Epigraph: Hans Morganthau asks Hannah Arendt what her political leanings are, “within the contemporary possibilities” (99).
Billy Budd is “moral parable” and “political allegory” (99).
“if, in the novella, monarchical authority repeatedly wins out over popular uprising, Melville’s concern is clearly with the ways in which the currents of revolution and counterrevolution, popular sovereignty and authoritarian order, the violence of radical liberty and the terror of repression, together flow into the broadly speaking Western political culture” (100).
“Billy Budd is finally less the story of the vindication of one side of the other of a given political antagonism than an “inside narrative” of the opening of what would be the era of modern democracy, human rights, and an evolving monarchical mode of government—as well as total war, modern political terror, and the modern security state” (100).
“Billy Budd, Sailor scrutinizes the ideological justifications that allow the violence of the exceptional emergency measure, on either end of the political spectrum, to appear as absolute and irresistible” (101)
“The exceptional (i.e., necessary) measure […] emerges as unexceptional within a transcendent moral framework” (101).
“the dissolution of legal control in the affirmative revolutionary state is an exception that is no exception, the result of an irresistible call from on high” (101).
Melville does not critique cynically, but rather is “fascinated by, and sympathetic to, the experience of being seized by deeply felt moral and political convictions” (102).
“Melville suggests that natural law discourse is inseparable from the exceptional measure of modern security crisis (whether crisis is viewed as the threat posed to the revolutionary rights of man or the threat posed by them)” (102).
Billy’s “violent act” and Vere’s “interpretive decision” stand for the “justice of the revolutionary state” and the “exceptional determination of the application of the rule” (102)—that is, revolution and counterrevolution.
“the sovereign decision [imperative violence] emerges as a call from the presumed moral order and normative universe that cannot be resisted or refused” (102).
Melville “grapples with the inner workings of political judgement, and with the fundamental blurring of sovereignty and subjection, norm and exception, that it seems to entail, in the security emergency of revolution at the dawn of political modernity in the West” (102).
“As a loyal subject of the King, or perhaps as one who has transcended Worley politics, Billy sanctified the monarchical sovereign violence by which he dies. Yet his unself-conscious creation of a unitary will under monarchical order also paradoxically precipitates a popular uprising—an eruption from the realm of nature against the art of monarchical domination” (103).
“The sound of revolution” is “pure nature” or “phusis” while “the sound of its repression” is “the sound of the art and craft […] or techne of counterradical sovereignty” (103).
The aftermath of Billy’s execution is a “nuanced reconstruction of the opposition between revolution and counterrevolution” that “may be read as a figure for the novella as a whole” and as highlighting “a more fundamental tension between alternative traditions of natural law” (103).
Revolution = “ahistorical, prepolitical, quasi-mythic nature” and “inviolate Nature primeval” and “state-of-nature theory” and “the Enlightenment doctrine of natural right” (103).
Counterrevolution = “historical, postpolitical art” (103) and “positive law” and “Stoic and Thomistic ideas of the natural moral order” and “natural jurisprudence […] the ‘inviolate oath’ of the eternal order” (104).
Vere’s argued juxtaposes “obedience to a putatively external natural order” and “his self-made ‘vowed responsibility’” (104). He invokes “Kant’s scheme of sovereign self-legislation” along with “Burkean practical moral thinking” (104). His “effort to justify a violent preemptive measure against popular uprising” is thus “subtly destabilized through this juxtaposition” (104).
The Politics of Pure Nature and the Rights of Man
“Billy is representative of ‘the natural in all men’ […] a figure for ‘nature’ in the sense of an original condition of humanity” (105). This natural state “constitutes the moral ground” of the revolutionary “political art” (105).
These “Natural rights […] are not merely temporally prior to the civil order, but ontologically superior to it” (105).
Melville uses “exegetical theology” to trope Billy as “Adamic man,” as “Paine’s notion of the ‘divine origin of the rights of man at the creation’ […] the ‘origin of man’ is also the ‘origin of his rights’” and therefore, to “unveil these rights” is a “moral imperative […] Billy is not just a figure for ‘natural being’ and ‘the natural in all men,’ but for natural morality” (105).
“The narrator then recasts this Rouaseauvian hypothesis of the corrupting influence of artifice and social convention in terms of Judeo-Christian myth, phusis now identified with the prelapsarian state” (106).
