Peripheral Justice: The Marxist Tradition of Public Hegemony and Its Implications in the Age of Globalization Weigang Chen The Issue: Culture and Peripheral Justice How do we explain the intriguing fact that precisely at the moment when the West scores a decisive victory over all political and economic alternatives, when capitalism is universally accepted as the only feasible way to rationally organize a modern economy, and when third-world industrialization tears down the traditional north-south structure marking the beginning of an age of capitalist globalization, there has emerged across non-Western societies an ever more powerful anti-Western backlash and an ever stronger aspiration for cultural assertiveness? To address these crucial issues, it will be necessary to take a step back and examine how the relationship of culture and modern transformation has become a dominant concern in social analysis. [End Page 329] The Paradox of Peripheral Capitalism The rise of liberal modernity in western Europe and North America more than two hundred years ago, as Ernest Laclau and Chantel Mouffe have forcefully put it, marked a momentous mutation in the social imagination of Western societies: the logic of equivalence displaced the logic of differentiation and imposed itself as a fundamental nodal point in the construction of the social. In the matrix of the new social imaginary, subordination was constructed as oppression. This effectively delegitimated older, hierarchic and inequalitarian views of social organization.1 The Kantian tradition conceptualizes this radical break as the replacement of the primacy of the good life by the primacy of justice. No social order can persist without appearing (i.e., being perceived by people in it) to be just. Indeed, our intuitive conviction that each person should be rendered his or her due is so fundamental now that it forecloses any possibility that sacrifices imposed on a few might accrue advantages that many, even society as a whole, could enjoy or benefit from collectively.2 However, this does not mean that every social order is equally just or should even be considered as just. In traditional or illiberal societies, the notion of justice presupposes that the basic principles of justice are derived from what Hegel termed Sittlichkeit, that is, the customs, norms, and expectations inherent in the conception of the good life of a given society. According to John Rawls, it is in this relationship between justice and the basic structure for society that the most distinctive feature of liberal society can be discerned. What is characteristic of liberal democracy is precisely its claim to social justice, or more specifically, the claim that "the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society" per se.3 Thus, for the first time in human history, there emerged a political-social order within which each person possesses an initial position of unconditional equality and any unequal distribution of social advantages among individuals is made on the basis of principles and

procedures that equal and rational persons would accept and regard as fair and just. This new structure is liberal modernity. The emancipatory implications of liberal modernity help explain why both classical liberalism and classical Marxism have shared a common belief in the effectiveness of capitalism in raising growth, alleviating poverty, and promoting equality and civil liberties everywhere, including the third world.4 [End Page 330] However, what these classical paradigms did not anticipate and certainly cannot explain is what Tom Nairn termed "the most brutally and hopelessly material side" of modern world history—the persistent uneven development between Western core countries and the peripheral world.5 Since the nineteenth century, social analysts have been haunted by this puzzling fact: that the imposition of basic ideas and institutions of liberal modernity (individualism, constitutionalism, human rights, free markets, the rule of law), which presumably has contributed to the vitality and prosperity of the advanced capitalist centers in the West, has produced in the peripheral world exactly the opposite effects, a direct descent into social decay and economic stagnation.6 Following Samir Amin, I shall refer to this "brutally and hopelessly" violent crisis either as the paradox of peripheral capitalism or as peripheral liberal deformation.7 Nowhere has this paradox asserted itself in a more glaring manner than in the post-communist world today. Contrary to the neoliberal views of the "end of history," the eager turn of former communist and developing nations to free-market economy and liberal democracy has not ushered in an unequivocal flowering of capitalism. Instead, the attempt has only been repaid with bitter disappointments: regional and ethnic conflicts, rampant corruption, glaring inequality between the rich and poor, and flagrant lawlessness.8 The rapid social disintegration of Russia since the early 1990s provides a compelling case in point. Western social scientists and third-world intellectuals have sought to understand the origins and effects of peripheral deformation. Two factors currently stand as eminently responsible: nation-states and the bourgeois class. The institutional framework provided by a modern nation-state, sine qua non for modern economic transformation, has exclusive power over territory and the means of internal and external violence.9 Thus the nation-state is defined as the political body representing national sovereignty. This constitutes a sharp contrast to traditional forms of states—empires and kingdoms—in which social control rests on a division of labor and a coordination of effort between a semibureaucratic state and a landed upper class, which retains considerable local and regional authority over the peasant majority of the population.10 The European, post-Reformation, modern nation-state was historically a product of aspirant middle classes, who typically play a decisive [End Page 331] role in creating a popular national identity11 or Benedict Anderson's "new form of imagined communities."12 The resulting bourgeois voluntaristic nationalism defines the

nation as a rational association of free and equal individuals in a given territory. It is precisely this voluntaristic, bourgeoisie-centered model of state building, which, when imposed on, applied to, or introduced into non-Western countries, has become a standard recipe for social and political disaster. Instead of a national consciousness or an imagined community, the whole society has fragmented into regional, linguistic, and religious assertions, or tribal or ethnic loyalties, leading subsequently to amoral familism, clientelism, lawlessness, ineffective government, and economic stagnation.13 The typicality of peripheral liberal deformation, to say nothing of its ubiquity, is central to understanding the modern world system. Nearly a century ago, it was precisely the convergence of a weak native bourgeoisie and the social disintegration in Russia that forced Lenin, Trotsky, and other Russian revolutionaries to give up Marxist orthodoxy regarding the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie and propose the idea of hegemony. Their point was that peripheral nation building could not work except by carrying out a nonbourgeois democratic revolution on the basis of a popular national identity organized by a revolutionary vanguard party.14 A similar crisis of bourgeois liberalism in China and in many other peripheral countries pushed these nations to follow the Russian route. The result is what Anderson called "official nationalism," which is characterized by a mixture of modern nationalism and the dynastic intention of old empires, forged and led by intellectuals and political elites.15 I shall term this type of nationalism—which swept across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the mid twentieth century—peripheral cultural nationalism or hegemonic nationalism to highlight its illiberal, nonbourgeois character. Virtually all successful third-world industrialization projects have taken place in countries that have grounded state building on hegemonic nationalism and adopted a deliberately illiberal or de-Western strategy of development. The so-called East Asia miracle, notably the gigantic economic growth of China, is the best illustration.16 Unlike other former socialist regimes, China still remains a single-party state. But its economic power, which constitutes such a sharp contrast to the ineffective struggles taking [End Page 332] place in Russia and other former socialist and developing countries, forces us to reach a near-paradoxical conclusion: given the persistence of peripheral liberal deformation, deliberalization or de-Westernization is almost a logical prerequisite for the upward mobility of a peripheral nation within the capitalist world system that is controlled and dominated by the Western core countries. Only against this background can we understand why there is currently a widespread resentment of so-called human-rights imperialism across the peripheral world, why peripheral nations insist on the primacy of national sovereignty over democratization, and why it is "in the realm of culture that emerging market nations in Asia and Latin America now feel most threatened and in which they are most insistently demanding independence and freedom from Western domination."17

The Logic of Eurocentricism The experience of the peripheral world fits the diagnosis of the crises of bourgeois modernity that Hegel and other communitarian philosophers and social theorists made. This fit brings the problem of peripheral capitalism to the center of current controversies over the nature of liberal modernity among proponents of liberalism and neo-Aristotelianism or neo-Hegelianism.18 As a theory of social construction, the whole edifice of the liberal tradition hinges on the Kantian notion of moral autonomy, which sets the unsituated self against both the Sittlichkeit, or the ethical way of life of society, and the individual's inclinations, desires, and interests. Jurgen Habermas's idea of modern structures of consciousness and Rawls's assumption about the individual's capacity to have an effective sense of justice are both contemporary reconstructions of the same central notion.19 All these conceptual constructs have been formulated to demonstrate how a popular national identity or consensus could be generated from within a civil society where "the pursuit of material interests were emancipated from moral passions and became in fact the ruling passion,"20 or, to put it bluntly, how private vices could become public virtues in the modern marketplace. The question is how can this be done without presupposing an Enlightenment notion of the rational subject, who is said to occupy a neutral, ahistorical position and is always [End Page 333] capable of subjecting passions to the control of reason, or a Kantian notion of the noumenal self, a disposition of rational beings to act in accordance with what ought to be rather than with what is? The essence of the critique, to use Hegel's terminology, lies precisely in the problem concerning the possibility of the "second nature."21 Viewed from this perspective, the idea of public use of reason by private people is self-contradictory. Public reasoning cannot but presuppose a sharp distinction between the private self and the public self, a distinction that stands at the heart of any form of Sittlichkeit—the traditional teleological scheme of the good life. Hegel accordingly predicted that the bourgeoisie as private people were by nature incapable of building up any meaningful social order—needless to say, an imagined community—and that no construction of a modern nation-state would be possible without the determinant role of the ethical state, which alone could serve as the ultimate locus of the general will of the nation or the ethical life in and for itself.22 The prevalence of capitalist deformation in the peripheral world has certainly brought into sharp focus the conceptual force of the Hegelian perspective as well as its current relevance. It demonstrates that those rational egoists collectively called the bourgeoisie are normally neither rational nor autonomous nor socialized; that a free-market economy without effective political-legal regulation is normally a system of cheats; that the liberal state, which is supposed to be separated from the ethical life of any historical community, is normally not operating for the interests of the public; that since no power can ensure that the state will act for the interests of the

