A few months ago a friend sent me the following lines by the Italian comedian Beppe Grillo: ‘For a long time Italians have been in a [political] coma. We are always in search of the lesser evil. In fact, we should construct a monument for the “lesser evil”. A huge monument in the middle of Rome’.
If anyone ever asked me to build such a monument, in Rome or elsewhere, I would probably look for a high hill and place the digits 665 (like giant Hollywood letters) overlooking the city centre—a notch less than evil, a counter displaying the fact that our society has become a calculating machine.
Indeed the principle of the ‘lesser evil’ has become so prominently identified with the ethico-political foundations of liberal capitalism (and its political system that we like to call democracy) and so firmly naturalized in common speech that it seem to have become the ‘new good’. Commenting upon the comparative merits of democracy shortly after the end of World War II, Winston Churchill may have inaugurated this trend when he sardonically noted that ‘it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’. Since then, and increasingly since Soviet (and Third World) horrors began to be exposed a decade into the cold war, the projection of totalitarian horrors has been mobilized, beyond a frank concern for individual rights, to stop all search for a different form of politics. It was ultimately the mediated spectre of these atrocities that compelled the public to constantly weigh liberal disorder against the worse evils of totalitarian tyranny in favour of the former. In comparison to the horrors of totalitarianism, this inegalitarian and unjust regime was presented as a responsible ‘lesser evil’, ‘the best of all worlds possible’, and as a necessary barrier against regress to bloody dictatorships.1 This multifaceted political shift within the left was largely promoted by post-1968 western ‘radicals’ who switched the focus of their political engagement to criticizing left-totalitarian regimes across the second and third worlds, while arguing for the autonomy of civil society at home. The notions espoused by these largely French nouveaux philosophes—‘let’s hold on to what we have, because there is worse elsewhere’—demonstrated that for liberals ‘evil’ was always somewhere else, lurking behind any attempt at political transformation.2
Hannah Arendt, the thinker who has done most to analyze and compare the political systems of totalitarianism, and whose work The Origins of Totalitarianism was most often mobilized in relation to this ‘antitotalitarian’ shift in the left, saw the principle of the ‘lesser evil’ strongly at work, not only in the ‘making-do’ of liberal capitalism but in the way the totalitarian system tended to camouflage its radical actions from those yet to be initiated—the majority of bourgeois subjects needed to run things until a ‘new man’ was created. Writing about the collaboration and cooperation of ordinary Germans with the Nazi regime, mainly by those employed in the Civil Service (but also by the Jewish councils set up by the Nazis), she showed how the argument for the lesser evil has become one of the most important ‘mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and crimes’. She explained that ‘acceptance of lesser evils [has been] consciously used in conditioning government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such’, to the degree that ‘those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil’.3 Against all those who stayed in Germany to make things better from within, against all acts of collaboration, especially those undertaken for the sake of the moderation of harm, against the argument that the ‘lesser evil’ of collaboration with brutal regimes is acceptable if it might prevent or divert greater evils, she called for individual disobedience and collective disorder. Participation, she insisted, communicated consent; moreover, it handed support to the oppressor. When nothing else was possible, to do nothing was the last effective form of resistance, and the practical consequences of refusal were nearly always better if enough people refused. In her essay ‘The Eggs Speak Up’, a sarcastic reference to Stalin’s dictum that ‘you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs’, Arendt pleaded for ‘a radical negation of the whole concept of lesser evil in politics’.4
In Arendt’s writings the principle of the lesser evil is presented as a pragmatic compromise and frequent exception to ‘common ethics’, to the degree that it has become the most common justification for the very notion of exception. It is in this seemingly pragmatic approach that the principle of the lesser evil naturalizes crimes and other forms of injustice, acting as a main argument in the state’s regime of justification—people and regimes tend to invent retroactive explanations for atrocious actions. Furthermore, Arendt saw the calculation and measurement of goods and evils, like statistical trends in the social sciences, as diminishing the value of personal responsibility. Once ethics is seen in the form of an economy, when issues are put into numbers, they can be changed and turned around endlessly. And lastly, the terms of the lesser evil are most often posed by and from the point of view of power. Using a formulation she conceived with Mary McCarthy, Arendt explained: ‘If somebody points a gun at you and says, “Kill your friend or I will kill you”, he is tempting you, that is all’.5
It is important to note that when speaking about the political options available to people living in the postwar western states, Arendt was much less damning about the principle of the ‘lesser evil’. She implied that these options did include various forms of compromise and measure.6 In other words, she described the lesser evil as a false dilemma when faced with a totalitarian regime that itself has no concept of the lesser evil (totalitarians simply camouflage their acts as lesser evils), but as a part of the very structure of politics in the context of Cold War western democracies. Whether we accept them or not, the distinctions she implied point to a possible differend within the term, and could lead us to open up the concept further. The various historical and philosophical uses of the lesser evil idiom demonstrate that it meant different things to different people at different periods in different situations. There is a difference between masking an act of perpetration as a ‘lesser evil’, choosing the lesser of two evils and trying to make the world a little less evil while still pursuing a cause.
