Starship Troopers novel. What a weird choice for an essay on political philosophy, right? According to some prominent thinkers like Hannah Arendt, politics is not just thoughts of the philosophers of higher standing and debates in parliaments. Politics is often created in the discussions in bars among friends. This way, political thought condenses into and manifests itself in books and creative works that seem very distant from philosophy. Moreover, books like these influence the common reader’s opinion far better than works of academics, so they are well worth our time and analysis. This essay will be a discussion of the science fiction novel Starship Troopers written by Robert A. Heinlein from the point of view of neo-republican theories.

Introduction

When the novel was published, it sparked a great deal of debate amongst critics and academics. The reason is that Heinlein provides much space for discussions of the structure of the future society, a lot more than is usually the case for sci-fi. It might even seem that the author tries to present his philosophy to the reader much more than he wants to tell the main character’s story.

It has led some to call Starship Troopers a “philosophical novel” (Shoales, 2009). My opinion is that most of the scholars and reviewers have treated the novel too harshly and were too quick to jump to conclusions. Many have labelled Starship Troopers as promoting militaristic, even fascist ideology. I suppose that not enough arguments have been presented against such views, especially from the republican side. Moreover, I believe that Heinlein has offered us some new and interesting ways of structuring a republican society. So, the main question of this essay will be identifying which elements are more present in this book, republican or fascist, and if the former are present enough for Heinlein’s political system to be called republican. I will begin by providing a purely descriptive account of the political system of the Terran Federation and its underlying moral philosophy. Then, I will discuss different arguments in favour of its description as “fascist” and try to refute them, as well as highlight the potential shortcomings of such a system. This part will be more normative and there I will also try to connect Heinlein’s principles to neo-republican theories.

The Terran Federation

Before describing the political system itself, I will provide some context. Terran Federation has successfully colonised other planets of the Solar System and is the only human state. At the beginning of the story, it is at peace, but the war starts as the story advances, which is an important element for this discussion. The most interesting part of the political system of the Terran Federation is that no one is born a citizen, meaning that no one has the ability to take part in exercising sovereign power of the body politic from birth. The initial status of every person living in the Terran Federation is “legal resident”. As far as the author allows the reader to understand, legal residents enjoy all the same rights citizens do, including the right to enjoy mostly uninterrupted economic activity, except for the right to vote. In order to acquire this right, a person has to go through Federal Service which usually lasts two years. Federal Service is strictly voluntary, no one is forced to participate in it. The job assigned depends on the person’s skills, qualities and predispositions, which are determined through a range of different examinations, including advanced psychological ones (Heinlein in a way tells the reader that in the future psychology will be a tool precise enough to get everything right in this process), as well as slightly on candidate’s preferences. It should be emphasised that all the jobs one can be assigned are to different extent dangerous, complicated or undesirable. As it is described in the book, most of the positions are offered in the military. Anyone regardless of age (starting from 18, of course), race, wealth, gender or even physical health can apply for Federal Service, and it is against the law to reject the application, unless a person’s mental health is not stable enough to understand the oath. Interestingly, in Heinlein’s system, at every stage of the application process, people are discouraged from actually doing it by clearly demonstrating how dangerous and complicated it really is and given various opportunities to change their minds. For example, the main character and his friend are greeted by a veteran who is missing two legs and one arm. The service is to that extent voluntary, that one is given the opportunity to resign at any moment of it and will lose nothing but the right to vote and the ability to re-apply for it. Even if someone decides to desert, no one will try to chase and try to get them back, and they will receive only light punishment if, and only if they decide to return. Civic education plays a huge role in the life of the society portrayed in the Starship Troopers. The author mentions the main character having the course of History & Moral Philosophy at school which has a special place among all the others.

The moral philosophy of the system itself is quite peculiar. Heinlein tries to provide his theory with some scientific grounds, this is why it begins with “correctly” defining human nature. In practice, his theory mostly resembles Hobbes in saying that natural humans do not have any moral instincts, only survival instincts with one important exception: it is believed this instinct “can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive” (Ch. 8). It means that what we have here is a meliorative survival instinct-based theory of morals. Terran Federation’s dominant theory of morality states that the so-called “moral instinct” is instilling by the person’s education of the principle that “survival can have stronger imperatives than that of one’s personal instinct of survival” (Ch. 8). This way one’s instinct is expanded to include members of the group such as family members, compatriots, etc., in a kind of “hierarchy of survival”. The tools employed for that are corporal (flogging or spanking) and capital punishments which are commonplace in all of the Terran Federation. The former is applied for major offences to prevent the latter from happening to the person. As far as justification goes, corporal punishments are a way to tie personal instinct to society and mould a person’s ‘moral instinct’, a sort of lesser evil with not the purpose of revenge, or retribution, but with the intention of betterment. Heinlein emphasises that such punishment should be impersonal, strictly according to the laws that were made known to everybody while making sure that the person will not get seriously injured or scarred. In the absolute worst of cases such as murder, capital punishment was employed. There was a widespread belief, even a part of doctrine, that society as a whole is responsible for every one of its members and the failure of one person is the failure of the whole.

