The Opportunist. Genealogy of a Social Figure

Jonas Helbig

Contemporary western "culture" is the "name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without 'taking them seriously'. " (Žižek) The assumption here is that with secularization and differentiation, the 'Wertrationalismus' of the Enlightenment has dissolved into cynical indifference, lack of principles and 'Zweckrationalismus' – in short: opportunism.

This research project intends to delineate the history of our alleged post-ideological era by investigating variations of opportunistic action as well as figurations of the opportunist in the age of Enlightenment. Although the term opportunism cannot be found before the nineteenth-century, the Enlightenment nonetheless represents a crucial time in which the phenomenon of opportunism, operating under different names (i.e. 'crassus', 'simulatio', 'cunning'), can be identified. This project therefore adopts an ahistorical approach by analyzing the opportunist within the discourses of the Enlightenment 'avant la lettre'.

Positioned within a spectrum of conformism and non-conformism or orthodoxy and heterodoxy, opportunism can initially be understood as a way of gambling with contingency. Derived from the latin 'opportunus' (opportune, beneficial, convenient) and 'opportunitas' (favourable situation, opportunity, advantage) the term is often associated with such notions as hypocrisy and unpredictability. Opportunism and its early modern predecessors are mainly discussed in terms of a subversion of normative structures: the opportunist bets on a latent functioning of the normative, that is to say, he gambles with the possibility that not every deviancy is punished. Within this grey area of non-sanctioned actions, behind the protective mask of social roles, he cunningly seeks advantage. Paradoxically, such masquerading presents itself as an over-identification with the normative and consequently the opportunist appears analogous to the ideologist.

The potential space of opportunistic action expanded along with early modern political, denominational and economic differentiation. Subsequently in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, specifically in the discursive fields of criminal law, religion, economy and politics, there can be found references to this type of action. By investigating these four fields this project will attempt to outline a genealogy of the opportunist.