Reframing the Present: Secularisation and the Rule of Law - 2022 Redux

            2022 Introduction

This is the last of the redux series where I'm republishing material from the defunct Spectre-Online website. This was a somewhat ambitious essay from autumn 2015 which attempts to argue a heterodox position on the influence of theology for modern jurisprudence and political categories more generally. As a piece of political-theology it's heavily influenced by my reading of Harold J Berman's two volume Law and Revolution, as well Giorgio Agamben's work on so-called economic -theology found in his Kingdom and the Glory.

There's a degree of naiveté shown here in my ignorance of the "dark side" of the process whereby the Medieval Catholic Church became a centralised transnational bureaucratic power, and how the birth of scholasticism was integral to that process. An excellent counterpart - or counterhistory even - can be found in R.I. Moore's The War on Heresy, which documents - from the ground up - the role that nascent Catholic legal science had in building the case for the Albigensian crusade.

Scholasticism gave a fixed and uncomprehendingly bureaucratic zeal to the clerics charged with prosecuting the war on heresy in the Languedoc and wider region of what is now South Western France. All too often the spectre of a "Manichean", or otherwise dualist Gnostic heresy was the convenient shorthand to gloss local disputes or reform activity which ran against the grain of the Church's attempt to centralise and systematise the faith. The invention of the heretic, with an almost standardised set of beliefs and posing an existential threat to the unity of the faith, emerged in the Paris schools of the twelfth century, coeval to the birth of scholastic rationality and the newly confident Church's drive to reform the secular world. Ranged alongside a French monarchy looking for excuses for expansion, the end result was a military campaign, unprecedented in its brutality, which historians now frequently refer to as genocide.

The second obvious naiveté in this text stems from it being written prior to the populist wave of 2016. While the displacement of the Church's claims to universality onto modern transnational institutions like the EU, IMF, World Bank, etc, is plain to see, my lament for the loss of a counterbalance to contest the Globalist (for that is what I'm talking about avant la lettre) pretentions of international finance proved to be premature. I read in those paragraphs a desire for a new movement, not a new Church, and certainly not what we got; a ragtag association of conspiracy theorists, 4Chan shit-posters, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. I'm being unkind, and the past seven years (only seven!) cannot be reduced to any one tectonic shift around worn-out political categories (least of all Left and Right). That's why the study of political-theology is so fruitful in destabilising our preconceived notions of how social and political life are put together. Now, the so-called Culture War really does look like the return of the wars of religion or the prelude to a crusade. As it was in the Middle Ages the battle lines are frequently being drawn between the rooted, parochial folk inhabiting the material world, and that assertive class of transnational administrator whose reified conception of how the world works depends for its stability on the ever present threat of the heretic.  

 

2015 text

"God is himself law; therefore law is dear to him" Sachsenspiegel (Saxon Law) of Eike von Repgau, Early 13th Century

 

Of all the grand narratives supposedly put to the sword during the era of post-modernity secularisation seems peculiarly resistant. While we are familiar with critiques of Western progress, cultural superiority and ethics, the narrative that would have us believe we in the West live in predominantly irreligious societies, and thus have passed through some process by the name of secularisation remains common wisdom. This idea is implicit in the way we see ourselves and how we frame our dealings with other cultures, and has become increasing acute in the post 9/11 world where the complexity of the global situation and the West's part in the multiplying fields of conflict are reduced to simple binary oppositions.  David Cameron provided a paradigm example of this kind of simplification in a recent speech on the ideology of Islamic State:

"It (ISIS) says religious doctrine trumps the rule of law and Caliphate trumps nation state and it justifies violence in asserting itself and achieving its aims. The question is: How do people arrive at this worldview?” (1)

One might critique this simplification by replacing the words religious doctrine with economic necessity or globalisation and Caliphate with American/Western hegemony. But this reversal - while having some truth to it - would gloss over what I think is the more important opposition Cameron sets up, which is the one between religious doctrine and the Rule of Law. Here the Prime Minister is drawing directly on a common assumption of secularisation, and from a particularly Protestant context, which draws a fundamental separation between human and divine law. This is one of the key assumptions of secularisation theory, that it involves purifying the legislative and governmental functions of the State from any kind of religious influence. That we in the UK live in such a state despite bishops sitting in the house of lords, an established church, and a sovereign who is also head of that church, is taken for granted. 

