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Security: The Long History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2013

ELI JELLY-SCHAPIRO
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Abstract

This articles undertakes a genealogy of security: its integral place in the philosophic justification of settler-colonial processes, its constitutive role in the genesis of the modern state and capitalist mode of production, its intellectual and political history in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. I contend that the current-day expressions of security governance – neoliberal technologies of accumulation by dispossession; the prosecution of a boundless and interminable War on Terror – reveal with a particular clarity the essential tensions and contradictions of the security project over the longue durée. And inversely, I argue, reflecting upon the longer history of the modern security project deepens our insight into the contemporary manifestation of security discourse and practice. My analysis of security is divided into three parts: security and property, security and race, and security and emergency. Property is the principal object of security governance, race delimits and structures the security state, and emergency is one governmental tactic through which a multifarious politics of security is legitimated and enforced.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 801 - 826
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Dillon, Michael, Politics of Security: Toward a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London: Routledge, 1996), 19Google Scholar. Stressing, via close engagement with Heidegger, the foundational place of security in the tradition of metaphysics (in particular its understanding of truth; the security, or certainty, of knowledge), Dillon argues that “security has always been concerned with securing the very grounds of what the political itself is” (13). Security, that is, “became the value which modern understandings of the political and modern practices of politics have come to put beyond question, precisely because they derived its very requirement from the requirements of metaphysical truth itself” (13). Dillon's is a crucial account of how philosophy and politics are intrinsically bound, and how security is central to that entanglement.

2 Jameson, Fredric, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 380Google Scholar.

3 On 11 September 2001, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage intoned that “history begins today.” “The world began on 9/11,” defense policy adviser Richard Perle later confirmed. This assumption of historical rupture was reproduced in critical discourse. For example: citing Giorgio Agamben and invoking Walter Benjamin, a chorus of voices announced that in the moment of the War on Terror the state of exception has become the rule. In seeming contradiction to his own historical theorization – which locates the moment of normalization in the Nazi concentration camp – Agamben repeated this refrain, stating that “Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule.” The War on Terror, Agamben implied, in agreement with Bush himself, is a “new kind of war.” Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 22Google Scholar.

4 Neocleous, Mark, Critique of Security (Montreal: McGill–Queen's University Press, 2008), 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Ibid., 139.

7 Ibid., 135.

8 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2010; first published 1651), 296Google Scholar.

9 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990; first published 1867), 388, 389. As Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working-Class in England, however, the advent of the Poor Law in fact stoked more revolutionary sentiment than it quelled: “the workhouses have intensified, more than any other measure of the party in power, the hatred of the working-class against the property-holders, who very generally admire the New Poor Law.” Engels, Freidrich, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (New York: Cosimo, 2008; first published 1845), 292Google Scholar.

10 See Klein, Jennifer, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public–Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, entire, but in particular chapter 1.

11 Several contemporary theorists of the biopolitics, in dialogue with and expanding upon Foucault's insights into the eighteenth-century articulation of the biological sciences and political economy, have traced the twentieth-century entanglement of the life sciences and capitalist accumulation. Cooper's, Melinda work (Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008)Google Scholar on biotechnology and neoliberalism is of particular note here, as is Reid's, Julian and Dillon's, Michael book The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Live (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar, which examines the biopolitical, and by extension necropolitical, logic of liberal rule and liberal warfare – focussing on but historicizing the moment of the War on Terror and the place of the “biohuman” therein.

12 In a recent echo of the Sputnik moment, in 2012 a Council of Foreign Relations task force, led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former chancellor of New York City public schools Joel Klein, published a report entitled “US Education Reform and National Security,” which claims that declining educational standards and results present a profound threat to US national security. Unlike its Cold War predecessors, however, “US Education Reform and National Security” calls not for a renewed political and economic investment in public education, but for the accelerated privatization of the US education system.

13 Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 243Google Scholar.

14 On a related note (one that recalls the Social Security moment), the National Security Strategy for Homeland Security of 2002 included a subsection on maximizing the market potential of terror insurance: “Enhance market capacity for terrorism insurance. The need for insurance coverage for terrorist events has increased dramatically. Federal support is clearly critical to a properly functioning market for terrorism insurance; nonetheless, state regulation will play an integral role in ensuring the adequate provision of terrorism insurance. To establish a regulatory approach which enables American businesses to spread and pool risk efficiently, states should work together and with the federal government to find a mutually acceptable approach to enhance market capacity to cover terrorist risk.” “National Strategy for Homeland Security 2002,” available at www.ncs.gov/library/policy_docs/nat_strat_hls.pdf, accessed 17 March 2010, italics in original.

15 Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007)Google Scholar, 12, 301.

16 In The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), David Harvey argues that imperialism's territorial and capitalist logics are rarely in perfect agreement. The convergence of neoconservatism and neoliberalism in the moment of the War on Terror is no exception. While Iraq may be a more market-friendly country in the aftermath of the US occupation, the war has had seriously negative consequences for US capital – notably exacerbating the severity of the 2008 financial crisis.

17 In Afflicted Powers (New York: Verso, 2006), 14, the Retort group argue that imperial power in the moment of the War on Terror is characterized by a “deep and perplexing doubleness,” the concurrence of the atavistic and the newfangled.

