Политолог Александр Гуревич: партии неизбежны, а искусственный интеллект угрожает способности людей мыслить самостоятельно

Alexander Gourevitch is a political theorist and historian of political thought at Brown University. His work focuses on labor, freedom, and political theory, with particular attention to the history of workers’ movements and ideas of economic independence. He is the author of From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth, which examines how nineteenth-century labor activists developed a vision of freedom rooted in collective ownership and cooperation. In his research and his courses at Brown, Gourevitch explores how democratic ideals can be realized under modern economic conditions. Charlotte Peterson: How have you seen cultural shifts or modernization of the thinkers that modern historians and philosophers consider? You talked a lot about Martin Luther King in your political thought class, which was very pleasantly surprising to me because he wasn’t a thinker that I expected to encounter. So which thinkers have been coming into the discussion? Alexander Gourevitch: I teach Martin Luther King because he’s a little bit like the Mona Lisa of American politics: We’re so familiar with an image that is produced that we can’t really see it for what it is. In the case of Martin Luther King, we get an image of someone who was a great rhetorician, a charismatic leader, and an inventor of a relatively safe form of civil disobedience that was just about affirming the liberal principles of America as it is. I thought that’s a mistake, and a little bit racist because it plays into this idea that major Black figures are great speakers but not deep thinkers. But King wrote five books; they are deep and extensive works of political philosophy and history. When you really read them, you see thousands of pages of speeches and essays, and they go as deep as any of the classic works of political philosophy. One reason I felt it important now to go back to a figure like him is to defamiliarize a little bit so that we could really see who he was as a thinker, and break through the stereotyped and romantic view we have about King as an innovator in political action. Civil disobedience isn’t what we thought it was. When you read King, what you discover is that his civil disobedience isn’t just breaking the law, but affirming the Constitution as it is. It involved very careful strategic thinking about what kinds of political action would really cause major social disruption, not just for the sake of causing disruption, but for forcing society to consider and deal with an injustice it refused to properly deal with. If we’re thinking about modern relevance, I think that was really the heart of what King was thinking about when it came to nonviolent mass civil disobedience and it should really cause a lot more discomfort than we think it does. His aim was not to make people comfortable, nor to reassure people: It was really to interrupt society at some key point in its functioning. It was a very pointed form of mass social disruption, which meant that he wasn’t proposing a formula. So we tend to think that King invented this formula for the “good” kind of protest. It’s peaceful, it’s nonviolent, it’s law breaking, but where you accept the punishment because you want to affirm the Constitution. I just don’t think that’s what he was doing. It’s more radical: King openly embraced the coerciveness of it, even if it’s not violent. It’s not a formula because the injustice might be different and therefore the kind of action that is necessary might be different. I like teaching him because I think he really forces us to think in the present about what’s going on, what matters most, and how severe are the wrongs. Today, I’m being interviewed when our president said that he is ready to destroy an entire civilization. He says he’s going to destroy the entire civilization of Iran. That is obscene and grotesque. King was assassinated trying to figure out how to protest imperial war and aggression, things that we most need to be opposed to and find a way to be opposed. The pressure that King puts on us is to figure out what the form of protest should be. We can march on the streets, but it’s unclear that it has any effect. What would have an effect? I don’t know. But that’s the kind of thinking we have to figure out. CP: Shifting gears to the older political thinkers, Rousseau claimed that the ‘general will’ cannot be wrong, but how do we reconcile this in a very polarized society where it seems people’s self-interests are so directly and at times irreconcilably at odds with others? AG: Rousseau was looking for a way of settling disagreements without everyone having to agree about everything. No matter what our private opinion is, we have to be willing to go along with the majority so long as the majority doesn’t just try to impose its will on the minority, and is ready to submit to the same law it wills for the minority. That would mean if the majority will is just to deprive the minority of rights, then the majority has to be ready to deprive itself of those same rights. There’s no general will that’s expressed by trying to divide and deny citizenship to part of the numbers of that general will. I think that what that meant in Rousseau’s case, is that the way to live with people who have differences, was by willing that everyone have an equal share in the making of political decisions. If we willed that, then we could at least agree to go along with the results of our collective political decisions. I think the other important idea from Rousseau that is in some ways even more relevant to us is that the people should control their government. The general will is a way of expressing the sovereignty of the people over the government, so the sovereignty of the people against those who happen to currently be exercising official power. Our society looks like the opposite. It looks like one in which government officials have usurped sovereign