The Underlying Political Philosophy

I dedicated so much space to the description of the political system to have a necessary base for normative arguments, and Starship Troopers’ moral theory is vital for most of them. At the same time, the punishment system has the potential to ruin all the republican arguments. According to Neo-Roman republican theory, freedom is non-domination, which can be reached only if the laws by which the state is governed are just and are legislated by the citizens themselves (Pettit, 2010). This way, citizens do not depend on arbitrary decisions and alien will and are enabled to take matters into their own hands. I argue that in Heinlein’s book, this principle is at work in the sense that citizens possess the sovereign authority to make decisions about how the Federation should function. A counterargument can be made by saying that legal residents (not citizens), who have not undergone Federal Service, will constantly feel dominated by the system because they are not allowed to vote. I admit that this is partially true. However, the best part of Heinlein’s theory (for me) is that they are able to gain this right at any time without any restrictions but the dangers, complexity and time-consuming nature of the Service itself. This partially aligns with Pettit’s invigilation principle which states that citizens should have the ability to intervene in the legislation if something goes against their will. The difference between Pettit and Heinlein is that this ability to intervene is not as direct and immediate, one has to spend two years in Service first. This way, the system accomplishes two things: first, it grants a huge number of people the liberty not to vote (I think of this as a part of the non-domination principle: you cannot be forced to vote), and places value and duty in the right to vote. This value and duty is what ties Starship Troopers to the Neo-Athenian theory of republicanism, which sees liberty as “sharing in self-government” (Sandel, 1996, p. 58). Every citizen receives civic education and is taught how to be a good citizen of the state, but not in the sense that they are indoctrinated, more as taught the principles of what it means to be a citizen and critical thinking; it is best thought of as cultivation of civic virtues. Just as Sandel advocated, the Terran Federation makes a very republican move of not detaching freedom from the “formative project”, pushing for the moral improvement of every person living in the state. What is more, this project is not in any way coercive: for example, History & Moral Philosophy classes (one of the tools of civic education mentioned in the book) are described by the main character as “different from other courses in that everybody had to take it, but nobody had to pass it” (Ch. 2). Returning to citizenship, the acquisition of the right to vote is regarded as one of the ultimate moral duties of the person to society. However, the reason for the establishment of Federal Service, as explained by the professors in the book is to place value in the right to vote. We can talk as much as we want about the importance of it for every human being, but the tendency in contemporary times is that people appreciate it less and less. Heinlein argues that the challenges one’s ancestors have gone through to acquire the right to vote are of little concern to the person, whether one places ultimate value in it if it has been acquired through one’s own work and it is one’s own achievement. By placing value in sovereign authority, the system supposedly eliminates a huge part of the citizen population (as it is in many countries today) who are not interested in voting or do not do any research, voting blindly and thus disrupting the will of other citizens who value their rights and vote responsibly. As a separate point, since the right to vote is treated as the highest duty, Federal Service serves as a test to determine whether one is responsible enough to participate in collective government or not, whether the person is able to place the interests of the whole society above their own, to avoid what Aristotle has called deviant constitutions in his Politics. I think that such an approach might help to fill some holes in both Pettit’s and Sandel’s theories. Pettit does not really speak of the problem of the decline of civic virtues under the pressure of the contemporary economics-centred system, which Neo-Athenians such as Sandel (1996) and Taylor (1991) emphasise so much in their works. For him, invigilation of the system by the citizens is enough, but I argue that after some time the citizens would not be capable of intervening precisely due to the decline in civil virtues. Sandel offers a solution by offering to have an ongoing formative project and viewing republican freedom as participation. The problem that I see here is that freedom as participation in a way denies the freedom of non-participation and can be quickly turned into a duty to participate. I doubt that every person in the state will be interested in government and what is more important, capable of it. Starship Troopers’ Federal Service is a test, but not an arbitrary one, where the decision of whether one is fit to vote or not is made by someone else. The decision is one’s own, if one is willing to sacrifice one’s time and work to acquire this right, sacrifice something for the good of one’s society. Therefore, this procedure is republican in spirit.

