Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 17

J.E. Ted McGuire RIP (pt 1.)

Nearly everything that's written, even by highly accomplished philosophers, about canonical historical figures is a weird kind of functional garbage. I call it 'functional' because often the disfigurations can be explained by the role the canonical figure plays in some grand narrative about the past, in undergraduate or graduate education, as a bit-player in some more recent partisan debates, and so on. I don't want to claim that Newton fared much worse than most canonical figures, but ever since the Leibniz-Clarke debate, through Kant, Mach, and the reception of Einstein's revolution very impoverished images of Newton displaced whatever nuance one can find in Newton's own writings. Even the one exception, Koyr��, is more informative on other figures of the scientific revolution than he is on Newton.

Now, as history of science became a professionalized field, Newton studies helped constitute it. This is associated with names such I.B. Cohen, Westfall, Whiteside, Hesse, Dobbs, the Halls, Herrivel, Dijksterhuis,  Sabra, and so. (And Kuhn, of course.) To the best of my knowledge, Ted McGuire was the first philosopher, or one of the first ones, to pick up on the opportunity to harvest the fruits of this historiographic revolution, or professionalization. And in a series of papers, he reintroduced a complex, messy and endlessly fascinating philosophical figure, Isaac Newton, to his peers and later readers. I have these papers in mind: 

McGuire, James E., and Piyo M. Rattansi. "Newton and the ���Pipes of Pan���." Notes and records of the Royal Society of London 21.2 (1966): 108-143.
McGuire, James E. "Force, active principles, and Newton's invisible realm." Ambix 15.3 (1968): 154-208.
McGuire, J. E. "Atoms and the ���analogy of nature���: Newton's third rule of philosophizing." Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 1.1 (1970): 3-58.
McGuire, James E. "Body and void and Newton's De Mundi systemate: Some new sources." Archive for history of exact sciences 3.3 (1966): 206-248.

I put the full citations in because each of these papers are lengthy, complex affairs in their own right. Often I cite one paper Y (on topic X). And then years later, I rediscover that X is one of the minor gems in Y, and that there is whole lot more to (say) McGuire 1966b. All these papers were written while he was at Leeds before he helped found the Pittsburgh HPS program (together with Larry Laudan) in 1971. When Ted and I first started corresponding, he once mentioned that he had been "pushing Newton as a philosopher, epistemologist and an ontologist" for most of his career. I was born in 1971, and Pitt HPS has been the dominant HPS program for most of my life. (Yes, Indiana and Madison gave it a run for its money, and for some periods my own Chicago could compete in a number of areas, and now, perhaps, Irvine LPS has taken over the torch. Time will tell.) And so Ted helped train in some fashion or another a whose who in HPS, including a whole number of people who are now shaping Newton scholarship, and who I hope will share their memories of life in daily company of Ted.

Now, most obituaries are more informative about the author than the deceased. In this case more than usual because I came late to Ted in my academic development and so I don't have a lot of anecdotes of him as (say) dissertation supervisor. But I hope what follows is also instructive about Ted, too.

I came to Newton scholarship through George E. Smith's now legendary two-semester year-long undergraduate course on Newton's Principia. And George had a habit of roping his undergraduate students into discrete research projects. Many of these projects developed what's known as the research frontier in Newton (and Huygens) studies (see, for example, this paper). We didn't know any better. George's main focus is evidential arguments, and he ignores issues most other professional philosophers want to talk about when they discuss Newton (or history of science more generally). So, I rarely heard of Ted.

I went to Chicago, to work with Howard Stein. And Stein also did a three-quarters year-long space-time course in which Newton figures heavily. And it was very clear that George and Howard were part of a mutual admiration society (mediated by Bill Harper up in Western Ontario, I believe). Howard also taught a lot of Newton in his empiricism course (where obliquely Newton was pretty much presented as superior not just to Descartes, but also to Locke and Hume). 

Now, Howard had also written a number of astonishing papers on Newton in the late 1960s:

Stein, Howard. "On the notion of field in Newton, Maxwell, and beyond." (1970). 
Stein, Howard. "Newtonian space-time." Texas Quarterly 10.3 (1967). 174--200

The second of these didn't just shape a new philosophical Newton, it also influenced contemporary space-time studies.