public and nothing can prevent those who control the coercive force of the state from using that force as their private capital, there normally exists "the unholy marriage of political and economic power, whereby money buys influence, and power attracts money"23; and, as a result of all this, that a capitalist society based on the principles of market economy and liberal politics is normally a society of rampant corruption. What is really at issue in the paradox of peripheral liberal deformation is not so much the question of why liberal modernity has failed in the periphery as the question of how it could ever have succeeded in the West in the first place. [End Page 334] Eurocentricism and Cultural Nationalism in the Current Age of Globalization Just as peripheral nations insistently demand that human rights must be considered in the context of national and regional particularities and various historical, religious, and cultural backgrounds, many Western culturalist analysts and communitarian philosophers appeal to values they see as rooted in inherited national, religious, or ethnic identities and promote as the inescapable framework within which all issues of justice and modern transformation should be addressed. This paradoxical convergence illustrates why the developmental state model cannot be an alternative to liberal modernity. As Edward Said, Bryan S. Turner, and others have rightly observed, this line of analysis is closely associated with the orientalist legacy in the Western social sciences.24 It carries the central implication that non-Western societies, for lack of various desirable cultural traits, simply deserve to be caught in the dilemma between social disintegration and authoritarianism. Here lies an apparent dilemma that any peripheral nationalist or multiculturalist position has to face. It certainly could be argued that the moral point of view advocated by prominent thinkers of the liberal tradition like Kant, Habermas, and Rawls is nothing but an occidental discourse about reason, which is a mere contingent product of linguistically socialized, finite, and embodied creatures. In making such an argument, however, one is actually asserting that only some specific groups of homo sapiens deserve or can afford "to reason about general rules governing their mutual existence from the standpoint of a hypothetical questioning: under what conditions can we say that these general rules of action are valid not simply because they are what you and I have been brought up to believe or because my parents, my synagogue, my neighbors, my tribe say so, but because they are fair, just, impartial, in the mutual interest of all?"25 This is more than a normative issue. It has tremendous practical implications in the present age of globalization. Third-world industrialization, especially the rapid rise of East Asian countries into the epicenter of global capital accumulation and transnational production, marks the beginning of a new phase of the historical development of capitalism within which the capitalist mode of production has become, for the first time in modern history, "an authentically global abstraction, divorced from its historically specific origins

[End Page 335] in Europe."26 Keeping in mind the decisive role of hegemonic nationalism and the developmental state in peripheral modernization, it can be said that globalization, defined as the expansion of capitalism to non-Western regions and the emergence of a highly integrated world economy, presupposes a structural differentiation between Western voluntaristic nationalism and peripheral cultural nationalism, that is, between liberal nation-states and peripheral developmental states. Moreover, this new global structure is not only differential but also hierarchical. Because of the persistent effects of peripheral liberal deformation and the juxtaposition between liberal and hegemonic nation-states, the third world today consists of territories of peripheral capitalist deformation, where "the state infrastructure and monopoly of the means of violence are so weakly developed (Somalia) or have disintegrated to such an extent (the former Yugoslavia)" that indirect violence of a Mafia-like or fundamentalist variety disrupts internal order.27 By contrast, the second world consists of those nation-states in the periphery that seek to compensate for instabilities through authoritarian constitutions and native values. As a result, some of them have achieved remarkable success in industrialization. Only the states of the first world, most of them in Europe and North America, can afford to harmonize their national interests with the norms that define the universalistic, cosmopolitan aspirations of the United Nations. It is in this pattern of globalization by hierarchical differentiation that some of the most profound contradictions of the present world system can be clearly discerned. Globalization, as so many analysts have pointed out, is by nature supranational or transnational. It inevitably intrudes on national economic sovereignty and, accordingly, undermines national sovereignty from within by fragmenting the national economy.28 The erosion of nation-states, in turn, necessitates a political, social, and cultural framework at the world level that can give coherence to the overall management of the system.29 This tendency toward de-nationhood or de-nationalization has posed fundamental challenges to peripheral nation-states. With cultural nationalism and developmental states as their only resource for survival within the system of capitalism, these nations have already been dragged by processes of economic globalization into an almost impossible situation. They are forced [End Page 336] to move simultaneously in two completely opposite directions: to be nationalistic while allowing themselves to be denationalized; to be radically multicultural or anti-Western while subjecting themselves to supranational institutions governed by norms of Western liberalism. There is little doubt that any attempt on the Western part to impose a global regime of liberal democracy would only have the effect of depriving peripheral nations of the very means that have been so critical to most successful instances of peripheral industrialization—the national sovereignty to manage internal affairs and the rights to regulate multinationals and promote domestic businesses.30 The Problematic of Peripheral Justice

Given the historical specificity of the Western bourgeoisie and its decisive role in the reproduction of liberal democracy, how then can we define or even perceive the logic of equivalence in nonbourgeois peripheral terms? Simply put, is it possible to develop a notion of the primacy of social justice that transcends the limits of liberal democracy and, therefore, can be applied to all conditions? If it is possible to do so, then the following question becomes essential: How can one explain why in the West, and only in the West, the ideal of public reasoning by private people has materialized, while still being able to demonstrate that the principles of justice and equality are beyond the peculiarity of occidental civilization? It is here that the Marxist tradition of public hegemony becomes relevant. The theory and practice of hegemony arose as a state-centered solution to the prevalence of liberal deformation across the peripheral world. For this reason, the tradition of hegemony should be perceived as a forerunner of contemporary peripheral cultural nationalism. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the two versions of official nationalism. While contemporary cultural nationalists find in the developmental state a viable alternative to the Western model of liberal modernity, Marxist state-builders were keenly aware that any attempt to construct a nonvoluntaristic form of popular national identity through the practice of hegemony would inevitably postulate a clear separation between the leading sectors and those who are led, thereby resulting in "a Bonapartist-Caesarist [End Page 337] type" of nationalism.31 Accordingly, the very constellation that made revolution possible would turn out to be "the greatest roadblock for developing a free society."32 This clearly visible dilemma was a major impetus for the development of a variety of Leninist or post-Leninist efforts to reconcile peripheral nationalism and the ideals of equality and justice, ranging from Lenin's scheme of Soviet democracy to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, to Mao's platform of new democracy. The process reached its culmination in the notion of public hegemony developed respectively by Antonio Gramsci and Liu Shaoqi. Before turning to this important tradition, it is necessary to take a closer look at the relationship between liberalism and Weberianism. Class and the Social: The Liberal Paradigm An appropriate point of reference for understanding the central role of Kantianism in a variety of liberal formulations can be found in the ideal of the primacy of justice as explicated by Rawls. Social justice, defined as the basic structure of society, presupposes the existence of a prepolitical state of nature and the possibility of a public perspective shared by the contracting parties, which, ironically, is least likely to exist in the absence of a political order. The perplexity highlights the centrality of the "duality of human existence" for collective action,33 accounting for the predominance of political society in premodern social formations, notably the fundamental contrast between the public realm of the polis and the private realm of economic activities in Greek city-states.34 Seen from this perspective, the

primacy of justice presupposes what Hannah Arendt has characterized as "the rise of the social"—the elevation of the private realm of labor into the public realm or, more simply, the institutionalization of private people's public use of reason.35 Framed as such, the social or civil society assumes the possibility that private people can reason for the public good. The question, of course, is how this is possible. This perplexity allows us to understand why the Kantian notion of moral autonomy or similar constructs about bourgeois subjectivity has been so important to the self-understanding of the modern West. According to this deontological view of the modern selfhood, the bourgeois as the privatized individual is actually two things in one: bourgeois and homme. On the one [End Page 338] hand, the bourgeois as an owner of goods is profoundly caught up in the requirements of the market and thus subject to empirical inclinations. On the other hand, however, the bourgeois as a human being is the subject of a pure interiority that follows its own laws and not any external purpose. This peculiar human subjectivity promises liberation from the constraints of what exists, whether what exists pertains to the prescription of culture or the necessity of life. For this reason, the split between the bourgeois public sphere and the marketplace, which is constitutive of the bourgeois social in the West, is best analyzed as the institutional expression of bourgeois subjectivity—i.e., the duality of the bourgeois personality.36 In a crucial sense, Marx's historical materialism can be seen as a materialist defense of the liberal idea of bourgeois civil society.37 What is characteristic of a modern capitalist society is its capacity to organize social interaction completely on the basis of economic relations. This economic form of social interaction finds its material presence in the emergence of socialized humanity, i.e., modern industrial classes. With the rapid transformation of the laboring masses into modern industrial classes, the old tension between particular and general interests is no longer of central significance for social formation, for the simple reason that class interests have replaced general interests as what generate and sustain public life. As class subjectivity enables the bourgeoisie "to organize itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest," the social integration of capitalist society no longer depends upon the role of the public authority in assuming the carrier of the publicness of society.38 Bourgeois society in this view is revolutionary and emancipatory by nature because the economic activity has arrived at the point at which it becomes the dominant factor in every aspect of social life, private or public, or, to put it differently, because the superstructure is now determined by the economic base. As Georg Lukács points out, the emergence of modern industrial classes for Marx is to be understood as a process of reappropriation, a process through which individuals come to recognize that their relation to the totality of society is an integral part of their activities as social beings. Now "man becomes, in the true sense of the word, a social being. Society has become the reality for man."39 [End Page 339]