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I would like to divide the use of the idiom ‘lesser evil’ into two—particular and general. The particular case is presented to a person or to a group of people as a dilemma between two (or more) bad options in a given situation. The general case is the structuring principle in an economy of ethical calculations, manifested in attempts to reduce or lessen the bad and increase the good. Both cases affirm an economic model embedded at the heart of ethics according to which, in absence of the possibility to avoid all harm, various forms of misfortune must be calculated against each other (as if they were algorithms in a mathematical minimum problem), evaluated, and acted upon. The principle of the lesser evil implies that there is no way out of calculations.
As a dilemma, the ‘lesser evil’ is presented as the necessity of a choice of action in situations where the available options are or seem to be limited. It is a dilemma in the classical Greek sense of the word—when each of the two options presented to the tragic hero necessarily lead to different forms of suffering. The dilemma implies a closed system in which the options presented for choice could not be questioned or negotiated. Regardless of what option is chosen, accepting the terms of the question leaves the (political) power that presented this ‘choice’ unchallenged and even reinforced. It is in accepting the parameters as given that the lesser evil argument is properly ideological. The dilemma, if we are still to think in its terms, should thus not only be about which of the bad options to choose, but whether to choose at all and thus accept the very terms of the question. When asked to choose between the two horns of an angry bull, Robert Pirsig suggested alternatives: one can ‘refuse to enter the arena’, ‘throw sand in the bull’s eyes’, or even ‘sing the bull to sleep’.7

The ‘Perpetrators of Lesser Evils’

The term ‘lesser evil’ has recently been prominently invoked in the context of attempts to moderate the excesses of western states, in particular in relation to attempts to govern the economics of violence in the context of the ‘War on Terror’, and in private organizations’ attempts to manoeuvre through the paradoxes and complicities of human rights action and humanitarian aid. More specifically, the lesser evil has been most often invoked at the very intersection of these two spheres of action—military and humanitarian. In relation to the ‘global War on Terror’, the terms of this argument were recently articulated in a book titled The Lesser Evil by human rights scholar and now deputy leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Michael Ignatieff. In his book, Ignatieff suggests that liberal states should establish mechanisms to regulate the breach of some rights and allow their security services to engage in forms of extrajuridical violence—in his eyes, ‘lesser evils’—in order to fend off or minimize potential ‘greater evils’, such as further terror attacks on civilians of the western states. His conception of the lesser evil is presented as a balancing act because its flexible regime of exceptions should be regulated through a process of ‘adversarial scrutiny of an open democratic system’ and is thus also aimed to prevent the transformation, through the ‘temporary’ primacy given to the security services, of the liberal state into a totalitarian one.8 Ignatieff calls for the security officials of liberal democracies to become the ‘perpetrators of lesser evils’.9 These postmodern perpetrators (the lesser evil should surely replace the ‘banality of evil’ as the contemporary form of perpetration of crimes of state) should weigh various types of destructive measures in a utilitarian fashion, in relation not to the damage they produce but to the harm they purportedly prevent. The calculation, however, is obviously most often about the suffering of somebody else.