power because they now exercise power outside the limits that the people, through their constitution, allow them. Trump is going to war without congressional authorization, but he doesn’t have that power. This has been constantly going on in American society for decades, Democrats and Republicans, particularly when in control of the executive branch, but Trump is an especially vivid expression of it. Usurping the sovereignty of the people happens by putting the government over and above the people. It makes Rousseau very contemporary and relevant for me because we the people see that the one way we can be sovereign is by creating a constitution that only gives certain parts of government certain kinds of power. It means that the ultimate check on that government is the people themselves. The Supreme Court has never been particularly effective at checking power in any regular way, especially the most important ones when it comes to war, the police, and the national security state. It helps to slightly rethink polarization. Governmental elites, the political class, have an interest in intensifying polarization because it’s how they get away with all kinds of political excess and their own interests. If we think that everybody’s fundamental interest is in the people controlling the government, that might be a way of depolarizing. By holding at bay our religious and cultural and other differences, what we all fundamentally share is a political interest in popular sovereignty and self-rule. That’s probably the only thing we’re likely to be able to bring up in the first place, but from that we get that perspective depolarizes in one sense and repolarizes in another. It polarizes the opposition between people and their government, which in some ways Trump and MAGA have been more effective at doing than anyone else. CP: Turning more towards explicit conversation about American democracy, you also talked a lot about the Federalist Papers. To what extent have the safeguards of the Federalist Papers, checks and balances, been successful in American history and specifically now? Are they just fundamentally flawed, not strong enough to withstand true tests of democracy, or is there potential for them to be adequately strengthened? AG: Not much of the Federalist Papers remain a part of our constitutional structure. The Federalists were interested in creating a stronger executive branch, one with more power to engage in national security and the suppression of domestic insurrections, so it was primarily an executive with greater capacity to tax and finance its security functions. I think that part still lives: We have a massive national security state, a huge military, relatively unchecked police forces, wide-ranging powers for the National Guard to suppress all kinds of domestic forms of protest. So much of it doesn’t apply, partially because we’ve undergone a couple of constitutional revolutions. The Civil War established both the sovereignty of the nation and the particular states. The Reconstruction Amendments were foundational in creating a national state with the idea of universal citizenship. They just did not imagine a constitution based on political parties. The whole idea of checks and balances with different branches checking each other depended on thinking of elected representatives as separate individuals, who were not themselves organized by any party-like institutions that would unify them into particular groups. You can only have “ambition-checking-ambition,” as the Federalists put it, if each person is a representative of their constituency and owes no loyalty to some other group, namely the party. Once your political future depends upon your role in the party, and once you have representative democracy based on parties, a lot of constitutional structures look very different. What parties really did was allow for the coordination of political action across branches. When we talk about one party control, because the Republicans dominate the Supreme Court, the presidency, and Congress, the Federalists really couldn’t even imagine that. Although political parties aren’t written in or out of the Constitution, they’re really a fundamental fact. I don’t think it’s bad to have political parties. But it fundamentally changes our politics and therefore where we think the limitations on power actually lie. A lot of the institutional imagination of the federalists just goes out the window almost immediately within the first cycle of elections—once you get the emergence of these political parties in the 18th century. CP: Would you say it’s impossible to reconcile the factions that we have now with any sort of proper democracy? AG: Well, no. I’m a believer in representative democracy, because I think that parties perform a really important function in the negotiation and organization of interests into a group that could in principle represent a plan and vision for the nation as a whole. So at their best, political parties have really performed a deep democratic function. The Republican Party before the Civil War didn’t just combine interests, but showed how they represented a new vision for society based on free men, free soil, free labor, abolition, certain kinds of property, property equality, and so on. So there are these moments when parties can do that: where what each voter is voting for can then be represented to them in a way where you can, at least in principle, know not just what you’re voting for but hold representatives to account and discipline and control them to do what you want. Without that function of organizing interests into a kind of collective ideology, I don’t think you can have a modern democracy. But I think that Washington thought representative democracy should look like something different. I think he thought it was electing virtuous old men to go and make political decisions in Washington, DC, free from the ongoing interference of their constituents. So when he’s worried about factions, I think it’s a double-edged