“Billy is emblematic of […] virtues pristine and unadulterated […] exceptionally transmitted from a period prior to Cain’s city and citified man […] pure phusis to such counterconcepts as nomos (“custom or convention”) and techne (“Cain’s city and citified man”)” (106).
“Billy’s violence is the paradoxical outcome of an unconditional moral obligation to assume sovereign freedom in response to the security emergency of the threat posed to nature and the natural […] the political and the sacred, never fully separable in Billy Budd, merge entirely in Billy’s fundamentally exceptional defence of natural “virtue”” (106).
This virtue should be seen as the Robespierrean sense of virtue, the “natural goodness of ‘the people’” (106). Thus, the “reign of virtue” is “preceded by or coterminous with the state of exception” or, the state of exception is “an ethical imperative” (107).
Billy’s virtue is so pure “as to render moot the question of individual will” aboard the Rights-of-Man, “into the state of involuntary general will—a people united in virtue” (108).
“Billy’s virtue is a trope for the underived, imprescriptible natural rights of man themselves, as they are understood to emerge prior to language, agreement, fiat, oath, or action” but in the face of opposition, where “virtue is powerless, it may be backed by the monopolization and channeling of radical popular violence in the name of a unitary political will and in defence of the patrie” (108).
“Billy’s monopolization and implicit moralization of the exercise of revolutionary violence (violence for the sake of the rights of man); his embodiment not just of nature but of a natural virtue that springs forth under necessity as sovereign violence; in short, his performance of legally exceptional and messianic violence as an immediate expression of natural virtue, unitary will, and regeneration and purification—that all of these figurative details register the multiple links between the discourses of political violence, legal exception, and the virtue of the peuple in the revolutionary year II” (108-9).
“Claggart represents pure phusis in the sense of an evil or depravity ‘according to nature’” and an evil that “‘folds itself in the mantle of respectability’ paradoxically suggesting natural corruption at the core of artifice and convention” (109).
“This double, absolute imperative—’I had to say something, and I could only say it with a blow’—is the sign of the unconditional imperative to perform radical moral and political violence in the name of simple nature, natural virtue, and the natural rights of man” (110).
“Billy’s strike indeed not only signifies the unpremeditated revolt of the ‘exceptional virtue’ against the ‘evil nature’ cloaked by convention and artifice, but also constitutes at some level a defence once again of the ‘Imperceptible rights of man,’ as well as the judgement (in the sense of divine verdict) of the radical revolutionary security project rendered upon the counterrevolutionary security project that would contain and control it, and the fleeting suspension or momentary crisis of sovereign power through the annihilation—by what takes the form of a sheer and irresistible force of nature—of the figure of the Bellipotent’s order and security” (110).
“Elevated into a subject empowered to judge in its own cause, the revolutionary actor thereby becomes like a conduit of forces of coercion that the revolutionary world seems to have created anew” (111).
Pragmatism and Obedience
“Vere deliberately orchestrates Billy’s execution […] to forestall the possible radical aftereffects of the crisis of sovereign power that Billy has unwittingly produced. Billy Budd allegories the terroristic suppression of radicalism” (111).
“Unable or unwilling, so Melville’s figurative logical implies, to sustain the crew’s allegiance ‘By force of his mere presence and heroic personality,’ Vere has recourse to an alternative security strategy—the “terror” that yields ‘base subjection’” (111).
Vere is “in fully sympathy […] with the sentiments born of ‘inviolate Nature primeval’” (111)—that is, he is in fully sympathy with Billy, figure of “natural right” and “natural virtue” (112)—but Vere “opposes ‘martial law’ and the ‘King’ to such concepts (112).
“Vere establishes, then, or at any rate upholds, a very particular jurisdiction of praxis, beyond the borders of which lies theoria—enticing in itself, but out of bounds” (112).
Vere is “at his most Burkean” in “his pragmatic rejection of speculative reasoning and his identification of a fundamental incompatibility between ‘Nature primeval’ and the political order.” Vere opposes Nature to the King, to right, through the Burkean idea that “civil society is grounded in a law of ‘convention’ rather than of ‘nature’ and that it functions not to safeguard but to repress the traces of ‘uncovenanted man’” (112).
In the “‘fundamental rules’ of civil society, “no man should be judge in his own cause” but should rather be judged “by a power out of themselves” (112).
Government is “generated solely […] out of practical art and practical knowledge (techne)” (113).
