The puer robustus strikes, scandalizes, rebels. He does not play along, he does not back down, he acts on his own initiative, he breaks the rules. He is unruly, unabashed, uncomfortable, undomiciled, and unconcerned. He is feared, marginalized, and punished, but also admired and celebrated. The puer robustus – the strong child, the sturdy boy – is a troublemaker.

The troublemaker makes trouble. He is, therefore, not a welcome sight – unless he happens to trouble waters that are only sluggishly and deceptively peaceful. Then he is thanked for breaking with the stagnant times. His alternately abhorrent and attractive face would fit well on the “tilt cards” I played with as a child. If you angled them just a bit, the ferocious countenance would turn into a friendly one – and vice versa. The puer robustus as we know him is either a horror or a hero, bête noire or beau idéal, feared opponent or leading figure.

The puer robustus as we knew him, I should say. Today he has been forgotten, despite having stirred emotions for over three centuries. Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and many others devoted their attention to him and were divided by the question of what to make of him. The puer robustus deserves another turn on the stage of political philosophy. He has what it takes to shake up established patterns of thought and action and to transform the entire scene. Were he not so boyish, he could be considered an éminence grise in the history of ideas.

The debate that raged around the puer robustus relates not to any old problem in political philosophy, but rather to the problem – namely, the question of how a political order establishes and legitimizes itself, how it is criticized, transformed, or attacked, how people are included in this order or excluded from it, how they adapt to it or obstruct it. The subject of order necessarily brings up the subject of disturbance, and thus the role of outsiders and marginal figures, obstructionists and malcontents. The political awakenings and upheavals of the modern age represent crises originating, as I see it, not in the centers of power but on the edges. Consequently, this is where we must look to learn how to cope with these crises and find solutions to them.

It was a spark in the seventeenth century that set off the intellectual fireworks surrounding the puer robustus. Thomas Hobbes first ushered him onto the stage of the modern era. In the second edition of his De cive (On the Citizen), published in 1647, Hobbes included a preface in which he wrote that the “vir malus” was almost the same as a “puer robustus, vel vir animo puerili.” The English translation that was published in Hobbes’s lifetime reads: “A wicked man is almost the same thing with a childe growne strong and sturdy, or a man of a childish disposition.” This puer robustus represented the ultimate threat to the state order, and Hobbes considered him the very epitome of an evil troublemaker.

The puer robustus made what was to be his last notable appearance (for the time being) in China during a brief period of political liberalization in the spring of 1957. “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” Mao had declared. The students at Peking University took him at his word, established a Hundred Flowers Society and publicly proclaimed their opinions in newspapers pasted to the walls. Tan Tianrong, one of the student spokespersons, began a message from May 20, 1957, with a quote from Heraclitus, which stated that the “governance of the city should be handed over to beardless young men”; he signed the notice with the Latin phrase “Puer robustus sed malitiosus.” This puer – very much unlike that of Hobbes – took the guise of a democratic activist: a good troublemaker.

The puer robustus roamed hither and yon, making his way from seventeenth-century London to twentieth-century Beijing – and many other places as well. But as of yet, no one has taken much heed of the tangled, intriguing history of this enfant terrible and reaped its benefits for the theory of order and disturbance. My book is dedicated to rediscovering, envisioning, and evaluating the puer robustus.

This book is constructed somewhat like a revolving stage. Each act reveals a new setting and a different puer robustus. He changes lickety-split, appearing pigheaded or happy-go-lucky, as a barbarian or a fool, freeloader or artist, robber or redeemer, Siegfried or Oedipus. Cries of lamentation and jubilation erupt all around him. This book naturally deals with his history after Hobbes and the lengthy, productive dispute about him conducted by writers ranging from Rousseau to Leo Strauss – and beyond. But it is not for purely decorative purposes that two of the most unusual heroes in French literature – Rameau’s nephew and the Hunchback of Notre Dame – also take the stage as embodiments of the puer robustus. They are joined by Parisian street urchins, European proletarians, the Californian pioneers of the nineteenth century, the youth movement of the early twentieth century, rebellious German teens, Italian communists, the Chinese students of the 1950s mentioned earlier, and many others. The thinkers who pay their respects to the puer robustus expose him to a frenzy of conflicts. They perform a dance around the subject – or, indeed, multiple subjects – of history.

There is more to this dance than simply striking up a paean to or requiem for the troublemaker. It may be tempting to focus only on the triumphal march of liberators or, conversely, to do away with spongers, malcontents, and provocateurs once and for all. But such tidy solutions and divisions are ruled out by the contradictory, recalcitrant puer robustus. He refuses to be forced into the confines of a bildungsroman in which “the subject” slowly but surely “sows his wild oats” (Hegel, HA 593).