It is noteworthy that uneven global development seems to have counteraffirmed, but at the same time reaffirmed, the liberal paradigm of the social. The prevalence of capitalist deformation across the peripheral world has called into question the liberal claim to the priority of bourgeois subjectivity and thus confirmed the Hegelian assertion on the primacy of political society for public life; but the same phenomenon—simply by being a distinctively peripheral occurrence—has, simultaneously and paradoxically, underscored the decisive role of the bourgeois class in the formation and reproduction of Western democratic societies. This paradox accounts for the ongoing sway of the Weberian civilizational analysis over theoretical analyses of the modern world order. The whole point of Weberianism is to demonstrate that, due to the profound contradictions of bourgeois society delineated by Hegel and others, the transition from political society to civil society as anticipated by classical theorists is normally impossible and that the developmental history of the West arose out of certain religio-cultural contingencies unique to occidental civilization, which alone can breed the crucial precondition for the public reorientation of private wealth—bourgeois subjectivity. Beyond Hegemonic Nationalism: From Soviet Democracy to New Democracy Leninism: Class Hegemony and Soviet Democracy Both Lenin and Trotsky attributed the weakness of the indigenous bourgeoisie in the periphery to its dependency on world capitalism. With the development of capitalism into the stage of imperialism due to the internationalization of capital, capitalism had become a world system. This system, which was conditioned to benefit the Western industrial nations, created a class alliance between foreign capital and domestic compradors (e.g., mercantile and landed elites). The alliance, in turn, resulted in a distorted class structure in peripheral countries and, accordingly, a situation of liberal deformation and overall socioeconomic disintegration.40 This assumption about the normal West and the abnormal East permits both Lenin and Trotsky to apply Marx's theory of the ontological linkage [End Page 340] between modern classes and autonomous polity to peripheral nationalist movements. While the penetration of foreign capital has led to a structurally distorted native bourgeoisie, it has also created and radicalized a class-conscious proletariat, whose political leadership (i.e., class hegemony) in the popular national movement will effectively prevent the mass revolution from degenerating into a Bonapartist state. Lenin, in "The State and Revolution" and "Can Bolsheviks Retain State Power?," both written on the eve of the October Revolution of 1917, drew a clear-cut demarcation between the Bonapartist state and the revolutionary hegemony with regard to the role of the state. Central to this theory is the distinction between state hegemony and class hegemony. The hegemonic formulation of the mass revolution differs from all other forms of hegemony in that it is first and foremost a mode of hegemony assumed by a social class rather than by the state. The bureaucracy of the Bonapartist regime derives

its power from organizing and representing the general will and common interest of the popular masses, thereby projecting itself as being superior to society proper. In this sense, the hegemonic links between the bureaucratic state and the populace deserve to be presented as internal, on the ground that the bureaucracy survives on its role as the carrier of the popular national will. In other words, the bureaucratic elites have a vested interest in perpetuating the structural cleavage between state power and the popular masses, between the representers and the represented. By contrast, the proletariat as a social class has its own identity and interest. The hegemonic links between the proletariat and the popular masses are external in the sense that the identity of the proletariat remains unchanged, in spite of its roles in organizing and representing the popular national will. For the working class, any hegemonic formation has only instrumental and strategic significance. According to Lenin, the external nature of the hegemonic relations, that is to say, the structural split between the class identity and the popular national identity, holds the key to the idea of the radical state under proletarian hegemony. It explains why the political rule of the proletariat is able to ensure the self-government of the masses. The historical interest of the working class lies in the creation of a socialist society in which a genuine form of democracy will assert itself. For this reason, the proletariat can realize its interests only by smashing the bureaucratic machine of the modern [End Page 341] state and setting the state on a course of withering away, that is to say, by ensuring maximum participation in the tasks of running the state and removing the possibility of the development of a bureaucratic elite. Thus the historical uniqueness of the working class accounts for why it is capable of accomplishing two seemingly paradoxical tasks: intensifying the political supremacy of the proletariat over the masses while ensuring direct control over state organs by the masses. This analysis of class hegemony allows Lenin to apply Marx's conception of the Paris Commune as a model of the radical state to the situation of peripheral revolutions. Where Lenin fundamentally differs from Marx is in his discussion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. For Marx, the gradual abolition of all the bureaucratic apparatuses of the modern state relies on the proletarianization of the majority of the people, or, in his own words, the sinking of the popular masses into the working class. It is in this context that Marx states that the abolition of state power is concomitant with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which for him indicates the transitional period between capitalism and communism, during which the proletariat, as the majority of society, organizes its social order on the principle of radical autonomous publicity but retains a state organization for the oppression of the remnants of the bourgeoisie. In comparison, Lenin offers a hegemonic interpretation of the constitution of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx's theory of the political rule of the proletariat, he emphasizes, concerns the capability of the revolutionary regime to crush the inevitable and desperate

resistance of the bourgeoisie and organize all the working and exploited people for the new economic system.41 This is a decisive step because it gives Lenin latitude to combine what has previously been completely uncombinable within the Marxist framework: the ideal of the radical state and the mass movement with its hegemonic formations. It is on the basis of such a hegemonic interpretation of the political rule of the proletariat that Lenin is able to claim that not only is the governmental formula of the democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants—the soviets that emerged during the Russian revolution of 1905–7—different from all other forms of hegemonic formations but also, even more importantly, it will involve much less need for a state machine than any bourgeois democratic regime. "This new type of state machinery was [End Page 342] created by the Paris Commune, and the Russian Soviets of the Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies are a state apparatus of the same type."42 The secret of the Soviet regime is its dual power structure, that is, the self-government of the popular masses under the political rule of the proletariat. To put it more explicitly, the Soviet state is not to be understood simply as rule by the people, which, as Marx predicated, would invariably lead to the domination of a bureaucratic state over society. The democratic control from below is possible only when state power is assumed by the working class, which alone possesses the capacity of organizing all the working and exploited people for the new social system. For this reason, the self-government of the toiling people (i.e., the soviets) must be concomitant with the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., the vanguard party). The theory of class hegemony, needless to say, completely hinges on the assumptions concerning the ontological immunity of the working class to bureaucratic domination. By juxtaposing the class interest of the proletariat and the hegemonic practices in a mass movement, the concept of hegemony has had the effect of transferring the ontological privilege granted to the working class by Marxism from the social base to the political leadership of the mass movement. The relations between the vanguard and the masses, accordingly, cannot but have a predominantly manipulative or oppressive character. Nowhere did the paradoxical character of the Leninist theory of class hegemony manifest itself more glaringly than in the Chinese mass revolution. Chinese Marxists adopted the model of the Russian Revolution in 1927, when the alliance between the bourgeois Nationalist Party and the Communist Party collapsed. For the majority of Chinese revolutionaries, the split of the alliance clearly demonstrated the political and ideological impotence of the Chinese bourgeoisie. This crisis explained why the Leninist concept of hegemony enjoyed great popularity and won strong support among Chinese Marxists during the post-1927 period.43 The formula of class hegemony, which, through the Stalinist doctrines of "socialism in one country," had firmly established itself as the official ideology of Soviet Russia toward the end of the 1920s, laid the foundation of the party's policies of the soviet era

(1927–35), with its principal tenets recounted in the resolutions and directives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during this period. [End Page 343] These resolutions and directives all insisted on the central importance of establishing a soviet democracy so as to remove the possibility of the development of a bureaucratic elite.44 At the same time, in light of Lenin's account of the reliance of soviet democracy on organized labor, the CCP's leadership put the organization of the rural proletariat at the center of the agrarian revolution.45 The policies outlined in the resolutions and directives of the party leadership during the soviet period all stressed that the most fundamental task of the new soviet state was to accentuate and advance the interests of agricultural and nonagricultural laborers at the expense of the nonproletarian strata.46 The party leadership's ongoing determination to advance proletarian primacy, as might be expected, created an inevitable clash between the narrow class interests of rural labor and those of the peasant majority and of the soviet areas as a whole. Officially organized and unimpeded labor militancy and costly worker benefits forced many of the local capitalists, merchants, and handicraft-factory or shop owners to close their businesses entirely or flee the soviet areas with their capital, leading to increased unemployment, commodity shortages, and rising prices. All this had the effect of making a shambles of the fragile small peasant, mercantile, and handicraft economy in the Jiangxi Soviet. Confronting such a desperate situation, the party leadership attributed the economic distress to the counterrevolutionary activities of rich peasants, merchants, capitalists, and remnant landlord elements in the soviet area. It was based on this assumption that the CCP launched the Land Investigation Movement in mid-1933, which represented the party's attempt to combine economic construction measures with sharply intensifying class struggle. This new phase of escalated rural class war soon became a campaign of "red terror"—an indiscriminate policy of total confiscation, mass conscription into hard-labor corps, sentencing of dependents to concentration camps, and even the physical destruction of landlords and rich peasants. The increasingly harsh repression inevitably served to increase active opposition to the soviets from not only landlord-gentry elements, rich peasants, capitalists, and merchants but also the majority of the middle peasants as well. All this largely undermined the very base on which the soviet regime was built—namely, peasant support.47 [End Page 344] The experience of soviet China exemplified the generally tragic fate of the Marxist-inspired mass revolutions of the twentieth century. When the working class and peasantry took power in Russia in 1917, great hopes were raised among dominated peoples throughout the world. Indeed, the mass revolutions that the Russian Revolution inspired in the peripheral world offered an unlimited prospect of social equality and justice and proposed to free people from the constraints of power. The irony, of course, is that where successful revolutions under a Communist leadership have taken place, they

