Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 11
October 18, 2022
Hobson's Statecraft, World Federation and the Nature of his Racism
I have set the economic compulsion in the foreground, because in point of history it is the causa causans of the Imperialism that accompanies or follows.
In considering the ethics and politics of this interference, we must not be bluffed or blinded by critics who fasten on the palpable dishonesty of many practices of the gospel of ���the dignity of labour��� and ���the mission of civilisation.��� The real issue is whether, and under what circumstances, it is justifiable for Western nations to use compulsory government for the control and education in the arts of industrial and political civilisation of the inhabitants of tropical countries and other so-called lower races. Because Rhodesian mine-owners or Cuban sugar-growers stimulate the British or American Government to Imperialism by parading motives and results which do not really concern them, it does not follow that these motives under proper guidance are unsound, or that the results are undesirable.
Duncan Bell once pointed out to me that while Hobson is a genuine and fierce critic of really existing imperialism, he is in favor of what we now call white 'settler colonialism' (with this qualification that the colony needs to occupy is thinly occupied). In addition, Hobson clearly argues for a European federal entity that, if it can be properly designed, will take on global responsibilities, and, in turn, even be the foundation for a world-federation.
One of these potential global responsibilities is to engage in a kind of eugenics (which Hobson calls echoing Pearson, 'rational selection'): "If progress is helped by substituting rational selection for the struggle for life within small groups, and afterwards within the larger national groups, why may we not extend the same mode of progress to a federation of European States, and finally to a world-federation?" As he puts it, "Biology furnishes no reason for believing that the competition among nations must always remain a crude physical struggle, and that the substitution of ���rational��� for ���natural��� selection among individual members of a nation cannot be extended to the selection of nations and of races."
Now, in general when an author freely uses language of 'lower races' and simultaneously argues for eugenics, it's safe to conclude one is in the company of scientific racism. And there are plenty of passages in Imperialism that if quoted in isolation in today's climate would lead to cancelation on a college campus and a lucrative substack column. Even so, throughout Imperialism Hobson engages in immanent criticism, but frustratingly to the modern reader, he doesn't always carefully distinguish between his own position and the one he is criticizing by way of, say a reductio. (His work seems like a good one to motivate use/mention and scare-quote techniques.) And so selective quotation from Imperialism may mislead about his position.
So, for example, I strongly doubt Hobson's race theory, such as it is, involves commitment to a fixed racial hierarchy. That's actually visible in the final paragraph of the passage quoted above, where Hobson warns against the possibility that a certain form of hegemonic rule engenders the conditions for racial 'degeneration.' (In larger context he suggests such degeneration seems to be the fate of imperial rulers on a regular basis.) And, in fact, that point is preceded in the quoted passage by the suggestion that any present advantage is the effect of "a more stimulative environment" (that is, their institutions and, perhaps, climate) not their stock. Near the end of the chapter, Hobson leaves no doubt that existing "white rulers of these lower races" is "parasitic." So, if Hobson were to believe his own racial theory, he is effectively predicting the demise of white stock!
In fact, Hobson tends to draw from Pearson's eugenics all kinds of conclusions that unsettle the very desirability of fixed racial hierarchy. For example, near the end of part I of the chapter on "The Scientific Defence of Imperialism," Hobson deserves with delicious irony, "Whether a nation or a society of nations will ever proceed as far as this, or, going farther, will attempt the fuller art of stirpiculture, encouraging useful ���crosses��� of families or races, may be matter of grave doubt; but if the maintenance and improvement of the national stock ever warranted such experiments, we are entitled to insist that logic would justify the application of the same rule in the society of nations." That is to say, Hobson suggests that if breeding (rational "stirpiculture") of populations were to take off as social policy (which, notice, he doubts), then international racial hybridity would be a natural and desirable outcome. In general, racial supremacists get rather anxious about such hybridity.
I don't mean to suggest Hobson is not a supremacist of sorts. In the passage I quoted at the top of the post he clearly implies that some of the conquered peoples in Africa and the Caribbean can be likened to children. (I put it like this because in a later chapter on "Imperialism in Asia," he clearly marks off Asian civilizations from the discussion that preceded it.) And, in fact, his position evokes John Stuart Mill's in which a proper imperialism would guide the lower civilizations. But the tendency to treat other peoples as childlike and uncivilized is one of Locke's really terrible ideas (see Essay 1.2.27) that badly shaped European intellectual culture (despite (recall) contestation of folk like Adam Smith).
Unlike, say, Mill, Hobson offers no defense of existing imperial practice (and when he praises individuals he tends to praise their intentions not the outcomes). In so far as he offers a normative account of statecraft it is one that would generate a world civilization in which the lower civilizations end up as 'developed' as the ones that understand themselves as higher in his time. Now, I am not interested in defending Hobson if only because he seems unambiguously open to the legitimacy of forced/compulsory economic development even if only when the proper conditions obtain for it.
But Hobson goes on to suggest that in practice these proper conditions simply do not exist:
Now, one might think this is the end of the matter. But, anticipating Mises (recall), it turns out Hobson goes on to advocate for a system that came to be associated with trust/mandate system of the league of nations: "until some genuine international council exists, which shall accredit a civilised nation with the duty of educating a lower race, the claim of a ���trust��� is nothing else than an impudent act of self-assertion." And while he recognizes that "one may well be sceptical about the early feasibility of any such representative council," he clearly seems to think it would be a proper function of a well functioning world federation. Why such a council would escape the problems he diagnoses as "inherent in the nature of...domination" is left unclear. As I have suggested elsewhere, it seems that such a position was respectable among left and right liberals until the 1940s.
October 17, 2022
Hobson, Mancur Olson, Lenin, and Laissez-faire democracy
Hobson claims that from the perspective of both liberalism ("laissez-faire democracy") and socialism a public, cost-benefit analysis of imperialism would find imperialism wanting. The mystery, then, is why it survives. And the mystery resolves once one realizes that imperialism benefits and greatly benefits concentrated, special or "sectional" interests. (He avoids the more Millian phrase, 'sinister' interest.)
Depending on one's training and disciplinary formation, it is incredibly difficult not to read the quoted passage and not think immediately of Mancur Olson's treatment of interest groups. And if I understand Paul Krugman's criticism of Adam Tooze correctly (see here), it's actually a good thing if that were to happen to you.
Or perhaps, if you are primed to see rent-seeking here, you think of Tullock and Krueger. The problem is that this literature is focused on tariffs, import licensing, and monopoly not imperialism (which tacitly is relegated to mere historical interest). That's not quite fair to Tullock, who is widely read and explicitly interested in vindicating "the classical economists;" and whose recurring mention of Gladstone in his short paper may well lead one to believe that the question of imperialism is lurking in the informal background of his treatment. After all, the implied lesson of Tullock's paper is that there are political costs from rent-seeking not well captured by a purely economic focus. And if this seems all too Straussian to you, Tullock has a known interest in Hobson (recall; see here 1963).
Hobson himself does not claim originality (his analysis is Smithian through and through) and evokes Tomas More. Some playing around with Google convinced me Hobson relies on a relatively late (1808) translation (Dibdin's revision of Raphe Robinson) of Utopia. But here I am not interested in tracing lineages. (That was the hook.)
As I have noted before (recall; and here) many people come to Hobson's Imperialism via Lenin and the tacit reception of Lenin in contemporary political economy and intellectual history. And once one has read Lenin, the crucial issue in Hobson's argument is Hobson's diagnosis of domestic underconsumption and over-saving as a driver of the export of capital. Imperialism then becomes a search for new markets (recall Duncan Bell's interpretation).
And from the Leninist-Marxist perspective domestic underconsumption is best understood as an effect of monopoly capitalism. There are, indeed, passages in Hobson that seem to evoke and anticipate this diagnosis. For example, in Chapter VI, Hobson writes,
It is not industrial progress that demands the opening up of new markets and areas of investment, but maldistribution of consuming power which prevents the absorption of commodities and capital within the country. The over-saving which is the economic root of Imperialism is found by analysis to consist of rents, monopoly profits, and other unearned or excessive elements of income, which, not being earned by labour of head or hand, have no legitimate raison d'��tre.