Ignatieff’s conception of the ‘lesser evil’ is problematic even according to the utilitarian principles invoked. The very economy of violence assumes the possibility of less violent means and the risk of more violence, but questions of violence are forever unpredictable and undetermined. The supposed ‘lesser evil’ may always be more violent than the violence it opposes, and there can be no end to the challenges that stem from the impossibility of calculation.10 A less brutal measure is also one that can easily be naturalized, accepted and tolerated.11 When exceptional means are normalised, they can be more frequently applied. The purported military ability to perform ‘controlled’, ‘elegant’, ‘pinpoint accurate’, ‘discriminate’ killing could bring about more destruction and death than ‘traditional’ strategies did because these methods, combined with the manipulative and euphoric rhetoric used to promulgate them, induce decision makers to authorize their frequent and extended use. The illusion of precision, part of the state’s rhetoric of restraint, gives the military-political apparatus the necessary justification to use explosives in civilian environments where they cannot be used without injuring or killing civilians. This process, recalling Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of “repressive tolerance” may explain the way western democratic societies can maintain regimes of brutal military domination without this brutality affecting their self perception as enlightened liberals. Elevating, for example, targeted assassinations (Ignatieff considers targeted assassination to fall ‘within the effective moral-political framework of the lesser evil’)12 to a legally and morally acceptable standard makes them part of the state’s legal options, part of a list of counterterrorism techniques, with the result that all sense of horror at the act of murder is now lost. The lower the threshold of violence attributed to a certain means and the lower the threshold of horror implied in its use, the more frequent its application could become. Because they help normalise low-intensity conflict, the overall duration of this conflict could be extended and finally more lesser evils could be committed, with the result of the greater evil reached cumulatively.13

The Humanitarian Paradox of the Lesser Evil

From this perspective it is possible to see that the discourse and practice of humanitarianism and human rights might paradoxically turn against the people it claims to help. When every soldier in what George W. Bush has called ‘the armies of compassion’ becomes a proxy expert in humanitarianism, humanitarian concerns could easily become a pretext to justify ‘neutrality’ with respect to a brutal conflict (as in Sarajevo) or an alibi for a political decision to mount a ‘military intervention’ against a sovereign state (as in Iraq).
Beyond state agents, ‘the perpetrators of lesser evil’ must also include nonstate organizations. Putting an end to human rights violations has become, increasingly since the 1990s, the platform that allows for the possibility of collaboration between NGO activists and western militaries. Beyond the fact that the moralization of politics through the terms ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’ and ‘liberal democracy’ has led to a general depoliticization, the paradox is that human rights and humanitarian action can in fact aggravate the situation of the very people it purportedly comes to aid.

The paradox of the lesser evil impacts most independent nongovernmental organizations that make up the various systems in the ecology of contemporary war and crisis zones, in addition to the military and the government.
Lesser evil is the common justification of the military officer who attempts to administer life (and death) in an ‘enlightened’ manner; it is the brief of the security contractor who introduces new and more ‘efficient’ weapons and spatio-technological means of domination and advertises them as ‘humanitarian technology’. Lessening evil is moreover the logic defining the actions of the subjects of this regime, who, sometimes assisted by human rights organizations, lodge petitions challenging the brutality of these means and powers. Lesser evil is the argument of the humanitarian agent as he seeks military permission for providing life substances and medical help in places where it is in fact the duty of the military in control.
This logic of the lesser evil somewhat obscures the fundamental moral differences between the various groups that compose the ecologies of conflict and crisis in allowing for the aforementioned moments of cooperation. Significantly, the western system of domination learned to use the work of local and international organizations to fill the void left by ‘dysfunctional’ Third World governments and manage life in their stead. Indeed, the urgent and important criticism that peace organizations often level at western militaries, to the effect that they de-humanise their enemies, masks another process by which the military incorporates into its operations the logic of, and even seeks to cooperate directly with, the very humanitarian and human rights organizations that in the past opposed it.
At the core of the paradoxes of the lesser evil is a tactical compromise that could deteriorate into a structural impossibility—one that would entangle the state and its opposition in a mutual embrace, making nonstate organizations de facto participants in a diffused system of government. In Slavoj Zizek’s words, the state thus ‘externalizes its ethical self-consciousness in an extra-statal ethico-political agency, and this agency externalizes its claim to effectiveness in the state’.14 In this manner, human rights and humanitarian NGOs could do the ethical thinking and some of the ethical practice, while their state does the killing.
The spatial order of contemporary military power does not only emerge from a series of open acts of aggression, but through attempts at the moderation and restraint of its own violence.15 Recently, western militaries began using the vocabulary of international law, with the effect that human rights principles such as ‘proportionality’ have become compatible with military goals such as ‘efficiency’.16

The Government of Evil (in Souls)

The common use of the term ‘lesser evil’ masks a rich history and various intellectual trajectories. What may otherwise seem to be a perennial problem endemic to ethics and political practice, a dilemma that simply reappears at every period anew in the same shape and form, in fact reveals something peculiar about each historical moment and situation. The different trajectories of the term cast different shadows on the investigation of the lesser evil as one of the problems of the politics of the present. What follows is not a sustained history of the concept but rather several of its paradigmatic moments, the beginning of a possible archive of probes into the lesser evil argument.
One of the trajectories of the concept of the lesser evil originated in early Christian theology and was secularized into the utilitarian foundations of liberal ethics. It formed the basis for the philosophy of ‘ethical realism’, differently formulated by George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau. Ethical realism traces its origins to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and insists on some ethical constraints on states and military action. It sees the role of liberal states and especially that of the United States in the pursuit of moral goals such as ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’. The destiny of the United States in particular and ‘the West’ in general is to fight radicalevil, whose traces could be found in any project predicated on an articulation of the idea of the ‘good’ (religious fundamentalism or communist egalitarianism).
