Review

This book traces the various ideological and legal developments in the Russian Federation and forms a captivating narrative which shows how the influences of Karl Marx and Adam Smith have shaped the evolution of Russia over hundreds of years to the rise of modern “sovereign democracy” or managed democracy in the Putin era. Moreover, like the broader debate surrounding law and ideology, the book brings to the forefront key issues in the development and practice of the rule of law in Russia and how it is juxtaposed with the new ideology of sovereign democracy. In effect, the book tells a tale of the practice of ideology in law. In general, the book deals with how Marxian thought evolved in Russia and how a new thought, based on the resurrection of Carl Schmitt, is proving to be the ideological foundations of modern Russia. But, at the same time, there are a number of questions pertaining to law and ideology that the book raises, and not all of them are adequately answered.

Authors often wrestle with questions such as: is law, or the rule thereof, the legal expression of a political ideology, and can the rule of law be separated from the “political vertical” of a state? These questions can be contentious and any attempt to provide satisfactory answers can transcend many fields: political science, sociology, history, legal science, philosophy among others. Furthermore, any “correct” answer can be dismissed for being subjective or for being based on a particular agenda. Unfortunately, that is one of the negative trappings of research into questions that concerns “law and ideology”, and often it is best to point only to the developments in a particular state to offer a meaningful discourse.

For some time now, at least since Vladimir Putin rose to power in Rossiyskaya Federatiysa (new Russia in this context, but Russia generally in other references), he has been promoting the idea of vertikalnaja vlast(power vertical) – or rule from the executive, in which power is consolidated centrally and manages the affairs of the state. The idea of vertikalnaja vlast in which a central source manages and coordinates the government and state in a tight manner is based on the view that in complex societies such as Rossiyskaya Federatiysaonly a central source of power can deliver the rule of law to unite the state. In this case the rule of law is an expression of the political. This is how I have come to construct the notion of the “political vertical” based on (a) the vertikalnaja vlast doctrine and (b) law seen as an extension of politics.

But my (subjective) outlook raises a number of other questions, and this is where the well-known Russophile, Bill Bowring comes in, because he has managed to provide a number of answers to similar questions in this work. Bowring’s work sometimes reads like a tale from Alexander Pushkin’s Istoriya Pugacheva (A History of Pugachev, 1833-4) or Mikhail Lermontov’s Stranniy Chelovek (A Strange Man, 1831 first published in 1860). Both works were written thirty years prior to the great legal and political reforms of Alexander II that began in the 1860s. Bowring manages to provide a narrative full of drama, tragedy and philosophical encounters, all the while narrating the various epochs that shaped Rossiyskaya Federatiysa in its ideological and legal evolution. And, Rossiyskaya Federatiysa, is indeed “strange” (Winston Churchill famously quipped that Russia is a riddle, full of mystery ‘inside an enigma’ (3)), and full of various rebellions (revolutions) that often aspire to great ideals and change.

Law and ideology from a Russian perspective are both progressive (revolutionary) and represent a struggle to adapt. If Pushkin was recounting the Pugachev Rebellion with new material and Lermontov was discussing a romantic drama with tales of sadistic rule, then Bowring is also narrating various Russian epochs with new material and telling the tales of victimhood via human rights and the death penalty, albeit with Russian material some of which he browsed at libraries in Moscow. Bowring’s narrative is set in three “scenes” that embodies a typical format when discussing Russia: i) the imperial period, broadly Chapters 1-4, ii) the Soviet period, Chapters 5-6, and iii) Rossiyskaya Federatiysa, Chapters 7-10, followed by a conclusion and an autobiographical sketch by Bowring of himself.

From the very beginning, Bowring is adamant that the book is just a collection of episodes and themes that are landmarks, and warns his readers that the ‘book is not a general history of law in Russia; neither is it one of politics or ideas.’ (1) Indeed, one gets the feeling that the book contains snippets, or “landmarks” of history of law in Russia, of how ideological theories shaped Russia during the imperial and Soviet periods, and how some of those ideas are again taking shape in the new Russia in the form of “sovereign democracy” (managed democracy), a theme Bowring discusses beautifully , although that discussion is brief. Russophiles get a rapid introduction to a series of historical and theoretical events in the history of Russia which most of the early chapters cover, while seasoned Kremlinologists can pay close attention to two particular chapters: the one on Yevgeniy Pashukanis and the chapter on “sovereign democracy”.