But as Hobson's wording suggests, his treatment is normative ("legitimate"). He does not think monopoly capitalism inevitable or necessary. In fact, as his analytic categories ('complete socialism' and 'laissez faire democracy') suggest he thinks alternative polities can be coherently thought. And that's because for Hobson imperialism is the effect of political decisions not the necessary outcome of economic laws. As he puts it (also in chapter VI), his economic analysis "dispels the delusion that expansion of foreign trade, and therefore of empire, is a necessity of national life." In so far as there are monopolies, these are themselves the effect of tariffs and political decisions.
Moreover, for Hobson, the search for new markets does not drive imperialism. (Simply put, he shows that the gains from new markets tend to be negligible. This does not deny some imperialist projects are pursued in the service of expanding markets.) For Hobson, while many interests benefit from imperialism, and sustain it, and while he recognizes all kinds of ideological commitments that promote it, imperialism is fundamentally a mechanism to protect high risk (and so high interest) investment income of creditors from political risk; as he puts it in Chapter VII:
That is to say, imperialism for Hobson is analytically connected with finance capital and its manipulation of the political process (and national public opinion).* If you pursue high risk, high reward investments, which effectively price in some defaults, you have no claim on socializing the downside risk.
On this view imperialism does not disappear with de-colonization, but is still exhibited in the gains from market turbulence -- "every oscillation of public credit short of this collapse, every risky enterprise in which public resources can be made the pledge of private speculations" -- and financial bailouts of the potential losses suffered by European and American creditors abroad.
I do not mean to deny that for Hobson protecting the political risks faced by a creditor class abroad isn't a peculiarly modern phenomenon. As he puts it:
To a larger extent every year Great Britain is becoming a nation living upon tribute from abroad, and the classes who enjoy this tribute have an ever-increasing incentive to employ the public policy, the public purse, and the public force to extend the field of their private investments, and to safeguard and improve their existing investments. This is, perhaps, the most important fact in modern politics, and the obscurity in which it is wrapped constitutes the gravest danger to our State.
And this gives rise to the modern phenomenon of competitive imperialism.+ But rather than treating such large saving surpluses as intrinsic to late stage capitalism, Hobson treats them as an effect of political decisions. For, Hobson does not subscribe to an economic destiny; he respects the primacy of what he calls "statecraft." And this means such saving surpluses are also correctable by political decisions. For as he puts it in Chapter VI:
Of course, diagnosing the desirably of an alternative political outcome is not the same as diagnosing the existence of a political coalition or a feasible pathway that can generate it.
*In particular, it corrupts national politics away from the path toward pacific internationalism toward acompetitive, zero-sum outcomes.
+He tends to deny the existence of competitive imperialism in the more distant past. This is an odd claim. Even the Romans (his favorite example) recognized other empires (especially the Parthian).
October 13, 2022
Smith did not hold a labor theory of value.
It's worth noting that passage...when quoted in full, explicitly involves a qualification that shows a circumstance prior to the invention of money and the development of property/rent: "IN that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land." (WN 1.6.1, 65) So, [it] involves a situation where nominal prices are absent, and where capital and rent are absent! It's akin to an early Lockean state of nature. In Marxist terms, if Smith holds a strict labor theory of value [LTV] as a measure of exchange value, then it is only well before the stage of primitive accumulation not in a capitalist economy. This illustrates my claim that the LTV gets introduced only in the context of thought experiments that go on to make more complex claims.--Eric Schliesser "Smith's Labor Theory Thought Experiment," @AdamSmithWorks
I don't have a lot of time for blogging this week. But, coincidentally, a relatively short essay appeared (here) in which I explain why it is a mistake to attribute to Adam Smith a Labor Theory of Value. (It's based on a twitter thread that went viral over the Summer, but slightly refined and more carefully argued.)
October 11, 2022
Hazony on Conservatism, Part IV
[S]uch expressions of traditional Anglo-American nationalism and public religion would soon come to an end. In the wake of the Second World War, America, Britain, and other Western countries underwent a dramatic change in self-understanding. Somehow, a war fought to defend God-fearing democracy inadvertently ended up destroying the religious foundations of the victorious Western nations. Within a few years, the God-fearing democracies came to see themselves as liberal democracies, and liberalism replaced Christianity as the perceived source of whatever was good about America and other Western nations.
We can see the beginning of this change immediately after the Second World War in the American Supreme Court���s determination, in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), that state governments could no longer support and encourage religion���whether a particular religion or any religion. In theory, this decision is deduced from the First Amendment of the Constitution as applied through the Fourteenth. But the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War to protect black Americans from violations of their right to due process under the law, had by this point been on the books for seventy-nine years without anyone supposing that support for religion by the states was a violation of anyone���s right to due process.
What had changed in the interim was not the letter of the law, but the narrative framework through which the justices of the Supreme Court, as representatives of elite opinion, understood the relationship between Christianity and the American nation. That there had been such a change is obvious from the fact that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Justice Hugo Black felt he needed to provide a new story of the American founding���one broadly hostile to government encouragement of religion. Among other things, he writes:
It is not inappropriate briefly to review the background and environment of the period in which that constitutional language was fashioned and adopted. A large proportion of the early settlers of this country came here from Europe to escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches. The centuries immediately before and contemporaneous with the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy. With the power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews. In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place, men and women had been fined, cast in jail, cruelly tortured, and killed.
In Black���s retelling, religion is no longer the source of American democracy and independence, as it had been in Roosevelt���s State of the Union address eight years earlier. On the contrary, religion is now portrayed as a danger and a threat to democratic freedoms. Indeed, the very form of the American Constitution is now said to have resulted from the excesses of religion that drove the first Europeans to settle in America. It is in the Everson decision, in other words, that we find some of the first intimations of the transition from a God-fearing democracy to a liberal democracy: one in which religion is perceived as being so great a threat that the federal government must act to safeguard every child in the country from being taught religion in a publicly supported school.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Part III" pp. 264-266,
This is the fourth in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here; here the second one on Hazony's post-feminist conception of the family; and here the third one on Hazony's account of statecraft). In this series, I mix exposition with immanent critique (even if sometimes I am bad at hiding my own skeptical liberal commitments).
The quoted material is part of a chapter, "Liberal Hegemony and Cold War Conservatism," that introduces Hazony's intellectual history of the post WWII conservative 'fusionist' movement. It has major treatments of Russell Kirk, Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Frank Meyer. (Burnham is notably missing.) The first of these is, in many ways, closest to Hazony, but Kirk's defense of states' rights (and the racialism supporting it) are criticized by Hazony. (As I have noted, before Hazony is a fierce critic of ethnic and genetic accounts of nationalism.) The latter three are all treated as liberals, and criticized for their one-sided defense of individual freedom. The cumulative effect of the chapter is, to simplify, to show how the intellectual, 'fusionist' movement organized by and around Buckley's National Review somewhat unintentionally contributed to 'liberal hegemony.' For present purposes what matters is a common thread in these thinkers that in different degrees they are willing 'to privatize' (a phrase Hazony uses in context of Meyer) religion to a relatively domestic sphere.
Now, Hazony treats World War II as a major rupture, or a triggering cause, for the retreat from public religion Stateside. (He resists the temptation to throw this on the sixties youth culture.) His explanation for this change is that elite opinion -- shocked and shamed by the racial Nazi atrocities -- correctly retreated from Jim Crow and other forms of state enforced, domestic racial oppression, and then mistakenly treated other forms of state sanctioned distinctions as on par with the racial kind. By contrast, Hazony does not "believe these aims are substantively similar at all. However, it is important to recognize that the U.S. Supreme Court did fid them comparable. Indeed, it is fair to say that these two goals���erasing distinctions based on race and religion���were the principal engines driving the establishment of liberal-democratic government in America after the Second World War." (267) And this led to the mistake of "instead of engaging in a focused effort to assist black Americans in overcoming the racial barriers that had been placed in their way, the constitutional revolution of the 1960s set out to reconstruct America in the image of the social-contract theories of Enlightenment rationalist philosophy." (270)
My interest here is not to contest the historical accuracy of this narrative. But it is worth noting an important irony. As I have noted before, Hazony treats Locke as the key 'rationalist,' who is foundational to the 'Enlightenment liberalism' (and 'liberal democracy') that Hazony treats as a rival to his own conservative/federalist nationalism. And Hazony implies throughout his argument that the Lockean liberals are to blame for the retreat of public religion. The irony, of course, is that Locke thought only protestants ought to be tolerated, and that Catholics and atheists not. And while Jews could be tolerate in Locke's day, and in the American Founders' era, the thrust of his argument is that no such toleration is possible once there is a Jewish state (due to possibility of divided loyalty, which is the argument to reject toleration of Catholics).
