The Virtues of Exit: On Resistance and Quitting Politics

By Jennet Kirkpatrick

Successful democracies rely on an active citizenry. They require citizens to participate by voting, serving on juries, and running for office. But what happens when those citizens purposefully opt out of politics? Exit—the act of leaving—is often thought of as purely instinctual, a part of the human "fight or flight" response, or, alternatively, motivated by an antiparticipatory, self-centered impulse. However, in this eye-opening book, Jennet Kirkpatrick argues that the concept of exit deserves closer scrutiny. She names and examines several examples of political withdrawal, from Thoreau decamping to Walden to slaves fleeing to the North before the Civil War. In doing so, Kirkpatrick not only explores what happens when people make the decision to remove themselves but also expands our understanding of exit as a political act, illustrating how political systems change in the aftermath of actual or threatened departure. Moreover, she reframes the decision to refuse to play along—whether as a fugitive slave, a dissident who is exiled but whose influence remains, or a government in exile—as one that shapes political discourse, historically and today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469635408

Jennet Kirkpatrick

Jennet Kirkpatrick is associate professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University.

Book preview

The Virtues of Exit

The Virtues of Exit

On Resistance and Quitting Politics

JENNET KIRKPATRICK

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

© 2017 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Utopia by Westchester Publishing Services

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: Kirkpatrick, Jennet, 1970– author.

Title: The virtues of exit : on resistance and quitting politics / Jennet Kirkpatrick.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2017]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017015697| ISBN 9781469635385 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469635392 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469635408 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dissenters—Political aspects. | Separation (Psychology)—Political aspects. | Political participation. | Government, Resistance to. | Exiles.

Classification: LCC JC328.3 .K47 2017 | DDC 303.6/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015697

Chapter 1 was previously published in a different form as "Exit out of Athens? Migration and Obligation in Plato’s Crito," Political Theory 43, no. 3 (June 2015): 356–79. Chapter 2 was previously published in a different form as Walking Away with Thoreau: The Pleasures and Risks of Exit, American Political Thought 5, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 446–66. Both are used here with permission.

For Dan Silverman

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION What Is Exit?

1 The Argument against Exit

Plato’s Crito

2 Expressive Exit

Thoreau

3 Exit and Solidarity

Fugitive Slave Narratives

4 Resistant Exits

Political Exiles

CONCLUSION Exodus

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

A friend pointed out that I experienced quite a bit of exit in my own life while working on this book. This is certainly true, and in many ways this is a personal book. It arose from a concern for how to walk away from fellow activists to whom I felt a deep obligation and responsibility. My sense of duty urged me to stay and work for change on the inside, while other equally compelling commitments pointed toward leaving. Haunted by this situation, I did what scholars have done for centuries: I looked for understanding in great political texts, and I sought insight in the lives of political activists and exiles. I wanted to understand the dilemma of exit in a more universal way, not just as I had experienced it, and I wanted to learn about different approaches to resolving it. What I discovered will, I hope, be meaningful to others who feel torn by the prospect of exit because they feel the full weight of their political obligations.

Lars Rensmann has been a constant intellectual companion throughout the writing of this book, and my conversations with him have been one of the best parts of writing it. From start to finish, Lars has given me good advice, some of which I had the wisdom to take, and he has renewed my confidence in this intellectual endeavor. Jim Morone, Suzi Dovi, Don Herzog, and Terry Ball closely read sections of the book and offered crucial ideas, references, and cautions. It has been a great intellectual pleasure to talk and learn from them. I owe a special debt to Dan Silverman, who encouraged me to write about exit from the perspective of a political theorist. Dan’s enthusiasm for the project encouraged me greatly—I’m not sure I would have written this book without it.

Chapters of the book were presented at seminars at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of Virginia; Arizona State University; and the University of Michigan. I profited from the questions raised by Lawrie Balfour, Ben Barber, Paige Digeser, Lisa Disch, Mary Gallagher, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Mika LaVaque-Manty, Andrew Norris, Jennifer Rubenstein, Arlene Saxonhouse, and Stephen White. Several scholars went out of their way to initiate an intellectual exchange about exit, including Josh Cherniss, Marianne Constable, Brian Garston, Dean Grodzins, Alan Kahan, Russell Muirhead, Nancy Rosenblum, Andy Sabl, Kim Lane Scheppele, Matt Simonton, Nicholas Smith, Jack Turner, Mark Warren, Mark Yellen, and Alex Zakaras. I am grateful for their generosity, which was made all the more special because it was spontaneous. Robert S. Taylor’s Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought (2017) appeared too late for me to cite it here, but I did read and learn from it.

I have been a professor at Arizona State University for four years now, and I feel fortunate to have found a supportive and collegial intellectual home. My political theory colleagues Terry Ball, Jack Crittenden, Tara Lennon, Amit Ron, and Avital Simhony have been unfailingly generous. I have also benefited from discussions with Kim Fridkin, Magda Hinojosa, Miki Kittilson, Will Moore, and Carolyn Warner. Also in Arizona, Rabbi John Linder and the lively participants in Temple Solel’s Torah study reminded me of the importance of Exodus, as well as the multiple ways that it can be read.