have resulted not in the elimination of social domination but rather in the growth of bureaucratic power more massive in scale, more powerful in function, and more independent in nature than that which they replaced.48 It is, in fact, the Marxist regimes, which came to power under the name of democratic control from below, that have affected the unleashing of "an almost permanent orgy of bureaucratic violence."49 Permanent Revolution or New Democracy? There were two responses to this dilemma of Leninism. The first, proposed by Trotsky and Lukács, was to push the logic of the normal West versus the abnormal East even further. According to this view, the distorted social structure caused by the global expansion of Western capitalism was responsible not only for the feebleness of the native bourgeoisie but also for the weakness of all social classes in peripheral countries, including the working class. It followed that the solution to the dilemma of hegemony must be of a global nature. The solution was to be found in international links between peripheral struggles and revolutionary movements in the West, where the normal class structure produced a strong working class characterized by high levels of class consciousness and autonomous will-formation. The dictatorship of the proletariat as a form of democracy, thus Trotsky argues, can only mean the self-activity of the proletariat itself and the establishment of a workers' democracy. The question is that in a peripheral country with a huge peasant majority, the working class cannot manage to maintain its minority rule and avoid political destruction without appeals to coercive state power. The only solution to this dilemma is the support of the international proletarian revolution in advanced countries, because its [End Page 345] victory alone can consolidate the workers' regimes in peripheral countries and thus ensure the prospect of establishing radical democracy on the basis of class identity in the peripheral world. This was the context within which Trotsky proposed his famous thesis of permanent revolution, which asserted that the Russian mass revolution must pass continuously from a bourgeois-democratic stage into a socialist phase and that the fate of this socialist revolution would depend on the world proletarian revolution that it would unavoidably provoke.50 Closely associated with this program was Lukács's theory of class consciousness, which stressed the strategic importance of establishing links between mass revolutions in the East and socialist revolutions in the West, where the self-activity of a modern class had already been institutionalized.51 In contrast, the second response to the dilemma of Leninism holds that such bureaucratic violence occurs precisely because of the loss of hegemony in Leninist practices. Representative of this approach is Mao's theory of new democracy.52 From this perspective, the predicament of class hegemony reflects the Bolsheviks' ignorance of the specificity of the peripheral world. The popular and the democratic were the only tangible realities at the level of peripheral mass struggles, which could not be ascribed to any strict sense of class belonging.53 Mao therefore proposed a distinction between the two

types of democracy in terms of class/mass dichotomy: one-class democracy and multiclass democracy. On the one hand, there are democratic states that are characterized by the dominance of one ruling class. These states include both liberal democracy (i.e., bourgeois dictatorship) and social democracy (i.e., proletarian dictatorship). On the other hand, what is characteristic of new democracy is its multiclass character. This model of democracy is applied to the peripheral countries in which no class is strong enough to establish its dominance over other groups. For this reason, it is not the identity of a dominant class but the common identity of a multiclass bloc that constitutes the social base of the democratic revolutions in these areas. As Laclau and Mouffe have correctly put it, the formula of Mao's new democracy exemplified a post-Leninist attempt among Marxist revolutionaries to locate their strategies "on a terrain that was difficult to define theoretically within Marxist parameters of class essentialism."54 In this connection, the Maoist idea of new democracy can be said to stand for a position [End Page 346] analogous to that which Gramsci holds in relation to the Leninist legacy. Both represent a fundamental shift from the class-centered conception of hegemony within the Leninist tradition to the terrain of Sittlichkeit. Both, therefore, carry the concept of hegemony forward to its logical conclusion by replacing the political leadership of a fundamental class with the moral-intellectual hegemony of an integral state. This problem became especially severe for Chinese Marxists. The new democratic strategies enabled the Chinese Communists to identify themselves as the organizers of the popular national will and thereby won them the popular support that was to lead to their final victory in 1949. Nonetheless, the success of the new democracy formula also necessitated the development of highly centralized forms of political organization and resulted in the emergence of new patterns in inequality. Thus Liu Shaoqi, then head of the Northern Bureau of the CCP, openly acknowledged that the rapid bureaucratization of the revolutionary regime was due to the practice of hegemony, that is, to the juxtaposition of the leaders and the led.55 The Chinese mass revolution, therefore, faced the danger of "going the way of the revolutions of the past, which had invariably resulted in the dominance of a new bureaucratic elite."56 The Idea of Public Hegemony: Confucian Marxism and Gramsci These developments made it crystal clear that a neo-Leninist or post-Leninist strategy for equal justice and equal development is possible only if two conditions are met. First, the social does not presuppose either the asserted class subjectivity or any mode of modern structure of consciousness. Second, the self-activity of the Western bourgeoisie is actually the effect of the public reorientation of social labor rather than its cause. In other words, the liberal paradigm of the social is an illusory self-interpretation of the West that simply cannot work anywhere, East or West. This was the context within which there emerged within the Leninist tradition a powerful and unprecedented interest in traditional ethical polity, an

interest that found its clearest expression in Liu Shaoqi's theory of Confucian Marxism and Gramsci's conception of civil society as civil hegemony.57 Central to this hegemonic approach to civil society was the assumption that [End Page 347] the real source of autonomous public life lies in the ethical substance of traditional political society. The elevation of social labor into the public realm, therefore, is to be understood as a historical process through which the laboring masses reappropriate the ethical public sphere of political society.58 I characterize this distinctive conception of the social as the idea of public hegemony. Domination by Cultural Differentiation: The Logic of Social Hierarchy The idea of public hegemony is grounded in a radical reinterpretation of the cultural logic of traditional hierarchy. Ever since Kant, the ethics/morality polarity has provided an overriding framework within which debates on liberal modernity have been developed. The polarity is based on a widely shared view of the ethical as the primacy of a common culture or dominant ideology in social life. Both communitarian and liberal theorists maintain that public life in a political society relies on a collective ethos or conscience collective that is prior to and above individuals, for the reason that only a collective will can produce a collective person, a historical subject who is alone capable of performing practical collective action.59 It is only against this shared conception of the ethical state that we can understand why liberal theories have attached so much significance to the private autonomy of bourgeois individuals, which for them is indispensable to the autonomy of civil society from political society. One of the most sophisticated analyses on the role of cultural domination in securing the submission of social labor to the state is to be found in Louis Althusser's well-known work on ideology and social reproduction. According to Althusser, one simple but extremely important fact about social life is that every economic system must make provisions for its own reproduction over time.60 The reproduction of social relations, which actually consist of structured behavior patterns, presupposes the voluntary submission of the labor force to the dominant rule of the existing order. Such submission occurs primarily through the role of a dominant ideology, which functions to constitute individuals as subjects through the imposition of dominant systems of symbolism on them. The dominant ideology penetrates the consciousness of the working masses in such a way that they come to see and experience [End Page 348] social reality only through the dominant conceptual categories. As a result, the working masses will tend to perceive the signified (i.e., social relations as imaginary entities projected by dominant categories) as if they are the real, and their subsequent actions (practices) will turn these essentially discursive entities into reality. Seen from this perspective, the ruling elite's ability to effectively exercise its hegemony over the production of symbolic representations is the key to its dominance in the relations of production. Cultural hegemony, therefore, is the most crucial function of the state. State power is first and foremost defined in terms of the capacity of a ruling class to exercise "its hegemony

over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses."61 Simply put, the ruling elite acquires and secures its political and economic domination predominantly through the articulation and imposition of its own values and concepts. Despite its remarkable popularity in social theory and cultural analysis, however, the Althusserian dominant-culture model has failed to come to terms with the precise role of culture in traditional political societies.62 This is markedly the case in studies of the Confucian polity, which can be appropriately characterized as domination by cultural differentiation. This framework is well illustrated by the following statement in the work of Yamaga Soko, a seventeenth-century Japanese neo-Confucian thinker: The Master [Zhu Xi]63 once said: The generation of all men and of all things in the universe is accomplished by means of the marvelous interaction of the two forces [yin and yang]. Man is the most highly endowed of all creatures, and all things culminate in man. Generation after generation men have taken their livelihood from tilling the soil, or devising and manufacturing tools, or producing profit from mutual trade, so that peoples' needs were satisfied. Thus the occupations of the farmer, artisan, and merchant necessarily grew up as complementary to one another. However, the samurai eats food without growing it, uses utensils without manufacturing them, and profits without buying or selling. What is the justification for this? . . . Hence we ask ourselves how it can be that the samurai should have no occupation; and it is only then as we inquire into the function of the samurai that the nature of his calling becomes apparent . . . . If one deeply fixes his attention on what I have said and examines closely one's own function, it will become clear what the business of the samurai is. [End Page 349] The business of the samurai consists in reflecting on his own station in life, in discharging loyal service to his master if he has one, in deepening his fidelity in associations with friends, and, with due consideration of his own position, in devoting himself to duty above all . . . . Though these are also the fundamental moral obligations of everyone in the land, the farmers, artisans, and merchants have no leisure from their occupations, and so they cannot constantly act in accordance with them and fully exemplify the Way. The samurai dispenses with the business of the farmer, artisan, and merchant and confines himself to practicing the Way; should there be someone in the three classes of the common people who transgresses against these moral principles, the samurai summarily punishes him and thus upholds proper moral principles in the land. It would not do for the samurai to know the martial and civil virtues without manifesting them. Since this is the case, outwardly he stands in physical readiness for any call to service and inwardly he strives to fulfill the Way of the lord and the subject, friend and friend, father and son, older and younger brother, and husband and wife. Within his heart he keeps to the ways of peace, but without he keeps his weapons ready for use. The three classes of the common people make him their teacher and respect him. By following his teachings, they are enabled to understand what is fundamental and what is secondary.64

What strikes one the most in this passage is the structural distinction between social and political reproduction, which constitutes a sharp contrast to the accentuation on culture and social reproduction in the common culture scheme. The common culture scheme as articulated by Althusser comprises three key elements:

1. Signification or imposition of the dominant culture on individuals in such a way that one "could only live and experience one's conditions in and through the categories, classifications and frameworks of the culture";65

2. Subjects capable of collective action; and3. Cultural incorporation, which is the key to the submission of social

labor to the state. [End Page 350]By contrast, central to the Confucian scheme is the assumption that Confucian elites embody the way and that commoners will follow as the result of such embodiment. This indicates the following scheme:

1. State structure is the objectification of dominant categories. Social reproduction, defined as the reproduction of the relations of production, relies on the state structure as the objectification of dominant categories and values. The submission of social labor to the state issues not from the role of the state as the locus of a common culture but from its capacity as the materialization of dominant categories. In performing this function, the state structure creates the submission of the working masses by securing institutionally legitimate means for action in accordance with dominant ideological mandates, thereby constituting the final source of collective actions for practices.