If this book were a living creature, it would probably have two hearts beating in its chest. It is a philosophical treatise – but also something like an adventure story. Admittedly, I am no competition for the reporters who hang out in the hip-hop scene or the Occupy Wall Street movement, who run around with revolutionaries and rioters. But I comfort myself with the belief that intellectual adventures exist, too, and I throw myself into them wholeheartedly. One might tentatively characterize this book as tracing an arc from Hobbes to the present day – but that would be somewhat off the mark. An arc is an uninterrupted, unbroken line. If you follow its course, you know where it will lead. An “adventure novel,” on the other hand, offers no such certainty. As a literary genre, it deals with a hero who occupies no fixed “place in life” and shows “how an individual becomes other than what he was.”¹

My hero – the puer robustus – is on the move. He does not know where or who he will be tomorrow. Instead of stringing his experiences like pearls on a thread until everything fits perfectly, he muddles through and hopes everything will turn out fine in the end. He admits that he does not know his way about. The adventure novel is unjustly viewed as a genre with anachronistic traits. It is the genre of a world – our world – in which we are called upon to “descend into the old chaos and feel at home there.”² This goes hand in hand with a view of history in which individual situations contain an excess, an element of surprise, and resist being categorized. “The adventure is the exclave of life.”³

Behind the affinity for the adventure novel lies a mistrust of theory. I do not think it wise for political philosophers to work through the question of order and disturbance at the drawing board. It is not enough to analyze arguments and establish rules, and it is also not enough to simulate situations or conduct thought experiments for putting such rules to the test. There is a “ridiculous immodesty” (Nietzsche, GS 239) to the assumption that one could get to grips with the subject matter in this way. This immodesty is counteracted by the lack of restraint that distinguishes the character of the puer robustus. After all, the puer robustus is exactly that: a character who appears here and there, in one form or another, not an argument or a thesis that could be clearly formulated and discussed. The thinkers who make use of the puer robustus might like to believe he is their compliant tool, but he scoffs at their self-certainty, leads his own life and advances to become one of the leading actors of the modern age. I could never dream up the internal transformations and external disputes that buffet him (and certainly not while I was awake).

What is required here, however, is not just a mistrust of theory, but trust in equal measure. With a bit of luck, by understanding its limitations and embracing the chaos of the adventure upon which it embarks, theory can take wing instead of being weakened. It can help us look beyond the individual situation, enabling us to look at ourselves and at everyone else. Hence, while this book is an adventure story, it is also accompanied by a theory of the troublemaker. This theory aims to identify the tricks he uses to change shape and help us determine what we should make of each of his appearances.

To maintain the balance between adventure story and theory, most of my systematic thoughts about the troublemaker will only develop over the course of the journey. I will ask questions such as why the puer robustus is so darn male and what happens to him when he discovers his female (or simply human) side. His masculinity is striking, but his individualism is also notable – and perhaps vulnerable. He is associated with the idea of negotiating social cooperation following the schema of concluding and breaking contracts. This interests me, as does the question of whether the puer robustus is destined to remain a loner, or if he can gain access to communities and collectives. (The distinction between sympathetic and synergetic socialization will prove beneficial here.) But before the revolving stage starts to turn to reveal the puer robustus, before we examine his moves and tactics in detail, I want to introduce one basic concept behind the theory of the troublemaker and briefly outline a typology of the various forms he takes. This basic concept is the threshold.

As I said at the start, this book deals with the relationship between order and disturbance. For any number of different reasons, the puer robustus slips to the margins, throws a wrench in the works, straddles two worlds. Regardless of how the troublemaker behaves, he finds himself on the periphery, on a border or – to put it more accurately – on a threshold. This threshold is one of the most inconspicuous and yet most important structural details in the edifice of political philosophy.

I prefer the word threshold to border because thresholds have two special characteristics. First of all, a threshold is typically low. You can step over it, stumble over it, or come to a stop right on top of it. The permeability of the threshold is far more variable and negotiable than that of the border. Second, a threshold can be used to divide two spaces and define one as being inside and one outside. This kind of distinction is also possible with borders, but in the case of a border, the definition of inside and outside depends entirely on the position of the observer. One person’s outland is the other person’s inland, and vice versa. By contrast, the most prominent version of a threshold is an entrance, which definitively marks the boundary between inside and outside. It is not possible for someone standing outside a door to convince themselves they are actually inside. The border, with its variable classifications, is less well suited to the political problem of order and disturbance than the threshold. The threshold relates to an interior space delineated by edges where members of the political order are confronted with outsiders. This is precisely what makes the permeability of the threshold a key issue.

