The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership

By Said Faiq and Erica R. Edwards

Do we live in basically orderly societies that occasionally erupt into violent conflict, or do we fail to perceive the constancy of violence and disorder in our societies? In this classic book, originally published in 1980, Cedric J. Robinson contends that our perception of political order is an illusion, maintained in part by Western political and social theorists who depend on the idea of leadership as a basis for describing and prescribing social order.

Using a variety of critical approaches in his analysis, Robinson synthesizes elements of psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, classical and neoclassical political philosophy, and cultural anthropology in order to argue that Western thought on leadership is mythological rather than rational. He then presents examples of historically developed "stateless" societies with social organizations that suggest conceptual alternatives to the ways political order has been conceived in the West. Examining Western thought from the vantage point of a people only marginally integrated into Western institutions and intellectual traditions, Robinson's perspective radically critiques fundamental ideas of leadership and order.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781469628226

Said Faiq

Said Faiq is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the American University of Sharjah, where he is Chair of the Department of English & Translation Studies and Director of the Graduate program in Translation & Interpreting. Prior to this, he taught at the School of Languages, Salford University, UK. He has published widely on (Arabic) translation and cultural studies.

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THE TERMS OF ORDER

The Terms of Order

Political Science and the Myth of Leadership

Cedric J. Robinson

Foreword by Erica R. Edwards

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

© 1980 Cedric J. Robinson

Foreword © 2016 Erica R. Edwards

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Designed and set in Swift Neue LT and Futura by Rebecca Evans.

Manufactured in the United States of America. The University of North

Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robinson, Cedric J., author. | Edwards, Erica R. (Erica Renee), writer of foreword.

Title: The terms of order : political science and the myth of leadership / Cedric J. Robinson ; foreword by Erica R. Edwards.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041085 | ISBN 9781469628219 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469628226 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Political science. | Political leadership.

Classification: LCC JA71 .R59 2016 | DDC 320.01--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041085

Originally published 1980 by State University of New York

For Winston (Cap) Whiteside, grandson of slaves

a man of extraordinary courage and profound understanding

… my grandfather and my first teacher.

Men who do not know what is true of things take care to hold fast to what is certain, so that, if they cannot satisfy their intellects by knowledge (sciencza), their wills at least may reston consciousness (conscienza).

Punishments were called paradeigmata by the Greeks in the same sense in which the Latins called them exempla; that is, exemplary chastisements.—GIAMBATTISTA VICO