2. Laborers act within the structural constraints imposed by the state. So long as the state ensures the availability of using institutional means, individuals will usually perform rule-regulated actions and the reproduction of economic structure is accordingly materialized.

3. The most important feature of the Confucian scheme of social reproduction is the uncoupling of culture and social integration at the level of social reproduction. Since the state structure, as the materialization of dominant categories and norms, creates popular submission through the structural constraints it exerts on the actions of an individual or a group, it can be said that these categories and norms, through the activity of the state, become material and objective entities relative to individuals—entities that have physical, tangible existence. Accordingly, what is essential to popular submission is that at the level of social reproduction, dominant categories are not present in any form of signification—ideology, culture, or whatever. Instead, they are present and materialized in the state structure and obtain their objective physical existence through the operation of the institutionally legitimate means of this structure. The term structural integration highlights the crucial role of state structure in the reproduction of the relations of production.

Structural integration at the level of social reproduction suggests that the symbolic isolation of the peasant culture from the dominant culture does not [End Page 351] necessarily point to the presence of resistance to a central dominant culture, let alone to the presence of any mode of class consciousness. On the contrary, a more possible scenario may be that the ruling elite, to its own advantage, will not only tolerate but also even intentionally deepen the gap between the dominant and popular cultures, for the simple reason that this would effectively deprive the dominated groups of the capacity to rework elite symbols for their own use. The predominant role of the state structure as the embodiment of dominant categories allows us to understand why Confucianism, like any other traditional ethical scheme, places the issue of political reproduction at its focal point. Since the reproduction of the state structure does not rely on any structural constraints, it can be accomplished only through cultural or symbolic mechanisms. To make the reproduction of the state structure possible, members of the political elite must identify themselves as bearers of dominant values and categories. This makes it necessary for them to embody or exemplify these categories and values by developing a specific mode of life conduct. For this reason, social integration at the level of political reproduction can be properly characterized as symbolic integration. This brings us back to Yamaga Soko's account of the Confucian polity, the essence of which can be reiterated as follows: the dominant status of the Confucian elite (e.g., the samurai class), whose members do not engage in the production of life necessities, can be justified only in terms of its function to provide and secure an ethico-political order for social reproduction. But it may perform such a function only if its members distinguish themselves from the laboring masses by their specific life orientation—to live and embody ethical commands. This means that, in contrast to the objectification model at the level of social reproduction, members of the Confucian elite must cultivate themselves in such a way that their actions always point to the imaginary realm of representations, which is deliberately understood and perceived as unreal or has little relevance to their conditions of existence. Only when actors identify themselves as the carriers of the imaginary and act accordingly, namely, only when they conduct themselves through inner forces, will the political as the material expression of dominant representations be reproduced. The key to the operation of an ethical state or state hegemony, therefore, is a structural distinction between the imaginary reality and the actual world of Sittlichkeit. The former arises from an imaginary projection of the world [End Page 352] in light of the basic schemes of a dominant culture. By acting as the carriers of this imaginary world, Confucian intellectuals allow these categories to be embodied in historical exemplary practices in such a way that they come to be materialized in state structures and thus constitute a sense of political reality for most people in the society. This specific mode of social practice has been referred to as praxis, which is defined as a way of

life whose practitioners identify themselves as successors or bearers of the narrative historical world.66 In summary, what renders possible the dominance of the state over social labor in the Confucian scheme is the state's monopoly of the ethical. By ethical, we mean a specific sphere within which social practice is defined and cultivated as praxis, i.e., action pointing to an imaginary realm of representations that is deliberately understood and perceived as unreal or has little relevance to people's conditions of existence.67 Confucian Marxism: The Ethical and Public Hegemony The preceding discussion of the role of cultural differentiation in the Confucian polity allows us to see why Confucian Marxists regard the relationship between the ethical and social labor as decisive for the social and political autonomy of the toiling masses. The power of the state, according to Liu, arises directly from a fixed differentiation between social and political reproduction, between structural and symbolic integration, between objectification and cultivation. The domination of the state over the masses is achieved through a deliberate creation of symbolic isolation of the masses. In other words, it is achieved by a deliberate effort to prevent popular masses from becoming subjects or public selves. Once political reproduction is secured through the role of the ruling elites as carriers of the ethical (i.e., cultivation), the structural submission of the production strata to the public authority would follow. In this sense, the monopoly of symbolic integration (i.e., the ethical sphere) by the ruling group constitutes the basis of its symbolic power, which, in turn, paves the way to its access to political and economic power. As Liu puts it passionately, In a society in which private ownership of the means of production has existed for thousands of years, the exploiting classes through their rule have built up great power in all fields and have grabbed everything under the [End Page 353] sun. Their long rule has given rise to backwardness, ignorance, selfishness, mutual suspicion, deception, mutual injury and slaughter in human society, which have persisted down the ages. It has exerted a most pernicious influence on the exploited masses and other members of society. This is the inevitable result of the efforts of the exploiting classes to preserve their class interests and rule. For they cannot maintain their ruling position unless they keep the exploited masses and the colonial peoples backward, unorganized and divided.68 It is on the basis of this analysis of the symbolic source of mass subordination that Liu puts forward the core theses of the Confucian Marxists: that autonomous publicness is to be defined as the reappropriation of the ethical public sphere by social labor, and that the party of the toiling masses must serve as the ethical public state for building up such public hegemony. Confucian literati or traditional elites, he emphasizes, do not achieve state power through hegemonic mediation; on the contrary, they may engage in hegemonic activities because they are already a potential national power. Their position of power is acquired from their privileged access to and monopoly of the ethical and the praxis of cultivation. The

current mass revolution, therefore, must be at the same time both a social revolution and a fundamental cultural revolution. To this end, the party of the toiling masses must serve as the organizational basis for breaking down the old ruling elite's monopoly of symbolic capital and for securing a direct penetration of Confucian ethics into the masses. At this juncture, it is essential to underscore the striking discrepancy between Confucian Marxism as a theoretical potential and Confucian Marxism as the de facto ideology of the revolutionary regime. By radically recasting Sittlichkeit, or the ethical state, as domination by cultural differentiation, and by highlighting the structural distinction between social and political reproduction, the theory of public hegemony promises to introduce a highly innovative way of thinking about the social and to thus present a powerful alternative to the liberal paradigm. It suggests that what holds the key to the public reorientation of the realm of labor is the rise of an autonomous ethical realm that has little to do with any mode of moralization or any unique traits of occidental civilization. Clearly, an effort to construct such an ethical paradigm of the social would require a return to Lenin's fundamental concern [End Page 354] with the antithesis between class and hegemony. Only with a thorough understanding of this crucial issue can we recapture the insights inherent in Marx's conception of modern class as the agency of revolutionary, practical-critical self-activity. But Liu did not pursue this line of inquiry. This may explain why, when he encountered the tough question of how to distinguish public hegemony from Confucian hegemony, he was forced to resort to the special relationship between the vanguard party and the laboring masses. What differentiates the hegemony of the party from the domination of traditional elites, he observes, lies in the social basis of the party: "As the exploited proletariat which we represent does not exploit anybody, it can carry on the revolution to the very end, completely liberate mankind as a whole and eventually make a clean sweep of all forms of corruption, bureaucracy and degeneracy in human society."69 What has been overlooked conspicuously here is precisely what has been of central concern for Lenin and other Bolshevik theorists: the representative logic of hegemony—i.e., the logic of differentiation, in terms of which only a small number of elites may represent and embody the public life of a society. Not surprisingly, the Confucianization of the CCP initiated by Liu's work had the effect of further facilitating the total bureaucratization of the revolutionary regime. The emergence of a new ruling elite produced a number of far-reaching consequences essential to our understanding of subsequent developments in China. It set the stage for the long-term confrontation between Confucian bureaucrats and Maoist radicalists, a confrontation that reached its culmination during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.70 Even more significantly, it prefigured the role of the party-state in post-Maoist market reforms, accounting for the paradoxical coalition between Confucian polity and global capitalism in contemporary China.71 In