The point here is not that Locke was a bigot, or even to suggest that the "spirit of old the Protestant republicanism" Hazony suddenly extolls in the context of Reagan's presidency, is rather Lockean in character (and so there is something off in Hazony's conceptual framework), but rather to look again at Justice Black's rationale (and by implication of those American elites) to change the relationship between 'government 'and 'Christianity.' And to point to a surprising equivocation in Hazony's position in which 'Christianity' is treated as a kind term and 'religion' or 'religious practices' a kind of synonym for it. We see this in how Hazony advocates for what he calls 'conservative democracy. I first quote the principle on which it rests:
Principle 3. Religion. The state upholds and honors God and the Bible, the congregation and the family, and the religious practices common to the nation. These are essential to the national heritage and indispensable for justice and public morals. At the same time, the state offers toleration to religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole. (337; this is repeated from pp. 30-1, end of chapter 1)
While Hazony rejects Locke's views on consent, in the practical effects this account of toleration (to tolerate 'religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole') is, thus, actually remarkably Lockean. And while Locke might emphasize more than Hazony the right to exit from one's congregation, Hazony, too, allows this as we have seen in his account of the nature of 'loyalty groups.'
Anyway, the principle is rather vague. And is to be balanced with a number of other principles. But the practical pay-off is articulated as follows:
Public religion. Conservative democracy regards biblical religion as the only firm foundation for national independence, justice, and public morals in Western nations. In America and other traditionally Christian countries, Christianity should be the basis for public life and strongly reflected in government and other institutions, wherever a majority of the public so desires. Provision should be made for Jews and other minorities to ensure that their particular traditions and way of life are not encumbered. The liberal doctrine requiring a ���wall of separation between church and state��� is a product of the post���Second World War period and is not an inherent feature of American political tradition. It should be discarded both with respect to majority religion and to minorities. (341)
That biblical religion is (in 'Western' contexts) the only firm foundation for 'national independence, justice, and public morals' might raise protests from liberals (like myself). But that does not concern me here. Rather I am interested in the consequences for religion to Hazony's view that a (local or national) "majority of the public" can impose their religious views on minorities. And I do so by returning to Hazony's treatment of Everson vs Board of Education quoted above.
In the passage quoted from Black's opinion of Everson v. Board of Education, justice Black is fundamentally concerned about the political effects of sectarianism that is repeated almost staccato like in the opinion: (i) 'escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches;' (ii) 'the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy; (iii) he power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews;' (iv) 'In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place.' And the implication is that such sectarianism has also shaped American political life, or is a danger to it.
Of course, for much of American history, Protestantism was the majority religion. But Justice Black is writing in the aftermath of a huge, century long demographic shift toward Catholicism, and consequent increasing Catholic, political emancipation. The series of legal rulings that make the state retreat from enforcing religion in public life, can be understood as an attempt to pacify the potential for non-trivial sectarian strife not the least among Catholics and protestants, and among different protestant sects. In fact, liberals of the age (including Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls) suddenly start to emphasize (it's an innovation) the significance of religious wars as a foundational myth in the growth of liberalism.
That is to say, if sects can justly try to control government, this means that religious life will be politicized and factionalized permanently. Now, I think Hazony accepts that loyalty groups are intrinsically political (and hierarchical), although he underestimates what kind of leaders will rise to the top within religion if religion is a means to political spoils. But the dangers of sectarianism are obscured in Hazony's argument because he kind of tacitly assumes that 'Christians' will agree with each other. Of course, he is not unfamiliar with the history of sectarianism and political religious persecution. But because contemporary conservative Christians understand themselves, rightly or wrongly, as embattled against, and unified in opposition to, the near victory of (secular) Enlightenment liberalism/rationalism, Hazony never has to confront the dangers of doctrinal and factional sectarianism.
Let me close. In a way the problem of sectarianism makes the problem of statecraft I diagnosed in the previous post on Hazony's book worse. For in order to maintain peace among different religious sects, the wise politician must not only navigate a complex commerce of honors (and interests), as Hazony advocates, but s/he must also navigate a complex set of doctrinal and theological religious disputes founded on by no means durable majority opinion. This is a recipe for permanent political strife.
October 10, 2022
Foucault, Lepage, Anarcho-capitalism and anti-Marxism
In his fifth lecture of 7 February 1979 Foucault introduces "American anarcho-capitalism" as a synonym for "contemporary American liberalism." (The Birth of Biopolitics p. 104.) In context, the intended contrast is with German Ordoliberalism and Hayek's Austrian liberalism. In the next lecture, of 14 February, 1979, Foucault contrasts "contemporary American anarcho-capitalism" with the "classical liberalism of the nineteenth century." (p. 133) Later in the sixth lecture, Foucault claims that "American anarcho-capitalism" develops from the rejection of "Keynesian economics, and others from the Beveridge plans or European social security plans." (pp. 144-145) Foucault doesn't use the phrase "Anarcho-capitalism" again. He does use 'anarcho-liberal' (and its cognates) a few times (p. 117; p. 161) as apparent synonym.
It's pretty clear, however, that he is thinking of the Chicago school, especially the strand inspired by Henry Calvert Simons (1899 ���1946). Because Foucault makes clear that that "Simons drafted a number of critical texts and articles, the most interesting of which is entitled: ���The Beveridge Program: an unsympathetic interpretation,��� which there is no need to translate, since the title indicates its critical sense." (p. 216) In addition, Foucault had just introduced Simons to his audience as follows, "The first, fundamental text of this American neo-liberalism, written in 1934 by Simons, who was the father of the Chicago School, is an article entitled ���A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire.��� (p. 216) And, in fact, Foucault explicitly identifies 'anarcho-liberalism' with the Chicago school (p. 161).
Foucault's adoption of the phrase 'anarcho-capitalism' is a bit strange because Simons is no anarchist. And, in fact, to the best of my knowledge most real anarchists (Left and Right) would not treat any Chicago economist as an anarchist (since they tend to accept non-trivial state institutions). Milton Friedman's defense, for example, of central banking often gets him criticized by certain libertarians and anarchists alike.
Unusually, the editorial team of The Birth of Biopolitics is silent on Foucault's use. I mention that not to criticize them. For, in a note attached to a cryptic remark by Foucault -- "The ideas of North on the development of capitalism, for example, are directly in line with this opening up made by the neoliberals" -- in lecture of 14 February 1979 they call to "H. Lepage, Demain le capitalisme (Paris: Librairie G��n��rale Francaise, 1978; republished ���Pluriel���) p. 34 and chapters 3 and 4 (this book was one of the sources used by Foucault in the last of these 1979 lectures)." Lepage treats North at length in this fascinating book, translated by Sheilagh C. Ogilvie* as Tomorrow, Capitalism: The Economics of Economic Freedom (Open Court, 1982).
Lepage introduces the term 'anarcho-capitalism' near the end of the first chapter ("The New Economists") in a section, "The Libertarians," as follows:
This renaissance in modern economic thought has given rise to the appearance on the American political chessboard of a new ideological movement���the Libertarian movement. It does not yet represent more than an intellectual fringe, but it embodies an astonishing reconciliation between a distinctly controversial social libertarianism (favoring legalization of drugs, moral freedom, freedom from military conscription, international neutrality, suppression of the CIA, abolition of the corrupt ������military-industrial complex������) and an economic libertarianism that calls for a radically laissez-faire capitalist society in which a maximum of transactions would take place through voluntary contractual exchange.