One component in the idea of the lesser evil, however, has gone missing in its secularization. For the Christian fathers the toleration of the lesser evil, as I will later show, should be understood in relation to the religious telos of salvation. The immanent management of evil on behalf of the church was conceived as part of a quest for perfection which forms a necessary stage on the way to transcendence—the replacement of the earthly kingdom with a heavenly one. Unlike the teachings of the Christian fathers, the liberal striving for perfection is not a quest for eventual transformation. Without transcendence it is locked within a perpetual economy of immanence and could be better interpreted as a drive for the ‘optimization’ of the existing system of government.17
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The vast extraterritorial institutional network of the ecclesiastical pastorate—the Church as it was formed and institutionalized from around the turn of the fourth century—dealt with the problem of the lesser evil in the context of the practical and intellectual problem of ‘the government of souls’. In his lectures on the origins of governmentality Michel Foucault analyzed the Christian form of pastoral power. ‘Economical theology’ sought to understand the management of both human and divine orders, each with its immanent order of execution. In relation to human action the divine management of evil is both general and particular, bearing on both the individual and society, the multitude of people in the flock. The Christian order thus operated by simultaneously individualizing and collectivizing—granting as much value to a single person as to the community and the multitude.18 Salvation—deliverance from the power and penalty of sin and evil and the redemption of the soul—must address thus all and each. This form of salvation is one of the aspects of general and particular providence. The pastor must account not only for the well-being of individual and community but for the totality of good or evil they perform personally and collectively.
Discussions of particular providence are organized around the question of choice, or of free choice—how to identify and pursue good and avoid evil. General providence, on the other hand, invokes a vastly complex intrapersonal economy of merits and faults—of sin, vice and virtue—operating according to specific rules of circulation and transfer, with complex procedures, analyses, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific interplay between conflicting goods and degrees of evil.19
But Foucault does not explain how evil could be understood in terms of an economy. The source of this understanding is the teaching of St. Augustine. In early Christian theology evil is no longer seen as the equal opposite of good. In the course of his break from Manichaeism, St. Augustine stopped seeing evil as glamorously demonic but rather merely as ‘the absence of good’, a deficiency of being that has no standing by itself. Evil is relative and differential, an obstacle to perfection, that which stands between man and the good. Because evil is not absolute, demonic or perfect it is forever on a scale of less and more, lesser and greater.
It is through this conception of evil that St. Augustine addressed the problem of the lesser evil. For Augustine, the lesser evil is not permissible, as it clearly violates the Pauline principle ‘do no evil that good may come’. It could however be tolerated in certain circumstances. For the lesser evil to be tolerated the situation has to be defined in such a way that a possible resultant evil outcome is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of the performance of individual and collective duties.
In his economy of lesser and greater evils, it is better to tolerate prostitutes in society than to risk adultery, and it is better to kill an assailant before he may kill an innocent traveler.20 In this way the principle of the lesser evil is conflated with the concept of preemption, and Augustine’s rationale for preemption is one of justice. Even war could be just under certain conditions. Under the principles of just war, a war should be considered ‘just’ if those waging it do so with the intention of doing good or pursuing a just purpose (such as, centuries later, the crusades), or with a desire to reach peace rather than wage wars for one’s own gain or as an exercise of power. Furthermore, just wars must be waged by properly instituted authorities of organized arms.
It is thus not coincidental that the discourse of the lesser evil developed at a time when the Christian church acquired real appetite and the real ability to exercise political and military power. Augustine, a fourth-century Christian, was teaching at the time Christianity had acquired the power to govern larger societies, and tried to reconcile Christian pacifism with the world of politics and the obligations of Roman citizens.
Importantly, Augustine saw the lessening of evil as part of a general inclination to pursue the good and a quest for transformation. Unlike in the tradition of liberal ethics that invoked him, in Augustine’s teachings progress towards a lesser imperfection is not produced by or content with a lesser imperfection. Only the desire for perfection could destroy in the soul these aspects of the evil that defile it.21 This progress—the lessening of evil—is the only way towards perfection and the ultimate transformation of the kingdom from earth to heaven. The individual must strive for the kind of perfection that would put her closer to God, overreach the earthly and thereby help transform it.
