Amore per Tutti

James R. Martel is not a Romantic. He finds it problematic to love what is traditionally defined as love. His book is an effort to uncover the unequal relations of power implicit in the concept of love (“the doctrine of love,” as he calls it) and demonstrate the corrosive influence of this concept on political theories which adopt it unquestioningly. Martel claims that the traditional definitions of love as eros, as agape, or even as a synthesis between the two, all fail to construct a genuinely democratic subject, a subject whose freedom would not depend on the physical and psychological subordination of itself and/or other subjects. In his words, all traditional definitions of love are premised on “human inadequacy, the need to be filled with the divine, and a [hierarchical] ordering of human beings” (p. 10). Hence the subject that these definitions bring into being cannot but be lacking and “hollowed out,” unable to become the source of ethical authority and political sovereignty.

The particular focus of Martel’s book is the interplay between the doctrine of love and liberal political theory. He argues that the difficulties that contemporary liberal theorists face in trying to devise frameworks for a liberal democratic community stem from the incorporation of the doctrine of love into liberalism by the originators of liberal thought. In fact, Martel devotes the greater part of his book to highlighting the role that the doctrine of love played in the works of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their American disciples Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He contends that the presence of the doctrine of love in these works subverts their democratic potential.

In the last chapter of the book, Martel offers an alternative to the doctrine of love and its constitution of the subject, which he locates in the works of Thomas Hobbes. Martel’s understanding of this alternative vision of love is influenced by recent works of Jacques Derrida, as well as by Derrida’s interpretation of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas. Yet, as Martel admits, the most that Derrida can offer is an elusive hope (“the perhaps”) that a community based on the new set of values can spring into existence. As I will indicate below, I think that this conclusion is not entirely satisfactory and that the kind of community that Martel desires to see has been concretely elaborated in the works of early Marx, and/or the early Frankfurt School theorist, Herbert Marcuse. It is therefore surprising to note the near absence of these thinkers in Martel’s book insofar as the alternatives to the hierarchical doctrine of love are examined. Marx for instance appears briefly in two footnotes, but there is no substantive engagement with his work.

It seems to me that the chapter on John Locke presents Martel’s basic argument in a particularly effective fashion. In a close reading of a variety of Locke’s writings, Martel reveals a conceptual ghost that he claims haunts all subsequent liberal theorizing. What gives life to this ghost is Locke’s unwillingness to see the human subject as the ground of all possible knowledge. Martel claims that Locke offers us only a qualified empiricism, which authenticates our knowledge only in relation to the existence of the loving divine being. Though he does so implicitly, Locke still postulates the existence of truths beyond reason, the access to which is possible only through a submissive relationship to the divine and/or to those who represent the divine on earth (conceptualized as the most rational, the experts). Hence, Lockean reason, just like eros in the ancient doctrine of love, is always lacking and depends on an external, superior entity to offer it the sense of certainty. Instead of an egalitarian relation necessary for a democratic polity, what is being inscribed here is a relation of hierarchy.

Martel argues that this hierarchical relation between the divine being and even the most rational subject is replicated in Locke’s understanding of social and political relations, and especially in reference to social...