multiple arrests had been made, 10,000 rounds of ammunition had been unloaded on the home, and the police had resorted to fire hoses and tear gas to drive the residents out of their home. When the resulting fire spread throughout the neighborhood, it left more than 250 people without homes. The mayor of Philadelphia at that time, the man who made the call to bomb the MOVE compound, was the citys first Black mayor, W. Wilson Goode. That was twenty years after the U.S. Congress had passed the Voting Rights Act, and here was the most gruesome evidence that politics could hardly solve the problems that politics itself had caused. Thirty years later, as the United States watches the administration of its first Black president languish on the shores of the promise of change, the mobilizations of those who might be said to constitute a modern-day motley crew

This was the worldis the worldinto which Cedric J. Robinsons first monograph, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership , announced its devastating critique of politics and its reorientation of intellectual and social energy toward antipolitical, radical transformation. What weve seen in the thirty-five years since SUNY Press first published Terms is that the mythos of leadership, masquerading as order, covers over the most hideous forms of violence against those who interrogate the status of the political both in explicit acts and in their very being. Most recently, the inescapable fact that police force has long embodied and emboldened this mythos has motivated both committed, daily antiracist resistance and provoked the intensification of everyday and spectacular counterinsurgency, from ubiquitous surveillance technology to police shootings and tear-gas canisters lobbed at protestors gathered with hands up or heads down.

The timing of UNC Presss reissue of this book is fortuitous, and tragically so: the avarice of the Western world powers poses an even greater risk to the vitality of the global majority than it did when The Terms of Order was first published. But, too, the movements of the oppressed to reimagine power itself and to release the globe from the clutches of what H. L. T. Quan calls savage developmentalism gives us great cause to return to this work, which is at once disturbing and inspiriting.

Robinsons The Terms of Order is the first of the five monographs that, together, represent one of the most significant bodies of work in Black studies for scholars of our time. This book, which grew out of Robinsons Ph.D. thesis, is a critique of the violence that secures the political and an investigation of those forms of life and modes of organizing that might be called antipolitical. Devoted to a piercing genealogy of the political as that grammar which supplies the terms of order in Western societies, Terms is a history of ideas that proceeds in pursuit of an urgent question: why is it that, in spite of the history of antipolitical challenges to the Western political bodies, the political came to mark the limits of thought on what constitutes social cohesion and political organization? Detailing the epistemological, analytical, and metaphysical dimensions of the political, Robinson exposes political sciences role in solidifying the hold of the political paradigm on modern consciousness while translating the antipolitical into an ethical theory and philosophy, that is into forms of idealism (p. 1). Robinsons history of the political begins with science studies, with Thomas Kuhns and Karl Poppers theories of how knowledge is produced (for Robinson, for example, what Popper defines as myths operate in political science as naturalized assumptions, presumptive generalities) (p. 15). Defining the political as a paradigm, Robinson ties its crystallization in classical political theory (and later, in modern political science) to the function of authority within societies that are structured by the presumption of order. The political, for Robinson, secures the order that rationalizes state power:

It is an ordering principle, distinguishing the lawful or authorized order of things while itself being the origin of the regulation. We associate, then, the political with power, authority, order, law, the state, force and violenceall of these are phenomena which restrict the outcome, deflect the extraneous, limit the relevant forces. We speak of the political as both an instrument for ordering society and that order itself. It is both a general way of acting on things and the consequences which follows having acted upon things. (p. 7)

These are, in effect, the terms of order: authority, power, leadership. If intellectual discourse, and perhaps as importantly, public culture, celebrates the imposition of authority as that which secures order, it imagines leadership as the embodiment of that authority and power as that which is exerted by authority in the name of order. And, scientists argue, the human organism prefers orderthe arrangement of patterns into recognizable sequencesto chaos. As normal science would have it, Robinson writes, we are instructed by simple biological mechanisms the truth of order, an order upon which our capacity to survive is dependent; thus social order must consist of integrations, institutions, and patters in order to satisfy the images of the mind and the skills of the brain and eye. And that coherence, the certainty of that coherence in Western political thought, is obtained by one object, political authority (p. 36). But what seems an elemental desire for order, Robinson argues, is actually a function of the scientific knowledge that has proceeded through the discourses of evolution, revolution, incremental integration, and disintegration, all of which are evidence of sciences naturalization of order as the raison detre for political authority and for leadership as the practical embodiment of that authority.

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