The general aspects of the problem of the lesser evil are also articulated in other theological discussions about the economic basis of divine government—the question of the origins and management of evil. It addressed the perennial question of theological philosophy: If God governs the world and if God’s economy is necessarily the most perfect one, how can we explain evil—natural catastrophe, illness, crimes?
In the context of his investigation of economia, a form of governmental power, Giorgio Agamben discussed one of the first formulations of this question by Alexander of Aphrodisia, a late Aristotelian commentator of the second century: God in his providence establishes general laws which are always good, but evil results from these laws as a collateral side effect. For example: rain is obviously a good thing, but as a collateral effect of the rain there are floods. Collateral effects—the bad effects of the divine government—are thus not accidental, but define the very structure of the action of government. Furthermore, it is through these collateral effects that the divine government becomes effective.
A millennium and a half later, in his Théodicée, Leibnitz attempted to resolve the same perennial question in a somewhat different manner. His intention is similarly to reconcile the apparent faults and imperfections in the world, which he does by claiming that the world is optimal among all possible worlds: ‘to show that an architect could have done better is to find fault with his work […] [if] a lesser evil is relatively good, so a lesser good is relatively evil’. Leibnitz unfolds a conception of God in the creation and management of the world as a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem in the calculus of variations. The world must be the best possible and most balanced world because it was created by a perfect God. God governs by determining and choosing, among an infinite number of possible worlds, that one for which the sum of necessary evil is at a minimum. In Leibnitz’s complex divine economy evil exists by definition at its minimum possible level. If evil is managed at its minimum level, then all evils are in fact always lesser evils. The statement that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ was famously parodied by Voltaire in Candide when he has a Leibnitz-like character, Dr. Pangloss, repeat it like a mantra.

A Calculating Machine for the Reduction of Evil

Different aspects of the lesser evil argument were secularized into the modern articulations of ethics and politics. Foucault argued that it is on the basis of ‘economical theology’ that modern power—the government of men and things—has taken the form of an economy: ‘We pass from an art of governing whose principles were derived from the traditional virtues (wisdom, justice, liberality, respect for divine laws and human customs) […] to an art of governing that finds the principle of its rationality […] in the state’.22 He argued that from the end of the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, the legacy of pastoral power was assimilated into the practice of government—a biopolitical form of power exercised upon a population to regulate and manage its health, felicity, reproducibility and productivity, while the pastoral power over the individual—particular providence—has evolved into disciplinary technology that subjectivises the individual in various institutions and buildings: the prison, the military barracks, the school, and the hospital.
Continuing Foucault’s work on governmentality and discipline and directly reflecting on the question of the lesser evil, the philosopher Adi Ophir has shown how the panopticon, beyond being a mechanism of discipline, control and subjectivisation, could also be interpreted as a closed system for the management and reduction of evils.23 Here it is necessary to mention that Bentham no longer saw good and evil as metaphysical categories, but rather as the sum total of good and bad things. He defined the task of government as minimising the bad things and maximising the good ones. This economy is at the centre of ‘the principle of utility’. The general aspect of the lesser evil argument is thus one of the forms by which the ‘greater good’ expresses itself.
The panopticon, a closed system that regulates everything that flows in and out of it, is according to Ophir a mechanism whose purpose is to make the calculation (a kind of proto-computer?) and reduction of evils possible.24 The panopticon is designed to bring to perfection the consequences of every action undertaken within it. The observation and control of individual actions that the panopticon produces is the very condition that makes the calculus possible. The system is constructed in such a way that however much evil is put in, ‘less evil’ is guaranteed to come out. Although the machine produces collateral evil—and Bentham is clear that both punishment itself and the friction the machine produces are evil—it guarantees, so Bentham tried to convince his contemporary politicians, the reduction of these evils and of the pain of the treatment to the necessary minimum. Ophir thus interprets Bentham’s panopticon as a Perpetuum Mobile of utility, a precurser to a panoptical society that has in itself now become a machine for the calculation and reduction of evils; the very diagram of biomorality (the necessary counterpart to biopolitics) which is focused on the increase of happiness and the reduction of suffering.25

The Road to Utopia is Paved with Lesser Evils

Lesser evil arguments are not only articulated from the point of view of Power but also in relation to attempts to subvert and replace it. An interesting example is provided in the discussion about the shortening of the working day in Marx’s Capital. Unlike the revolutionary and militant communists who protested the drift towards a timid, reformist politics of choosing the lesser evil, of making the kind of compromises with capital that may divert the struggle from the absolute ideal of communism, Marx thought that the winning of the ten-hour day was a huge victory for the English proletariat. The ten-hour working day reduces the duration of evil, but ‘normalises’ and regularises exploitation. According to Marx, on the other hand, a ten-hour day allowed fourteen hours of non-work, in which ‘the laborer can satisfy his intellectual and social wants’ and which would allow the proletarians to organize and continue fighting. Marx’s argument was that this lesser evil gives the proletarians the space to build an organizational platform, the consciousness and experience needed to take over the means of production. It created the productive forces capable of generating a sufficient surplus to enable socialism and the proletariat to continue fighting and build something better.26 His ultimate aim was still of course to abolish the state. But advanced capitalism was not only seen as a lesser evil compared to ‘primitive manufacture’, it was also a transformation that made a better world possible. Marx saw the struggle for the shortening working day as one corridor, potentially opening into future struggles: ‘the limitation of the working-day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive’.27 Paradoxically, as we now know, the greatest expansion of British industry occurred after the deal for the normalisation of the working day.