Contents

Foreword by Erica R. Edwards

Preface to the First Edition

Acknowledgments 2016

Introduction

1 The Order of Politicality

Democracy and the Political Paradigm

Consciousness of Politicality as Ideology

Authority

Order

2 The Parameters of Leadership

The Leader as Manifest Idea

The Relationship of Political Leadership to Political Authority

The Leader as Deviant

The Conceptual Imprint of the Market Society

The Decision as a Logical-Positivist Event

3 The Question of Rationality

The Quest for the Intelligibility of Mass Movements

Rudolph Sohm

The Irrational as the Psychologic Subconscious

The Irrational as the Psychoanalytic Subconscious

The Historicization of the Analyses of the Subconscious

History as the Subconscious

The Subconscious and Analytic Terror

4 The Messiah and the Metaphor

Concepts of Time

Time and Authority in Weber

The Meaning of Myth

Functional Mythologists

Structural Mythologists

The Mythology of Political Thought

Messianism and Charisma

5 On Anarchism

Anarchy and Anarchism

William Godwin and the Authority of Reason

The Individualists and the Anarcho-Socialists

The Stateless Society

The Ila-Tonga and the Social Authority of Kinship

The Principle of Incompleteness

The Instruction of the Tonga Jokester

6 Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

In 1985 Philadelphia police bombed the Osage Avenue residence of MOVE, a Black radical organization originally known as the Christian Movement for Life, and killed eleven of its members. This was after multiple arrests had been made, 10,000 rounds of ammunition had been unloaded on the home, and the police had resorted to fire hoses and tear gas to drive the residents out of their home. When the resulting fire spread throughout the neighborhood, it left more than 250 people without homes. The mayor of Philadelphia at that time, the man who made the call to bomb the MOVE compound, was the city’s first Black mayor, W. Wilson Goode. That was twenty years after the U.S. Congress had passed the Voting Rights Act, and here was the most gruesome evidence that politics could hardly solve the problems that politics itself had caused. Thirty years later, as the United States watches the administration of its first Black president languish on the shores of the promise of change, the mobilizations of those who might be said to constitute a modern-day motley crew¹ of the dispossessed have thrown into tragic light what was so obviously clear then: the security presumed to rest in the agents of law and order—that is, in government—is a security that destabilizes and voraciously seeks the destruction of the lives, worldviews, and ways of being of those who cling to other forms of safety, other modes of knowing, and other reasons to plan.²

This was the world—is the world—into which Cedric J. Robinson’s first monograph, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, announced its devastating critique of politics and its reorientation of intellectual and social energy toward antipolitical, radical transformation. What we’ve seen in the thirty-five years since SUNY Press first published Terms is that the mythos of leadership, masquerading as order, covers over the most hideous forms of violence against those who interrogate the status of the political both in explicit acts and in their very being. Most recently, the inescapable fact that police force has long embodied and emboldened this mythos has motivated both committed, daily antiracist resistance and provoked the intensification of everyday and spectacular counterinsurgency, from ubiquitous surveillance technology to police shootings and tear-gas canisters lobbed at protestors gathered with hands up or heads down.

The timing of UNC Press’s reissue of this book is fortuitous, and tragically so: the avarice of the Western world powers poses an even greater risk to the vitality of the global majority than it did when The Terms of Order was first published. But, too, the movements of the oppressed to reimagine power itself and to release the globe from the clutches of what H. L. T. Quan calls savage developmentalism gives us great cause to return to this work, which is at once disturbing and inspiriting.³ The Terms of Order is a grand indictment—of discipline and disciplinarity—as well as an act of faith in the truest sense: a deeply invested statement of belief in the power of language, of communal approaches to social organization, and of the rule of the people where the people—from pöbel, that poor mob alluded to in classical literature—is not an elite corps of managers and representatives but rather the rabble, the mob, the motley crew.⁴

Robinson’s The Terms of Order is the first of the five monographs that, together, represent one of the most significant bodies of work in Black studies for scholars of our time. This book, which grew out of Robinson’s Ph.D. thesis, is a critique of the violence that secures the political and an investigation of those forms of life and modes of organizing that might be called antipolitical. Devoted to a piercing genealogy of the political as that grammar which supplies the terms of order in Western societies, Terms is a history of ideas that proceeds in pursuit of an urgent question: why is it that, in spite of the history of antipolitical challenges to the Western political bodies, the political came to mark the limits of thought on what constitutes social cohesion and political organization? Detailing the epistemological, analytical, and metaphysical dimensions of the political, Robinson exposes political science’s role in solidifying the hold of the political paradigm on modern consciousness while translating the antipolitical into an ethical theory and philosophy, that is into forms of idealism (p. 1). Robinson’s history of the political begins with science studies, with Thomas Kuhn’s and Karl Popper’s theories of how knowledge is produced (for Robinson, for example, what Popper defines as myths operate in political science as naturalized assumptions, presumptive generalities) (p. 15). Defining the political as a paradigm, Robinson ties its crystallization in classical political theory (and later, in modern political science) to the function of authority within societies that are structured by the presumption of order. The political, for Robinson, secures the order that rationalizes state power:

It is an ordering principle, distinguishing the lawful or authorized order of things while itself being the origin of the regulation. We associate, then, the political with power, authority, order, law, the state, force and violence—all of these are phenomena which restrict the outcome, deflect the extraneous, limit the relevant forces. We speak of the political as both an instrument for ordering society and that order itself. It is both a general way of acting on things and the consequences which follows having acted upon things. (p. 7)