this sense, the Confucian Marxist legacy is part of the problem of peripheral justice rather than a solution. Gramsci: Class and Civil Hegemony The same shift from class hegemony to public hegemony took place in Gramsci's radical reinterpretation of the asserted moral autonomy of the [End Page 355] occidental bourgeoisie. It is through his discussion of civil hegemony that the theoretical potentialities present in the notion of public hegemony have been fully developed. Gramsci begins with a historical analysis of the uniqueness of the European bourgeoisie. One of the most conspicuous differences between the European bourgeoisie and the bourgeois class in Latin America, Russia, and other non-Western societies, according to him, lies in their distinct relationships to two categories of intellectuals: traditional and organic. Simply put, the rise of the Western bourgeoisie as the organizer of a popular national identity is largely due to the effects of a highly unnatural process: the bourgeoisie's deliberate effort to downplay the role of organic intellectuals, who have grown up with commerce and industry, as well as its capacity to assimilate and conquer traditional intellectuals, who are closely associated with the monarchy and aristocracy. It is this aberrant suture that has made it possible for the Western bourgeoisie to transcend its corporative economic interests, elevate itself up to a universal plane, and become the state.72 To see why this is the case, according to Gramsci, one must bear in mind the fact that the hierarchical order characteristic of traditional states is not merely social; it is first and foremost a system of cultural hierarchy. The best way to examine the crucial importance of cultural hierarchy for the social reproduction in traditional societies is to compare classical or humanistic education and vocational education in terms of their distinct nature of intellectuality.73 The division between these two types of education is a rational formula: classical education for the dominant classes and vocational education for the instrumental classes. The principle of classical education is the humanistic ideal symbolized by Athens and Rome. Here knowledge is learned not for any immediate practical or professional end. Indeed, the end seems to be of little interest "because the real interest was the interior development of personality, the formation of character by means of the absorption and assimilation of the whole cultural past of modern European civilization."74 This general, disinterested, deliberately unpractical nature of classical education, Gramsci emphasizes, holds the key to the domination of the state over the world of economic production in traditional societies. This is because the public life of any society presupposes the collective man, who is alone capable of accomplishing the hegemonic tasks: to create and [End Page 356] sustain "a ‘cultural-social' unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world."75 Vocational education, by contrast, is characterized by its overwhelming concern for a specific practical or professional end and by its organic connection to an essential function in the world of economic production. The

limitation imposed by this organic linkage to the specific position and economic interests of a fundamental social group in the economic life explains why organic or professional intellectuals do not possess the crucial intellectual qualities that are indispensable to governing—dedication to the general interests of society as a whole and the public-oriented personality and will to act in accordance to this general vision. Organic intellectuals, Gramsci adds, are, at most, capable of giving the economic group a class consciousness or an awareness of the common interests among all members of the group and of representing such shared corporative interests in the social and political fields. But it is precisely because of this corporative character that they can never elevate the fundamental group to the universal plane of the state. They can act only "within the existing fundamental institutions."76 The discrepancy between the ethical or universal character of the state and the limits of organic intellectuals has widened and deepened in modern bourgeois society, in which industrialization and mass education have created a large number of organic intellectuals for the new economic classes: "industrial technicians, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc."77 The autonomy of bourgeois civil society relies on the construction of the hegemonic mechanism, which carries out in the private terrain of civil society the same function that the ethical state performed in precapitalist societies. For this reason, civil society is best understood as "the ‘image' of a State without a State."78 The irony, however, is that the process of specialization, differentiation, and particularization of knowledge is pushing the organic intellectuals of the bourgeois class to move in the opposite direction. Here, according to Gramsci, lies the crisis of the state that any modern society has to face: While regressive and conservatist social groupings, to an ever-increasing extent, have lost their role as the carriers of the ethical state and are being reduced to their initial corporative economic stage, the progressive and innovatory groupings, [End Page 357] for lack of the mechanisms of the ethical state, are staying in their initial corporative economic phase.79 The crisis of the state in modern transformation, according to Gramsci, allows us to understand the incalculable historical significance of the traditional intellectuals, who are detaching themselves from the social groupings to which they have been hitherto related and, because of this, are actually the only people who possess "the most extensive and perfect consciousness of the modern State."80 All this, Gramsci concludes, allows us to understand why the abnormal suture of traditional intellectuals and the new dominant economic classes has been the most decisive factor for the emergence of an effective and stable bourgeois civil society. A remarkable historical instance of this type of unity can be found in early modern England, where the old land-owning class loses its economic supremacy "but maintains for a long time a political-intellectual supremacy and is assimilated as ‘traditional intellectuals' and as a directive group by the new group in power."81

Only against this background may we understand the rationale of Gramsci's highly original concept of civil society, which deliberately excludes the market system and thus marks a most decisive departure from the conception of civil society as the sphere of autonomous economic relations that emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century and has hitherto fundamentally shaped the ways in which we think about modernity.82 As Norberto Bobbio puts it, "Civil society in Gramsci does not belong to the structural sphere, but to the superstructural sphere."83 In other words, civil society compromises not all material relationships, but all ideological cultural relations; not the whole of commercial and industrial life, but the whole of spiritual and intellectual life, or, in Gramsci's own words, "the ethico-political sphere."84 The debates on the issue of civil society since Kant have centered around the principal antithesis between the private realm of labor and the traditional ethical state. But Gramsci adds to this antithesis a secondary one, the antithesis between the ethico-political sphere (hegemony) and coercive power (domination, force) within the traditional ethical state. Of these two factors, the first is always the positive element,85 which for Gramsci is the source of the universal character and the ethical content of the traditional state and concurs with what Arendt has termed the freedom of the political realm. The rise of the social, from this perspective, is defined as the private realm's appropriation of the ethical content (the ethico-political sphere) of the state, [End Page 358] which is now estranged from the state and assumes its own existence in traditional intellectuals and classical education. For this reason, the civilized nature or the autonomy of civil society is best understood as the result of a historically unprecedented development: the direct integration of the ethico-political sphere into the private realm of labor. The key to the successful transition from natural society to civil society, therefore, lies in two historical processes: the split between ethical content (hegemony) and political society within the ethical state per se and the subsequent appropriation of the former by the private terrain. Civil society, accordingly, is to be conceived of as the ethico-political sphere in the private realm of labor. It is in this sense that Gramsci suggests calling civil society "civil hegemony" or "the image of a State without a State."86 As he explains in a fundamental passage from the Prison Notebooks: "What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural levels: the one that can be called ‘civil society,' that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private,' and the other of ‘political society' or the State. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of ‘hegemony,' which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of ‘direct domination' or command exercised through the State and ‘juridical' government."87 It is on the basis of such a radical reinterpretation of the source and nature of the social in the West that Gramsci proposes a central thesis of his theory of civil society—bourgeois civil society as a specific form of civil hegemony.

The assimilation of the ethico-political sphere into the sphere of the production of material life, in this view, holds the key to the secret of bourgeois subjectivity. This process not only explains why the private realm began to assume public significance in early modern Europe but also, even more significantly, allows us to specify the very conditions under which the European bourgeoisie as a modern class was born. The appropriation of the ethico-political sphere by private sectors had been made in such a fashion that the sphere became the private property of the dominant economic grouping, which was cut off from the rest of society. Civil hegemony was thus transposed to the subculture of the dominant economic group, under the guise of its internal or intimate space. Here, from Gramsci's perspective, lies the very source of all those speculations about the mysterious civic ethos of the European bourgeois class: autonomous will (Kant), Protestant ethic or ethics of responsibilities (Weber), civic virtues (Alexis de Tocqueville), [End Page 359] civic traditions (Robert D. Putnam), postconventional morality (Lawrence Kohlberg), or modern structures of consciousness (Habermas). In this sense, class structure becomes the principle for social organization when, and only when, the dominant economic group takes over civil hegemony and transforms it into its own subculture. It is by possession of such a subculture that the bourgeoisie distinguishes itself from all the remaining sectors of society: in its capacity as the organizer of national unity and identity, it firmly establishes and secures its domination over them. Seen from this perspective, the rise of the Western bourgeoisie with its ethical mode of life conduct and high levels of political competency occurred because of contingent historical developments. Only specific cultural, economic, and historical configurations in the West can explain why and how the dominant economic group in Europe and North America could transcend its corporate limits and seek to construct an intellectual and moral unity by way of actively assimilating traditional intellectuals. For this reason, the experience of the Western bourgeoisie is unique and can hardly be replicated anywhere else. But this does not mean that autonomous publicity is a mere product of Western cultural values or that the private mode of hegemony characteristic of bourgeois civil society is the only form of civil hegemony. Whatever cultural and historical contingencies have brought about this group's appropriation of traditional intellectuals, and no matter how decisive a role it has played in the formation of the suture between the economic and the ethico-political, it is the emergence of an ethical state without state in the sphere of material production and the subsequent separation of hegemony from the public authority (the political society), rather than any ontological propensities of the Western bourgeois class per se, that accounts for the successful institutionalization of the principles of private people's public reasoning in Western democratic societies. Bourgeois Publicity and Uneven Development: Toward a Theory of Peripheral Justice

