Abstract
Mika Ojakangas’ book is advertised as ‘a political genealogy of western ethical experience’ and ‘the canny voice from within’ (p. 1). In other words, the author attempts something of a history of the concept of ‘conscience’, understood as an internal ‘voice’ of ethical judgement, from Socrates onwards. The scene is set by an exploration of the role of the idea of ‘inner truth’ in Nazi thought, the congruence between Martin Heidegger's philosophy and his support for a National Socialist re-awakening of responsibility, and Hannah Arendt's ‘nihilistic’ view of conscience and judgement. Ojakangas then goes on to try to demonstrate a view of conscience as the ‘empty’ centre of the ethical and political subject in Western philosophy, drawing on a very wide number of thinkers, including the fathers of the Christian church, Luther, Calvin, Suarez, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Levinas, Derrida and many others. A central aim, the author says following Giorgio Agamben, is to demonstrate a ‘radical continuity’ in Western ethical and political thought, and therefore to rebut the dominant view of rupture and discontinuity characteristic of intellectual history since the 1970s.
Ojakangas does not succeed in this aim. The problem is that he never makes very clear what, precisely, might be involved in the kind of ‘political genealogy’ he wants to write. There is of course mileage in the notion of genealogy in comparison to other kinds of historical writing, such as narrative or conceptual history, but it is hard to see here how a genealogical method succeeds in connecting the disparate material of numerous authors, writing in very distinct political and social contexts. Ojakangas wants to join them up, as is made clear in the conclusion, by the shared commitment to some core concept of the ethico-political subject being born out of a ‘nothingness’ at its heart, a surrendering of its given beliefs, values, and so on to the voice of conscience that allows it to become an autonomous being. He has an easier job showing some such view to be held by a thinker such as Kant, than he does when considering Hobbes and others, who are treated in such summary fashion as to appear unfamiliar. This is not a short book, but to have any chance of succeeding in the lofty aim Ojakangas sets himself requires a much closer analysis of the subjects of the inquiry than he provides. Without this, it fails to convince.