These are, in effect, the terms of order: authority, power, leadership. If intellectual discourse, and perhaps as importantly, public culture, celebrates the imposition of authority as that which secures order, it imagines leadership as the embodiment of that authority and power as that which is exerted by authority in the name of order. And, scientists argue, the human organism prefers order—the arrangement of patterns into recognizable sequences—to chaos. As normal science⁵ would have it, Robinson writes, we are instructed by ‘simple’ biological mechanisms the truth of order, an order upon which our capacity to survive is dependent; thus social order must consist of integrations, institutions, and patters in order to satisfy the images of the mind and the skills of the brain and eye. And that coherence, the certainty of that coherence in Western political thought, is obtained by one object, political authority (p. 36). But what seems an elemental desire for order, Robinson argues, is actually a function of the scientific knowledge that has proceeded through the discourses of evolution, revolution, incremental integration, and disintegration, all of which are evidence of science’s naturalization of order as the raison d’etre for political authority and for leadership as the practical embodiment of that authority.

In this deconstruction of the terms of order, Robinson exposes political scientists as those intellectual heirs of scientific analyses of change. Like Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the aesthetic as that value and practice which organizes the world around the colonial category of the human, tying the imposition of order to the delivery of opiate chemicals to the brain, Robinson’s unmasking of the political relies on a deconstructionist practice in conversation with linguists and philosophers of language such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Ludwig Wittgenstein, political economists such as Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi, and historians of power such as Michel Foucault and J. G. A. Pocock.⁶ When he discusses the myth of leadership, for example, he discusses how the idea that leadership is necessary for effective social action derives from the myth of the leader as alter to or deviant from the mass. Our ideas of leadership, he explains, owe their coherence to the church, the state, and industry: The mystification of the ruling class of industrial society became the historical and political basis for the mystification of leadership in contemporary Western thought (p. 55). Therefore, the market society motors political authority in Western society, and political authority, in turn, rationalizes an economic order that is, too, presumed to function according to natural laws governing order and social cohesion. Robinson’s deconstruction of the terms and the terminology of order brings what was understood as the linguistic turn in intellectual discourse home to that arrested discipline that he did his doctoral studies in—political science (p. 22).

Terms is an analysis of how power is rationalized and protected by a discipline whose mission it is to study power. Analysts of power, Robinson argues, have approached the analysis of social life through paradigms that are shaped by power and rooted in the objective to reproduce and maintain the order of things. To expose the complicity of the social sciences in reproducing the presumption that political authority produces order, Robinson traces the naturalization of the political, or what he at times calls the political consciousness. Arguing that the presumption of order in political thought owes its coherence to the ideal of political leadership, Robinson describes political leadership not as a natural or inevitable phenomenon central to the organization of the polis or various constituencies within it but rather as a way of comprehending, an epistemological construction through which the political becomes knowable (p. 45). Sociology, political science, history, and anthropology, Robinson argues, stridently substantiate through the plethora of analytical instruments, the metaphysics of leadership.… Leadership is presumed to augur effective social action just as authority is inexorably related to the social order (p. 49). By demonizing chaos, disorder, disintegration, and disorganization, the modern discipline of political science followed up on classical Western political thought’s denial of disorder. If, as Foucault argues, order is that which is given in a glance, an examination, a language, Robinson posits that political thought has played a critical role in creating the essential language of modern power.⁷ For him, the conception of the ancient polis depended on an ordering of things whose irrational basis was refused. The ideal of the polis depended on the refutation of the existence, for example, of irrational numbers: for the ancient Greeks, the polis was an achievement of spatial symmetry, proportionality, and right organization. As Jewish historical experience synthesized this myth of political order with the Christian expression of political society as the form through which the human could achieve transcendental order, order became the rationale not only of power but also of the discipline whose mission it has been to make power legible:

Western historical experience seems to have sufficiently falsified for any deliberate, reasonable intelligence, any presumption of order (if it is to mean anything more than severely momentary regularity); the power-order dyad; participant democracy (a term itself which is an unashamedly needful redundancy since the understanding of democracy has become so expedient); representativeness and constitutionality; yet studies continue to proliferate in deathly replica in attempts to probe the infrastructure of these hypotheses cum presumptions. (p. 14)