But what precisely secularisation consists in, and where and when did it occur, is still a vexed question, the answers to which very often fall back on the sort of grand narrative type of historiography that we are meant to have left behind. The answers may vary but inevitably they include many of the most recognisable events in Western historiography; the renaissance, the reformation, the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the French revolution, the industrial revolution, etc. Here we are confronted with a process supposedly ending in the present and yet seemingly without an origin. I would argue that this thing we call secularisation is a far more complex idea than it is generally taken to be and that an on-going critique of our assumptions regarding religion and the West is vital to understanding the current predicament we face in politics and culture. With such a vast topic a detailed treatment isn't feasible here. Instead it might be worth taking a historical perspective on the supposedly common sense opposition between religion and the Rule of Law.

 

A Note on the "New Atheists"

As is well known the question over religion's place in society and international affairs has been constantly raised over the last fifteen years or so, given impetus by 9/11 and the war on terror. There has been no more prominent voice during this period than the so called New Atheists with Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens being their most visible public figures. Their "debates" and public actions have more often than not focussed on opposing religion to their own brand of secular, empirical and scientific world view. As such they tend to spend most of their time debunking bible stories and criticising the irrational belief in higher beings rather than enquiring into the sociological and philosophical intersection between religion and modernity. They assume a break, so to speak, between the two and so their actions display an almost incredulous attitude towards those who haven't got the message yet.

This analytic/empirical attachment to the God question has skewed public discourse on religion to the detriment of other approaches which might yield a less partisan, less triumphantly antagonistic form of enquiry. One obvious source of that antagonism is the presupposed association of secularism with rational government and democracy, and thus their opponents with religious dogma, fanaticism and authoritarianism. Cameron's quote above fits squarely within this form of thought. To get beyond this antagonistic staging of debate around religion it is vital to turn away from the limited questioning around the existence of God and instead enquire into the history and operation of religion as a form of social ordering centred around the sacred. To do this broadens the enquiry to take account of the intersections between the history of philosophy, science, and most critically, the development and formation of Western legal and governmental systems. In doing this however, in particular to put the role of science into question, is a step too far for the New Atheists and their analytic empirical commitments.

To borrow a distinction from Ian Paisley, the activity of the New Atheists in public is in fact not to debate but to dispute religion. Their aim is to displace it from public discourse and to install their own version of secular empirical rationality as  "established". Thus they hope to remove the need to debate it in the future. In this sense it is broadly correct to describe the kind of militant atheism practiced by Dawkins et al as a kind of secular religion, construed as a form of totalised social ordering and fundamental set of principles beyond question.

 

Western legal rationality and the Canon Law: The Papal Revolution

To begin to  critique the accepted narrative on secularisation we need to go further back than the well known events listed above. Back further than the reformation and renaissance, back to the very heart of Medieval Europe. At the end of the eleventh century Europe experienced what some scholars have described as the first of the great revolutions; the so called Gregorian or Papal revolution. To summarise, it involved a declaration of independence by the Papacy from the control of Kings, lords and the Emperor within the multitude of Germanic proto states that made up the bulk of central and Western Europe at that time. But the infamous Dictatus papae of Pope Gregory VII was more than just a declaration of independence. Among its 27 statements it asserted for the first time the unity of the Church as a transnational body with the Pope as its supreme head; that the Pope may appoint or transfer bishops as he sees fit, and only he may depose them; and of particular importance was the statement that only the Pope can approve laws for the church. This was a new and powerful declaration of the dualism of secular (meaning temporal or earthly) and ecclesiastical powers and jurisdictions which came to be known as the Two Swords theory.

