The rule of law always includes deliberate mechanisms for the reform of law. An irrational law, let alone an unjust law, is always an appropriate object of critique. Critique is always the predicate for reform.

Reform and reason, however, to what end? Just like the myth of nature, the claim of reason represents an imaginative possibility, not a substantive position. Reason is not self-defining. Not so long ago, reason took the form of theology: understanding the mind of God as it shows itself in and through creation. Stripped of the sacred, a humbled reason today is more likely to offer us a politics of well-being.

In the contemporary liberal state, the edifice of reason is tightly bound to the health and well-being of the body of the citizen. Not the advancement of the interests of a particular group, but the well-being of all. The liberal state does not generally tell its citizens where or how they can realize their own ideas of a good life. But it does assume that all such ideas include bodily well-being—health, and freedom from pain.

The well-being of the individual, understood quite literally as the health of the body, is assumed to be the unproblematic foundation for public policy. This is related to, but not the same as, the satisfaction of interests that drives the economic order. Economic outcomes are measured against citizen well-being in this more basic sense.

Despite its economic success, the United States, for example, is not only deeply criticized for its failure to assure universal access to high-quality health care, but is itself in a kind of unending policy crisis over how to advance toward this goal.

Government cannot proclaim its indifference to citizen well-being. It cannot define care of the body as private—not a public concern—even if it is committed to the use of private institutions to achieve that well-being. That doesn’t mean that governments are always successful, only that they will be measured by their success or failure to improve the health and well-being of their citizens.

Health care is not different, in this respect, from general economic performance. Both are fundamental public concerns quite apart from the use of private institutions to advance these interests. Morbidity rates stand right next to, if not above, GDP as the ultimate measure of progress. A democratic politics is thought “naturally” to pursue these ends: how could government by and for the people fail to seek the health and well-being of its citizens?

We conclude the general narrative of progress, then with a contrast between contemporary biopolitics, the end of which is the minimization of the body’s pain and the maximization of its health, and the pre-modern state in which the end of the state seemed often to be the production of pain, whether as punishment or warfare.

This progressive narrative has not gone unchallenged. The modern era has generated a counternarrative as well. In this account, the state remains deeply invested in the production of pain. This is the narrative that begins not in the hospital, but in the camps; that registers a gap between the reformist ambition of penal science and the practice of incarceration; that notes the deployment of weapons of mass destruction threatening entire populations; that perceives the disappearance of the spectacle of the scaffold but sees in its place the rise of mass armies.

This narrative takes as its reference points the trench warfare of the First World War, the mass bombings of the Second World War, the terrorizing tactics of the wars of decolonization, the recurrent outbreaks of civil war, and the proliferating threats from weapons of mass destruction.

The liberal state, no less than the nonliberal state, has been intimately involved in these phenomena. The United States, for example, imprisons well over two million men—a portion of its population equivalent to that of South Africa under apartheid.

It maintains armed forces of roughly similar size. Until recently, the history of modern Europe was a history of confrontation of mass armies and concentration camps; not to speak of the European involvement in colonial and neocolonial efforts. Leading liberal states have not seen a problem with their own possession of weapons of mass destruction. In this counternarrative, the symbol of political power remains the body in pain, and the measure of power is the capacity to produce pain.

A state, like an individual, organizes its history around pain. It is a story of battles fought, of war and threats of war, of disasters—natural and man-made—overcome. When we commemorate loss, we acknowledge that the pain is ours. It tells us who we are: we are the people who have suffered this pain—others have not.

When we have lost the memory of that pain, we have lost the connection to that earlier community. Its experiences strike us in the same way as those of any other foreign community: subjects about which we may learn and to which we may extend sympathy, but about which we do not care.

This counternarrative of pain is surely not the only history that is or can be written; it is not even the favored form of professional history today. Nevertheless, even in the modern state, the counternarrative is encountered as a story of past sacrifice. It provides the foundation for a patriotic identification with the community—love of nation. It provides the national myth.