Often having close ties with the ������radical������ philosophy of the New Left and mostly less than 40 years of age, these libertarians are the direct descendants of the great libertarian revolt of the 1960s. They hold the very existence of the state to be the supreme evil that is to be actively resisted. Opponents of all manifestations of Gulag, down to the least offensive, their objective is to abolish the state in favor of a social system in which all public functions would be made private. This has given them the name ������anarcho-capitalists,������ a name assumed by certain of their leaders such as David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, also a professor of economics, now at UCLA and formerly at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg." Lepage Capitalism, Tomorrow, p. 25
A few pages later Lepage clarifies that "Milton Friedman, for instance, passes for ������libertarian������ in most circles, but he is not recognized as libertarian by militants of the Libertarian Party such as his own son." (p. 27) And a few lines down, he is equally clear that "not all Chicago school adherents or the new economists are libertarians." (p. 27) It's natural to read this page as suggesting that Nozick and David Friedman are anarcho-capitalists. In the section on anarcho-capitalism (near the end of chapter 7) only David Friedman is mentioned and quoted (and no Chicago economist).+
I suspect Foucault gets the term 'anarcho-capitalism/liberalism' from Lepage. And it is pretty clear that Lepage's discussions of Becker, Stigler, and North shape Foucault's analysis (about this some time soon more). But Foucault does not follow Lepage slavishly (or may have conflated Milton and David Friedman). Another important difference between Foucault and Lepage is that while Lepage identifies Simons as one of the founders of the "Chicago tradition," he treats Knight (correctly) as the "true founder." (p. 5) Lepage devotes no space at all to discuss Simons (who was long dead when Lepage wrote his book). By contrast Foucault largely ignores Knight and focuses on Simons.
Okay, Capitalism, Tomorrow (Demain, le capitalisme) is a superb survey of anti-Keynesian economics and political philosophy of the 50s-70s. (It was a bestseller in France.) In his "foreword" to the English translation, James Buchanan notes that Lepage visited in September 1976. Throughout the foreword Buchanan treats Lepage as a "journalist." But I understand from Guillaume Yon that Lepage wrote important policy briefs for the regulatory framework of French electricity industry. And in France Lepage quickly became associated with 'new economists' and 'anarcho-capitalism.' And I suspect that Foucault used 'anarcho-capitalism' to alert his audience that he would be talking about the whole ensemble of characters that Lepage discusses in his book, rather than conflate the more narrow work of David Friedman with the much broader movement that Lepage discusses.
One reason Douglass North is so important to Lepage's argument, and why I think Foucault mentions him in that otherwise obscure passage when he first introduces 'anarcho-capitalism,' is that running through Lepage's book are a whole number of set-pieces in which known criticisms by Marxists of capitalism, markets, and/or liberalism are answered (if not refuted) rather thoroughly. As Lepage puts it in his introduction, "capitalism and economic freedom cannot be defended successfully...[without] new theoretical and scientific insight into the economic bases and implications of their own political philosophy," (p. 3; emphasis in original.) In fact, Capitalism, Tomorrow would still work very well in an 'intro to PPE' course or as the right-wing response to (say) Polanyi's The Great Transformation (or some such book) or as an introduction to economic way of thinking.
An example of this occurs right at the start of the book. After briefly introducing the significance of human capital theory and the new theory of consumer behavior to his audience, Lepage writes,
Formulated separately by Gary S. Becker at Chicago and Kelvin J. Lancaster at Columbia, the new theory of consumption sees the consumer as an individual who not only consumes but also ������produces������ his own satisfaction, using inputs consisting of his market purchases and his time. This is in itself���as we shall see'������an intellectual revolution, yet despite its controversial political implications it is still practically unknown outside economic circles. Its new view of consumer demand finally makes it possible to reply effectively to the critics of capitalism who base their view of society on a supposed distinction between ������true������ and ������false������ needs. In their view, advertising, by changing people���s desires, makes consumers the slaves of the producers, and the proliferation of new products becomes proof of the wasteful and suicidal nature of consumer society. But consumer behavior can be explained convincingly without invoking ������false needs������ or consumer irrationality. (Capitalism, Tomorrow, Chapter one, pp. 9-10, emphasis added)
My present point is not to endorse Lepage's claim that the new theory of consumption does respond adequately to the Marxist criticism. To evaluate that we will need to explore the details of his argument (in the very near future!) But rather that responding to anti-capitalism systematically is clearly Lepage's purpose. And I suspect this is what made the book attractive to Foucault, who, as is well known, runs with the idea that what is distinctive about American neoliberalism (as exemplified by Becker and Stigler) is the "programming of policies of economic development, which could be orientated, and which are in actual fact orientated," toward the development of human capital. (Birth of Biopolitics, p. 233) And this programming can, as Foucault clearly discerns, be developed through social policy and one's own activities.
Finally, Becker's move is at odds (recall; see also here) with Frank Knight���s position who claimed that ���wants which impel economic activity and which it is directed toward satisfying are the products of the economic process itself.��� (This is a view that is not just Marxist, but goes back to Smith and Rousseau and probably Aristotle.) Arguably this is one of the central oppositions between 'old' and 'new' Chicago. TBC.
*I believe this is the same person as the Chichele Professor of Economic History at Oxford University. So there is an interesting back-story lurking here.
+There is a fascinating footnote to chapter 1, that brings the nouveaux philosophes and David Friedman rather close together. But I leave discussion of it for another occasion.
October 7, 2022
On Foucault, Rawls, and Hal��vy on Bentham and Adam Smith and the Art of Government
For England, like France, had its century of liberalism: and to the century of the French Revolution corresponded, on the other side of the Channel, the century of the Industrial Revolution: to the juristic and spiritualistic philosophy of the Rights of Man corresponded the Utilitarian philosophy of the identity of interests. The interests of all individuals are identical. Every individual is the best judge of his own interests. Therefore it is necessary to break down all artificial barriers which traditional institutions set up between individuals, and all the social restraints based on the supposed necessity of protecting individuals against each other and against themselves. It is a philosophy of emancipation, very different in its inspiration and principles, but akin in many of its applications, to the sentimental philosophy of J.-J. Rousseau. The philosophy of the Rights of Man eventually led, on the Continent, to the Revolution of 1848; in England at the same time the philosophy of the identity of interests resulted in the triumph of the free-trade doctrine of the Manchester School.--��lie Hal��vy (1901) The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, Translated by Marry Morris, London Faber & Faber (1928), p. xvi.
Despite the different terminology, ��lie Hal��vy's distinction anticipates the Rawlsian distinction between a social contract and a utilitarian tradition. According to Hal��vy both traditions are a "philosophy of emancipation." In Hal��vy (1870 ��� 1937) the opposition of utilitarianism to the social contract is introduced via Hume's criticism of Locke which Bentham takes over from Hume and then also applies against Blackstone (and the inconsistencies in Beccaria) in chapter 2. It's worth noting, again, that Foucault, treats the first as the "axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach" (he drops its connection to sentimentalism--Hal��vy is clearly seeing the influence of Mandeville on Rousseau) focused on contracts and rights, which Foucault explicitly associates with Rousseau, and the second Foucault associates with "English radicalism" or "the problem of utility" or interest (The Birth of Biopolitics, 17 January 1979, pp. 39-40), My interest here, however, is not in labeling.
Rawls knew Hal��vy's book. After introducing "the distinction between the constitutive rules of an institution, which establish its various rights and duties, and so on, and strategies and maxims for how best to take advantage of the institution for particular purposes," and explaining this distinction (Rawls does not cite Buchanan & Tullock here, but rather Searle and Anscombe),* Rawls goes on to cite Hal��vy's Growth (from the French original) as a source on Bentham and Smith in A Theory of Justice:
In designing and reforming social arrangements one must, of course, examine the schemes and tactics it allows and the forms of behavior which it tends to encourage. Ideally the rules should be set up so that men are led by their predominant interests to act in ways which further socially desirable ends. The conduct of individuals guided by their rational plans should be coordinated as far as possible to achieve results which although not intended or perhaps even foreseen by them are nevertheless the best ones from the standpoint of social justice. Bentham thinks of this coordination as the artificial identification of interests, Adam Smith as the work of the invisible hand.3 It is the aim of the ideal legislator in enacting laws and of the moralist in urging their reform.--Rawls A Theory of Justice (Revised edition), p. 49 [it's also in the original 1971 edition.]