In the period after the disintegration of the Western Roman state and prior to the eleventh century these powers tended to be tied together in the concept of sacred Kingship where the ruler was not simply an enforcer of the peace but the spiritual head of the community; God's vicar entitled to dispose of ecclesiastics as he saw fit and intervene in church policy and governance within his respective territory. The freedom of the church from secular control and the declaration of the Pope's supremacy over spiritual matters began the process of eroding this notion of Kingship. The King was to be a layman whose role increasingly came to be seen as keeper of the peace and law-maker within the jurisdiction of temporal affairs only. However, as is well known, the Dictatus papae also made the radical claim that the Pope could himself depose Kings and Emperors, in accordance with the theory the ecclesiastical sword was ultimately superior to the temporal sword. This shouldn't obscure the fact however that the first tentative moves towards the separation of Church and State were made by the church itself, and it had to fight hard to assert this independence with the so-called Investiture controversy and the martyrdom of Thomas Becket being two significant flashpoints.

But the Church's declaration of political separation was only one part of the revolutionary changes that took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. More important for the emergence of the idea of the Rule of Law was the concurrent development and systemisation of the Canon law inspired by the newly rediscovered Roman Law books of Justinian. Scholars such as those at the recently founded law school at Bologna began examining the legal doctrines of the church in light of Justinian's texts which they took to be a complete and ideal legal system, a ratio scripta endowed with near biblical authority. To do this they employed the method of analysis and synthesis developed by Saint Anselm, Peter Abelard and others known to us as Scholasticism. Since they assumed that the edicts and responsa of the Roman Law were true and just they could in effect be treated as first principles. But since both the Roman Law, and the writings and Canons of the Church contained gaps and contradictions, a process of dialectical reasoning had to be employed to smooth out the different legal norms contained within; abstracting, classifying and synthesizing conflicts.

Legal historian Harold J Berman has argued that this movement represented not only the emergence of modern rationalised legal science but of the modern scientific method more generally. The glossators of Roman law and the Canon lawyers worked by formulating hypotheses that could serve as a basis for ordering phenomena (in this case legal phenomena) in the world of time that could yield probabilities and predictions rather than certitudes and necessities. Their approach moved dialectically by establishing general legal principles and then relating them back to particulars in predictions (2). Certainly this wasn't the sort of exact empirical science favoured by Dawkins but it did have an experimental side insofar as the developing system was tested in practice in the ecclesiastical courts and in the conflict between overlapping legal jurisdictions throughout Europe. The apogee of this work came in the mid twelfth century with Gratian's decretum, a collection of church Canons which formed the basis of Canon law until the 20th century. It is thus not an exaggeration to describe the Canon law that emerged from the Papal revolution as the first recognisably Modern legal system complete with a professional body of lawyers and a student body to study and develop it. But more than this it coincided with the independence of the church from secular control and its rise as a form of transnational state in its own right. This new state with its officials and sovereign (Pope) was to be a state based on law, a Rechtsstaat which in practice placed considerable limitation on the power of the Pope up to the point of theorising conditions where he should be deposed.  

As the legal system of the church developed so too did its legal practices, which in turn influenced the legal practices of the hitherto unsystematic and arbitrary forms prevalent in the Germanic kingdoms. Trial by compurgation (oath helping), ordeal or battle were rejected and superseded by the investigative or inquisitorial procedure which emphasised the establishment of the facts. To be sure the Catholic inquisition would later come to be associated with the worst of the Medieval church, but in the twelfth century these new procedures constituted a dramatic shift towards a more rational, logical and more distinctively modern jurisprudence where the direct intervention of God was ruled out. The Canonists and Glossators of the Roman law took up an agonistic relationship to the secular laws of the various Germanic and Frankish kingdoms, both supporting and challenging them, giving rise to many basic legal concepts we still carry with us today. Indeed the principles of reason and conscience were proclaimed by the ecclesiastical jurists as weapons against the formalism and magic of Germanic law (3). This relationship hinged upon the freedom of the Church and the fact that the boundaries between temporal and ecclesiastical power which inaugurated the Papal revolution were constantly being contested.