I mention this because to the best of my knowledge McGuire and Stein never cite or mention each other in print then and since. (If this turns out to be poetic exaggeration, I apologize.) I know they were aware of each other! When I came out of Chicago, with a PhD primarily on the reception of Newton, I knew of McGuire's existence, but it  was more as a distinct orbital body on the horizon than an important influence. But action at a distance, even joint action, is a funny concept.

A few years later, together with Andrew Janiak, I hosted a conference on Newton and/as Philosophy, and I met there some of McGuire's great students including Zvi Biener and Chris Smeenk (both of which I have since collaborated with in co-authored papers and edited volumes). I also met Doreen Fraser and David Miller in that period. Some of his other Pitt students include Brian Hepburn and I think Peter Harman (who I never met). He was also John Henry's supervisor at Leeds. (I am sure I am missing folk.) Ted himself had been one of the first people I invited to keynote in Leiden; he had accepted enthusiastically and I used his name in the call for papers. But at the last minute, he had to withdraw due to a hip replacement.

The conference was an important few days in my life because I met so many people who have become lifelong friends and important interlocuters. In addition, I realized that I had been wrong to think 'all the action was in the reception of Newton because Stein, McGuire, Harper, Smith, Ernan McMullin, Mary Hesse, and Domenico Bertoloni Meli had exhausted the topic.' In front of me the students of Stein, McGuire, Harper, Arthur Fine, Harvey Brown, and Michael Friedman were reading each other's teachers and each other's papers, and just beginning to ask some tough questions. McGuire himself kept learning from the youngsters, engaging with us in print and in private correspondence, and when he couldn't beat us he joined up with some of us (especially Ed Slowik).

After the conference, I returned to Ted's early papers in earnest. And also started pestering him with letters like this, "I am about to write a paper on Newton's Fourth Rule of Reasoning; other than George Smith's work, the most helpful thing I encountered was your long footnote 8 in your 1970 paper on the third rule." The answer was a sweet, "I did consider writing a paper on the fortuna of the rule up to the time of Darwin but never got around to it."

Once you see the footnote, you can see why that's not an empty boast. Here's that eight footnote:

