Power, Discourse, and Ethics

Despite Heinrich Popitz’s non-ideological, carefully descriptive account of how power is initiated and maintained, he too easily dismisses the Frankfurt School’s call for domination-free discourse as merely a subject for academic speculation. Because of his focus on the factual, Popitz neglects the possibility that ethical norms can challenge strategically-guided discourse even if only counterfactually. In addition, such norms are at work in the very discursive exchange represented by his writing his book for his readers and in that book’s aspiration to universal validity claims that run counter to strategic interests that tend to be particularistic. Popitz’s own conviction that power does not completely suppress freedom provides at least a space in which claims can be advanced and evaluated independently of strategic imperatives. Perhaps because Popitz’s approach is limited to describing the functioning of power, the underlying philosophical anthropology of his work is Hobbesian insofar as agents seek to subject others to asymmetrical power relationships and insofar as even the recognition one gives to another aims at retrieving recognition for oneself. A counter-asymmetry is to be found in Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological descriptions of the ethical summons of the other which provide a philosophical backdrop against which power is exercised and in which the first event of the interpersonal encounter is peace, not war.