The practical consequence of this development of the political consciousness was that concepts like democracy, as Robinson explains in chapter 1, The Order of Politicality, have consecrated political order as a presumption rather than treated it as an object of inquiry. If democracy is rule by the people, the notion of the people is at its base informed by this presumption, and we can witness the way the myth of political order debases our ability to conceive of people power. Primitive Christianity saw the people as unsophisticated and clumsy; Aristotle in turn imagined these as the characteristics of dull, subservient classes; and the Christian doctrine of the Elect so transformed the notion of the people that to speak of the electorate thereafter was to speak not of the people but of the bourgeoisie or of a class set aside from the mass. Liberal political theory’s ingestion of this idea of democracy is clear, as theorists John Locke and John Stuart Mill followed up by presupposing civil society as having its basis in bourgeois man, and contemporary democratic theory remains covered beneath the illusion and structure of mass authority while it masks from view of the ordinary man a political process engineered by infinitely smaller minorities (p. 21). Terms can so be read as a genealogy of contemporary power, one whose aim it is to expose the political as an historical, one temporarily convenient, illusion (p. 215).

Terms was written in chaotic times, when oppressed peoples in the West were becoming more and more intimate with misery and, at the same time, increasingly familiar, and in increasing numbers, with how it felt to occupy power. It was published during the postrevolutionary period of the Cold War, what Jodi Kim refers to as a geopolitical scheme for making sense of the world, a discursive cloak obfuscating a decades-long race war.⁸ The year of its publication, 1980, was a year that solidified the neoliberal assault on the common: in the United States, for example, attacks on unionism and progressivism, on public welfare agencies, on the rural and urban poor populations, and on communities of color paraded under the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan’s victory against soft-on-crime policies and paved the way for the official antiracisms that came to circumscribe and defang discourses of race in the contemporary West.⁹ Five years after Robinson published Terms, James Baldwin would describe Black neighborhoods as territories where citizens of the ghetto have absolutely no way of imposing their will on the city, still less on the state. No one is compelled to hear the needs of a captive population.¹⁰ Throughout the 1970s, deregulation and deindustrialization created chronic unemployment for the working class and the poor; hospitals and clinics, social welfare agencies, and public libraries were downsized and shut down; public education was decimated; and mass imprisonment and police violence were offered as solutions for the social crises ignited by the globalization of capital and the AIDS and drugs epidemics.¹¹ As Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, after the disruptions of 1968, when opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam; anticolonial and antiapartheid movements throughout Asia, Latin America, and Africa; and the U.S. Black Power movements posed a radical challenge to the Western world powers by reinvigorating the connections between First and Third world liberation projects, the state responded to radicalism by distilling radicalism into ‘singular instances of criminality.’¹²

The terms of order were now incorporate and incarcerate; coopt and incapacitate; represent and destroy.¹³ At the same time as the United States and the other Western powers waged war on the global majority—on women, on peoples of color, on the disabled, on queers, on the poor—the exponential growth of the Black middle class in the United States positioned Black people as power brokers and mediators between poor and working-class Black people and the power structure.¹⁴ While Reagan came to bear the hope of White Reconstruction, the rise of a Black petit bourgeoisie with some political power came to represent the possibilities and limits of Black political involvement and the efforts of Black politicians and civic activists to ignite a Second (Black) Reconstruction.¹⁵ In this context, the politicization of Black radicalism placed greater and greater hope in electoral politics. Whereas in 1965, there were fewer than 500 Black elected officials, by 1970 there were 1,469, and by 1985 more than 6,000.¹⁶ In this context of what Cathy Cohen calls advanced marginalization, where the marginalization of racialized groups is dissimulated by the incorporation of a select few into highly visible positions of state power, Black leadership apparatuses have become increasingly hierarchical and decreasingly able to respond to cross-cutting issues affecting their constituencies.¹⁷ The turn to Black electoral activism in the early 1970s thus conflated protest with politics even as it marked a fraught turn from protest to politics. By 1980, as Devin Fergus argues, black radicals and their successors were more likely to petition Congress than blow it up.¹⁸

