Again on cooks and politics
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 8, 2026
It is well to reflect on the phrase attributed to Lenin — though he apparently never uttered it — according to which “every cook can and must learn to govern the state”. Hannah Arendt, commenting the pseudo-Leninist sentence, wrote that in a classless society, “administration would be so simple that any cook could take charge of it”. Lucio Magri rightly observed years later that Lenin’s phrase should be reversed, so as to mean that “state can be run by a cook only insofar as there are no longer any cooks”.
In the only passage where a cook appears in his writings, Lenin actually says something different and differently well developed. “We are not utopians”, he wrote in a 1917 article. “We know that a cook or an unskilled labourer cannot immediately get on with the job of State administration. In this we agree with the Kadets, Breshkovskaia, and Tsereteli. We differ, however, from these citizens in that we demand an immediate break with the prejudiced view that only the rich, or officials chosen from rich families, are capable of administering the state, and carrying on the routine, everyday work of government. We demand that instruction in matters of governing the state be carried out by conscientious workers and soldiers and that this begin at once, i.e., that all working people and all the poor begin promptly to be given access to this instruction”.
As Lenin’s words suggest, the paradigm hidden behind the utopian government of the cook is that of the administrative state, according to which, once the domination of capitalim is eliminated, politics would give way, as Engels also reiterates, to the simple “administration of things”. Or, if you prefer, politics would present itself in the form of the “police”, which, starting with the theorists of police science in the 18th century, is the term which translates the Greek politeia. “Police” we still read in Marcello Adriani’s translation of Plutarch, published at Florence in 1819, “it means the order and arrangement of a city by which its affairs are organised; and so it is said there are three polizie (sorts of government): monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy”.
This is the paradigm of the admnistrative State theorised by Sunstein and Vermeule, which is now imposing itself in advanced industrial societies, where the state seems to be resolved into administration and government, and “politics” to be turned entirely into “police”. It is significant that, just in a state conceived in this sense as a “police state”, the term ends up designating the least edifying aspect of government, i.e., the bodies bound to ultimately ensure, by force, the realisation of the state’s governmental vocation. What we see today with brutal clarity is, in fact, that this very seemingly neutral state, which claims to pursue only the good order of things and mankind, can reveal itself just because of this to be devoid of any kind of limit in its action. The cook is today the quintessential figure of the tyrant.
Politics can never exhaust itself in mere administration, even in the form of good government that inevitably degenerates into bad government. Because it coincides with the free life of human beings, politics is essentially ungovernable and unmanageable. This is why Lorenzetti’s fresco in Siena, so-called of Good Government, depicts dancing maidens in the foreground. “Good government” is no government at all.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 8, 2026
It is well to reflect on the phrase attributed to Lenin — though he apparently never uttered it — according to which “every cook can and must learn to govern the state”. Hannah Arendt, commenting the pseudo-Leninist sentence, wrote that in a classless society, “administration would be so simple that any cook could take charge of it”. Lucio Magri rightly observed years later that Lenin’s phrase should be reversed, so as to mean that “state can be run by a cook only insofar as there are no longer any cooks”.
In the only passage where a cook appears in his writings, Lenin actually says something different and differently well developed. “We are not utopians”, he wrote in a 1917 article. “We know that a cook or an unskilled labourer cannot immediately get on with the job of State administration. In this we agree with the Kadets, Breshkovskaia, and Tsereteli. We differ, however, from these citizens in that we demand an immediate break with the prejudiced view that only the rich, or officials chosen from rich families, are capable of administering the state, and carrying on the routine, everyday work of government. We demand that instruction in matters of governing the state be carried out by conscientious workers and soldiers and that this begin at once, i.e., that all working people and all the poor begin promptly to be given access to this instruction”.
As Lenin’s words suggest, the paradigm hidden behind the utopian government of the cook is that of the administrative state, according to which, once the domination of capitalim is eliminated, politics would give way, as Engels also reiterates, to the simple “administration of things”. Or, if you prefer, politics would present itself in the form of the “police”, which, starting with the theorists of police science in the 18th century, is the term which translates the Greek politeia. “Police” we still read in Marcello Adriani’s translation of Plutarch, published at Florence in 1819, “it means the order and arrangement of a city by which its affairs are organised; and so it is said there are three polizie (sorts of government): monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy”.
This is the paradigm of the admnistrative State theorised by Sunstein and Vermeule, which is now imposing itself in advanced industrial societies, where the state seems to be resolved into administration and government, and “politics” to be turned entirely into “police”. It is significant that, just in a state conceived in this sense as a “police state”, the term ends up designating the least edifying aspect of government, i.e., the bodies bound to ultimately ensure, by force, the realisation of the state’s governmental vocation. What we see today with brutal clarity is, in fact, that this very seemingly neutral state, which claims to pursue only the good order of things and mankind, can reveal itself just because of this to be devoid of any kind of limit in its action. The cook is today the quintessential figure of the tyrant.
Politics can never exhaust itself in mere administration, even in the form of good government that inevitably degenerates into bad government. Because it coincides with the free life of human beings, politics is essentially ungovernable and unmanageable. This is why Lorenzetti’s fresco in Siena, so-called of Good Government, depicts dancing maidens in the foreground. “Good government” is no government at all.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Detail from Allegory of Good Government, 1338–1339. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. |
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