Similarly, at different times, Lenin, Kautski, Luxemburg, Trotsky (!) and Gramsci grappled with the problem of fighting for compromised gains here and now on the one hand while also fighting for a better world on the other. At various points they stood for tactical struggles for immediate gains, advocating trade unions, whose function was to win a better deal for workers in an exploitative system; but none of them thought that trade unions were all that was possible, and none of them were satisfied with simply winning a better deal in this exploitative system.
Tensions between evolutionary and revolutionary Marxism were articulated differently in relation to different historical moments: throughout his World War I polemics against the social patriots, Lenin emphasized the difference between various periods and trends:
[U]nlike yesterday, the struggle for socialist power is on the order of the day in Europe. The socialist working class is on the scene as a contender for power itself. This means: There may still be ‘lesser’ and ‘greater’ evils (there always will be) but we do not have to choose between these evils, for we represent the alternative to both of them, an alternative which is historically ripe. Moreover, under conditions of imperialism, only this revolutionary alternative offers any really progressive way out, offers any possibility of an outcome which is no evil at all. Both war camps offer only reactionary consequences, to a ‘lesser’ or ‘greater’ degree.28
The debate articulated by Marxists in different periods was about how political transformation should be brought about: in an evolutionary fashion—a step by step approach along a trajectory of improvement (a kind of Darwinian evolution by which the reign of the proletarians is a historical necessity)—or rather in a revolutionary manner, with a fast and decisive break with the past. In other words, Marxists in various periods asked whether change arrive through the reduction of pain – do things become gradually better until they become good, with the danger that with the reduction of pain society should become content and complicit? (In which case pain should be seen as a self-disciplining device). At one of the ends of the spectrum in which the lesser evil argument occupies the middle are the utopian absolutists who believe that every possible gain at present is insignificant in light of the essentially compromised state of the world. Part of the structure of this argument is found the principle of the politique du pire—the politics of making things worse in order to hasten political change—or the theory of dolorism, which sees pain as a spiritual experience that allows people to see reality more clearly. The danger was of course that things simply get worse and worse. In fact Marxists used these approaches alternately, in a tactical manner, in different periods and situations.
The lesser evil argument was articulated in another way by Herbert Marcuse in the context of discussions regarding the Marxist attitude to the danger of fascism:
Compared with a neo-fascist society, defined in terms of a ‘suspension’ of civil rights and liberties, suppression of all opposition, militarization and totalitarian manipulation of the people, bourgeois democracy, even in its monopolistic form, still provides a chance (the last chance?) for the transition to socialism, for the education (in theory and practice) and organization to prepare this transition. The New Left is therefore faced with the task of defending this democracy? Defend it as the lesser evil: lesser than suicide and suppression. And it is faced with the task of defending this democracy while attacking its capitalist foundations.29
Marcuse saw bourgeois democracy, with its freedom of speech and association, with space for self-organization (of, for example, workers and women) as a lesser evil to dictatorship in as such but also inasmuch as it would provide a real opportunity for its subversion and eventual transformation. ‘Defending democracy while attacking its capitalist foundations’ is an articulation of a necessary paradox: could one simultaneously defend democracy in its liberal form against the encroaching evil of fascism, all the while attacking its foundations?

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The problem articulated by Marcuse are somewhat relevant to the political predicaments pertaining to different kinds of contemporary non governmental activists: being intransigently in opposition to the neoliberal global order and market hegemony, for example, while, at the same time using their (infra)structures, and even momentarily cooperating with their institutions. Negotiating this paradox—and ‘negotiation’ could only merit its name if it seeks to bring together incompatible positions— must be the most important challenge to these contemporary activists. How to engage in practiced of “lesser evil”, but seek to mobilize the effect of these actions in the service of larger political claims; how to work from “inside” systems while simultaneously seeing beyond them, even precipitating their end?