A border separates domains or realms, each of which has its own members. But the puer robustus who roams around on the threshold is not caught between two different political orders; instead, he moves along the edge of a single world that is defined by the reach of its power. This edge is not a different place, it is actually a non-place. The puer robustus does not belong in one place or the other; he is the very epitome of non-belonging. He finds it hard to settle down in this non-place. He cannot simply bask in the feeling of wanting nothing to do with the world. Instead, he inevitably relates to the political order and finds himself in a state of tension with it. He leads a life “on the threshold” and remains “internally unfinalized.”⁴

Because an order cannot exist without an edge marking its ambit, it must take into account that there will be people outside of its domain, beyond its boundaries. As Hegel points out, “something is already transcended by the very fact of being determined as a restriction.”⁵ The political order therefore actually creates the troublemaker that it observes and opposes. It wants to be exclusive and must live with the unrest that surrounds it like a ring of fire. This inside/outside schema is tied to a centralist model of politics in which the only opponents are outsiders. Historically speaking, this means the puer robustus must be a child of the early modern period, a time in which the power play between different authorities (monarchy, church, nobility, etc.) was replaced by the power monopoly of the state. It is no coincidence that Hobbes was the one to introduce the puer robustus to the field of political philosophy. But this character survives as long as these centers of power (be they nation states, imperial forces, transnational institutions or other global players) continue to call the shots – in other words, to the present day. It is therefore clear that, by the end of this book, the puer robustus will have become a contemporary of ours.

When we talk about thresholds or liminality, the ethnological theory of threshold creatures or “liminal entities” inevitably comes into play.⁶ And yet the puer robustus is not, in an ethnological sense, a being whose existence is tied to a hiatus or interim period, such as a youth who briefly runs riot or spends a week in the wilderness in preparation for adulthood. The transitional ritual is not just a phase or episode for the troublemaker; transition is the troublemaker’s purpose in life. He pauses right when his life hangs in the balance and, in doing so, spoils the closure of the political order. This order can put on a show of force and punish him for his refusal, of course, or use all of its might to make him back down. But the troublemaker is not limited to a choice between exclusion and integration. By challenging the order and testing its elasticity, he can also shake its very foundations. This raises the question of the direction of fit. Who is adapting to whom? Will the political order make short work of the troublemaker, or will the troublemaker cause an upheaval and force the order itself to change?

As a threshold creature, the puer robustus is pitted against the homo sacer, a figure whom Giorgio Agamben rescued from oblivion. Both characters represent exclusion, and just as Hobbes’s puer robustus is said to be a vir malus, the homo sacer is referred to as a homo malus in Roman law.⁷ But in Agamben’s analysis, “exclusion” and “abandonment” are definitive.⁸ The homo sacer is banished to an absolute outside, he is the complete Other against whom an order defines itself and whom (in antiquity, at least) it can kill without punishment. The distinction “between the State and the non-State”⁹ is cemented here, and the threshold, which Agamben also frequently mentions, is transformed into an insurmountable barrier.¹⁰

Unlike Agamben and many others, however, I am interested not only in borders, but also in border crossings. When exclusion is made absolute, the outsider – and history along with him – is paralyzed. Instead of being an actor, he becomes a victim.¹¹ We could deploy Foucault against Agamben here: “We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.” – “To interrogate a culture about its limit-experiences is to question it at the confines of history about a tear that is something like the very birth of its history.”¹² If “limit-experiences” themselves have a history, it means that limits must be continually confirmed, debated, defended, shifted, and broken. And for all of this to be possible, there must be not only victims but also actors among the included and excluded alike. The puer robustus is just such an actor. We can count on him to influence the course of the world – for good or for evil.

My critique of Agamben is tied to a more general point: I have the impression that political philosophy suffers from an unfortunate opposition between identity and alterity.

On the one hand, the outsider has become such a popular theoretical subject that one could, paradoxically, believe he or she were one of us. Even back in 1990, Stuart Hall noted that many “elegant treatises on the ‘other’” could be written without their authors necessarily “having encountered what ‘otherness’ is really like for some people.”¹³ A certain strain of political theory cannot get by without mentioning alterity, marginality, multitude, etc. There is, broadly speaking, both a cheerful and a melancholy version of this; namely, one that focuses on the mobilization of heterodox energies and one that refers to the fundamentally unfathomable otherness of the Other.

On the other hand, an equally prominent strain of political theory is fixated on models of collective identity, and it goes about gathering materials that could form the cement of society. The relevant buzzwords here are dominant culture, social capital, communities of memory, solidarity, public welfare, global ethics, etc. There are different versions of this strain of theory, too: one that exhibits a constructivist zeal to establish universally binding and unifying standards, and one that makes restorative gestures toward safeguarding traditions.