What we tend to think of as the religiosity of the Medieval Canon law and its conflict with secular state affairs was in fact always already a process of secularisation. The Glossators and Canonists endowed the Roman Corpus Juris, as it was known, with a sacred quality comparable to the Bible itself. They took it in effect as a total system developed over centuries that not only reflected the best that mankind's reason could produce, but also represented a common law of all peoples under God. This universalism and the Church's newly acquired mission to reform the secular world was a defining shift in the minds of Medieval people in comparison to previous centuries where the earthly realm was seen as little more but one of chaos and decay; a world sliding away into dust before the coming of The Kingdom of God which the Church was to patiently await. The period of the Papal revolution however saw a massive shift in Medieval European society. The invasions from the North, South and East of Europe finally came to an end, populations rose and thousands of new towns were founded along with increases in trade and artisanal production. Amid these changes the church declared its unity and independence and its mission to reform the secular world; a mission in which Law came to play a defining role. This shift in legal ideology might be summarised as the move from a chaotic irredeemable law of an irredeemable world to a systematic legal rationality that could aim to approximate divine justice itself and in doing so reform that world.

 

From the Two Swords to the global oikonomia

The above summary is obviously brief and simplifies considerably what was a complex and multi-facetted era in European history. It should however suffice to demonstrate that Cameron's assertion of the opposition between religion and the Rule of Law is wholly misplaced and in fact the Medieval church was instrumental in desacralizing Kingship and bringing to a closure the era of Germanic folk-law which reigned in Europe after the fall of the Roman state. We owe to the Papal revolution of the eleventh and twelve centuries and to the philosophers, theologians and jurists of that time the modern notion of a rational, logical, law governed world, one capable of embodying an ideal of Justice and ultimately the Rule of Law itself.

It should be noted that subsequently during the Reformation, and English and French revolutions it was the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts that was primarily attacked and only secondarily, over time, the content or procedure of the law itself. In England after Henry VIII broke from Rome the authority of the Pope was taken up by the monarch who not only maintained but even extended the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. It wasn't until the 19th century that the jurisdiction of church courts in England was thoroughly curtailed and the secular legal system took up what Michel Foucault has called its "pastoral power". In the modern era it is the secular powers that have assumed the task of judging and shaping the soul of Man.  It is only in the 20th century that the idea developed initially by the Canon lawyers, that the law should represent something universal for all peoples, something that embodies higher values beyond mere contingent political interest, has faded from view. More to the point the church's role in championing such a position and challenging the secular power to meet that obligation has almost entirely evaporated (although Pope Francis seems at times to hint at a revival of this tradition). It is Berman's thesis that this eclipse of universality constitutes the great crisis in law today. Without a common consciousness that the law should embody universal values about ends and purposes of society people lose respect for it and more often it becomes what Karl Marx and Max Weber believed it was; merely an instrument for the prevailing power.

I am more of the view that what has occurred over the last century or so is not the eclipse of universality but rather its displacement into a new field, namely economy. The IMF, World Bank, and other transnational financial institutions have issued their own Bull of unam sanctam and hold sway over the governments of nation states to a degree the Pope could never had imagined. For us unlike the peoples of Medieval Europe there is no Two Swords theory that would have the secular and spiritual authority vying for position, criticising and constraining each other's power. Nor does the universal law of the market admit of any other values aside from profit and competitive positioning. The nature and actuality of justice is no-longer contested as a political concern and is increasingly identified under neoliberal economisation with market outcomes. The American political philosopher Wendy Brown's recent analysis of the "revolution of neoliberalism" claims that under such conditions what disappears is precisely this capacity to limit, this platform for critique, and this source of radical democratic inspiration (4). Since the transnational apparatus for global finance holds both swords they can influence the laws and economies of sovereign states (need I mention Greece, Chile, South Korea) while judging the soul of human life according to the logic of homo economicus.

It is the radical thesis of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben that the paradigm for modern globalised economy was gestated in the Western church's theories of the divine economy and Providential government of creation (5). Just as the Medieval church came to see Law as a way of reforming the world and directing moral conduct towards a state mirroring that of the divine Kingdom, the modern era uses it - and governance more generally - as a way of reforming national economies and directing individual economic conduct towards market norms. The supposedly natural and immutable form of marketized world governance is however a Providence divested of its messianic fulfilment, and as such is a potentially eternal government of the world without the possibility of an eschaton.  

