Asceticism in Contemporary Political Theory: Marx, Weber, Nietzsche and Beyond

In this article, I will explore notions of asceticism in political theory in relation to contemporary welfare prescriptions and low wage policies² in the United States. I will not only interrogate the idea that there is a double standard operating in ascetic demands and normative values but also analyze how this double standard is deployed in terms of Michel Foucault’s concepts of bio-power and disciplinary power. Furthermore, I argue that welfare “solutions” and the more general policing of the poor are not only lacking in compassion but signal the exercise of prerogative power domestically, significantly at the bureaucratic level. Prerogative power is “legitimate arbitrary power”³ that indicates the suspension of law and can be deployed systematically, rationally, and domestically.

This argument challenges two widely held assumptions: that prerogative power is only wielded in the international realm and that because it is characterized by arbitrary decision-making and the suspension of the law, that bureaucracy and its modalities preclude the existence of prerogative power.⁴ Rather, prerogative power has been historically exercised domestically just as much as internationally and bureaucracy facilitates this exercise in the modern state. As I will examine below, the combination of policies affecting the poor shows that the rule of law can bring about the suspension of law and this is justified by an ascetic double standard. Hence, I believe that the conventional theoretical separation of warfare and welfare is misguided. ⁵ That is, ascetic principles are linked to the development of the state and prerogative power in contradistinction to the conventional linkage between asceticism, welfare and democracy. Fourth, with Giorgio Agamben, my argument challenges Michel Foucault’s notion that sovereignty, on the one hand, and disciplinary and bio-power, on the other, are distinct exercises of power.⁶ In this context, I will critique the gendered and racialized public policy and ideology (in welfare/workfare policies, low wage strategies, the War on Terror, and the War on Drugs) that place poor women, immigrants and minorities in a politically and economically vulnerable position.

I first discuss recent welfare cuts in relation to the globalization of the economy as well as the alternative to welfare: low paid, unskilled or semi-skilled, temporary work. Second, I investigate arguments about asceticism in modernity as found in Nietzsche, Marx, Weber and later, Foucault and Agamben. In particular, I critically examine how groups whose political status is defined biologically fit into what Sheldon Wolin calls “the Economic Polity” where capitalist values inform criteria for citizenship. Finally, I discuss the consequences of these ideas. Because my primary aim is to investigate the theoretical linkage between liberalism and prerogative power, demonstrating that ascetic language and values in liberal-capitalist theory are the ideational justification for this connection, I merely suggest how political practices toward the poor are in fact the exercise of prerogative power.

Ascetic ideas as they are applied by neo-liberals and “new Democrats” in the United States to welfare/workfare policies and low wage policies affecting poor workers⁷ include the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act, resultant workfare policies, and the demand for worker flexibility in low tier employment. Ascetic ideas are increasingly emphasized in order to justify deregulation, the expectation of worker flexibility, and the dismantling of the welfare state. In this framework, ascetic practices ostensibly make the individual independent from state aid (welfare recipients) or state intervention (in the case of poor workers). Demanding ascetic practices of workfare recipients or poor workers is not hypocritical or unreasonable, the argument would go, because we all refer to and practice this belief system. For this reason, we are outraged by the high salaries of Chief Executive Officers just as much as we are irritated by the idea of poor single mothers on welfare. The implementation of increasingly moral policies for both the working poor and welfare recipients is thus justified because they are the same values to which we all adhere. However, there is a difference in viewpoint depending on the group; it is assumed that some individuals have achieved self-mastery and others need to be guided. The aim of asceticism in...