thing. I think he wanted people to believe that these representatives were just virtuous, had the public interest in mind, and therefore shouldn’t be constrained by anyone else, which I think was false. CP: It sounds like he was influenced by the executive powers he had seen before. That’s almost more king-like than anything, if there’s such a diminished feedback mechanism from his constituency. AG: That’s right. I think he was influenced by that. He was also influenced by imagining that the people who get elected were a natural aristocracy. You know, people of superior virtue, which is at odds with what Federalists write. So when you read the Federalists, the idea is, well, we don’t imagine that any of these figures are virtuous in any way. We’re going to assume they’re self-interested and ambitious, so we must set up institutions that take these ambitious, self-interested people and make sure that they can be played off each other so that nobody receives more power than they should have and each is made to do what’s in the general interest by the institutional logic of checks and balances. Madison does say that he thinks that representatives can enlarge the perspective of constituents by bringing the view of the whole constituency, but also the demands of the nation itself, which I do think is a value of representation. But I think Madison also thought, like Washington, that representatives do that because they somehow have a superior degree of virtue. They wanted to guarantee that by ensuring that the people who held office had property, were educated, and were older. So they had a view that somehow being property and educated made you more virtuous, which I think is a dubious assumption. CP: Are there any political thinkers who have messages that you would think that everyone would benefit from knowing and thinking more about the current political climate within the context of? AG: Yes, I would say, aside from King, who I discussed, there are four people in particular who come to mind: Schumpeter, because he was the greatest theorist of the entrepreneur: figures like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel. Schumpeter shows us that these are some of the most unusual and potentially problematic figures in our society because they have a huge amount of power to determine our collective future. They exercise this political power, but not through political means, and there’s a way in which they really found and re-found our society. They’re like founding fathers, but they escape our democratic control. We’re just subject to their will and they have a very tyrannical impulse behind them. We don’t really think about them that much when we think about the problem of politics. Obviously when Musk was in DOGE we did, but that was just a more conventional, oligarchic moment. We live in a society dominated by these entrepreneurial figures and we do well to think a lot more about that. Another is Marx. Not just for the famous reasons, like as a critic of inequality and capitalism, but I think that Marx’s way of thinking about the relation between culture and economics is an interesting way of trying to get around our current culture wars. He seemed to think that just criticizing people for their beliefs leads to a static cultural confrontation. Instead of ending up in this way of trying to decide whose beliefs should be upheld, it’s better to look at and criticize the institutions through which we develop our beliefs. He offered a different way of thinking about cultural and political criticism that I think might help get us past some of the impasses of culture wars. The two other people are Max Weber and Mary Wollstonecraft. I think Weber still has one of the most interesting things to say about what he called the ethics of responsibility, which is that if you’re going to do politics, you have to recognize that what matters is not that you have the right intentions but what you’re actually doing with the power that you have and whether you’re ready to take responsibility for the outcomes—even the unintended consequences of the exercise of that power. A lot of people both on the left and the right fail in that fundamental way of relating to politics. They fail when something negative or morally horrendous happens; they blame the victims for having had the wrong views or for having gotten in the way. Trump did that the other day when he said the Iranians are defeated, therefore any further violence is their fault for having refused to accept defeat when he’s the one dropping the bombs. That’s a failure to take responsibility for what it is to do politics. Politics is about imposing your will, and Weber’s essay, Politics as a Vocation, is excellent on that. Finally, Mary Wollstonecraft, because she has one of the best arguments for how to deal with the AI age. In her essay On the Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft said that the problem for women was how they’d been educated. They hadn’t been taught mathematics and philosophy and history in a deep way that encouraged them to form their own judgments, exercising their own reason. Instead, they’d been taught only to be interesting to men, and when it came to having opinions, to defer to the opinions of men. And this, over time, she thought, deformed women. In the AI age, the danger is that we’re all going to become like that. Instead of learning how to think for ourselves, acquire knowledge, reason for ourselves, we’re all going to just ask computers how to consume, what to think, and what opinions to have. Over time, our capacity to think for ourselves will atrophy in just the way that Wollstonecraft thought was supposed to be the hallmark of the pre-modern age. She’s the most eloquent person to have ever articulated the importance of developing your own reason and thinking for yourself, independent of your gender or anything else. To know how to respond to the AI age, we should all read Wollstonecraft. *This interview has been edited for length and clarity.