This dark thesis suggests a controversial way of looking at secularisation. According to this view secularisation is not a concept operating within historical processes but rather a "signature" which continually marks history, showing where the forms, modes and underlying metaphysical assumptions have shifted from the field of religion to those of politics and economics. While this is by no means uncontested ground we should perhaps be open to the possibility that our contemporary era is more marked by the ideas and signatures of theology than we are led to believe.

 

References.

1 - Cameron warns of 'quietly condoning' IS ideology (BBC News, 19 June 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33192306)

2 - Berman,Harold J - Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition ( Harvard University Press, 1983) - pg151

3 - Berman,Harold J - Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition ( Harvard University Press, 1983) pg251

4 - Brown,Wendy - Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone books, 2015)

5 - Agamben, Giorgio - The Kingdom and the Glory (Stanford University Press, 2011)

Unprejudiced Reading

 

It strikes me that unprejudiced reading is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

An unprejudiced reading first considers what is being said before broaching the question of who is saying it.

Nowadays such reading practices seem rare.

People instead first ask “who is this addressing me? What’s their agenda? Should I trust them? Do their politics or worldview align with mine?

There are undoubtedly many causes for this.

The collapse of any notion of centre ground or shared reality will naturally produce defensiveness and an oppositional attitude as default positions.

When I say the collapse of a shared reality, this also implies the collapse of any purportedly neutral authority that might be appealed to in a dispute.

More generally, the absence of an authoritative shared reality means that even the basics cannot be assumed when we encounter another person.

Have you noticed how people are so much more polite when you pass them on isolated country lanes?

“Good morning!” “It’s such a beautiful day?”

Some might say that's because people are just more polite outside of the cities.

But if so, why do I also find myself being more polite? I am after-all a “city boy”.

Is there not a sense that once we are abstracted from the hoi polloi, as we are when we go out into the country, that those obligations we have to each other – of hospitality and cordiality – come more plainly into view?

After all, if we did not assume these things when we encounter another person alone in the wilderness, would we not be exactly like Hobbes’ man in the State of Nature, and we might well tear each other apart?

In cities by contrast, and certainly in the digital domain, these obligation are obscured, overtaken by rational/legal modes of commerce (in the broad sense of the word) which finesse those exchanges on our behalf.

Obligations are defined by your role, your job specification. There are positions, not persons.

And since you are always plugged into the network, you are always playing a role.

In the absence of a shared reality, which first and foremost is constituted by the obligations we owe to each other, the world is a wilderness, and we are but wolves. 

It has been noted that deep literacy is also passing away. Deep literacy is the combination of an active, synthetic mode of understanding, brought to bear on a text that seeks to communicate with us.

It is associated with an engagement with extended writing and forces us to ask questions about the text and about what the author is trying to communicate.

To open a text deeply demands a suspension of judgement.

Digital technologies, most obviously social media, encourages habits to form in the opposite direction.

Social media is not an extended text to be immersed in and interpreted, but a real-time assault upon attention.

What do you think? You need to respond now! Don’t miss out!

The social media post is not there to be interpreted but to be reacted to – LIKE!

Sometimes we like too fast, then we notice the post was written by someone we are told we must hate.

Now you must make amends.

Every time you like a post on so-and-so group’s page God kills a kitten. Or he would do anyway. Abrahamic Gods certainly. Others I’m not so sure.

It’s better to keep one eye, or one and half, on the person - on the role they're playing - and only half an eye on the words.

Every time you share your #awesomedinnerpics you feel the little endorphins popping behind your eyes.

Dinner is not prejudiced. Unless you share only veal.

Look this little calf in the eye and tell me about endorphins.

In networked society one cannot afford not to read prejudicially.

We are always already judged.