At the University of North Carolina Press, Mark Simpson-Vos and Lucas Church made this a better book. I am grateful, too, for Joe Parsons’s enthusiastic support. An early version of chapter 1 appeared in Political Theory, while chapter 2 appeared in American Political Thought. They are reprinted here with the kind permission of these journals.

The Virtues of Exit

INTRODUCTION

What Is Exit?

Leaving has long been a part of the human experience. Early texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, and the biblical story of Exodus tell of a heroic individual or people who depart from their native lands on an epic journey of hardship, loss, discovery, and triumph. Though these tales have been with us for some time, the study of leaving and its relation to politics is comparatively new. In the early twentieth century, Walter Bradford Cannon argued that fleeing was a primal, physiological reaction when confronted with a perceived threat, the fight-or-flight response. The Holocaust—an existential threat more calamitous than anything Cannon could have imagined—exposed the need to leave a country when faced with mass violence. Numerous stories of escape and failed escape from Nazi Germany reveal that in some political contexts, leaving is quite simply the only way to survive.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Albert Hirschman argued that exit was a fundamental political concept and that, along with voice and loyalty, it explained political and economic change. Hirschman elevated exit, giving it a more positive, productive character. For Hirschman, individuals exited by choice, not because of fear, when they confronted a failing polity, organization, product, or public good. Perceiving failure, negligence, or a breakdown, rational individuals took themselves or their business elsewhere; they voted with their feet. In the early twenty-first century, talk of exit has broken free of academic circles. Debates about globalization and porous national borders, the so-called Brexit of Great Britain from the European Union, the problem of the brain drain, and the migrant and refugee crisis in Europe reveal popular concern about exit in our contemporary world.

This brief history suggests that though departing has long been a part of human history, exit is a fairly new political concept. Leaving is not just something we do these days; it is something we study for insight into politics. Taking the long view of Western political history, the minting of a new political concept, while exciting, is not unfamiliar. Political concepts come and go, and—as with slang—new terms rise to the fore while others fade into the background. Concepts such as rights, the social contract, and totalitarianism have not always been with us; rather, they originated at particular points in history and gained prominence because of their capacity to explain the social world. Concepts also foster sharp disagreement about what they mean. We do not have just one concept of the social contract but conflicting ideas of it from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. There is good reason for these strong differences because, in addition to describing the social world, concepts shape our shared political lives. How we conceive of rights, the social contract, or totalitarianism matters. A society aspiring to Hobbes’s notion of the social contract will look quite different from one fascinated with Rousseau’s vision, and an erroneous idea of totalitarianism can lead to inadequate measures to halt its progress.

An odd thing about exit is that it has not sparked these sorts of debates or disagreements about what it means. Indeed, just the opposite is true. If, as songwriter Paul Simon memorably put it, there must be fifty ways to leave your lover, there seems to be only one way to exit: cut ties completely from the political organization by walking away. Though rational choice theorists, scholars of American politics, and comparative political scientists have studied exit extensively, the dominant works tend to assume that exit is a uniform, uncomplicated action. This straightforward understanding of exit makes it amenable to quantitative studies and rational choice models because departures can be coded as either a 1 or a 0, or they can be represented in an equation by an x or a y. Political theorists—who, as a group, tend to be interested in conceptual distinctions—have generally adopted a uniform view of exit as well. Much of the debate within political theory has centered on whether exit is a right and, if so, how far it ought to be extended and to whom. The action at the center of the discussion, exit, has not garnered much attention.

One possible explanation for this agreement is that leaving a political organization is, in truth, a simple, one-dimensional action that can be done in one way. A straightforward deed would be accurately reflected as an uncomplicated idea, and vice versa. We might still object to a lack of debate about exit on normative grounds—that is, that the single, dominant notion of exit could be shaping our shared political lives in detrimental ways—but there would not be a problem in the term’s capacity to explain the political world. In addition, we might conclude that while some concepts are subject to debate (the social contract or rights), not all are. Some political concepts might yield multiple definitions and understandings, while others do not.

There is reason to pause at the simple-action, simple-concept explanation, however. As the brief history of leaving shows, the act has been understood in different ways in the past. Ancient stories draw attention to the hardship and loss entailed in leaving, while contemporary scholars tend to see it in a more positive light—as an understandable, even rational response to a disagreeable or threatening situation. Even the interpretations of the ancient tales of leaving have shifted over time, and narratives like Exodus have proven to be remarkably protean in different political contexts.¹

This history indicates that there are more ways to think about exit and its relationship to politics than are apparent in the current political science scholarship. A first step to seeing the limitations of this literature is to look more carefully at the current, agreed-upon notion of exit. What are the main attributes of this dominant, existing conception of exit? What does it look like? What are its general characteristics?

