A republic of rules: procedural arbitrariness and total institutions

Abstract

The modern Republican canon provides a number of rival accounts of domination, mostly sharing a conception of domination as arbitrary power. A key disagreement focuses on the nature of arbitrariness. So – what does it mean for power to be arbitrary? One influential answer is what Frank Lovett calls a ‘procedural’ account: roughly, power is arbitrary when it is unconstrained by effective, common-knowledge rules. Despite their simplicity and initial appeal, in this paper I argue that we should reject such procedural accounts. After giving the best case for procedural arbitrariness and defending it against an intuitive objection, I proceed by examining a set of problem cases, examples of what Erving Goffman called ‘total institutions’ – highly rule-bound, tightly controlled environments. Although it is possible for these institutions to be non-arbitrary in the procedural sense, I argue that we should nevertheless see them as prime examples of domination. Such environments produce a relevantly similar bundle of psychological effects – anxiety, adaptation, and so on – to other paradigm cases of domination. I conclude by stressing the relevance of an analysis of totalising tendencies to a variety of contemporary political problems, and the inadequacy of any conception of domination that cannot accommodate them.