18 See Traverso, Enzo, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003), 110Google Scholar.

19 See Foucault, Michel, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 60Google Scholar.

20 Goldberg, David Theo, The Racial State (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 40Google Scholar.

21 Gordon, Linda, Pitied But Not Entitled (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5Google Scholar.

22 Mink, Gwendolyn, Wages of Motherhood: Inequality and the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 126Google Scholar.

23 Ibid.

24 Campbell, David, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 164Google Scholar.

25 Ibid., 159.

26 Borstelmann, Thomas, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 29Google Scholar.

27 See Dudziak, Mary, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Anderson, Carol, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

28 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 195Google Scholar.

29 Ibid.

30 SF BayView, accessed 10 March 2010, http://sfbayview.com/2010/after-katrina-new-orleans-cops-were-told-they-could-shoot-looters.

31 Neocleous, Critique of Security, 13–24.

32 Ibid.

33 Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitcs,” Public Culture, 15, 1 (2003), 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Ibid., original emphasis.

35 In his “Society Must Be Defended” lectures, at 103, Michel Foucault insists that “while colonization … obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West.” This is an observation made elsewhere by Hannah Arendt, Sven Lindqvist, Enzo Traverso, and others. See “Part Two: Imperialism” in Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1951); Lindqvist's “Exterminate All the Brutes” (New York: The New Press, 1996); and Travero's The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003). The latter writers primarily focus on how technologies of racial violence – e.g. the concentration camp, instruments of industrial and bureaucratic extermination – were born in a colonial setting and first practiced upon colonized bodies, before their re-actuation in the Holocaust and other instances of intra- European violence in the twentieth century. The procedural question of “emergency” is only peripherally included in these genealogies, but it serves as a uniquely revealing lens through which to observe the routes of affiliation between European conquest abroad and forms of governance internal to Western political orders.

36 Martial law was imposed by General Andrew Jackson upon the city of New Orleans during the war of 1812, and by President Lincoln, with congressional authorization, in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War (Lincoln proclaimed the suspension of habeus corpus throughout the country, a declaration essentially identical in its consequence to the declaration of martial law).

37 For example, martial law was imposed in 1892 by the governor of Idaho, in response to a mineworkers' strike; in 1912 by the governor of West Virginia, again in response to a mineworkers' strike; in 1914 by President Wilson, in response to the Coal Field Wars in Colorado; and in 1934 by the governor of California, upon the city of San Francisco, in response to a dockworkers' strike.

38 See Neocleous, 39–75 (in particular 52–9), for a lucid account of the expansion of emergency powers into the economic realm. Neocleous explores three examples from the interwar period – the Weimar Republic, the New Deal, and the Third Reich – to demonstrate the importance of “emergency” discourse and policy to the management of labor relations and economic order more broadly.

39 The emergency declared by President Truman in 1950 lasted until 1978. Emergencies ongoing today include the emergency declared in 1979 by President Carter, in response to the Iran hostage crisis; the emergency declared by President Clinton in 1995, also regarding Iran; and the emergency declared by President Bush in 2001, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The National Emergencies Act of 1976 set a two-year limit on federally declared states of emergency, but the President retains the power to renew the emergency indefinitely.

40 The expansion of executive powers in the twentieth century was the consequence, most profoundly, of a series of great political and economic crises – most notably, of course: World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War – and it has been enabled as well by the related ascent of “emergency” politics. Provoked in part by the arrogation of powers to the executive in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, and in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, several recent studies trace the growth of executive power over the past century and call attention to the relationship between the “permanence” of crisis/emergency and expansion/normalization of prerogative power. See, for example, Posner, Eric A. and Vermeule, Adrian, The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Shane, Peter M., Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Posner and Vermeule consider the expansion of executive powers inevitable and necessary to the functioning of government, while Shane – as the title of his volume indicates – maintains a more critical perspective.

41 See Hogan, Michael, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945– 1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in particular chapter 2, “Magna Charta”; also see Sherry, Michael, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

42 See Bacevich, Andrew, “Tailors to the Emperor,” New Left Review 69 (May–June 2011), 101–24Google Scholar, for a discussion of the Wohlstetter School – the foreign-policy tradition, based on the imperative of an anticipatory self-defense, that emerged in the early stages of the Cold War and is a clear ancestor of the Bush Doctrine of military preemption. Also see Gaddis, John, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, for an argument that traces, in an affirmative register, the doctrine of preemption (inspired by the specter of the “surprise attack”) to the moment of the republic's founding and to the space of the frontier.

43 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 71–81, 136–41Google Scholar.

44 The Nation online, accessed 10 July 2011, www.thenation.com/video/160041/how-michigans-financial-emergency-law-abuse-power and http://www.thenation.com/article/159452/noted.

45 Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War, 86.

46 In The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963; first published 1961), 38, Frantz Fanon observed that violence is inherent to and ubiquitous within capitalist order. The universality of capitalist violence, Fanon argued, is revealed in space of the colony, where processes of exploitation and expropriation unfold in the naked light of day, without the social institutions and “middle class” that disguise capital's contradictions in the metropole.

47 See Neocleous, 41–42.

48 In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968; first published 1940), Thesis VIII, 257, Benjamin wrote, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ within which we live is the rule.”

49 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998; first published 1995), 37.

50 Neoliberalism itself might be understood as one example of what Aimé Césaire termed choc en retour, the boomerang return of imperialist violence to the cities and nations of the North. See Césaire, Aimé, Discourse sur le colonialisme (Paris: Réclame, 1950), 36Google Scholar.