In Chapters 1 and 2 Bowring recounts how Karl Marx and Adam Smith influenced ideological and legal innovations in Russia. Bowring relies heavily on a number of authors, using numerous long quotations, to demonstrate that Marx and a combination of early Russian religious beliefs embed the idea that Russia had a messianic duty to save the world thus creating a ‘Russian identity and ideology.’ (17) A religiously infused Russia coupled with early Marxian thought set the tone for Russia’s course with destiny. Bowring is not convinced that we ought to believe that Russian ideology and legal philosophy began with Marxian thought. Adam Smith, he contends, also had a role, and in Chapter 2 he produces a convincing discussion on how the Scottish enlightenment influenced legal innovations in the Russian empire, in particular through the Scottish educated jurist Semyon Desnitskiy (1740-89) and the German educated Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-65).

Unlike Chapter 1, which lacks substantial discussion of the lengthy quotes, Chapter 2 provides an excellent narrative on the early emergence of reformism and legal thought in Russia. The effects of those legal innovations and reforms kick in, in the 1860s, when Tsar Alexander II initiated the great legal reforms in Russia that Bowring discusses in Chapter 3; and which, in an ironical twist of fate, Putin reactivated in the 2000s. One of those reforms was trial by jury which Putin successfully restored in Russia. But prior to the new Russia, the remnants of imperial Russia flirted with a mixture of Marxism and Lenin’s Bolshevism, ideas that gave the world the Soviet Union. Soviet jurists had to adjust their legal and philosophical thoughts to fit the new paradigm, and Bowring explores the works of eminent Soviet jurists such as Pashukanis in Chapter 4 and the idea of self-determination in international law in Chapter 5.

The short lived flirtation with communism and the disappearance of the Soviet Union overnight (in 1991) left Russia in a wounded state, and by 1999 a new tsar from the “imperial courts” of St. Petersburg arrived in Moscow. His message was a new form of Russian conservatism and interpretation of the rule of law:vertikalnaja vlast, and “sovereign democracy” would be the new mantra that began to shape Rossiyskaya Federatiysa. In Chapter 6 and 7 Bowring recounts how the internal struggles by “provinces” in Rossiyskaya Federatiysa for independence along the lines of the Republics of the former Soviet Union created a ‘parade of sovereignties’ and autonomy. In a number of themes Bowring highlights some of the complications thatRossiyskaya Federatiysa faced with its subjects, and how it had to enter into bilateral treaties.

Those discussions are too short and in any event cannot be fitted into a book that purports to give snippets of the events that shaped Russia. The internal struggles for “independence” (autonomy) in Rossiyskaya Federatiysa, Bowring declares, had much stronger roots than in most western democracies which gave Russia a greater tolerance of religious and legal pluralism. By Chapter 8, Bowring begins to show his strength, and in what is the best chapter up to that point, he describes the pro and cons of the human rights debate inRossiyskaya Federatiysa and its accession to the Council of Europe (COE), and then in Chapter 9 the debate on the death penalty. By this point, it is also evident that Bowring has an agenda – Russia is terrible at compliance with its obligations in the human rights field and this is due in part to ‘anti-Western and anti-liberal thinking’ (173) and, what seems “strange” to Bowring, Russia’s efforts to abolish the death penalty (191), especially the steps taken during the imperial period.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the book, in particular from a law and ideology perspective, is the discussion of sovereign democracy in Chapter 10, which Bowring argues ‘has a direct impact on law and on human rights’ (194) in Rossiyskaya Federatiysa. The idea of sovereign democracy – ‘the supreme independent (sovereign) power of the people (democracy)’, as one justification puts it, is largely a phenomena ofRossiyskaya Federatiysa where, broadly, the vertical power consolidates the Russian government and manages the affairs of the state from a central point (president and siloviki). One of its sponsors declares: ‘Russian democracy – is sovereign, and the sovereignty of the Russian state – is democratic … Precisely for this reason in the globalizing world the defense of the interests of the state demands the uniting and not the breaking up of sovereignties.’ (197) The emergence of this new form of thought in modern Russia is the work of a handful of young conservatives who belong to institutions such as the Supreme Court, influential research institutes in Moscow with government connections, and elite academic institutions.

The proponents of sovereign democracy have resurrected theorists such as Carl Schmitt to argue thatRossiyskaya Federatiysa had a duty to defend its national interests especially from external influences such as the European Court of Human Rights to which it subjected itself when it joined the COE. Bowring is rather disturbed at the invocation of Carl Schmitt in the new Russian ideology of sovereign democracy and the impact Russian constitutional scholars, who are proponents of sovereign democracy, have on ‘the ideology of law and relations between Russian and the European Court of Human Rights’ (203), Although the Chapter ends without a proper conclusion or assessment, without a doubt Bowring has a deep insight into Russian law and ideological developments, in particular the ones he highlights as landmarks in this narrative.

