Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy, and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (review)

Love is a Sweet Chain is an extended study of both the benefits and the dangers of attempting to unite people into a democratic community on the basis of a doctrine of love. Though love is at times sweet, James Martel argues, it can in certain guises conceptually promote hierarchy and oppression rather than link people through a democratic equality. According to Martel, a particularly problematic conception of love can be found throughout liberal political theory, and he traces its incarnations from its origins in Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, through the liberal political theorists Locke, Rousseau, Emerson, and Thoreau. Along the way he follows suggestions from Nietzsche and Derrida that another notion of love may better serve democratic goals of liberty and equality, and he concludes by locating the first stirrings of this alternative conception in a seemingly unlikely place—the writings of Thomas Hobbes. Martel argues that whereas the doctrine of love found in the work of many liberal theorists too easily supports inequality, domination, and enslavement, Hobbes provides a path toward rethinking love in a way that may, if it is developed further, help us unite more "next" to one another than "above" or "below."

According to Martel, the views of love in Locke, Rousseau, Emerson, and Thoreau tend to build equality between persons in a democratic polity upon hierarchy and inequality: friendship and love are possible for some only insofar as others remain unequal. He argues that hierarchy is a necessary part of liberalism because the identity and autonomy liberal theory promises to individuals comes not from themselves, but from their relationship to something external, something "higher." This allows for an ordering of individuals according to the character of their relationship to that which gives them identity and autonomy. Martel connects this to the notion of divine love as agape, which tends to "hollow us out" and fill us "with the divine," since as ourselves we are inadequate (10). We can then be ordered according to the degree to which we are filled with something other than ourselves, and this hierarchy is reproduced in political theorists' analyses of our love for each other. In Locke, the divine agape is secularized into reason, in Rousseau it is the general will, in Emerson it is the notion of transcendence, and in Thoreau it is nature. We could all be equal through filling ourselves with such incarnations of agape, but to the extent that we do not, we remain unequal in our loving relationships. In addition to supporting hierarchical ordering between individuals, this idea of incorporating our substance from beyond ourselves focuses on our own inadequacy, and produces a need to enhance the self by finding new external sources for our substance—often in the shape of colonization of others:

Without a source of substance, an idea of selfhood that is wholly our own, we are always seeking to colonize the other as a way to delineate and define (and protect) the self. The absence of selfhood at the core of this doctrine of love means a profound dissatisfaction, an inadequacy inherent in the search for love, and always, the need for fresh conquests.

(192)

Spending most of the book arguing against trying to connect to each other through a love that fills us with something other than ourselves, Martel does not suggest as an alternative that we drop the notion of love altogether from political theory. Instead, he argues that beginning from our liberal background, with its dreams of a democratic love running through it, we can find the possibility of a better conception of love. Hobbes suggests the way, according to Martel, by presenting a view of the subject that gives it a more robust autonomy, one that requires us to "make our own meanings, give ourselves our own substance" (195). Martel argues that for Hobbes, even though God exists and...