When (as one might hope) the validity of this formal contrast becomes apparent to representatives of both sides, the next step is to determine whether it is advisable to come down on one side or the other. In light of the threshold theory I have just outlined, this seems absurd to me. Those who celebrate the play of alterities while simultaneously mistrusting the institutionalization of communal life should note that they are not actually promoting difference but rather indifference, a state of apathy. The debate about deviation is only conceivable as a debate about commonalities. Those who cling to identity might be brought to bay most easily with a quote from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship:

Whether this be a theatrical company or an empire, […] a moment is usually reached when it is at its zenith, its best, its greatest unity, well-being and effectiveness. Then personalities change, new individuals arrive on the scene, and the persons no longer suit the circumstances and the circumstances the persons. Everything becomes different […].¹⁴

The discrepancy between “circumstances” and “persons” is not limited to the possibility that the latter may not agree on what form their political framework should take. In fact, this discrepancy can radically destabilize institutions. They are on shaky ground because the “personalities,” as Goethe calls them, are always changing. A sense of otherness does not come from spatial distance alone; it originates first and foremost in temporal life changes. Political orders are exposed to these changes as soon as they relate to and rely on the initiative of their members in one way or another – and this applies to every modern society since Hobbes.

When we think of strangers today, we immediately think of the migration flows in our globalized world, which inevitably appear on the horizon of this book. But what must be described first is the inner migration in a society – that is, the intense activity and impetus on the threshold where political subjects become what they are, where political orders are challenged to assert or renew themselves. And it is precisely because modern societies deal with inner migration on their own initiative (willingly or not) that they are prepared to deal with external migration.

How does the puer robustus fare as he stands on the threshold of the political order? He can be broken and defeated by it, or he can surrender and slowly but surely become reputable. But along with these more or less fatal endings, there are also scenarios of self-assertion open to him. They take extremely different forms and can be summarized in a brief typology of the troublemaker, which will be the thread that guides me through this book.

First, there is the egocentric troublemaker, who – figuratively speaking – stamps his foot on the threshold, bridles against the state order, and acts on his self-will. (Hobbes kick-starts the history of the puer robustus with this type of troublemaker.) Next there is the eccentric troublemaker, who flouts the rules but cannot rely entirely on his self-will because he is still searching for himself. The margin on which he stands is not a place for him to settle down but a springboard into the unknown. (Diderot will introduce this type of troublemaker to the history of the puer robustus, and Tocqueville will vacillate between antipathy toward the egocentric troublemaker and sympathy for the eccentric one.) Then there is the nomocentric troublemaker, who fights against the political order in anticipation of a different set of rules that will one day take its place. (We find this type of troublemaker in the writings of Rousseau; Schiller will bring him to the stage in the characters of Karl Moor and Wilhelm Tell; and Marx will try to drag him off the stage and into the reality of the class struggle.)

The triad of the egocentric, eccentric, and nomocentric troublemaker covers all of the characters who appear in this book – or nearly all of them. In the later years of the puer robustus, we will run into a type who makes mischief by unleashing a kind of disturbed disturbance. His relentless rabble-rousing requires something that actually goes against the self-image of the troublemaker: the protection of the mass, in which he disappears and in whose name he acts. There is, therefore, no better name for him than the massive troublemaker.

This sequence of types might suggest that I am describing a historical development in which different troublemakers appear and make their exit one after the other. But this is not my intention at all. The history of the puer robustus is and always will be an adventure story, meaning there is no underlying logical consequence or historical-philosophical tendency. The different types of troublemaker take to the stage, disappear, and then pop up again elsewhere. And they are in fruitful-frightful competition with one another. The puer robustus is in conflict with himself because the thinkers who concern themselves with him force him into a wide variety of roles. They fabricate him in order to attack or defend him.

The story I have to tell coincides temporally and factually with the establishment of democracy in the Western world. As a result, the image of the political order held up by the respective thinkers to counter the troublemaker is also subject to change. Attachment or aversion to the troublemaker goes hand in hand with the fight for or against democracy, though it is not always the same coalitions and fronts that form in this dual for-and-against. Ultimately, we will have to ask which agenda the troublemaker pursues when democracy declares itself ready to welcome him with open arms, when democracy refers to itself as “wild” (Lefort), “insurgent” (Abensour) or “creative” (Dewey). I will say this much: he will not disappear.

In this book, I will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the roles into which the puer robustus slips. This role-playing can only be understood in light of the backdrop against which the puer robustus appears, and in contrast with the defenders of order who wrestle with him. If we want to know the troublemaker, we must get to know his enemies as well as his friends – and there will be a few false enemies and false friends among them. It remains to be seen which troublemaker deserves recognition and encouragement and how one can be properly devoted to him. I can tell you now that it is the eccentric troublemaker to whom I am most attached.

On the revolving stage that beckons the puer robustus, the precarious, risky positions of the outsider will be marked, the strategies of the political order to exclude or tame him will be explored, and the troublemaker’s attempts to rattle or reform this order will be acted out. The curtain rises. Let the play begin.