But Bowring’s narrative suffers from a few shortcomings. The most anticipated discussion, and arguably the most gripping chapter – on sovereign democracy – suffers from a lack of detailed discussion. This is also a feature in most of the other chapters. Although rich in mostly Russian sources and lengthy quotations throughout, one often gets the feeling that a skeletal brief for a court argument has been drafted and presented without the support of extensive analysis.

Nevertheless, Bowring uses his combined talent in law and philosophy to produce a narrative that will grab the interest of Russophiles and Kremlinologists alike. But perhaps one of the greatest contributions that Bowring makes is giving anti-Russians a useful insight into how to contextualize their arguments when making claims about Rossiyskaya Federatiysa, because westerners generally make a lot of claims about Russia without properly understanding the enigma that spans the Eurasian landmass with its varied “peoples”, ideas and legal pluralism. Bowring should be commended for transferring some of that knowledge into an accessible format in what is largely a gripping discourse on a strange people often fraught with rebellions.

Review

There is a certain vulgar “Marxism” which treats Plato (428-348 BC) with suspicion, and for didactic purposes divides philosophy into two schools, “idealist” (Plato) and “materialist” (Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, 384-322 BC). Neither Marx nor Engels had such a pejorative assessment of Plato.

Marx, for example, cited Plato many times, especially in Chapter 14 of Volume 1 of Capital, as an example of the writers of classical antiquity, who were “exclusively concerned with quality and use-value”. He continued: “This standpoint, the standpoint of use-value, is adopted by Plato, who treats the division of labour as the foundation on which the division of society into estates is based” and his footnote had the citation in Ancient Greek, in which he read Plato (Marx 1976, 487-8).

And in 1877 Engels, in Anti-Dühring, wrote concerning the same passage: “Herr Dühring has nothing but sneers for Plato’s presentation – one which, for his time, was full of genius – of the division of labour as the natural basis of the city (which for the Greeks was identical with the state)”. For Marx and Engels, Plato was a worthy predecessor.

In our own time Alain Badiou, who made his way through a Maoism on which he continues to reflect critically and self-critically (as a good Maoist), is the most prominent materialist philosopher. He has described himself as a Marxist, although his philosophy in no way concerns the critique of political economy, and asserts consistently that he is a Communist. I agree with him, in the sense given by Marx in 1845 in The German Ideology: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

In his 2010 Second Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou clarified the reason he turned to Plato:

the philosophical position I combated twenty years ago was principally the Heideggerian position in its French variants (Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, but also Lyotard) … My `Platonic gesture’ was to reaffirm the possibility of philosophy in its original sense – namely the articulation … of a crucial categorical triplet: that of being, the subject and truth … by the construction of a new concept of truth or truths. I set myself up, in sum, against the critical ideal of deconstruction. (117-8).

Adam Bartlett, who teaches at Monash University, is a distinguished Badiou scholar. This is his latest monograph; another is on its way. He positions Badiou as follows:

Badiou duly identified his own project as a ‘contemporary Platonism’ … at once faithful to the mathematical conditioning of thought, whereby the most rigorous thinking of being passes through the most contemporary discoveries in mathematics, and to the ‘Platonic gesture’ that declares ‘there are truths’ (2)

There is more than a gesture. As Bartlett points out, Badiou’s four conditions for the existence of philosophy – the thinking of being, art, love and politics – are also the subject matter of Plato’s Dialogues, with which Bartlett is also impressively familiar. It is only a shame that Bartlett wrote and published before the publication in 2012 in French and in English of Badiou’s Plato’s Republic. Simon Critchley has described this text – 372 pages of it – as “something really remarkable: a complete reimagining of the founding text of philosophy … an utterly contemporary transposition”.

Plato’s Dialogues are united by the figure of Socrates, an educator who insists that he knows nothing, is not paid a penny for his labours, and whose unceasing struggle is against sophistry. For Plato, as explained by Bartlett,

what usually passes for education, in any state, the teaching of skills for commercial prowess, technical skills which serve the whims of interest and power, or a training in debate which might ensure the subject a reputable place within the polis, does not ‘deserve the name’ of education.

For Bartlett, `Plato’s fundamental claim, a claim that links the entirety of the dialogues, is that “non-sophistry is possible”’.

This book is divided into six chapters: State, Site, Event/Intervention, Fidelity, Subject, Generic. The reader of Badiou will see at once that these are Badiou’s central categories. Thus, this is primarily and engagement with Badiou, explaining his concepts and arguments by continual reference to Plato’s own engagement. It is possible to recommend this text, with some reservations explored below, to an attentive reader who is a specialist in neither Plato nor Badiou, but for whom the idea of “an education by truths” is attractive – and in the present climate of the privatisation and commodification of education, entirely necessary.

