Anomie, Philosophy, and the Remington

A Reflection on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in a Time of Structural Disappearance

Abstract

In the fifty years since Albert O. Hirschman proposed his triad of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, the political and institutional terrain has shifted so drastically that his model now serves less as a framework for reform than a record of decline. This essay reinterprets Hirschman’s schema through the affective triad of Fear, Uncertainty, and Denial, mapping how anomie becomes a form of exit, philosophy becomes voice without audience, and the Remington becomes loyalty rendered fatal. Drawing on thinkers from Hobbes and Arendt to Agamben, Wendy Brown, and Zygmunt Bauman, it argues that modern governance does not resolve suffering — it allocates its erasure. In the military, where sacrifice has become a subscription service and death a reimbursable outcome, we see the full realization of Hirschman’s inverted legacy. This is no longer a model of engagement; it is a cartography of fracture. We are not citizens choosing how to respond. We are inputs awaiting processing — or disappearance.

Prologue: What We Were Given

We were given a clean diagram:

Exit. Voice. Loyalty.

Albert O. Hirschman, in his seminal work Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, described how individuals respond to institutional decline: by exiting the relationship, voicing discontent, or remaining loyal in the hope of reform.¹ His model applied to markets, governments, and voluntary organizations — systems where membership was generally elective and value was assumed negotiable.

But what if the “organization” in question is not voluntary?

What if the thing in decline is not a firm — but the very idea that you matter?

Fifty years later, these three responses still stand.

But they are no longer options.

They are conditions.

Not chosen, but lived through.

To understand them now, we must read them alongside a darker triad — Fear, Uncertainty, and Denial — the affective logics that animate each mode of engagement.

This is a reflection on that world.

I. Anomie: Exit Without Leaving

In Émile Durkheim’s foundational sociology, anomie describes a condition of normlessness, where individuals lack the moral framework to orient their actions within a coherent social order.² Today, anomie is not a sociological accident but an administrative design. It is engineered disappearance.

You don’t exit the system. The system quietly stops counting you.

You become:

The file that never gets processed.
The overdose never grieved.
The veteran lost in hold music.
The civilian casualty without a ledger.

This is Exit in the American empire:

Not walking out, but being rendered surplus through protocol.

The form of Exit today is administrative nullification.

It is not revolt. It is not flight. It is a long, slow vanishing.

And underneath it all: Fear.

As Thomas Hobbes observed in Leviathan, fear is the founding condition of political order:

“The passions that incline men to peace are: fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them.”³

Fear is the logic that animates the economic subject. Fear of hunger. Fear of pain. Fear of irrelevance. Fear keeps people compliant long after the system has stopped delivering.

You don’t stop being a citizen.

You stop being someone the state needs to recognize.

And this collapse begins earlier than most realize. It begins at birth.

Jus soli — “right of the soil” — promises that you are born a citizen of the United States, no questions asked.

But the moment you need something — care, recognition, protection — the questions begin.

Jus soli guarantees you entry, not belonging.

You are born American — no questions asked — until the day you must prove you are American enough.

“American enough” is not about birthright. It’s about usefulness:

If you dissent: Prove your loyalty.
If you suffer: Prove your work ethic.
If you survive without serving: Prove your worth.
If you die without ritual: You do not count.

Jus soli is entry. “American enough” is audit.

It’s the point where Exit begins — not with leaving, but with being left out.

II. Philosophy: Voice After the System Stops Listening

Voice, for Hirschman, was the tool of the engaged citizen or consumer — a mechanism of feedback intended to prompt institutional reform.¹ But in our time, Voice no longer guarantees response.

To speak today is not to be heard.

It is to remain legible to oneself when the system no longer reads your body as meaningful.

This is not “saying something.”

It is writing through refusal — philosophy not as solution, but as refusal to disappear.

The addict who narrates his survival.
The mother who keeps a journal while waiting in line at the benefits office.
The soldier who testifies into the silence.

Hannah Arendt writes that action and speech are the very modes through which we appear in the world — the means by which we reveal ourselves to others.⁴ In an age of abandonment, to philosophize is to insist on one’s visibility.

Philosophy is Voice when no one is listening — but you cannot afford to stop speaking.

And beneath this voice is Uncertainty.

Paul Tillich writes that uncertainty is the defining burden of human existence in a secular, unstable world:

“The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.”⁵

Uncertainty is the ground of the political. Not resolution, but contestation. Voice emerges in the ambiguity of a world that cannot decide what counts as valuable, livable, or real.

It is not voice-as-democracy. It is voice-as-presence.

And often, it limps.

III. The Remington: Loyalty Without a Future

Loyalty, for Hirschman, was the glue that delayed Exit and made Voice possible.¹ But today, loyalty is not civic virtue — it is a gamble on ritualized disposability.

You pay $30 a month for a $400,000 payout.

Your death is insured. Your life is optional.

This is Loyalty at the edge of the American state:

You wear the uniform.
You follow orders.
You are injured.
You are erased — or folded in a flag and paid out as a number.

And when loyalty becomes unbearable, the Remington appears — not as madness, but as final clarity.

A weapon. A sentence. A precise and private audit of a system that no longer recognizes you alive.

As Giorgio Agamben shows in Homo Sacer, the sovereign holds the power to decide who lives and who may be killed without consequence.⁶ The servicemember becomes bare life — whose death is not only permitted but sublimated into civic order.

The Remington is not rebellion.

It is loyalty fulfilled — fatally.

And beneath that act is not anger — but Denial.

As Ernest Becker writes in The Denial of Death:

“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation… but it is life itself that awakens it.”⁷

Denial is the logic of the ethical. It rejects the world as it is. It insists that death might be the only form of protest left when care is allocated algorithmically.

What Hirschman Could Not Have Known

Over the decades, thinkers have extended Hirschman’s schema. Pierre Bourdieu emphasized that voice depends on symbolic capital — structured by race, class, education.⁸ Asef Bayat showed that exit is often quiet, invisible, unrecorded.⁹ Wendy Brown argued that neoliberalism redefines loyalty as survival strategy, not conviction.¹⁰

The military is the clearest illustration of this transformation. It has evolved from “military as a service” — a civic obligation — to “military-as-a-service” — a securitized, taxpayer-funded platform for force projection.

Once, the soldier was a citizen first. Today, the soldier is a quantifiable asset: insured, surveilled, substitutable. The system does not ask for sacrifice; it contracts it. When the contract ends, so does the care.

Hirschman gave us a map for decline. But what he could not have known is that in the late empire, the people still on the map are paying for the map’s destruction.

Coda: The Inverted Hirschman

We are no longer participants.

We are inputs.

Some of us Exit — by never being processed.

Some of us Voice — by writing through the wound.

Some of us stay Loyal — until the Remington does the accounting.

This is not a model.

It is a map of fracture.

As Zygmunt Bauman warned, institutions no longer offer anchorage.¹¹ Responsibility is individualized. Risk is privatized. The social contract dissolves into personal debt.

So if you’re asking:

“Where do I go?”

“What can I say?”

“How long do I have to stay?”

The answer is:

You already know.

You stay.

You write.

You limp.

You do not vanish.

Because if Hirschman gave us the map,

you live in the place where the map has burned.

Endnotes

Hirschman, Albert O. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Durkheim, Émile. Suicide and The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. W.D. Halls and John A. Spaulding. New York: Free Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press, 1973.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts of Resistance. New York: The New Press, 1998.
Bayat, Asef. Life as Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos. New York: Zone Books, 2015.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.