The Conventional View of Exit in Political Science

In political science, the foundational text on exit is Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, which starts with a customer who is unhappy with a product or service.² Hirschman argues that there are two broad courses of action that a dissatisfied consumer can take: (1) the consumer can express displeasure to the company through the use of voice, and (2) the consumer can exit by switching products or service providers. The third term, loyalty, influences the choice that will be made: high loyalty leads to voice, whereas low loyalty encourages exit.³

Hirschman notes that political scientists tend to focus on voice, or the attempts either to appeal to a higher authority with the intention of forcing a change in management or to use various types of actions and protests, including those intended to mobilize public opinion.⁴ In contrast, exit involves withdrawing from an organization. Exit causes "revenues to drop,

[and]

membership

[to]

decline; thus, it impels management to search for ways and means to correct whatever faults have led to exit."⁵ Hirschman is primarily interested in the relationship between exit and the decision making of those in power, and he explores how exit might impel leaders in business and politics to make different decisions. He understands exit as a means to encourage decision makers to be responsive. It is, in short, a tool to pressure the decision-making process. Much of the significant and influential work on exit follows Hirschman in adopting this focus on decision making.⁶

It is common to think of exit in relation to physicality and movement—that is, exit is often thought of entailing a physical departure from one material, political, or legal space to another. Physical exit can occur on two basic levels:

Physical exit (or exile) from a country. This kind of exit consists of physical movement from one distinct juridical territory to another.

Physical exit from within a country. In this exit, individuals or groups migrate within a country, moving from one location to another (e.g., the Tiebout framework).

As Hirschman defined it, an exit can occur without a physical departure or movement from one political space to another. Consider, for instance, Hirschman’s foundational example: a consumer who stops buying a firm’s products. Switching from Brand A to Brand B does not entail any sort of physical movement, but it is an exit for Hirschman nonetheless. In terms of politics, good examples of nonphysical exits include resigning from office; leaving a political party; or opting out of a public good, such as public education or vaccines. Exit also takes on a metaphorical dimension at some points in Hirschman’s text. For instance, he frames the 1960s ‘cop-out’ movement of groups like the hippies and the passing of Jews and African Americans as exits.⁷

A way to elaborate a bit more on the nonphysical aspect of exit is to compare it to travel. A traveler goes on a physical journey, a temporary excursion that typically has a fixed beginning and end and will cover a particular geographic route or area. Travel is physical, and a traveler typically knows when she or he will return. Moreover, travel is not a signal of discontent. In terms of politics, it is generally inoffensive and unobjectionable. Exit has more of an edge to it, however. It reveals an objection, and it can be objectionable.

We do not tend to think of travel or movement as antipolitical, yet exit has been described in this way from its start. Exit denotes walking away, separating, or alienating oneself from organizations, and it achieves change through disassociation and the severing of ties. In this respect, exit has been conceived as the opposite of political participation and engagement (in Hirschman’s nomenclature, voice), which attempt to halt decline through involvement within the organization itself and depend on interacting with other political actors. Exit can have effects on political organizations by drawing attention to their decline and prompting their reformation. But, as currently conceived, exit is not political in and of itself. It is seen as a tool that can be applied to political organizations (as well as economic firms, religious groups, medical institutions, and so on) and can change them.⁸ Exit’s core characteristics—detachment, disassociation, and estrangement—are often viewed as oppositional to political participation.

Contemporary Political Theory and Exit

Though Hirschman generally avoided discussion of whether exit is a right, some political theorists have taken up this issue, considering whether exit is an individual right that enables personal liberty and autonomy.⁹ Much of the theoretical work on exit has centered on how a liberal state should respond to illiberal groups within it. Political theorists are divided on this issue, and they disagree about the proper role of the state in dealing with illiberal comprehensive communities, especially as it relates to vulnerable minorities within these groups, the so-called minorities within minorities.¹⁰ Despite these differences, theorists on both sides of this debate tend to agree that it is essential that members of illiberal groups have the capacity to exit from them and join the mainstream liberal society whenever they so choose.¹¹ Yet this consensus about the necessity of exit has created an unanticipated problem in terms of exit itself: the concept of exit in this debate has been presumed, not examined. The dominant, agreed-upon view that exit is crucial has unwittingly diminished exit itself, rendering it in limited and one-dimensional terms.

To understand the consensus about the need for exit, it is essential to begin with the question that has prompted it: What should the liberal state do in response to illiberal comprehensive communities in their midst? To give one example, how ought a liberal state approach a minority group like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), a dissenting religious sect that adheres to a polygamist theology long abandoned by the mainstream Mormon Church?¹² A central issue has been whether a liberal state should tolerate or protect an internal group, like the FLDS, in the name of pluralism and diversity, or whether it should intervene in order to protect vulnerable members of those communities, such as women and children. If intervention to protect minorities within minorities is permissible, when is it warranted?¹³

Some multicultural theorists have argued that this problem is adequately addressed if the liberal state ensures a voluntary right of exit—that is, all members of an illiberal, comprehensive community should be permitted the opportunity to leave it and cannot be forced or compelled to remain members.