I take it that Rawls is describing his own program when he writes that in designing and reforming those social arrangements which are "the constitutive rules," which just are (a part of) the basic institutions of society, "the conduct of individuals guided by their rational plans should be coordinated as far as possible to achieve results which although not intended or perhaps even foreseen by them are nevertheless the best ones from the standpoint of social justice." As I recount in my book, the distinction between intended and foreseeable consequences is rather important to a proper understanding of Smith's account of the invisible hand, but I leave that aside here.
As an aside, it's worth noting that the terminology of the 'ideal' here (recall) echoes the manner by which Knight and Arrow refer to what they call the 'idealist tradition,' which in the very notes that Rawls calls attention to (see p. 233 and 314 n. 16 of TJ) in Arrow, Arrow mentions Rousseau, Kant, T.H. Green and Milton in the context of discussing the 'Idealist' tradition. (On p. 233, Rawls tacitly divides the Idealist tradition, which he ordinarily only associates with Bradley (in the sense familiar to us), into a social contract variant.))
Be that as it may, in the accompanying footnote to the passage from p. 49, Rawls claims that "The phrase ���the artificial identification of interests��� is from Elie Hal��vy���s account of Bentham." Rawls cites pp. 20-24 from volume 1 of the French edition. In the English translation this is pp. 15-18 (which basically runs from Mandeville to Helvetius). The key passage is worth quoting:
But there is yet another argument which can be used: while still admitting that individuals are chiefly or even exclusively egoistic, it is yet possible to deny that their egoisms will ever harmonise either immediately or even ultimately. It is therefore argued that in the interest of individuals the interest of the individual must be identified with the general interest, and that it is the business of the legislator to bring about this identification. This may be called the principle of the artificial identification of interests. Hume approved the maxim of political writers according to which every man should, on principle, be held a knave, and, once this principle had been laid down, concluded that the art of politics consists in governing individuals through their own interests, in creating artifices of such a kind that in spite of their avarice and their ambition they shall co-operate for the public good. If politics are not carried on in this way, it is vain to boast of possess-ing the advantages of a good constitution ; for it will in the end be found that a man���s sole guarantee of his liberty and property consists in the good-will of his rulers, which amounts to saying that he has no guarantee at all. ��� Now this is the form in which Bentham first adopted the principle of utility. It is true that he occasionally applied, by accident, the principle of the fusion of interests. It is true that in political economy he adopted, with the ideas of Adam Smith, the principle of the natural identity of interests. But the primitive and original form in which in his doctrine the principle of utility is invested is the principle of the artificial identification interests. Bentham appealed to the legislator to solve���the great problem of morals, to identify the interests of the individual with the interests of the community. -��lie Hal��vy (1901) The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 17-18.
(For the roles of knaves in public choice see this lovely paper by Kliemt; and my response.) Notice, first, that Hal��vy does not claim here explicitly, as Rawls does, that the invisible hand solves the meta-coordination problem that Bentham ascribes as a task legislator. Rawls' position or gloss is explicable, of course, that if (in Bentham) a legislator is needed to identify and coordinate artificial identification (of true/authentic, well-considered) interests, then no such legislator would be needed if such identification is natural (and, hence, can be left to the market mechanism or the invisible hand, or as Halevy, phrases it sometimes in his treatment of Smith, "the spontaneous harmony of egoisms." (p. 89)) Hal��vy explicitly suggests that Smith invisible hand links egoism to general interest of society or civilization on p. 90, where no "wisdom of a legislator" is said to be required. So, Rawls' echoes Hal��vy's nicely which suggests he read more of the book than just the pages cited in TJ.
Shortly after the passage Rawls explicitly cites (and before p. 89), Hal��vy points out that for Bentham, "Either the man whose actions I intend to direct is myself, in which case morals is the art of governing myself or private morals: or else the men whose actions I intend to direct are men other than myself. In this case, if they are not adults, the art of governing them is called education, which is either private or public: if they are adults, the art of directing their actions so as to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number appertains to legislation, if the acts of the government are of a permanent kind, or to administration, if they are of a temporary kind dictated by circumstances." (p. 27)
So, for Bentham (go check out Bowring, vol. i, pp. 142-143, partially cited by Hal��vy), the (outer directed) "art of government" directs the actions of "other human beings" and is divided in legislation and administration. The terminology of 'legislation' as the permanent kind is a bit misleading to modern ears, which often associate it not with the constitutional rules or basic structure, but with particular laws. (Bentham's terminology here follows Smith's something Hal��vy emphasizes throughout.)
In Rawlsian terms the Benthamite art of government just is the setting up of constitutive rules (that is legislation) such that "men are led by their predominant interests to act in ways which further socially desirable ends." If these rules work properly, then "the conduct of individuals guided by their rational plan" produces what in context Rawls calls "social justice." (We later learn quite a bit is packed into the idea of a rational plan for Rawls.) Somewhat surprisingly, then, the design of the basic institutions behind the veil of ignorance in the original position in which we imagine we pursue a rational plan (without knowing our station) just is what Bentham would call the 'art of government.' (A phrase Rawls never uses I think. But I return to Rawlsian art of government some other time.)
I should stop here. But I want to begin to argue that Hal��vy is non trivial to Foucault's overall argument in Birth of Biopolitics. In Foucault's account the art of government in the history of liberalism (in The Birth of Biopolitics), Hume is the crucial originary figure (against the confusions of Blackstone) that helps set up a separation between the juridical rights based approach and the one focused one interests (see 28 March 1979, pp. 273-274; recall this post). Chronologically, Foucault's argument is a bit dubious (Hume's crucial material seems to be published ahead of Blackstone.) But conceptually, Foucault is clear and he is clearly echoing Hal��vy's narrative (see, especially, p. 133 in the English translation; but it's anticipated between pp. 12-25!) And, in fact, Foucault's subsequent claim that the subject of interest and the subject of right cannot be superimposed on each other (p. 276) is a nice summary and crystallization of Hal��vy in memorable language!+
And, then, after developing the point through Mandeville and Condorcet, Foucault turns to Smith's invisible hand and claims "that kind of bizarre mechanism which makes homo oeconomicus function as an individual subject of interest within a totality which eludes him and which nevertheless founds the rationality of his egoistic choices." (p. 278) Now, as a straight reading of the invisible hand passage of Wealth of Nations this is very implausible. But if we return to the very same passage from Hal��vy that Rawls cites and uses to frame the nature of constitutive rules above quoted above, Foucault's claim is, in fact, a lovely interpretation of Hal��vy's account of Smith!
TBC+
*The language of 'Constitutive rules' does not play an important role in Rawls' subsequent argument. Its presence harks back to early Rawls' interest in ordoliberal and Hayekian thought (conceived in terms of rules of the game) as documented by Katrina Forrester, see p. 33 and the material leading up to it.
+In his introduction to the Foucault Effect, Colin Gordon calls attention to Hal��vy's treatment of the "radical discord between the economic and juridical register" (see p. 21). In the paragraph before Gordon goes over the material I had discussed in my earlier blog post on Hume and Foucault. So, I don't want to claim originality in recognizing the significance of Hal��vy here.
October 6, 2022
Arendt, Foucault, Orwell, Swift, on the newness of totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt's book appears in 1951 by which time relative interest in totalitarianism already seems to have peaked. There is a further irony lurking here: the term 'totalitarian' is introduced in the context of (Italian) fascism and not always as a term of disapprobation. In her big book, Arendt is adamant that 'fascism' needs to be distinguished from 'totalitarianism.' For her the distinction between the two is roughly (and to simplify) that the former aims to capture the state and is in many ways no different from a military dictatorship that despite its ambitions leaves much alone, whereas the latter actually destroys the state as an independent institution in the service of an all powerful party (or its leader) that aims to control all facets of life.* For, she writes, "the "totalitarian state" is a state in appearance only, and the movement no longer truly identifies itself even with the needs of the people. The Movement by now is above state and people, ready to sacrifice both for the sake of its ideology." (p. 266) While 'fascism' and 'totalitarianism' are relatively new terms, only totalitarianism is something really new, on Arendt's view. What's interesting about the ngam is that it empirically does track a point Arendt makes after the death of Stalin (in later editions) that the USSR has stopped being totalitarian (and has shifted to a more ordinary dictatorship).