The Weinstein and Westminster Scandals Should Make us Reflect on the Connection Between Power and Sexual Violence (2022 Redux)

 

2022 Introduction:

Not the snappiest of titles. This is the third in a series of "redux" posts republishing material which originally appeared on the Spectre-Online zine. This one from 2017 responds to the series of sexual abuse scandals, which in that darkest of years were seemingly ever-present in the news. What this essay argues for is a sort of political ontology of abuse, which tracks mass instances of sexual violence to institutional and cultural arrangements where relations of domination are prevalent. I begin with the news stories around Harvey Weinstein and other recent sexual abuse scandals before jumping to the historical example of slavery and the long shadow that institution casts over our understanding of domination and systemic violence. Then, in a form of argument one could call the Great in the Small I try to show how our commonplace thinking  about slavery (and by implication freedom too) masks what would be a more profound understanding of how power and domination function in the era of global governance.

Giorgio Agamben's writing on the significance of economy (the Oikos or household government) becoming the principle form of Western power, guides much of this analysis, as does my reading of nominally less radical thinkers like Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. The latter's concept of Neo-Roman freedom (or freedom as non-domination), which builds from an analysis of liberty and slavery in the ancient world, is I think a very useful one. At the time I was reading their work alongside the later Foucault, with all its fascinating takes on the government of self and others in Greco-Roman culture. But alongside the minutiae of Greek political education or Roman household management I was also - and still am - trying to think about these problems of social and political ontology from the perspective of globalised humanity.

The term one-world governance (not government!) is one I began using around this time. There is something of the provocation in it, insofar as it bears more than a passing resemblance to a common trope in conspiracy theories. The point of using it is to make a claim for a kind of negative universality, where the pure relation of domination (between parent and child) is potentially generalised by the total depoliticisation and economisation of humanity. That's the apocalyptic bit. What we are increasingly witnessing now as that system of governance  continues its collapse, is the full actualisation of the global civil war which has been gnawing at the margins of our world for decades. What will become of the eternal problem of domination and violence in human life when the institutions of the West ,which have now lost all legitimacy, collapse into the void which they have created?

 

(2017 text)

1). What started in October with the rapid fall of a once untouchable movie mogul has grown in the intervening weeks into a full blown crisis for institutions across Britain and the US. The British Prime minister has had to hastily convene cross party meetings and cobble together a semblance of an HR system at Westminster after a series of accusations against MPs and ministers from both sides of the house. Her defence secretary has had to resign after revelations of inappropriate advances toward journalists and lewd comments to one of his own female MPs. Her first secretary of state is also under investigation. While in the US, allegations against Harvey Weinstein ranging from aggressive propositioning to rape continue to accumulate.

The actress and producer Brit Marling wrote a powerful account in The Atlantic of her experiences with the mogul: "I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me"? The scandal across the pond has now claimed the career of Kevin Spacey and has expanded to encompass predictable questioning over the peculiarities of the film industry; its glamour, its shallowness, its obsession with young female flesh, often paired with less than youthful male co-stars. The same form of questioning was heard after the abuse perpetrated by Jimmy Savile was exposed in the UK, and has often been raised regarding the abuse carried out by religious institutions and care homes like Haut de la Garenne.

Given the breadth of institutions involved,  terms like sleaze or sex scandals that have in the past been used to refer to such revelations hardly seem appropriate. It's also worth remembering that this is only the latest salvo in the now permanent crisis of British institutions embroiled in accusations of systematic sexual abuse and cover-ups. The expression 'Sexual Abuse Scandal 'might as well be built in as an autofill for newspaper headline writers. And yet despite the near ubiquity of abuse revelations on the contemporary social landscape little is done to try and draw the commonalities together. We walk dumbfounded from one crisis another, each time raising up the same sense of shock and surprise. Perhaps the subject is just too large, and the issue of sexual violence too ingrained in the dark corners of human societies to be worth treating at a general level.

Certainly it seems that way in the case of the UK government's unwieldy public enquiry into historic sexual abuse allegations, which has had a turnover of leadership comparable to many Premier League football clubs. Framed in the way it has been, there is something almost inevitably self-defeating about its scope. How can an enquiry, which in its range and manpower becomes an institution in its own right, be able to investigate, appraise and recommend remedy for abuses committed in seemingly every type of institution in the land? Since the scandals in Westminster and Hollywood have predominantly involved the abuse of adult women the focus has understandably been on the issue of sexism and misogyny; just as in the case of Savile and child abuse in the Church the focus has been on paedophilia. I wonder though if there's not a more general way of capturing an important aspect of all these cases from Weinstein to Westminster, from the Catholic Church to care homes. Why not talk about relations of domination and their direct link with sexual abuse?