Obviously, the argument that the principle of the lesser evil is dangerous because it may produce more harm is a contradiction as blatant as saying that it is a lesser evil to avoid the lesser evil argument.30 I am also not suggesting that the horrific spectacles of ‘greater evils’ should be preferred to the incremental damage of ‘lesser’ ones, that the violence of the present conflicts should be made (even) more brutal in order to shock a complacent population into mobilizing resistance (the threshold of the “intolerable” is elastic enough to make most people easily accommodate and domesticate a sense of an ever worsening reality); rather, that opposition and resistance must dare to think beyond the economy and the calculations of violence and suffering that liberal ethics touts forward. Dealing with the political ethics of the lesser evil could be articulated by bypassing the closed economy that a particular “dilemma” presents with an insistence on the expansion of the limits of the problem in both space and time – the former by seeking to identify more extended and intricate political connections leading to the issue at stake and the latter by looking further into the future.
More about the predicament of contemporary non governmental organizations I hope to articulate in later versions of this text. The installation 665/The Lesser Evil in Manifesta7 seeks to start unpacking this problem by presenting some of the histories and contemporary tactics of such attempts and the humanitarian and human rights activists caught up in dilemmas and struggling, successfully or not, to liberate themselves from a mutual embrace with the very organizations they vehemently oppose. Many of these activists clearly realize that it is counterproductive to accept the myopic pragmatism of the lesser evil, one that leaves a given mode of government intact, and seek ways to go beyond these actions. Their contemporary deliberations reflect historical ones.
Strategically planned or spontaneous action would always inevitably put activists on the ground within an arena of political struggles in compromising situations that can easily deteriorate into a counterproductive complicity, but these forms of practice must look for ways to, simultaneously and paradoxically, challenge the truth claims and thus the basis of the authority of the powers they both cooperate with and confront – the very regimes that placed their bulls before us and then asked us to choose the lesser of their two horns.

This text originates in discussions around an ongoing programme of workshops, lectures and films exploring the structure of the lesser evil argument that I run together with Thomas Keenan and Eyal Sivan. I would like to thank Alberto Toscano for his useful comments.

Notes
1. Alain Badiou has been the strongest critic of this notion: ‘If the lamentable state in which we find ourselves is nonetheless the best of all real states […] [If humanity] will not find anything better than currently existing parliamentary states, and the forms of consciousness associated with them, this simply proves that up to now the political history of men has only given birth to restricted innovations and we are but characters in a pre-historic situation […] [that] will not rank much higher than ants and elephants’. See Alain Badiou, ‘Eight Theses on the Universal’, in Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004), 237. Renata Salecl introduced Badiou’s work to the discussion in a workshop titled ‘Lesser Evils’ organized by Thomas Keenan, Eyal Sivan and myself at Bard College in February 2008. Presentations were given by the organizers and by Adi Ophir, Ariella Azoulay, Simon Critchley, Joshua Simon, Olivia Custer, Renata Salecl, Karen Sullivan and Roger Berkowitz. Salecl introduced Badiou’s ideas through a reading of an interview in two parts Badiou gave to Cabinet Magazine before and after 9/11 (http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php). Salecl added new doubts of her own: ‘not even knowing what good and evil are, how can we choose and calculate? When evil is so enjoyable, what does ’lesser evil‘ mean?’
2. For Badiou, according to Salecl, evil is when one lacks the strength to search for the good. The politics of the lesser evil give up on the event, renounce the drive. At the Bard workshop, she asked: ‘Is there a new theory of the good ready to fight the self-contents of liberalism?’
3. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2005), 35. In his presentation to the workshop, Roger Berkowitz presented Arendt’s argument against the ‘lesser evil’ in the context of her thought on judgment, as part of what she identified as ‘the crisis of judgment’.
4. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Eggs Speak Up’ (1950), in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 270–284; see especially 271. Arendt claims that Stalin’s ‘only original contribution’ to socialism was to transform the breaking of eggs from a tragic necessity into a revolutionary virtue.
5. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2005), 37. (I think)<> sorry no – can we remove the note?
6. In an article on segregation in southern schools, after making her readers understand she was against all forms of racism, she voiced scepticism about federally enforced integration, claiming it politicized the educational system, which she believed should be immune to such forces, and insisting that the survival of the Republic may require that the battle line be drawn somewhere else. Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 45–56.
7. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Bantam, 1974).
8. Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
9. Ibid., 152.
10. In the Lesser Evils workshop at Bard, reading Ignatieff’s book, Thomas Keenan pointed to the impossibility of calculating evils. Rejecting the notion of grades of violence, he used a Derridean formulation when he argued: ‘is not the slightest violence always already the greatest violence?’ He pointed as well to the fallacy in the supposed difference between qualitative and quantitative judgment on evil, asking whether the quantitative cannot cross a threshold and become qualitative itself.
11. Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils, section 7.100 as well as 7.2 and 7.3. See for example 7.335.
12. This under the following conditions: that they are ‘applied to the smallest number of people, used as a last resort, and kept under the adversarial scrutiny of an open democratic system’. Furthermore, ‘assassination can be justified only if […] less violent alternatives, like arrest and capture, endanger […] personnel or civilians are not possible, and] where all reasonable precautions are taken to minimize collateral damage and civilian harm’. Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil, 8, 129–133.
13. It is this principle that guarantees, paradoxically, that all ‘greater goods’ could necessarily become ‘greater evils’. Health economists have a chilling and interesting version of this economy of calculations, a ‘value of statistical life’, or VSL, to cope with what some of its proponents see as the following conundrum: the ‘prevention of every possible accidental death would be intolerably costly in terms of both money and the quality of life’. See Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, ‘The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May’, forthcoming in Boundary 2.
14. Slavoj Zizek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 349.
15. Michel Feher, ‘The Governed in Politics’, in Nongovernmental Politics, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 2007), 12–27, esp. 21.
16. David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 235–323, esp. 295.
17. Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006).
18. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 164–173. The immanent disorder exercised by the pastorate was ‘an art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand, and manipulating men, an art of monitoring them and arranging them…an art of taking charge of men collectively and individually throughout their life and at every moment of their existence’ (173).
19. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.
20. Augustine thought that prostitutes should be tolerated ‘because they fulfil a similar function in society to that of the cesspool in the palace’. Speaking through Evodius, Augustine says: ‘It is much more suitable that the man who attacks the life of another should be slain than he who defends his own life; and it is much more cruel that a man should suffer violation than that the violator should be slain by his intended victim’ (118, De lib. arb. I.v.12)<>. In her presentation for the Lesser Evils workshop at Bard, Karen Sullivan presented Augustine’s teachings against lying as one of the only cases in which a compromise for the lesser evil is not even possible. ‘A lie is an offence against truth, perversion of speech’, and the imperative against it should in no case be breached, even to save innocent people. Having such universal effect, lying is worse than killing; the latter is tolerated under certain conditions of the lesser evil principle.
21. Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (Florence, KY: Routledge, 2001), quoted in Peter Paik Yoonsuk, ‘The Pessimist Rearmed: Zizek On Christianity And Revolution’, Theory & Event 8, no. 2 (2005). Karen Sullivan made a similar point in her discussion of Augustine.
22. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 163, 183.
23. Adi Ophir in the Lesser Evils workshop at Bard.
24. Bentham’s preface to the Panopticon opens with a list of the benefits to be obtained from this inspection house: ‘Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—economy seated […] all by a simple idea of architecture’.
25. Bentham believed the panopticon could correct itself instantly. Ophir to the contrary observed that ‘closed systems which are run by imperfect agents and in which the costs of exit are high tend to produce greater rather than lesser evils…’ The term biomorality comes from Zizek, In Defence, 50.
26. Engels argues for the positive effect of the deal for the ten-hour day on completely different grounds: ‘Were the Ten Hour Day Bill a final measure, England would be ruined, but because it necessarily involves the passing of subsequent measures, which must lead England into a path quite different from that she has traveled up till now, it will mean progress’. If English industry were to succumb to foreign competition the revolution would be unavoidable.
27. Karl Marx, Capital, http://www.bibliomania.com/2/1/261/1294/frameset.html. See ‘The Working Day’, especially sections 6 and 7.
28. Hal Draper, ‘The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism”’, http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1953/defeat/chap1.htm.
29. Herbert Marcuse, Towards a Critical Theory of Society, vol. 2
(Florence, KY: Routledge, 2001), 169. Joshua Simon’s contribution to the Lesser Evils workshop at Bard was a reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he made similar points about Marxism’s relation to Fascism.
30. In the Bard workshop, Adi Ophir compared this to Bentham’s own statement: ‘“The principle of utility, (I have heard it said) is a dangerous principle: it is dangerous on certain occasions to consult it.” This is as much as to say, what? that it is not consonant to utility, to consult utility: in short, that it is not consulting it, to consult it’. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), ch. 1, ‘Of The Principle Of Utility’.
31. Feher, Nongovernmental Politics<>, 21.