Foucault agrees with Arendt (without mentioning her name) in his lecture of 7 March 1979: "I would also like to suggest that the characteristic feature of the state we call totalitarian is far from being the endogenous intensification and extension of the mechanisms of the state; it is not at all the exaltation but rather a limitation, a reduction, and a subordination of the autonomy of the state, of its specificity and specific functioning���but in relation to what? In relation to something else, which is the party." (Birth of Biopolitics, p. 190) In context he is clearly thinking of Nazism and Stalinism.
As an aside, a certain kind of correlational linguistic historicist will deny that a social phenomenon can really exist before the term that describes it has been coined and gained wide circularity. For such a historicist, racism (for example--see the NGRAM below) is really the more modern phenomenon that comes into existence pretty much after the civil rights movement has peaked!
Perhaps we can burry some forms of linguistic idealism? Be that as it may, that totalitarianism is distinctly new is not an agreed upon fact. As I have noted before, in passing (recall), Orwell, who also thought deeply on the matter, claims that Swift is the original theorist of totalitarianism. Orwell writes in 1946:
Swift's greatest contribution to political thought in the narrower sense of the words, is his attack, especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ���police State���, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials, all really designed to neutralize popular discontent by changing it into war hysteria. And one must remember that Swift is here inferring the whole from a quite small part, for the feeble governments of his own day did not give him illustrations ready-made. "Politics vs. Literature ��� An examination of Gulliver's travels"
To be sure, Orwell's wording suggests that in Swift's time the intent to be totalitarian already exists, but the capacity was lacking in a certain sense. And so that leaves an open question when this capacity was first developed. And this also suggests that one can a be a theorist of the future. (Plato's Laws may prompt similar reflections.)
A careful reader may well think there is an important equivocation here. A 'police state' is not identical to what Arendt, and we moderns, means by 'totalitarianism.' And one reason to think that is that a police state is centered on the state whereas totalitarianism seems to efface it. This is, in fact, Foucault's very point in the lecture from the Birth of Biopolitics that I have quoted above, where he goes on to say (inter alia) that "the totalitarian state is not the...the nineteenth century Polizeistaat pushed to the limit." (p. 191)
Even so, it's worth noting that in Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, 'police state' is barely used. One rare occasion is in a footnote to her preface to part III, when she reports it is the term Bukharin is said to use (in 1936) in order to accuse Stalin of having changed Lenin's party. So, if there is a distinction between police state and totalitarianism it's not in terms of actor's categories. (There is a further complication here in that 'police' itself shifts meaning from roughly what we might be inclined to call 'policy' to a particular instrument of 'law enforcement.' However, in both uses wider issues of social control and terror are lurking.)
In the Birth of Biopolitics, at the very point I have been quoting, Foucault promises to develop his ideas. He is recorded to have said, "The party, this quite extraordinary, very curious, and very new organization, this very new governmentality of the party which appeared in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century is probably���well, in any case this is what I may try to show you next year, if I still have these ideas in mind���at the historical origin of something like totalitarian regimes, of something like Nazism, fascism, or Stalinism." By implication, here we are really promised a kind of extended reflection on Arendt's famous book or at least the themes in it.
As scholars of Foucault note, Foucault changed direction and started to explore very different issues in subsequent years. One possible reason for this is that Foucault seems to have changed his mind about the nature of totalitarianism. For he has come to side with Orwell (and Bukharin as reported by Arendt). For, in the second of his Tanner Lectures delivered at Stanford, 16 October 1979, he explicitly describes the police state, and its interventions, as "totalitarian" in character.
I actually think that in the Tanner Lectures Foucault expresses and develops a point he had already started to recognize at the beginning of The Birth of Biopolitics, "The object of police is almost infinite....the absence of a limit in the exercise of government [is characteristic of] the police state." (p. 7; 10 January 1979; 'police' here is closer to our 'policy.') So, that he came to realize that his prying apart of the police state and totalitarianism (as he done later in the Birth of Biopolitics) was on shaky grounds.
There is, of course, a way to resolve these apparent changes of heart and differences among the thinkers discussed. One can claim that the techniques and aims of totalitarianism are already present in the police state and its conceptualizations. But that these are state centered in a way that the ideology of totalitarianism is ultimately not. Somewhat paradoxically, when state capacity develops to use such techniques of control and terror on mass populations, the state's necessary independence simultaneously is fatally undermined by the ideology and people that wish to deploy it. That fact has not changed, yet.
*See, for example:
The difference between the Fascist and the totalitarian movements is best illustrated by their attitude toward the army, that is, toward the national institution par excellence. In contrast to the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, who destroyed the spirit of the army by subordinating it to the political commissars or totalitarian elite formations, the Fascists could use such intensely nationalist instruments as the army, with which they identified themselves as they had identified themselves with the state. They wanted a Fascist state and a Fascist army, but still an army and a state; only in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia army and state became subordinated functions of the movement. The Fascist dictator-but neither Hitler nor Stalin-was the only true usurper in the sense of classical political theory, and his one-party rule was in a sense the only one still intimately connected with the multiparty system. He carried out what the imperialist-minded leagues, societies, and "parties above parties" had aimed at, so that it is particularly Italian Fascism that has become the only example of a modern mass movement organized within the framework of an existing state, inspired solely by extreme nationalism...(p. 259)
October 5, 2022
Hazony on Conservatism, part III
The state thus introduces a profound transformation in human life. But the fundamentals of human nature are not changed by it. Human beings continue to form families, clans, and tribes. And while these loyalty groups are to various degrees domesticated���meaning that they become more peaceable among themselves���they nonetheless retain their hierarchical structure, their tendency to adopt a common judgment based on the views of leading figures within the hierarchy, and their intense competition for honor and influence. All this continues, along with the insult and anger that occur when one���s family or tribe has been disregarded or dishonored and its influence slighted. And if the norms of domestic speech and behavior, which have been established to guarantee a measure of honor and influence to all sides, are not upheld, then the peaceful coexistence and alliance among the tribes will quickly disintegrate. At such times, the old order of tribes and clans inevitably reasserts itself. Then the competition among the tribes becomes violent again, and their assertions of independence from one another grow more strident, until finally the state exists in name only or not at all. Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Chapter: V "The Purposes of Government,"pp. 234-235)
This is the third in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here; and here the second one on Hazony's post-feminist conception of the family). And as should be clear by now, I mix exposition with immanent critique (even if sometimes I am bad at hiding my own liberal commitments). Hazony starts the fifth chapter with the claim that "Enlightenment liberalism" -- by which he means an ideology that originates in what he calls a "rationalist manifesto," Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) -- has, in virtue of a one-sided focus on the "freedom of the individual," no place for "the national interest, or of the general welfare of the nation, or of the common good of the nation, or of the good of the commonwealth" (p. 223 emphasis in original).
The claim would have surprised Locke, who, after all, put the Latin phrase "Salus populi suprema lex esto" [that is, The health/welfare of the people should be the supreme law"] on the frontispiece of the Two Treatises. Locke goes on to remind the reader (at II.158) that it "is certainly so just and fundamental a rule, that he, who sincerely follows it, cannot dangerously err." Even Jefferson -- who is the high priest of Enlightenment Jefferson in Hazony's book -- appealed to the principle in a 1810 letter to John B. Colvin (28 September) in order to explain that the executive sometimes can ignore written law (and offering several examples of this behavior from one of Hazony's heroes, George Washington).*
I do not mean to suggest there is no genuine contrast between liberalism in all its varieties and Hazony's conservatism. One cluster of contrasts becomes clear if we look at how Hazony describes the purpose of government and the function of statecraft in it. As the quoted passage shows, the state transforms the state of war (constant bloodshed) into a situation of "intense competition for honor and influence." (At another point, Hazony describes a "bitter" competition. (p. 237)) The Hobbesian or Spinozistic state of nature is always a latent possibility within the ordinary life of the polity. Hazony doesn't mention Spinoza, but his view is actually rather close to Spinoza.** Unlikes Hobbes and Spinoza, Hazony understands the state of nature and peace not in terms of individuals, but in terms of hierarchically organized loyalty groups (families, congregations, tribes, clans, nations, etc.).
