Monopoly Violence not Sovereignty: Leviathan as the Gift

    Klima, in his otherwise compelling "ethnography as theory", drawing on the social exchange with the dead and of images of death in a Thailand vacillating between democratically elected and military junta regimes, makes a questionable aside, in the midst of his ethnography, by invoking a muddled theory of Leviathan.  He begins by arguing for "two sovereign powers that emerged" from massacre of protesters at the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, which Klima identifies as the public sphere, enacted through free market capitalism, and the monarchy, expressed through a feedback loop between public confidence and international opinion.  Unfortunately, his argument here confuses power of commodity flows and reputation flows (both free exchange between parties, whether or not mediated by representatives) with "sovereign power" (the powers vested to a designated representative upon the authority of a multitude in enactment of contract with itself).  That is, Klima conflates the powers of multitudinous exchange between parties, on the one hand, with the rights of a representative, nominally "sovereign", to exercise powers exchanged by the multitude with itself, on the other.  "This is perhaps the meaning of sovereign power," says Klima.  Or perhaps not.

    Klima would have the power expressed through the action of flowing commodities (the market of the charnel grounds) and the action of the flow of trust (the reputation of the king) be "a power exceeding" the power of the junta, expressly because the power of free flow is not derived from a monopoly of violence (an exclusive freedom to act), whether legitimate or illegitimate.  It is here that Klima first invokes the Leviathan, assigning to it a power "to cow the awed and frightened populace into submission".  Except this is not the power of the Leviathan as Hobbes set it forth.  Quite the contrary:  the power of Leviathan is achieved through the covenant of each natural person in the multitude to give up their freedom to cow others into submission, so as to be free of the risk of being arbitrarily cowed into submission.   In giving up this freedom, a monopoly on cowing to submission, on violence, is established, yes, but this is a freedom to act, not the power of any such act.  The "awe" of Hobbes is a common power, but awe can mean veneration and/or wonder, just as easily as it can mean dread, and very little evidence to suggest that Hobbes uses the term in the latter sense.  Indeed, to venerate one's king, to stand in wonder at images of atrocity, seems more congruent with an expression of awe than facing off defiantly against armed soldiers.

    The junta may exercise a monopoly on violence, but such monopoly is enacted through international conventions of monopolized of violence.  That is, it is not that the Thai multitude are "united by consent" in the artificial person of which the junta is sovereign representative, but rather that the monopolists of violence are united by consent to territories of monopoly.  (At best, we might say that the artificial person of the junta acts on the authority of the multitudes of those true Leviathans that would cede other multitudes to conditions of war so as to preserve their own peace.)  Just because a "state" is recognized, in modern usage, as "sovereign" by other states (sovereign being a nominal designation, always), does not mean that recognition of such entity from without confers upon it the status of Leviathan, by Common-wealth, as conceived by Hobbes, where "sovereign" denotes a representative of a multitude in contract with itself.  The condition of nature described by Hobbes is one in which "the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary."  So long as there is a "known disposition" to fighting, whether such disposition is monopolized by a military junta or freely available to an anarchic multitude, the conditions from which Common-wealth naturally proceeds have not yet produced the conditions of Common-wealth as enacted.

    "The power of a man", begins Hobbes, in his discussion on the subject of power, "is his present means to obtain some future apparent good, and is either original or instrumental".  Here, the flow of commodities, of photos of the dead and bootleg satellite news video of the killing and dying, is at once original and instrumental:  original as an expression of "the faculties of the body" (here, its faculty for death), and original also as "eloquence", instrumental in that, such commodities are "acquired" by the faculties of body and mind and/or "by fortune" of a global infrastructure.  The flow of reputation, meanwhile Hobbes deals with quite succinctly:  "Reputation of power is power; because it draweth with it the adherence of those that need protection."  With international investors and local populations both needing protection, the reputation of the king plays like the valuation of any floating currency:  just as the value (and thus, the power) of the U.S. dollar is buffeted by confidence in its value, which in turn is influenced by confidence in how confident others are about its value, so the same occurs for the Thai monarchy.  

    The powers of Ratchadamnern market and of King Bhumipol, both being "compounded of the powers of most men" (indeed, where "most", here, includes persons natural and artificial not even of the Thai Common-wealth), may exceed the powers of the junta state, even if these are not compoundings "united by consent, in one person, natural or civil":  the market does not appear as a person, and insofar as the King participates in unity, it is a reciprocal unity of confidence, local and foreign, in the King, like confidence in any currency, and not unity in the King per se.  One need not invoke a monopoly of violence (or its lack) to understand why this might be.  The market and the king might both be greater, without being the "greatest of human powers", because the junta was not greatest, was not even "compounded of the powers of most men", whether "as is the power of a Common-wealth...of a faction, or of diverse factions leagued", even if the junta were a compounded of the powers of some faction of men.  The junta had the freedom to let violence flow, but doing so was not, as it turns out, a "means to obtain some future apparent good" for the junta.  Their actions compounded not "the powers of most men, united by consent", but rather compounded powerlessness:  if "riches joined with liberality is power", then control of television broadcasts surely serves to "defend not, but expose men to envy"; if "reputation of love of a man's country, called popularity," is power, then unpopularity surely is the opposite of power; if "reputation of prudence in the conduct of peace and war is power"... need more be prudently said?  

    Instead, Hobbes's conception of power is perhaps the very Maussian gift Klima seeks to uncover (and to contrast with the gift of Derrida):  "For the nature of power is, in this point, like fame, increasing as it proceeds", says Hobbes.  "One can see how if you are really adept at generosity, there is no limit...to the merit that can be made, shared, produced, and returned to you in greater proportions the more you give it away", says Klima.  Indeed, Hobbes's Leviathan is produced through covenant, a giving with only a trust of receipt, but here it is a covenant between a multitude and itself, "so that", in Klima's words, "it is terribly difficult to say who among [the multitude] are the givers and who are the receivers".

    "There is no other kind of economy than gift economy.  There is always a return on any transaction, whether visible or not.  There is nothing outside the gift."  This is not a surrogate or new Leviathan.  Common-wealth, conceived of as a contractual transaction with nothing outside of it (unlike contracts that are valid or invalid by justice of Common-wealth), whereby a "spiritual value" deemed Mortall God is enacted, "is only a clumsy signifier for this kammic effect of generosity so unlike the utilization of things, in the sense that the mode of its production is also its mode of expenditure, and spending is its accumulation."  The freedom to give is not the power of generosity, rather the power of generosity is the gift enacted.  So too the freedom to kill is not sovereign power, rather the power of the sovereign is the covenant of peace.