Kingdoms are Criminal Gangs

...No Laws, No Caesars

St Augustine once recounted the tale of a notorious pirate who was captured and tried by Alexander the Great:

“What is your idea, in infesting the sea?” Asks the great ruler.

“The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I'm called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you're called an emperor.”

Augustine’s thought was as follows:

“Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralized that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues people, it then openly arrogate to itself the title of kingdom, which is conferred on it in the eyes of the world, not by the renouncing of aggression but by the attainment of impunity.” (City of God IV, ch4)

This is not a strong case for the divine right of kings.

A certain amount hangs on those first two words, “remove justice.” In a world of Caesars, even anarchists have occasion to be grateful for the laws of accountability that keep us safe from overreaching tyrants. But of course, just as law is unavoidably married to violence, so it is also unavoidably tied to Caesar himself. This is firstly because it is Caesar's sword that watches over the law. But it's also a matter of some ambiguity which comes higher up the pecking order. Does Caesar serve the law or does the law serve Caesar?

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben finds the crux of the matter in a phenomenon we call the “state of exception.” This is where, under the exceptional circumstances of some national emergency, a ruler may take it upon themselves to change the laws. Some are suspended, some done away with, and others are introduced. This might be done entirely for the purpose of keeping people safe, or it might be some opportunistic power grab, or perhaps a messy combination of these things. The point is not to moralise about the justice or injustice of these various measures and legislations, but to ask what is meant by “justice.” The state of exception reveals the obvious: all state laws are human inventions, and it is those in power who are privileged to make them. The relationship between Caesar and the law is ambiguous because they're not, exactly, two different things. They are overlapping categories. Caesar is a space of exception. 

Laws work because everyone is subject to them. But they're also made up by someone, and that someone always has one foot outside of that sphere of laws, in order to make them. “If I do it, it is  legal,” said Richard Nixon. I believe Donald Trump said the same. Tony Blair didn’t face a criminal trial for war crimes, but an “inquiry.” In the end, the decisive thing is not justice (not human justice anyway) but power itself. Grasping the soap of power is the endless and miserable task—the tragi-comedy—of the Great.

The stand off between Alexander the Great and that nameless pirate plays out in real time. States, kingdoms and rulers still use violence which would never prevail outside those categories. The waves of protest against today’s massacres break against the rocks of state impunity. The myth of Caesar's exceptional right to rule by force pervades, as ever. 

I don't wish to be too blunt a tool. I’m wary of playing the cheap demagogue, for a shallow hurrah. Just because kingdoms are more or less criminal gangs who attain the power to legalise themselves, it doesn’t mean that there is no economy of possibilities therein. Not everything done is criminal, nor is everything illegitimate, whatever we might mean by those categories. None of this means that altruism, or sincerely intentioned acts of government are impossible. Augustine certainly didn't think so. Correspondingly, it's possible that Alexander's pirate believed he was making the world a better place. Maybe he was. All roads do not lead to violent iniquity. But as far as Caesars go, all roads are rooted in the myth of Caesar's exception.

As Walter Benjamin saw it, the western political imagination lived in a more or less permanent state of exception in which the impunity of states functioned much like the divine right of kings, in perpetuity. “Our task,” he said, “is to declare our own state of emergency;” that is, to unmask the royal spell by declaring oneself an exception to Caesar's permanent state of exception.