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Related Content: Balfour and Newbold (PAR September/October 2016)

This paper examines a speech, "Winning the Cultural War," that Charlton Heston gave to the Harvard University Law Forum in February 1999. Several years into the Democratic policies and gun control measures of the Clinton administration, Heston's Right-leaning speech critiqued the limitation of personal freedom and the national obsession with political correctness. While on the surface Heston's speech reads (and probably sounded) inspirational and well-structured, it lacks the depth and clarity to spur long-lasting and specific change. Heston uses his image as an actor and as president of the NRA, as well as anecdotes and attempts at humor, to paint himself as a down-to-earth fatherly or professorial figure. He seems to hope and ask for a specific change, but his speech leaves a lot of room for (mis)interpretation.

I propose a theory of domination derived from republican political theory that is in contrast to the neo-republican theory of domination as arbitrary interference and domination as dependence. I suggest that, drawing on of the writings of Machiavelli and Rousseau, we can see two faces of domination that come together to inform social relations. One type of domination is extractive dominance where agents are able to derive surplus benefit from another individual, group, or collective resource, natural or human. Another is what I call constitutive domination where the norms, institutions, and values of the community shape the rationality of subjects to accept forms of power and social relations and collective goals as legitimate forms of authority. Each of these make up two faces of a broader theory of social domination that is more concrete and politically compelling than that put forth by contemporary neo-republican theory. I argue that this understanding of domination should be seen as a kind of 'radical republicanism' where the centrality of asymmetrical power relations are placed at the centre of all political concerns. I end by considering the relevance of the common interest as a central means by which to judge the existence of these kinds of domination as well as establish a convincing evaluative criteria for critical judgment.

This article provides a reconstruction of the concept of false consciousness seen as defective forms of reasoning that derive from particular forms of socialization. In contrast to the traditional understanding of the concept, I suggest that it is a state of accepting the value patterns and cognitive styles of thinking generated by others, particularly by forms of institutional norms and cultural patterns of activity that can deform critical-cognitive capacities. As a result, false consciousness is a phenomenon linked to questions of power since it is the very means by which groups come to submit themselves to the interests of others, in particular the ability of an elite to be able to actively distract subordinates from questioning the basis of their social relations with one another. False consciousness is therefore recast here as a pathology of subjective cognitive and moral reasoning faculties brought on by particular social-cultural forces within administrative-capitalist society.