Thus the “State” explored in Chapter 1 is the Athenian state, which in the end found Socrates’s presence and continued existence to be intolerable, so that he had to be executed. Bartlett concludes the chapter by asserting that he has tried to “demonstrate that under the condition of Badiou’s distinction between the situation and its state the possible place for the arrival of something other than the rule of interest and the conceit of knowledge might be found.” (61).

Chapter 2, on the “Site”, introduces Badiou’s fascination with contemporary mathematics, and the ontology he develops in relation to it. Those who find Badiou’s close attention to mathematics eccentric should reflect on the fact that Karl Marx wrote extensively on mathematics. His Mathematical Manuscripts, edited by S. A. Yanovskaya, were published in English by New Park in 1983, and the full text, nearly 300 pages, is available in PDF on the http://www.marxists.org website. In his review published on the same web-site, Andy Blunden wrote:

The actual historical development of mathematics over the last century and a half has moved on from the particular problems with which Marx was concerned in relation to calculus, but has confirmed the essence of Marx’s ideas on the subject.

These problems, however, continually re-emerge at a deeper level and are linked to methodological problems in all branches of science, and close study of Marx’s method is essential – his synthesis of the logical and historical; his insistence on the highest standards of precision in science and contempt for all ‘sleight of hand’ etc.; his insistence on the sublation of the old into the new, established more concretely with every further development of the new. Only by his struggle to develop his algebraic method of differentiation could Marx bring out what was new in the calculus.

And here I come to my one serious criticism of Bartlett, who otherwise succeeds in writing about difficult and complex matters with admirable clarity.

On page 73 Bartlett refers to “the rigorous and systematic thinking of pure multiplicity established in ZFC set theory.” There is no footnote or other explanation here, and far too much is expected of the reader, who almost certainly will never have heard of ZFC.

ZFC is in fact the abbreviation for “Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice”. This is named after the mathematicians Ernst Zermelo (1871-1953) and Abraham Fraenkel (1891-1965). It is the most influential of several axiomatic systems that were proposed in the twentieth century to formulate a theory of sets – that is, a theory of everything there is – which could be free of paradoxes such as Russell’s paradox. Russell’s paradox (also known as Russell’s antinomy) was discovered by Bertrand Russell in 1901. Russell showed that the naive set theory created by Georg Cantor leads to a contradiction.

On page 211, in Chapter 6, “Generic”, Bartlett not only refers once more to “ZF axioms of set theory” without any explanation, but also mentions Cohen (first mentioned on page 205) in connection with AC (the axiom of choice) and CH (the continuum hypothesis). This, Bartlett should have explained, is a reference to the great mathematician Paul Cohen (1934-2007). Cohen developed the mathematical technique called “forcing”, which he used to prove that neither the continuum hypothesis (CH), nor the axiom of choice, can be proved from the standard Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms of set theory. In conjunction with the earlier work of Gödel, his proof showed that both of these statements are logically independent of the ZF axioms: these statements can be neither proved nor disproved from these axioms. In this sense, the continuum hypothesis is undecidable, and it is the most widely known example of a natural statement that is independent from the standard ZF axioms of set theory.

This may all, of course, be Ancient Greek to most readers of this review, and much of Badiou’s work and the conclusions he draws, must be taken on trust. Competent mathematicians say that Badiou is pretty good.

And I can say without fear of contradiction that Karl Marx would have found this work and Badiou’s reflections on it, in relation to politics in particular, utterly fascinating and vitally important.

Chapter 3 is “Event/Intervention”, and Bartlett says: “We are certainly not saying that Plato had a theory of the event, but we are saying that in Plato there is an event – Socrates’ encounter with the sophists and therefore the state.” (103)

Chapter 4, “Fidelity” focuses in particular on the militant, who functions according to Badiou “by conviction,” or a “knowing belief” or confidence. “A militant is simply one who enquires into what he does not know, predicated on the confidence that, to quote Mao, ‘we will come to know all that we do not know’.” (132).

Chapter 5, “Subject”, contains the following stirring passage: “As we have stressed, the Socratic lesson of thePhaedo does not concern death but the very possibility of a life lived by truths. The Platonic ethic is that of Badiou: continue! Continue, in the face of the triumph of sophistry to be the immortal that you also are.” (185)

I hope that in this short review I have conveyed the importance of Badiou and Plato to contemporary Marxists; and especially those struggling against sophism in the academy. Those who want to understand Badiou (and Plato) better will find much to enjoy, and perhaps even a source of inspiration. Bartlett concludes: “Education understood as only by truths over and over again has had to force its way back into and through the knowledge of the city for which it was nothing.” (231)