The hope on all sides of the Reagan-Thatcherite reign of terror was that political leadership could solve the crises that racial capitalism set in motion and, in effect, create order out of the chaos that the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, from the civil rights and Black Power to the antiapartheid struggle, made inevitable and, in some sense, irresistible. The New Right opposed what it saw as liberalism’s feminine weakness with its insistence on strong masculine leadership, while Black public discourse constructed political leadership, too, as the answer to social misery. Robinson summarizes this faith in leadership this way: Greater social cohesion, we are instructed, is dependent upon better leadership. If we understand neoliberal economic policy and the political and social policies that buttressed it as responses to the fact that, as Robinson wrote in 1983, the most formidable apparatus of physical domination and control have disintegrated in the face of the most unlikely oppositions (India, Algeria, Angola, Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Mozambique), we can grasp why Robinson takes up Terms when he does and addresses it, in effect, to those unlikely oppositions. At the same time as political leadership was imagined as the answer to social, economic, and political crises of the post-1960s era, radical movements challenged the hegemony of Western politics. The ongoing eruptions of Third World revolution—in the antiapartheid movement, in radical Black feminism, in indigenous uprisings throughout Latin America—set whole other ways of being in conflict with the emerging new world order. The discipline of political science was a key player in this clash. As H. L. T. Quan analyzes the consolidation of political science as the discipline that rationalized and served as the ideological umbrella under which the United States’ unbridled expansionism and war making could proceed, she sheds light on the context in which Terms articulated its damning critique of the discipline: "Coinciding with the mushrooming of counter-hegemonic protests across the globe, a whole school of thought in the late 1960s and early 1970s devoted its research agenda to the study of change, yet its premise was based on an idea against change. This antidemocratic intelligentsia advocated the notion that, without order and institutionalization, a society would not develop."¹⁹ If political science traded democracy for order, American academics’ theories of world politics were critical in providing the ideographical language for the Cold War–era global war against insurgency.

In these chaotic times, Terms troubles the idea that what we need is better leadership. The myth of leadership, the presumption that leadership secures political order, which in turn secures social order, is a product not only of market society but of the Western tradition of political philosophy that emerged out of and rationalized the market society. Charting the emergence of political philosophy and its formalization in the academic discipline of political science, Robinson relentlessly exposes the massive blind spots that are constitutive of political consciousness, which he promises in his preface that he intend[s] to abuse.²⁰ Terms documents the momentous shift of the late 1970s and early 1980s by offering a treatise on what constitutes the political at the very moment in which the political was projected as the arena of solutions rather than crises. And Robinson pursues his analysis by way of a devastating critique of political scientists: he argues in the preface that that branch of the academic industry that has marked as its special province the explication of social organization has effectively ignored both the disruptive character of our times and the fundamental nature of social disorder (xi). While Robinson aims this critique at political scientists and political philosophers in particular, Terms indicts the whole of Western social science. Social scientists, Robinson argues, persist in the delusion that, beneath the chaos, ordered systems reign administered by stable institutions (xi). Exposing the fundamental instability of the Western order, and then going on to write what Fred Moten calls this amazing and beautiful ode to disorder, Robinson painstakingly dismantles the assumptions that found political science, academic social science, Western statecraft, and the very idea of the political.²¹

We should understand Terms, though, not only as a critique of political science but also as a lens through which we can grasp Robinson’s generative interventions in Black studies during these chaotic times. What could it have meant to be trained in the antipolitical tradition of Black liberation and, at the same time, labor under, or against, the aegis of the discipline of political science?²² For Robinson, it meant a rejection of what he called in 1980 Black scholasticism, a way of pursuing academic work that reproduces the terms of order, a way of compromising with Western empiricism’s standards of facticity that would no doubt produce ill-gotten rewards. Black scholasticism, Robinson argues, is the debasement of intellectual labor:

It corrects the facticity defined and determined by theories of history antithetic to the evolution of Black people. It contributes to the ideological traditions of a civilization whose raison d’être is violence, domination, and exploitation. Black scholasticism does not challenge theft but attempts to deflect it. (And here I am referring to thefts of consciousness as well as thefts of labor, life, and material well-being.) The result, I would presume, is an honored position for Black thieves.²³