As a crucial aside, for Hazony such loyalty groups are not primarily organized around genes or race. He makes this clear in a crucial note attached to the introduction where he distinguishes his views from those of "the ���white identity��� movements of the extreme right, which seek a politics based on biological race." His loyalty groups share a "heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies." In the note, Hazony emphasizes his is "the traditional Anglo-American conception of the nation, inherited from the Bible." In context he does not explain what he means, but there is a passage (recall here), drawing on Talmud Megillah 13a, in his earlier God and Politics in Esther, centered on an interpretation of the daughter of the Pharao's actions at Exodus 2: 5-6, which shows that for Hazony through one's actions one can become part of, and be adopted by, a loyalty group. (In Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything one finds (recall) a description of such a mechanism in their account of pre-Columbian conquest practices of the Turtle and Bear clans.)
It's worth noting that the mechanism of inclusion (and exit) from a loyalty group is ground in a kind of individual conscience that the pharaoh's daughter exercises. Conscience is emphasized in Hazony's (protestant and American) sources, but Hazony ignores it in Conservatism. But the freedom to act on conscience -- and some room for exit -- is crucial for Hazony's scheme if one wish to avoid loyalty groups to become despotic. This is tacitly recognized in the moving, concluding autobiographical personal chapter. But it does not have a comfortable theoretical place in his general argument (because it would move his stance too close to Locke's and presumably open the door to a species of liberalism.)
Be that as it may, a key function, then, of statecraft or the art of government in Hazony's political theory is to manage or balance the intense competition for honor and influence among the hierarchically organized, social pillars of state. The point of managing it is to generate internal cohesion, so as to allow not just domestic peace, but also for a "unified front...[and] power projected" against foreign rivals. (p. 237) Without such proper management the cohesion and "bonds of loyalty" will quickly fall apart.
Hazony explicitly recognizes that the skill-set involved in managing honor and influence among traditional loyalty groups is distinct from the leadership within traditional loyalty groups. But Hazony treats the problem as one involving issues of scale due to lack of repeated personal interaction. When one has a liberal sensibility one immediately recognizes a further problem for such statecraft in Hazony's account. Honor is intrinsically zero-sum. This is a feature and not a bug within traditional loyalty group in Hazony's account, but it turns into a dangerous impediment to stability in the interactions among loyalty groups, absent a common enemy.
Hazony rejects the liberal solution which, roughly, is to displace the political onto non-zero-sum 'growing the pie activities' (increase trade -> wealth and cosmopolitan structures). So he offers an alternative:
To put this matter as simply as possible: The state and government are traditional institutions of certain societies. Their continued existence therefore depends entirely on the cultivation of bonds of mutual loyalty among the rival tribes that constitute the nation; and these bonds, in turn, depend on the conservation and transmission of particular traditions of speech and behavior that allow rival tribes and parties to compete, while at the same time honoring one another. There is, in other words, a causal relation between the cultivation and transmission of certain traditions within society and the existence of the state and state government. If appropriate traditions are not intensively and successfully cultivated, then the alliance among these rival tribes will end, and both the state and its government will cease to be. (237)
One effect of this is that political management becomes an intense task not just for the leadership of the state but also the leadership of the loyalty groups. And the glue that holds them together is constituted by traditions (including nationalism and a national religion(s)).
This is not incompatible with democratic life and constitutional parliamentarianism (as Hazony emphasizes). In fact, in principle, it can also be characterized by pluralism (which Hazony ignores). Some version of such an approach is familiar from, say, Lijphart's account of the social pillar system of Dutch Consociationalism. This is characterized by quite intense elite interaction (as Hazony emphasizes, too). Hazony's account does not really emphasize the pluralist possibilities. (The word 'pluralist' occurs, I think, only once in a reference to Isaiah Berlin's analysis of Selden, who is, in fact, a key progenitor of Hazony's intellectual thought.) In a later post, I discuss the motives and grounds for as well complications of Hazony's rejection of a pluralist consociationalism, and his insistence on adopting Christianity as a public religion.
The problem here is that the existence of such glues does not solve the zero-sum nature of honor. Hazony himself kind of recognizes this because he returns to it again as follows:
What is needed above all else is to do the practical political work of cultivating ties of mutual loyalty among the various tribes and parties. This involves constantly balancing their interests and needs against one another, and ensuring that this balance leads to a renewed exchange of honors among them. Where the national political leadership has cultivated such mutual loyalties among the differents [sic] tribes and factions that constitute the nation, then the state can be firm and its government effective. (p. 239)
So, the domestic art of government requires constant political management of interests and needs of loyalty groups. The cultivation of "ties of mutual loyalty" is -- echoing Hume, who is self-consciously echoing Montesquieu -- in the service of the national spirit of unity. But the spirit of unity can only be stable if the loyalty groups have a commerce in honors among them. The problem is that such a commerce (it's the nature of the beast) has winners and losers.
The problem for Hazony's scheme is not, as one might suspect I'll argue, that a system of hierarchy ground/founded on honor is intrinsically unstable (although it is always teetering on the brink of violence), but rather that it requires unusual if not rare and rather demanding skill to manage it properly. And as far as I can tell, he offers no mechanism such that the nation or the leaders of the nation can recognize and regularly elevate the right sort of leader into the position. (For as he notes this is not a skill that is exhibited in the life of loyalty groups themselves.) If anything, since in his scheme such leadership accrues non-trivial honor, one should expect the honor loving to seek it in particular. But there is no reason to believe that honor loving and the practical judgment needed to manage the honor loving are naturally conjoined.
*The main issue involves General Wilkinson's behavior toward Vice President Burr. It's pretty clear that Jefferson thinks Wilkinson (and he himself) were very much in the same position as Cicero toward Cataline.
**Hazony does claim Montesquieu as a source of inspiration, but he does not analyze the latter's account of the Troglodytes.
October 4, 2022
Arendt and the Illusions of democracy
The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that each individual was in sympathy with one's own or somebody else's party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority. The second democratic illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and constituted no more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public opinion had ever been able to show, namely, that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country. Thus when the totalitarian movements invaded Parliament with their contempt for parliamentary government, they merely appeared inconsistent: actually, they succeeded in convincing the people at large that parliamentary majorities were spurious and did not necessarily correspond to the realities of the country, thereby undermining the self-respect and the confidence of governments which also believed in majority rule rather than in their constitutions.
It has frequently been pointed out that totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them. This is not just devilish cleverness on the part of the leaders or childish stupidity on the part of the masses. Democratic freedoms may be based on the equality of all citizens before the law; yet they acquire their meaning and function organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups or form a social and political hierarchy. The breakdown of the class system, the only social and political stratification of the European nation-states, certainly was "one of the most dramatic events in recent German history" and...favorable to the rise of Nazism....--Hannah Arendt (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part 3: Totalitarianism (Chapter 10: "A Classless Society"), New Edition, pp. 312-313. ]
I often return to the quoted passage. It's not unfair to say that quite a bit of existing normative and deliberative democratic theory (alongside much social theory) tacitly continues to adhere to the illusions diagnosed by Arendt. It's often treated as bad taste or, worse, a sign of one's reactionary sensibility to point this out. And if you don't believe me, recall all the good things that are supposed to flow -- as you probably also believe my dear reader -- from (say) the abolition of the electoral college once pure majoritarianism can work its magic.
While it is easy to be distracted by Arendt's argument for the functionality of social hierarchy to democratic political life, the key historical claim that she makes is that the ideology or commitments of governments (and the minority of rotating elites that can form one) are central to the survival of liberal democracy or parliamentarianism. And she implies that if (ruling) political elites had been less respectful of majoritarianism and more willing to defend constitutional government, the collapse of liberal democracy could have been prevented.
The point is not a historical (or moral one), but rather follows from her observation that [liberal] "democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority." That is to say, that as long as elites are willing to adhere to constitutional norms because these are part of their esprit des corps or shared ideology liberal democracy can survive. Lurking in Arendt's argument are the ideas of Pareto, Michels, Mosca, and Schumpeter. (She cites Michels a few pages before, and mentions Pareto in passing later.)*
Of course, the more fundamental point is that for there to be elites in the relevant sense, society needs to have the right sort of social hierarchy that maps onto political hierarchies as instantiated by political parties and social intermediaries. On her view liberal democracy is compatible with mass society -- notwithstanding Arendt's own recurring nostalgia for the ancient Polis -- as long as social differentiation can be made politically functional.