The most intriguing aspect of uneven global development is the paradoxical connotation of peripheral capitalism for the liberal paradigm of the social. [End Page 360] Although peripheral capitalist deformation confirms the Hegelian assertion that a modern market economy would require the public authority of an ever more powerful ethical state, the phenomenon as a distinctively peripheral occurrence highlights the dynamics of Western civil societies as well as the crucial role of the Western bourgeois class in autonomous public life. Thus the occidentalist argument holds that only the civic ethos unique to Western civilization can breed and sustain the practice of public reasoning and that the fate of each nation in the modern world, therefore, was sealed centuries, if not millennia, ago. A contemporary illustration of this intrinsic linkage between liberalism and Eurocentricism is Habermas's theory of communicative action, which "lays claim to a universal binding on all ‘civilized men.'"88 Habermas, however, has never succeeded in explaining why it is that the same process of "de-ethicalization" has led to the moralization of the social world in the West but only become the very raison d'être of "de-moralization" anywhere else. Due to this paradox of peripheral liberal deformation, deliberalization, or the state-centered model of development, constitutes a logical prerequisite for the upward mobility of a peripheral nation within the capitalist world system controlled by Western powers. This helps explain why over the past decades there has emerged in the peripheral world a burgeoning movement that seeks to Confucianize or Islamize modernity.89 The irony is that the more a peripheral nation achieves economic success within the world system, the more it is exposed to the dictates of the global market regulated by liberal norms, that is, the more it is forced to give up its only resource for survival within the system—the ethical state. A good example of this dilemma is the predicament facing the current Marxist leadership in China. China's impressive economic growth in recent years has been achieved mainly by virtue of the regime's tactical mixture of its authoritarian legacy with market forces. The incorporation of China into global capitalism, however, has rendered inevitable the rapid commercialization of virtually every aspect of social life, leaving little room for the subsistence or development of any autonomous ethical order. In a world in which money corrupts everyone, the domination of political rule over the marketplace is unsustainable, and the rule of an ethical elite is simply out of the question. [End Page 361] By redefining bourgeois subjectivity as the result of the bourgeoisie's monopoly of the ethical, however, the Marxist theory of public hegemony suggests that bourgeois democracy such as that which prevails now in the United States and Europe is best viewed as a civic mode of domination by cultural differentiation. The significance of this approach to bourgeois democracy can hardly be overestimated. It carries a number of crucial implications that have the effect of turning the Weberian line of analysis on its own head. These implications can be boiled down to three main assertions:

1. Contrary to the liberal theories of bourgeois publicity, what characterizes Western liberal democracy is, in fact, a structural split between the dominant culture and the overall liberal culture, between the institutional base of public reasoning and the public sphere.

2. This structural split helps explain why ethnic differentiation has been an essential component of bourgeois society. Moreover, the core/periphery distinction is best analyzed as a global replica of ethnic disparities of capitalist core countries.

3. The solution to the problem of peripheral justice therefore lies in a radical reversal of the liberal model of autonomous publicity.

Let us start with the problem of civic ethnicity. Civic Ethnicity and Bourgeois Publicity Given the civic nature of Western democratic societies, the persistence and increasing intensity of ethnic differentiation in the first-world states has come as a great surprise to most scholarly observers.90 What accounts for the endurance of ethnic inequalities in a civic society that supposedly treats all persons as equals, regardless of ethnic, cultural, religious, or gender identity? In the face of this perplexity, liberal theorists such as Habermas have sought to reaffirm the civic nature of Western bourgeois societies by making a distinction between two modes of social integration: ethical-political integration based on a shared political culture, on the one hand, and ethical-cultural integration rooted in diverse subcultures, or "life-worlds," on the other.91 While the former is related to the constitutional principles of a democratic society with regard to equal rights, the autonomy of the citizens, and [End Page 362] the practice of the public use of reason, the latter bears on the contexts to which an individual legal person has been socialized and within which the individual has formed her or his identity. The identity of the individual is therefore interwoven with collective identities and can be stabilized only in a subcultural network.92 Since political integration is a matter of agreement concerning basic constitutional principles and procedures rather than concrete forms of life, it follows that cultural or ethnic diversity in a pluralistic society produces little effect on the individual's status as the bearer of equal rights and equal autonomy. This line of analysis clearly hinges on the assumption that political integration, rather than ethical-cultural integration, constitutes the defining character of a democratic constitutional state. This assumption is obviously untenable. As so many studies on ethnic conflict in capitalist core countries have shown, civic ethnicity is first and foremost a problem of ethnic disparities or racial inequalities rather than of any sort of aspiration for cultural recognition. Simply put, ethnic diversity reveals a system of differential positions within which subculture and ascriptive relations, rather than political culture and formal associations, play a determining role in social stratification. This fact alone may explain why minority groups are systematically denied equal chances in social mobility.93

These difficulties allow us to see why, over the past decades, the concepts of subculture and subsociety have been used as the main basis for studying racial inequalities in Western core countries, especially in America. In his classic study on assimilation in American life, Michael Gordon isolates the culture/subculture polarity as a key to analyzing racial disparities in socioeconomic mobility.94 At the root of the persistence of ethnic differentiation in American society, in his view, is a structural distinction between culture, which refers to the values and norms regulating formal social structures and secondary relationships such as the state, political party, company, interest groups, and subculture, which includes all norms regulating informal organizations of primary relationships such as church, family, play group, neighborhood.95 It is important to recall, Gordon advises us, that the dominant cultural patterns and basic values in American society derive from the subculture of the dominant Anglo-Saxon group.96 Insofar as an ethnic [End Page 363] group is defined by virtue of its specific subculture, and insofar as there is a structural affinity between the overall American culture and the subculture of the dominant middle-class, white Protestant, it can be said that social class in American society is "ethclass" created by "the intersection of the vertical stratification of ethnicity with the horizontal stratification of social class."97 Here, according to Gordon and his followers, lie the real origins of racial disparities. Strictly speaking, equal opportunities are available only to those minority groups that are willing to achieve structural assimilation by constructing an effective subculture that is functionally compatible with the dominant culture of American society, which is at the same time the subculture of the dominant group.98 The ethclass thesis leaves open, however, several critical questions: How and why should subculture and vertical relations become such predominant factors in social stratification in a civic society, which is supposed to distinguish itself from noncivic societies by its civic traditions and horizontal civic bonds?99 How can it be the case that the same primary structures and subcultures that are said to be responsible for the absence of trust and cooperation outside local communities in non-Western societies, and thereby to be held accountable for the domination of the state over society in those low-trust societies,100 have become the very basis for civic norms and networks of civic engagement in Western high-trust societies? The answer, according to Gordon and his followers, lies in the conflict between the overall liberal culture and the subcultures of immigrants. Precisely because the American Constitution created a land of equal opportunity for each individual, thus, Gordon asserts, it is imperative for immigrants and minority groups, who come mostly from non-Western societies where such civic traditions do not exist, to learn how to behave in accordance with the cultural patterns of the core culture of American society.101 A more recent version of this internal civilizational conflict theory has been offered by Samuel P. Huntington: "Historically American national identity has been defined culturally by the heritage of Western civilization and politically by the principles of the American Creed on which Americans

overwhelmingly agree: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property."102 But this Western heritage, Huntington proceeds to argue, has been challenged by groups within the United States and in other Western [End Page 364] societies. The challenge comes primarily "from immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and to propagate the values, customs, and cultures of their home societies."103 Simply put, the problem of subculture and subsociety is actually introduced from without, created by immigrant groups' reluctance, inability, or refusal to assimilate themselves into the civic traditions of Western democratic societies. It is in this context that the Asian American success story, i.e., the phenomenal surge of Asian Americans in socioeconomic status in recent decades, has captured the interest and attention of analysts of different persuasions. Since the abolition of the exclusion laws against Asians at the end of World War II, the socioeconomic status of Asian Americans has improved in a dramatic way. In explaining the Asian American success story, analysts generally agree that the impressive socioeconomic mobility of Asian populations is largely due to their extraordinarily high educational achievement. Educational achievement, in turn, is attributed to the specificity of Asian American subcultures and ethnic communities104 or their peculiar social capital such as hard work, thrift, and morality.105 At first sight, the Asian American experience seems to provide strong support for the internal civilizational conflict theory. A closer look at the data on Asian achievement, however, reveals just the opposite. As a number of substantial studies on the Asian American success story have shown, the most surprising and certainly the most significant aspect of the story is actually an inverse correlation between the degree of assimilation and the level of educational attainment.106 Asian students from relatively highly acculturated homes tend to have much lower levels of academic achievement than those coming from homes of low acculturation. In other words, the more the adults have been Americanized, the less educational attainment and social advancement their children are likely to achieve. To put it in a more dramatic way, not assimilating with the dominant American culture proves to be a strong contributing factor to minority upward social mobility. This pattern of minority advancement clearly indicates that the principal mechanism for the reproduction of racial inequalities in American society is a structural split between the mainstream liberal culture of American society and its dominant culture, i.e., the subculture of its dominant group. The split alone may account for the remarkable effectivity of the antiassimilation strategies of Asian Americans for achieving upward social mobility. [End Page 365] Democracy by Cultural Differentiation: The Private Ethical and the Public Sphere Social integration in modern civil society depends on and presupposes the duality of the bourgeois character: on the one hand, the owner of goods that