2). Our understanding of domination is strongly conditioned by the historical legacy of slavery. A dominated person is someone in chains, forced to work under threat of death. Their status is that of property, owned by a master and disposed of as they see fit. Slavery is also a complex institution requiring the collaboration and complicity of wide sections of the society in which it exists. Its eventual abolition across much of the developed world in the 18th and 19th centuries was due to multiple factors, only a few of which involved what we might now call "changes in attitudes". Since we tend to associate relations of domination with historical slavery and its outward appearance it has taken a long time for the issue of modern slavery to be taken seriously. Only in 2015 did the UK bring in the Modern Slavery Act which while being a step in the right direction of recognising modern relations of domination, in practice merely reiterates the common understanding of domination as "servitude and forced labour". It does little to break down precisely what constitutes a basic condition of servitude.  I'm bringing up slavery as it represents the most extreme example of a relation of domination. However unless we have an account of precisely what a relation of domination actually is in itself we won't be able to recognise less extreme forms, which I suggest are much more prevalent.

The Canadian philosopher Philip Pettit, drawing on the ancient (specifically Roman) understanding of domination cited three criteria for a person to be in such a relation. A person dominates another if:

-They have the capacity to interfere.

-On an arbitrary basis.

-In certain choices that the other is in a position to make.

This is a useful albeit somewhat formal definition, not least as it doesn't depend on the slave/freeman distinction. It also emphasises that it is the capacity to interfere, not actually occurring interference that is the dominating condition. By this account a person could be in a relation of domination relative to one person or group but not to another, and perhaps only within a particular field of choices. Think about Weinstein and Brit Marling again. As an aspiring actress and screenwriter her field of possibility crossed over with his field of influence. Relative to her he was "...this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me". The language here is not an accident. The power to anoint or destroy, to bind or loose, is symbolic of power at its most dominating. Think too about the power Jimmy Savile held over the children he abused and to an extent over the staff at the BBC, who, relative to him - the big star - were mere flunkies.

Another element of dominating relations which Pettit discusses is the absence of contestation. Put broadly, contestation is the ability of a person to find redress for an abuse, either through the courts, or through extra-legal means such as disciplinary proceedings or even local forms of community or family resolution. The capacity for contestation is a brake on the ability of the master to do what he wants with impunity (his arbitrium in the Latin understanding). Absence of contestation is a major contributing factor to the ability of a person to interfere with another on an arbitrary basis. There is after all nothing to stop them. Even in the presence of nominal procedures for redress, the ability of a person to challenge abusive behaviour can be thwarted by prejudice, the reluctance of others to assist owing to the influence of the perpetrator, or structural reasons which shield powerful people from the consequences of their actions.

These facts serve to remind us that relations of domination do not exist in isolation. Like the historical institution of slavery they require the active collaboration and complicity of a host of others. Think about how many people turned a blind eye to the behaviour of Weinstein. Think about the cover-ups and the advice given to women not to pursue complaints against high value stars and officials, or of the care home staff and police who refused to the believe the testimony of victims. And think also of the capacity rich and powerful people have to pay off complainants, to keep their abuse out of the public domain. Where money and influence are involved the network of power extends to the potential legal repercussions against those who speak out. And in a world where the media walk in step with politicians and the superrich, the threat of having one's life torn apart by their attack dogs is all too real.

There are often too many parties interested in seeing the structures of power which allow sexual abuse to remain undisturbed. For instance, to question how Savile was able to operate with impunity is to question the nature of celebrity and the role a monolithic institution like the BBC or Fox News (which has also been mired in scandal) has in raising them up. To question the power of politicians to abuse their staff similarly puts the whole form of parliamentary power under the microscope. At least it should, if the journalists involved were not also polluted by the same toxic material. A few individuals might quickly be made example of, if only to appease the sense of outrage and give the establishment time to reorientate itself; to put in more procedures and ensure the machine keeps on turning. Risk management, not justice, is the order of the day.