In place of such collusion in the theft of Black being, Robinson argues that the task of the Black scholar is a new philosophy and a new theory of history. African peoples, he instructs, must be accounted for, and such reckoning can only be done authentically in our own terms.²⁴

Robinson of course has given us definitive examples of this new philosophy and new theory of history. At the end of his landmark 1983 magnum opus, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, for example, Robinson leaves us with a profoundly prescient statement about Black people and the new world order. Diagnosing the degenerating mechanism of Western culture, he writes: Physically and ideologically … African peoples bridge the decline of one world order and the eruption (we may surmise) of another. It is a frightful and uncertain space of being. If we are to survive, we most take nothing that is dead and choose wisely from among the dying.²⁵ Robinson’s work across his monographs—The Terms of Order, Black Marxism, Black Movements in America, An Anthropology of Marxism, and Forgeries of Memory and Meaning—has been to invite us into this frightful and uncertain place of being. It has persistently called attention to the vulnerabilities within the Western world powers and, at the same time, pointed to the ways that peoples of color, particularly those with African ancestry, pose an imminent threat to the West and generate alternative worldviews and ways of being. Throughout, Robinson has attempted to create the very terms within which Black radicalism can be grasped. As Avery Gordon notes in her preface to Robinson’s fourth monograph, An Anthropology of Marxism: "If historical materialism was unable to understand Black radicalism’s struggle, consciousness, and truth on ‘its own terms,’ but only able to receive it as ‘merely an opposition to capitalist organization,’ then Black Marxism’s greatest contribution is to have established this radical tradition’s distinction and authority.²⁶ Indeed, from all sides—historical analysis, political philosophy, cultural history, economics—Robinson has hastened after a singular truth: that the Black Radical Tradition is not simply the dialectical antithesis of capitalism or the blind spot of those movements that have posed a challenge to capitalism, such as Marxism, but, in Gordon’s words, the living and breathing entity that stands in the place blinded from view."²⁷

Black Marxism, the text for which Robinson is perhaps best known, is about the development of racial capitalism and about the preservation of those lifeworlds that preceded racial capitalism in the movements of the Black Radical Tradition. In Black Marxism, Robinson argues that race is not a function of capitalist modernity but rather that the racial classifications upon which capital depends precede capitalism. Black Marxism is a magisterial history of race. Robinson returns to the historicity of race in his most recent monograph, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War I (2007), a materialist history of the American film industry in which Robinson begins with the argument that racial regimes are commonly masqueraded as natural orderings…. Yet they are actually contrivances, designed and delegated by interested cultural and social powers with the wherewithal sufficient to commission their imaginings, manufacture, and maintenance.²⁸ If racial regimes are fabrications of Western order, the Black Radical Tradition is the history of a whole other way of being.

This, then, is Robinson’s method: to carefully excavate the mechanisms of power and to just as meticulously, and with a singular determination that I think can only be called faith, detail the radical epistemologies and ontologies that those mechanisms have been erected to restrain.²⁹ Central in each of these treatments is the metaphysical. In Black Marxism, Robinson argues that the Black radical tradition is a collective consciousness informed by the history of liberation struggles and spurred by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.³⁰ Its focus, Robinson writes, was always on the structures of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material.³¹ If the Black radical tradition was, as in Robinson’s words, more charismatic than political, it was because African captives were more likely to devise metaphysical systems that turned inward: not toward the experience of or the destruction of the plantation but toward a total rejection of [the captives’] lot. Or it was because Black radical thinkers of the twentieth century cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture.³² Likewise, in An Anthropology of Marxism, where Robinson excavates the histories of utopian socialism that preceded and exceeded Marxism, he writes that Marx and Engels dislodged a pre-Marxian socialist ethic rooted in the awareness that people were ‘divine agents’ for the fractious and weaker allegiances of class. Avery Gordon reads Robinson’s formulation of divine agency as a move to destigmatize the utopian—as he does earlier in Terms when he recovers the antipolitical from charges of naive idealism—and to measure our freedom less by what subordinates us and more by what we are capable of divining.³³ In his way of positioning Black social life through the history of radical metaphysics, Robinson ends his 1997 book Black Movements in America with a statement of faith in the Black religious denominations as those institutions whose resilient communitarianism or militant communitarianism make it possible that the next social movement will obtain that distant land, perhaps even transforming America with it.³⁴ As H. L. T. Quan and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard insist, the faith that so powerfully motors Robinson’s method also motivates his work as a teacher and mentor: "His commitment to a ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ reflects incredible investment and care in students, public officials, and friends in order to constantly re-baptize them with the most profound sense of their own capacity to produce knowledge and creative genius. This reflects, they argue, how Robinson so persistently marks the ways that we are salvageable and that the markers of our worth are not proscribed by the conditions that create the status of observable and quantifiable misery."³⁵