submits to the requirements of the market, and, on the other, the subject of pure interiority that follows its own laws rather than any external purpose. Such a duality, according to Habermas, finds its institutional expression in a separation within the realm of the social between the market society and the bourgeois public sphere. What is characteristic of modern bourgeois society, according to Habermas, is "bourgeois publicity" (bűrgerlichen Őffentlichkeit), or autonomous publicity, in which a common will or consensus regarding the general interest and general rules governing publicly relevant affairs is generated through rational discussion among free and equal individuals. The rise of bourgeois publicity resulted primarily from a split within the realm of material production between the marketplace and the public sphere, in which citizens define the terms and conditions of their common life through public use of their reason and in which debate and argument about collective norms, social policies, and political decisions take place.107 It is the practice of public reasoning in the public sphere that accounts for the formation of "the public of private people" and thus provides a normative framework for the operation of the market economy in the private domain of labor. The problem with this line of analysis, as public hegemony theorists have argued, is that it is based on an illusory understanding of the source and nature of the social in the modern West. In particular, it has reversed the de facto relationship between the social and class. The public significance of modern civil society issues from civil hegemony, i.e., the appropriation of the ethical sphere by the domain of social labor. Class structure becomes the organizational principle of bourgeois society because, and only because, the dominant economic group takes over civil hegemony and changes it into its own subculture. What actually distinguishes bourgeois domination from traditional state hegemony lies in the precondition for social reproduction. In traditional political society, the reproduction of economic structures is secured by the structural constraints imposed by the state as the embodiment of dominant values and norms. To prevent those who run the state from defecting, a [End Page 366] fixed differentiation between social reproduction and political reproduction is essential to the public order of any political society. For this reason, the monopoly of the ethical or symbolic capital by the ruling elite constitutes both the prerequisite for political reproduction and the basis for the domination of the state over the realm of material production. In comparison, the reproduction of material production in bourgeois society can be properly characterized as the "self-reproduction" of the economic structure, in the sense that the appropriation of the ethical sphere by the realm of production has rendered a significant portion of the producers (i.e., the bourgeoisie) to become carriers of praxis. For this reason, the economic structure has itself become the embodiment of dominant values and categories. It is thereby able to reproduce itself without appeals to the structural constraints of the state.

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Table 1 Comparison between liberal and ethical paradigms of the social with regard to bourgeois publicity

This ethical approach to the bourgeois social, and bourgeois duality (since the bourgeois class is the carrier of both labor and praxis), has a number of significant implications for theoretical attempts to analyze the source and nature of bourgeois publicity. These implications may be illustrated by a comparison between the liberal and the ethical paradigms of the social with regard to bourgeois publicity (table 1).108 As can be seen from the schemata, the liberal paradigm of the social might be properly characterized as the public-sphere model of bourgeois publicity. [End Page 367] Central to the liberal paradigm, as we have seen, is the contention that the rise of moral autonomy, or modern structure of consciousness—detached from any process or institution of socialization—accounted for the dual character of the bourgeoisie, i.e., bourgeois and homme. It was this bourgeois duality that created a structural separation inside the realm of material production between the private domain of social labor and the public sphere, a separation that set off the public reorientation of social labor. For this reason, the public sphere as the institutional embodiment of bourgeois moral autonomy constitutes the very domain in which public reasoning by private people is institutionalized and the public of private people is formed. By sharp contrast, what is to be derived from the ethical paradigm of the social implied in public hegemony theories can be considered the private-ethical model of bourgeois publicity. Since the dual role of the bourgeois class (as the carrier of both labor and praxis) results from the appropriation of the ethical domain by the realm of labor, as well as the bourgeoisie's monopoly of the ethical as its subculture, the subsociety of the dominant economic group constitutes the de facto institutional base for the formation of the public of private people. In other words, it is the subculture and subsociety of the bourgeoisie that is responsible for the institutionalization of public reasoning in bourgeois societies. Seen from this perspective, the bourgeois public sphere plays only a secondary role in the formation of bourgeois publicity, in the sense that it serves merely as the arena in which the bourgeoisie presents itself as the public of private people—a public that is actually produced and reproduced within the private domain. What is characteristic of bourgeois publicity, then, is a structural split within bourgeois society between the private ethical as the institutional base of public reasoning and the bourgeois public sphere as the manifestation of bourgeois publicity. This split is essential to our understanding of the puzzle of civic ethnicity. It secures the public dimension of economic activities but at the same time generates a civic mode of domination by cultural differentiation, which accounts for the determinant role of subcultures in social stratification.

It is of paramount importance to notice that, due to the monopoly of the ethical by the dominant economic group, social reproduction means different things to the bourgeoisie than it does to nonbourgeois laborers. While for the [End Page 368] former the economic structure is indeed autonomous and self-reproducing, for the latter the same structure is nothing more or less than a system of structural constraints within which they perform rule-regulating action through institutionally legitimate means. For this reason, social reproduction in a bourgeois society relies on the reproduction of the bourgeoisie, or class reproduction. As in the case of traditional political society, the ruling group's monopoly of symbolic capital constitutes the basis for its domination in the economic and political domains. Since class reproduction hinges on the bourgeoisie's possession of the ethical as its subculture, and since subculture is embedded in the primary relations of subsociety, a structural split between the dominant subculture and the overall liberal culture in the public sphere, between the informal relations of subsociety and the formal structures of society, becomes essential to class domination. In this sense, what is characteristic of bourgeois society is a fixed differentiation between social reproduction and class reproduction. Bourgeois democracy is therefore best characterized as democracy by cultural differentiation. From this perspective, ethnic differentiation is, in fact, rooted in the very nature of bourgeois domination and constitutes an essential component of Western democratic societies. Bourgeois domination systematically and persistently produces ethnic diversity through the mechanism of cultural differentiation, which may be properly referred to as symbolic isolation through assimilation. Due to the monopoly of the dominant culture by the bourgeoisie and the subsequent structural split between the mainstream liberal culture and the dominant (sub)culture, acculturation, or the assimilation of minorities into the mainstream culture, becomes one of the most effective mechanisms through which the symbolic isolation of laboring masses from the dominant culture is created and the submission of nonbourgeois laborers to bourgeois domination is secured. As a result, the more a minority incorporates itself into the overall liberal culture and becomes symbolically isolated from the subculture of the dominant group that is actually the bona fide dominant culture, the more it becomes marginalized for its uncivilized cultural traits and dragged to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The mechanism of symbolic isolation through assimilation therefore provides the most appropriate conceptual framework for understanding why deliberalization has proved to [End Page 369] be a prerequisite for upward social mobility for minorities, as is well illustrated by the effectiveness of antiassimilation strategies for Asian American advancement. Uneven Development as a Global Replica of Civic Ethnicity The preceding analysis of the relationship between bourgeois democracy and civic ethnicity allows us to propose a radical reinterpretation of the source and nature of the core/periphery distinction at the global level. Modern world

history is the history of Westernization, i.e., the global expansion of liberal modernity to non-Western societies. Given the fact that bourgeois domination is defined by cultural differentiation, the expansion of the West has had a number of foreseeable consequences in the non-Western world. The most significant consequence of Westernization has been the total de-ethicalization of society that eliminates the very resources essential to the rise of the social in non-Western societies. As was discussed above, Western liberal democracy arose out of the separation of the ethical from political society and the subsequent reappropriation of the ethical by private sectors. Ironically, what Westernization has ruled out in the non-Western world is precisely this necessary condition for the rise of the social. Westernization first and foremost indicates the imposition of overall liberal values in all aspects of social life in non-Western societies, especially in the domains of culture and education. This process systematically transposes the intellectual and political leaders of these societies into the organic intellectuals, or professional intellectuals, of dominant economic groups, thereby totally eliminating the ethical substance of society as a whole. As a result, any process of the reappropriation of the ethical by private sectors is simply out of the question. Instead, what has actually emerged is a process of passive revolution, within which private sectors take over the state structure and uproot the very locus of structural constraints essential to the reproduction of material production. In this setting, one could only expect a typical scenario of peripheral capitalism, i.e., a rapid descent into social decay and economic stagnation. Here lies the source of the striking analogies between ethnic disparities within Western core countries and the core/periphery distinction abroad. It is [End Page 370] not difficult to discern how the mechanism of symbolic isolation through assimilation, which holds the key to civic ethnicity, has been used by European powers to systematically create the core/periphery disparities at the global level. As in the case of minority groups, the more a non-Western nation incorporates itself into the global culture of liberal democracy, then the more it is symbolically isolated from the very culture of the Western bourgeoisie that is actually the dominant culture of the capitalist world order, the more it is marginalized within the world order, and the more it is condemned for its non-Western traits. In this sense, uneven development can be properly characterized as a global expansion of racial disparities within the capitalist core. This brings us to the second important parallel between civic ethnicity and uneven global development. Just as deliberalization or ethnic subculture constitutes a prerequisite for minority advancement within Western core countries, so anti-Westernization or cultural nationalism acts as an indispensable precondition for the upward mobility of a peripheral nation within the capitalist world system controlled and dominated by Western powers. Such a parallel is significant because it brings into focus the decisive role of the politics of civilizations in the reproduction of the liberal world order.

It is here, as Gramsci stresses, that we may recognize the philosophical importance of the Leninist concept and practice of hegemony.109 The significance of the Leninist legacy lies in its potentiality to transform what the Western bourgeoisie has accomplished out of historical contingencies into a conscious, structural strategy for constructing a stateless ethical state for all laboring masses. Central to this solution to the problematic of peripheral justice is the construction of a public-ethical sphere, or the public ethical state, that will serve as a school of state life, in which each nonruler is ensured free training in the skills necessary for governing: "character (resistance to the pressures of surpassed cultures), honor (fearless will in maintaining the new type of culture and life), dignity (awareness of operating for a higher end), etc."110 If democracy, by definition, means that every citizen can govern and "that society places him, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this," then a public-ethical sphere is not only necessary but also indispensable.111 In other words, political and social equality presupposes and relies on a system of public hegemony that is open to and publicly accessible for each member of society. [End Page 371]