A Formative Project

Another part of the book worth discussing here is the theory of morality and punishment, which Heinlein mentions a lot. I doubt that anyone could call a system that employs corporal punishments regularly a republican one. I would not too. My argument is that even though the grounds of the Terran Federation’s punishment system may be republican, the scientific premises of the theory of morality which underlies it may be quite short-sighted and therefore have fascist implications. As was explained above, a survival instinct-based theory of morals is used, and from the point of view of the book’s philosophy, the only way to influence those instincts is to directly impact them by having physical punishments. However, I will ask the reader to pay attention to vital differences Heinlein’s system has in comparison to (I argue) any other system throughout history that employed corporal punishments: first, punishment is administered only according to the law, which is no way arbitrary and can be changed by the citizens; second, the purpose (telos) behind it is not retribution, revenge, inflicting as much pain as was inflicted by the crime itself, etc., but the improvement and forging of the moral instincts of a person, and therefore is impersonal and adjusted in such a way so as not to cause any permanent injury. For Heinlein, the main function of the society is ensuring the well-being of its members and promoting civic virtues. Failure of a person means that the society failed to perform its chief functions. This theory is behaviouristic, stating that to create moral instincts, a person must face the consequences of their actions. Heinlein argues that more lenient punishments such as short jail time, do not form one’s instincts well enough, therefore, when someone commits worse crimes, they do not understand the wrongness of their actions to the fullest. Therefore, the dominant opinion of the book is that it is more humane to use corporal punishments instead of prison sentences because they impact a person’s moral compass more efficiently and allow them to return to normal life and once again become a member of society, instead of wasting their life and government’s money on them in prison.

Fascist or not?

Let us now take a look at the arguments regarding Starship Troopers promoting fascism. Fascism is commonly defined as a political philosophy that includes such elements as dictatorial leadership, militarism, authoritarianism, natural social hierarchy and subordination of individual interests for the good of nation/race. Cass (1999) argues that in the book Heinlein may be trying to justify imperialism, especially in America, to fight against imperialism of another kind. He argues that the way how the “Bugs” are presented as “them”, and “the enemy”, to defeat whom the society must unite contributes to his view.

I will argue that while the book promotes the strong empire of humankind, fighting the common enemy is far from being the central idea around which the society is united. In fact, it is specifically mentioned in the book that people did not know anything about the war for a long time, even though the war was going on. Heinlein presents the war as more defensive than offensive. Suvin (2008) offers an argument that the book is simply a propaganda of military values and that everyone should serve in the military. I will respond by arguing that while Heinlein did provide much space to the discussion of the military, I do not think it is a necessarily bad thing, because some of the values required to be a volunteer to the army are much treasured among the members of the civil society. As for the service in the military, which many scholars portray as the only type of Federal Service, Heinlein described that there are different types of service apart from it. For example, he mentioned participation in space exploration, as well as in studying Antarctica. One feature that all these jobs have in common is that they are all dangerous and undesirable for the previously mentioned reasons, so there is no reason to speak of fascist militarism. However, I acknowledge that appreciation of the military is hugely present in this book, but for the civil virtues that military volunteers exhibit. Having addressed the major arguments supporting allegations of fascism, I will briefly discuss all the other traits. Authoritarianism is absent, and somewhat limited democracy is in place; no trace of natural social hierarchy as well, since everybody can apply to become a citizen, and the philosophical theory is generally meliorative.

Conclusion

To sum everything up, I have demonstrated how republican elements are evident in the political system of the Terran Federation. It is not entirely republican, since I believe corporal punishments do not match the spirit of republicanism at all, but at least they are based upon somewhat meliorative morals, which does not justify the existence of this element. Allegations of militarism and imperialism are true to some extent but are not severe enough to say that the system is fascist. The factor that hugely influenced scholars’ interpretation of the novel is Paul Verhoeven’s film of the same name which is loosely based on the novel but omits most of the finer details and is, in fact, promoting fascism.

I believe that I was able to show that the book Starship Troopers contains enough elements to be called mostly republican in its spirit and not fascist. However, due to its utopian nature, most of the political innovations have not been tested. Therefore, it is not certain whether they can be implemented at all and what the implications will be.

Bibliography

• Cass, J. (1999). SS Troopers: Cybernostalgia and Paul Verhoeven’s Fascist Flirtation. Studies in Popular Culture, 21(3), 51–63.
• Heinlein, R. A. (1959). Starship Troopers. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Pettit, P. (2010). Civic Republican Theory. In J. L. Martí & P. Pettit (Eds.), A Political Philosophy in Public Life. Princeton University Press; JSTOR.
• Sandel, M. J. (1996). America’s Search for a New Public Philosophy. The Atlantic, 227(3), 57–74.
• Shoales, I. (2009, May 14). The square-jaws are coming! The square-jaws are coming! Salon | Ill Humor. Link
• Suvin, D. (2008). Of Starship Troopers and Refuseniks: War and Militarism in U.S. Science Fiction, Part 1. In D. M. Hassler & C. Wilcox (Eds.), New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction (pp. 115–144). University of South Carolina Press.
• Taylor, C. (1991). The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvv41887