Given Robinson’s interest in and active cultivation of the possibility of conceiving other forms of survival, of intimacy, and of human life—modes of living based in the surreal, in the rejection of the promises of the West, in the power to divine—it makes sense that Terms mobilizes what Robinson calls the countersciences to effect a turn away from the authority that secures the political and toward the authority of prophetic collectivity or of kinship.³⁶ And if this book defamiliarizes the political as the language of Western power, it also, like Robinson’s other work, draws attention to that which the political by necessity obscures. To return to the myth of leadership that is at the root of the paradigm of the political, for example, Robinson is more interested in how political science unknows the metaphysics of leadership and followership than he is in that discipline’s myth. First, Terms shows how political science, along with the social sciences of sociology, history, and social psychology, has historically viewed leadership, again, through the prism of alterity: the leader, rare, implicitly alien (p. 60), is set apart from the mass as he is gifted with extraordinary qualities. Political science sees political leadership as the center of rational political action: the leader gives to the situation a definition and is capable of identifying a problem and presenting a solution; he symbolizes state power and he brings rationality to the situation (p. 41). If this is so, political leadership is, importantly, an analytic or epistemology that rests on two fallacies: (1) that leadership is necessary for achieving order; and (2) that hierarchy, based in the leader’s rare excellence and natural superiority, is itself excellent and rational.

For Robinson, not even the metaphysicians—the social psychologists, the psychoanalysts, the sociologists of religion—have been able to break with the paradigm of political order because, as they attempted to analyze how mass movements cohered, they, too, presumed that it would be consequent to what lay on top (p. 105). For Max Weber, for example, the leader was psychopathic: he was the embodiment of that disorder which necessarily gave rise to a more harmonious, more just society. In Weber’s work, charisma is synonymous with political authority. For Robinson, in contrast, the charismatic leader might be understood as the expression of a people focused onto one of their members, that is, as the responsive instrument of rather than leader of a people. And contrary to Weber’s view that charismatic authority is the most total dominance of a people by a single individual, it becomes the most pure form of a people’s authority over themselves.³⁷ So charismatic leadership is not a question of authority but rather a question of how the relationship between a leader and his or her followers demands the submission of the leader to the demand that it become the vehicle of a collective, and thus embodied, identity (p. 150). I have elsewhere referred to this prophetic collectivity as the charismata: the gifts of the faithful conferred upon the many rather than upon one gifted spokesman.³⁸ This, for Robinson, is a relationship of liberation, not domination.

Robinson exposes the myth of leadership at the core of conceptualizations of political authority and, therefore, foundational for Western power’s development under the guise of order, and he goes on to explore the alternatives to political leadership and details those alternative authorities that are possible within social communities organized by their antipolitical commitments to an ecology of care and liberation (p. 69). Here he compares the tradition of anarchism that is derivative of Western power to that antipolitical tradition that survives in certain African societies—particularly the Ila-Tonga, an agrarian, Bantu-speaking people living in Zambia—who have managed to survive as communities without the hierarchies of political authority. Because those rational anarchists like Godwin and those individualists and socialists like Stirner, Nechayev, Nietzsche, Marx, and Camus constructed their vision of society in stark opposition to the European political order, they "had failed to free themselves, to disengage meaningfully from the existential boundaries and force of