          3). The Romans had two ways of conceiving relations of domination. Where the power in question related to public power, such as the State or its institutions, they used the term Imperium, from which we receive the words empire and emperor. Where the power in question was private such as the family, or in the modern world a private corporation, the term used would be dominium, which relates to the domus, the home and consequently to notions of household management and property. It is the latter term from which we get our modern lexical understanding of slavery as related to private ownership and property rights more generally. This is not the place to elaborate on the complex genealogy of these concepts and how they have impacted on modern Law and our experience of power in social life. What seems clear, however, is that in the contemporary era the distinction between private and public power seems less and less tenable. The state and the non-state are no longer divided down lines which would be recognisable even to people living a century ago. The influence of transnational forms of governance such as the EU, IMF, the World Bank and huge communications and media corporations like Google, Facebook and News International threatens the centrality of the nation state as the key operator in political life.

           Another problem is that liberalism has tended to focus on the threat of state interference (imperium) at the expense of seeing how private domination, particularly that of large corporations has grown exponentially in the post-war era, given impetus by the developments in communications technologies and the internet. The global dominance of economy in human affairs means that one single form of governance, originating in notions of household management (combining the Roman domus with the Greek oikos) now holds sway. No longer does the State attempt to hold back the violence of the market, and no longer is private economy a bulwark against interference by the State. Under global capitalism State and market, public and private, operate as two elements of the same power. More and more of us today are subject to dominating relations produced by this total global economy, which sees everything and everyone in terms of measurable, calculable units.

Slavery, the most extreme form of domination has since the beginning been associated with sexual violence. It flows directly from the status of a person as the property of another to be enjoyed as they see fit. Sexual violence was routinely deployed against slaves of both sexes by colonialists in the Caribbean and slave owners in the United States. In the ancient world the master's sexual use of his slaves was a natural consequence of their thing-like status. Where restrictions on the sexual abuse of dominated persons have historically existed they have tended to take the form of appeals to the moral character of the master rather than the humanity of the victim. Codes of chivalry, notions of nobility or virtu, religious commitments and other such regimes have often been the sole restraint to unfettered rapine in peacetime as much as war.

In the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, a compendium of dream interpretations written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, it is considered a positive portent if the master dreams of sexually using his slaves, since it shows him deriving satisfaction from his property. Wherever relations of domination exist we find sexual violence, not because the absence of restraint allows pre-existing violent desires to go unchecked, but because such relations in themselves produce that violence. In a condition of domination my will is absent, completely or partially consumed by the other. What I want or don't want is irrelevant.  As Brit Marling wrote: "Consent is a function of power. You have to have a modicum of power to give it". Dominating power by contrast, whether by an individual, a bureaucracy or a State, is ultimately domination over the ability to refuse, to say no. Under domination one cannot refuse to comply. And under such conditions my body and person are available for use by the one who wields power.

                It's clear that the position of Brit Marling and of Westminster staffers, or even the victims of Savile was not that of slaves, but they were within relations of domination to varying degrees; limited, but enough to allow abuse to occur under certain circumstances. If this is the case we should then acknowledge that domination exists on a spectrum that correlates with an increased risk of abuse.  The thing-like quality of a person tracks with perfect symmetry this spectrum of relations of domination. The more dominated a person is - the more thing-like they become - the more their body is rendered as something for the master to take pleasure from as they desire. Sexual possession of the dominated body is not a pathology external to power, it is its most visceral sign. In an era when the household, the domus, the oikos, has become the model for globalised humanity, it is worth remembering that it is in the house that we find the most common and most acute relation of domination; that between parent and child. And it is also worthwhile remembering that of all human institutions it is within the household that most sexual violence takes place. Only in a return to politics, in opposition to globally triumphant neoliberalism, might humanity start to take the problem of domination in wider society seriously again; to see in every accumulation of power the real possibility of violence and to cut it off at the root, before the victims pile up.