Thus, the counternarrative of democratic pain succeeds the narrative of royal succession. That too was a narrative of life and death, focused, however, on the body of the king. The move from the monarch as sovereign to the people as sovereign relocates the suffering body that bears the state. It does not abandon what I have called the counternarrative of suffering for that of well-being, but locates that suffering in every citizen.

The popular sovereign truly emerges when all members of the polity can experience the pain of politics. This is not a matter of extending the franchise, but of a revolution in the political imagination. All citizens are equal, when all read the same history of suffering as their pain, and all stand equally before the threat of future pain—sacrifice—for the state.

Institutionally, this demand for an equality of suffering expresses itself in the extension of military service to groups previously excluded: participation in the military expresses equal dignity within a democratic state. Groups excluded will not see in that exclusion good fortune, but a stigma of shame.

Implicit in the imagination of the democratic state is a deep rejection of that ideal of modern humanitarian law, which insists upon a distinction between combatants and noncombatants. That is an aristocratic ideal in tension with the democracy of pain that founds the modern state in revolutionary action of the popular sovereign.

At the heart of this state, accordingly, we find a commitment not to the principle of discrimination on the battlefield, but to the willing sacrifice of all of the national resources—human and material—for the end of preservation of the state. All can be called upon to sacrifice—to suffer—for the maintenance of the state.

Nuclear weapons are the perfect expression of democratic pain. A policy of mutual assured destruction is the end-point of the counternarrative. Just as the narrative ends in a vision of universal well-being under the regime of reason, the counternarrative ends in a vision of universal self-sacrifice founded on a love of nation.

The attachment of politics to pain, accordingly, is not simply a premodern phenomenon. At the core of modern political belief has been the imagination of violence: the Western idea of democratic citizenship entails the possibility of killing and being killed for the state. Nothing is easier than to describe the horror of the battlefield.

Yet, despite our knowledge of that horror, we celebrate a political history of achievement on the battlefield. The West not only experienced the destruction of a generation of young men in the First World War, it pursued the Second World War to the point of genocide and the destruction of European material wealth and civil society.

My point is not that all the participants in these wars are to be judged equally accountable, that all violated moral norms or that we cannot make normative distinctions among the politics of the different nations. Rather, it is that the imaginative connection of politics to violence remains vibrant.

My own generation has lived its entire life under the threat of mutual assured destruction. The ordinary background condition of our lives has been the constant possibility that we will die for the sake of our political identity: where and how are accidents of circumstance.

This willingness to hold an entire population hostage to political meanings is now celebrated as victory in the Cold War. More than anything else, the Cold War should have taught us that modern political identity extends to everybody the possibility of pain and the demand for sacrifice. If we missed that lesson then, surely the contemporary war on terror is teaching it again.

The narrative and the counternarrative of the modern state, accordingly, exist in a deep tension. The former links reason to well-being; the latter links love to pain. Pain is the enemy of reason, but not of love. The narrative leads toward the universal; the counternarrative celebrates the particular.

The former generates law; the latter, sacrifice. Advancing the interests of the individual in his or her own well-being, the narrative imagines the state as nothing more than a transitional point in the progressive development of a universal legal order in which the well-being of every individual will be of equal concern.

The counternarrative focuses on the special character of the particular state to its own citizens. It speaks of friends and enemies, not universal care. This counternarrative commemorates past pain and speaks of future sacrifice. Narrative and counternarrative are literally at war with each other, and often at war in the single individual. One appeals to well-being, the other to pain; one imagines a universal order, the other a bounded community; one appeals to reason, the other to will.

This may be the greatest puzzle in the inquiry into evil: has the Western nation-state itself become so bound up with the production of pain that we must condemn the entire history of that political form as an expression of evil? While we need to distinguish between good and bad among these political regimes—democracies are not the moral equivalent of totalitarianism regimes—these distinctions may themselves occur within a domain of profound evil.

A state that simultaneously devotes its resources to health care and weapons of mass destruction can never decide whether it is founded on the narrative or the counternarrative. Somehow the two narratives have become tightly bound to each other.