Natural right poses “a drastic threat to the only ‘real rights of men’ […] civil rights, which one gains by abandoning natural rights […] The natural right is not to be secured; the natural right is that which in-secures, that against which the political order must be defended” (113).
Nature and King (law) are separated by the opposition of phusis and techne, but in Burkean philosophy, law is “revelation of Nature in the cosmic sense.” “Nature” is “ made legible in social structures and civil institutions […] The members of the legitimate state in fact ‘receive,’ ‘hold,’ and ‘transmit’ their government and its ‘privileges’ precisely by ‘working after the pattern of nature’ […] Nature in this sense (as opposed to the concept in state-of-nature theory) is therefore the efficient cause of law, the maker and arranger of the civil order, the sovereign power behind the convention that is, as we have seen, otherwise the law of civil society”: all this to say, “Art [artifice, politics] is man’s nature” (113).
“Contract is covenant” and civil society is an expression of the law of nature (114).
“positive law and convention, or nomos, as they emerge in Vere’s rhetoric, can be read as signifying the art or techne that discloses the natural order of things. Where Vere is unBurkean is in his overt sympathy with state-of-nature theory […] Natural law is the discourse through which the imperative of the expedient measure becomes absolute” (114).
“War, as if in place of the present Sovereign” is the “very father of the law” and “is analogous [with] Burke’s ‘law above’” (115).
“In directing the judgment of the court, Vere claims no more than to expel the exception and to sumpbmit himself, according to his ‘vow,’ to a higher, external authority that, like Burke’s “great primeval contract of eternal society,” is equal to the eternal order itself” (116).
Sovereign Self Legislation
“‘The very choice of the conditions of judgement itself constitutes a judgement’” (117).
“Burke’s crucial claim on necessity (“[N]eccesity is no exception to the rule”) actually “holds only because the rule, as always in the space of sovereign exception, has become indistinguishable from its suspension at the moment of sovereign decision or choice. How can one know whether one is choosing or whether necessity has chosen? Whether one has ‘submitted to necessity’ or whether one has exceeded law, reason, and order in the moment of choice . . . ?””
“In short, Vere, like Burke before him, tries to cover over that an act of (sovereign) decision is bound up with the norm, at human decision haunts any natural or divine principle that supposedly lies at the (arbitrary) founding of the political order, and that the unique power of the sovereign to declare where the law does not apply is continuous with the power to declare where it does” (117).
BUT: “Vere’s decision [his “vowed responsibility”] is not externally derived” (117).
“Vere activates what Eve Sedgwich calls a ‘threshold between acts done on the responsibility of the person and acts done in the name of the state, between the official and the unofficial’” (118).
“Vere actually denies his desires or ‘hungers’ [for compassion] […] in a conflation of ‘acts done on the responsibility of the person’ (what we could also call individual “choice”) and ‘acts done in the name of the state’ (“submission”)” (118).
“One must in a sense choose, not just to ‘administer’ the law ‘operating through’ oneself, but to have no choice in the matter” (119).
“Vowed responsibility is he name for an ethical principle and imperative that, in Vere’s argument, is law in itself, law as absolute necessity, transcending the particulars of the situation, individual desires, feelings, and personal motives […] perhaps even an analogy for he determination of pure reason alone […] And this absolutely necessary law is one that Vere gives to himself” (120).
“Billy Budd stages the perpetual recapture of the (decisionist) exception within the (moral) norm” (120).
“Vere’s argument for the necessity of political violence invokes yet complicates the Burkean argument, rejecting moral reasoning from fixed theoretical principles in favour of the pragmatic application of the rule through a submission to the external higher order, but all according to a self-legislated ethical obligation based on the expulsion of pragmatic, contingent, or, as Kant termed them, “pathologically determinable” factors. His argument also invokes and complicates Kant, determining an ethics political obligation (“vowed responsibility”) as strict adherence to duty without reference to subjective desire, but doing so for the purposes of expediency within a particular political and historical situation, and arguably on personal motives” (121).
Vere “attempts to blend the antithetical, if related, natural law idioms of two major, contemporary late-eighteenth century thinkers who were, in their quite different ways, antirevolutionary in outlook” (121).
Conclusion
“The sophisticated ideological fictions that Melville detected behind the justifications for the terrifying political violence of revolution and repression provoked language as tricky and complex, and allegorism as intricate, as anything in his corpus, for he was responding to solutions to security crisis that he knew carried the aura of inevitability and with which he was very far from being at ease” (121).