I don't mean to deny that one could respond to Arendt's claim by arguing that if liberal democracy is to be secure one could also aim to convince the vast majority that it should adhere to constitutionalism. Surely civic religion -- with ceremonial pledges to constitutions not to monarchs/presidents/flags -- can be organized to promote this. And one may well believe that by serving the interests of the majority, constitutional elites can gain its approbation and support. I don't think Arendt would disagree as long as the elites don't assume that this is sufficient for constitutional survival (that's one of the exploded illusions).
It's pretty clear today that the enemies of liberal democracy are better students of earlier collapses of democracy than its defenders are. For in many countries they aim, while drawing on all kinds of conspiracy theories, to convince the people at large that parliamentary majorities are spurious and do not correspond to the realities of the country. In fact, they relentlessly aim to show that all kinds of elites (medical, legal, political, academic, etc.) are 'out of touch' or 'in a bubble' or lacking in 'common sense.' (Recall also Michael Polanyi's diagnosis.) This is why the unwillingness to pay lip-service to abide by electoral outcomes, or to suggest that these are fictitious (based on fraud etc.), are themselves signs that one is unwilling to act according to the rules of democratic and constitutional life, but that one stakes one's political fortune on a truer reality.
In larger context, Arendt is predicting that the spirit of totalitarianism is not defeated permanently in Europe because the grounds of its revival -- "isolation and lack of normal social relationships" (317) -- are not gone with the end of war. (One fears the pandemic may well be an accelerating cause.) In mass society the views of the fundamentally unpolitical majority are shaped by "all-pervasive influences and convictions which [are] tacitly and inarticulately shared by all classes of society alike." (314) And these convictions are even with a robust civic religion never fundamentally about constitutional life; they are about nation, religion, a cult of financial success, celebrity, etc.
It may seem that Arendt rests her hopes on the prudence or interest of political elites in the status quo to fight off the would-be-usurpers. But as she notes, this cannot be expected when respectability and playing by the rules are treated as na��ve (that is, when the gangster's practices becomes admired), and when constitutional order itself is taken to be the barrier to action and the true destiny of society.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is not a manual for the survival of liberal democracy. In fact, as Arendt explicitly notes in the book there are, in addition to totalitarianism, more ways democracy can end (e.g., fascism, military dictatorships, plebiscitary dictatorship, etc.). But it's very hard not to read chapter 10 without coming away thinking that liberal democracy is doomed. Nearly all the examples she mentions of the anticipations of democratic decay in the arts and social culture can be updated to our age. And if one is familiar with Arendt's essays from the 1960s, one can't help but think this pessimism stayed with her. Yet, it's seventy years on, and European liberal democracy with its re-founded parties turned out to be much more robust in a mass age than Arendt seems to have thought possible. Why this is so --memory of the earlier collapse or a side-effect of cold war, American empire, years of prosperity, or a new kind of stratification (based on education) -- I do not know. Perhaps, social differentiation was made politically functional. But even in our post-post-modern age, dancing on the precipice of environmental catastrophe, it is worth figuring out.
*There is no mention of Popper, but we're clearly in the ambit of his views on how to defend democracy from its enemies.
October 3, 2022
Covid Diaries: a much fuller glass despite some tricky issues.
It's time for another entry in my Covid Diaries. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here, here; here; here, here; here; here; here; here; and here.) If you don't want to read the whole post, here is my executive summary: the glass is much fuller than two months ago, while some tricky issues remain.
About a month ago, I wrote that "I can report some modest, good news. Without any evident explanation, I suddenly improved greatly from the start of August onward." Since then I traveled to Durham for a six week visiting stint at Duke University. (I am exactly at the half-way point now.) Packing, travel, and getting oriented in a new place is pretty stressful. Luckily the trip was uneventful, and Kirun Sankaran (a very talented local postdoc) helpfully picked me up at the airport, and organized a stop at a supermarket before dropping me off at my new abode.
Despite the lovely and very organized welcome at the Center for the History of Political Economy, the first week in Durham was pretty challenging due to my jetlag and the really oppressive humidity and heat (as well as some maintenance issues in my rental). I adore warm weather, but dislike having to hide in airconditioned spaces. By the end of the first week I was, in fact, under the weather, and worried that I had overestimated my recovery. I canceled my social schedule, and spend a few days in bed and on the sofa of my rental. By Tuesday I was feeling much better, and able to comment on a fascinating workshop paper by Jennifer Jhun in the Duke philosophy department. Shortly thereafter the humidity disappeared and until Hurricane Ian we've had just lovely, even inspiring. weather.
As the hurricane arrived on campus -- classes got canceled -- I workshopped a chapter of my Foucault/liberal art of government book in progress in the HOPE Center, and then enjoyed a festive reception and a joyous dinner (in the otherwise deserted campus center). Ian was a serious storm, but not frightening in my location. While I was in bed relatively early, no amount of meditation helped my excited brain relax. I went over the day countless times, and had to pinch myself I had been in a professional academic environment focused on my work. I had a restless sleep, and the next day I just chilled--with the storm raging there were no other options anyway. The dreaded headache did not materialize, but I felt very fatigued.
So, looking back at my first three weeks here: I have had some intense and very good conversations, socialized a few times (a Dim Sum, a BBQ dinner, some lunches and coffee, etc.), and even engaged in non trivial academic work. All of that is very encouraging. The anti-inflammatory meds I use are excellent in preventing and treating headaches and other long covid related symptoms. And I have become more willing to experiment with social interactions without taking meds altogether. And while I still struggle in environments with other social stimuli, it's much improved from where I was.
Having said that, I have woken up with random (but sadly familiar) headaches in the middle of the night a few times, and I do bump into my limitations at odd moments. I am currently struggling greatly in my morning work outs, and I need to take more regular breaks while writing/researching.
I have my own cubicle in the library (sadly without windows), and access to the open stacks. It's bewildering that I have more shelve-space for books in the cubicle at a place I am visiting than at my shared office at my home university. I was completely blown away when, during my first day at the HOPE center, the economics department's tech support came by to set me up with local printing (etc.). (I was happy I had brought extra Harrods ginger biscuits from London so I could express my gratitude spontaneously.)
As an aside, in fact, while I have spent a good chunk of the first few years of my academic life employed at rather wealthy, private US universities (and have visited countless times since), the contrast between life at Duke with my current work conditions at a massive Dutch state university hit me hard. While I may publish in similar outlets as the locals, what one may call the 'phenomenological-geography of our daily academic lives' (e.g., class size, office space, technical support, length of academic year, etc.) is incomprehensibly different. For example, in order to visit here I had to take unpaid leave (and cash in overtime hours) because it will be a while before I am eligible for the very new sabbatical arrangement my department finally instituted. Odds are I will never be eligible for it. (Don't ask, but it's basically a money/funding issue.)
Anyway, I spent mornings writing, and if I socialize at all this starts after lunch. I mostly read secondary literature in the afternoon. I miss my family intensely, but I very much appreciate the lack of responsibilities to others and the general quiet of my life. This week, I have set aside to get on top of some professional obligations to others (letters of recommendation, reviews, revise and resubmits with other authors). All and all, I feel pretty blessed. (And I welcome suggestions for more opportunities to be on paid leave!)
Okay, I should wrap up. Technically speaking I am not on disability anymore since the first of September. But I am obviously relieved I don't have to teach full time this Fall, especially because of the many small cognitive (weird memory issues and odd moments of head fatigue) and physical issues I still encounter. And while I teach a huge lecture course in the spring, It's under seven weeks. So, the real test of my cognitive stamina will occur only a year from now (at the start of next academic year). I am tentatively scheduling academic commitments (talks, workshops) along the way. Because I love undergraduate teaching, I am more optimistic than I have been in close to two years that it's not unreasonable to expect I will be able to return to things I adore about my profession on a regular basis. I am even hopeful I will be able to socialize with friends and family more normally again. So, there, the glass is filling up with the nectar of life; I said it.
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