Plan and Council: Genealogies of Calculation, Organization, and Transvaluation

Representation and Its Discontents: The Council as Concrete Utopia Oskar Negt has memorably characterized workers’ councils as “the concrete utopia of the twentieth century.”28 Indeed, the council form is a utopia of concretion in that it rejects the politics of what has been termed abstract representation. The historian Paul Friedland uses this term to characterize the concept of political representation developed during the French Revolution by Abbé Sieyès, in contradistinction to corporational representation under the Ancien Régime.29 Based on a protosociological account of the division of labor in modern societies, Sieyès argued that politics, too, was best left to the specialists, to professional politicians, so the role of “the people” should to be reduced to elections. Direct democracy was anathema.30 To constitute the feudal Estates General, the representatives of the three estates (nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie) were selected in local meetings during which the delegates were also given a binding cahier with agreed-on political positions.31 Precisely this mandat impératif was scuppered in modern parliamentary democracy—hence the familiar sight of politicians forgetting about their election promises once in office. In 1818, the German reactionary romantic Adam Müller defended the feudal society of estates as an “organic state,” pitting this politico-aesthetic ideal against the “newfangled head-, souland money-representation,” which he considered a dangerous French innovation.32 Leftists, too, attacked abstract representation. As Jonathan Beecher writes in his biography of Charles Fourier, “One of the most striking intellectual developments of the postrevolutionary period in Europe was the growth of interest in groups and communities, both as constituents of society and as influences on individual personality and behavior.”33 Reacting to “the destruction of parish, guild, and other primary groups during the French Revolution,” reactionary and progressive thinkers alike broke with the eighteenth century’s “atomistic conception of society as a network of specific and willed relationships entered into by free, autonomous and rational individuals.”34 Marx himself, in his early essay on the “Jewish Question,” homed in on the contradiction between the “living individual,” as a social and economic (as well as religious) subject, and the abstract citoyen or citizen. If the living individual