See, for instance: Henry Pemberton, A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (London, x728), 24-5; Colin Maclaurin, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (London, 174B), 22; Gowin Knight, An Attempt to demonstrate that all the Phenomena of nature may be explained by two simple active Principles Attraction and Repulsion (London, 1748), 7; George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Religion : Natural and Revealed (London, 1715), 36; Willem Jacob Storm-van 's Gravesande, Physices Elementa Mathematica...sive Introductio ad Philosophiam Newtoniam (Editio Secunda, Lugduni Batavorum, 1725), Praefatio, and Liber I, Caput I, I-7; Benjamin Martin, Philosophia Britannica: or a New and Comprehensive System of the Newtonian Philosophy (Reading, 1747) , 1-42. In his first lecture, Martin discusses Newton's four rules in some detail. Thus when 'we take survey of the visible world', we conclude that all bodies 'consist of one and the same sort of Matter or Substance'. He concludes that 'Matter, thus variously modified and configurated, constitutes an infinite variety of bodies, all of which are found to have the following common Properties...'. Thomas Rutherforth, A System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, i748), Introduction. The first three rules are discussed as the only means of making 'knowledge real and universal'. Rule Three is seen primarily as an inductive rule. Richard Helsham, A Course of Lectures in Natural Philosophy, published by Bryan Robinson, 5th edition (London, 1777). The four rules are quoted in full in the Preface. Robinson notes that 'This method and these rules, have been carefully observed by our author in these Lectures...' (viii). George Adams, Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy (London, t794) , vol. II. In a lengthy lecture entitled 'In the method of Reasoning in Natural Philosophy' Adams concludes his discussion of the history of analogy to extend our conclusion to all other bodies, and thus make it universal: a way of reasoning, that is agreeable to the harmony of things, and to the old maxim, ascribed to Hermes... (p. 34). For this maxim see note 38 below, on Maclaurin. Adams is drawing on Maclaurin's treatise. Tiberius Cavallo, The Elements of Natural or Experimental Philosophy (London, 18o3), vol. I, 7. Quotes Newton's four rules and connects them with the generality of the three laws. William Nicholson, An Introduction to Natural Philosophy (London, 18o5) , vol. I. In his introduction he discusses intuition, demonstration, and probabilistic knowledge, saying of natural philosophy that it is based on analogy: 'To give stability to this science, it is necessary to admit no probabilities, as first principles of analogy, but those which possess the strongest and most incontrovertible resemblance to truth. For this purpose, the following rules are adopted': the first three rules are then quoted without comment. Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, 2nd edition (Birmingham, 1782), sections I and II; Etienne Bormot de Condillac, OEuvres Completes de Condillac, tome troisieme (Paris, i8o3) , chapitre XII, 327-58; Petrus van Musschenbroek, Elementa physicae (Lugduni Batavorum, 1734), 6, and Introductio ad philosophiam naturalem (Lugdunl Batavorum, 1764), vol. I, 14; Roger Joseph Boscovich, A Theory of Natural Philosophy (Latin-English Edition, London, x 922), sections 4o-2. Boscovich is critical of the third rule on the grounds that induction does not support the transference of many physical properties to the parts of phenomena. The Theory was first published in 1758. Brian Higgins, A Philosophical Essay Concerning Light (London, 1776), 18--19; James Hutton, Dissertations on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1790), part III, 279-3o0; William Whewell, On the Philosophy of Discovery (London, 186o), chapter XVIII, 181-2oo, section 14. Whewell is mainly concerned in this chapter with the notion of vera causa as discussed in Newton's first rule. He points out, however, that the third rule's conception of universal laws is inconsistent with the stricture of the fourth rule that a 'law may be inaccurate'. See also Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London, 184o ), vol I, 4-6, where Whewell observes that the third rule is circular. James Challis, 'On Newton's "Foundations of all Philosophy" ', Phil. Mag., 26 (1863), 28o-92. In this particular article Challis is attempting to base a theory of science on Newton's third rule.
These discussions are the most interesting in the literature I have examined. Most of these writers are concerned with the problem of generalizing properties of matter, rather than with Newton's criterion for deciding essential qualities. Many other writers such as Halley, Sterling, Ferguson, Desaguliers, Wright and Worster mention or refer to the rule; these with the above references are more than sufficient to establish the widespread influence of this aspect of Newton's methodology throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  I am grateful to Laurens Laudan for the references to Condillac and Musschenbroek, and to Peter Heimann for calling attention to Higgins.

So, that footnote was constructed decades before the internet. It's an astonishing synthesis that basically tells future grad students where to look. I am sometimes disparagingly called 'widely read' or broad. But I am still busy tracking down some of Ted's leads in this note! (I had some pride in my dissertation because McGuire misses Adam Smith's and Diderot's treatment.) At the time, the idea to put any scholar in historical context was still radical. But even more innovative was the idea that this context included lots of now forgotten people. In addition, that material not thought of as 'scientific' like Newton's theology and angelology was crucial to understanding his more 'philosophical' views. 

Our correspondence took off after he read a draft of my paper on gravity as a relational quality in Newton. He discerned at once that I was defending (and updating) a version of his position against Stein and Janiak. He suggested some improvements including a thought experiment that when a while later I ran it past Bill Harper at an airport, Harper just sat there and said (at least according to my self-serving memory), in awe, 'you have battled Stein to a draw.' (And I noted quietly 'with the help of McGuire.') After that, our correspondence took on a more chatty and more equal flavor. (Ted had that capacity to make you forget he had heard it all before.) And he would read and improve many of the Newton papers I wrote in the next decade.

In a recent self-serving "introduction" to my collection Newton's Metaphysics: Essays (OUP 2022), I added a note qualifying my own claim to originality, "Obviously that diagnosis does no justice to Ted McGuire's contribution to Newton scholarship. McGuire's work anticipates most of my own efforts."

I finally met Ted at an APA session in Chicago organised by Geoff Gorham, February 2010. I don't want to claim we hit it off at once. But I was impressed by his kindness, his wit, and his sharpness (he was already in his late 70s). He was a much abler drinker than I am, too. But shortly thereafter we got chance to deepen our connection. My then new Ghent colleague, Maarten Van Dyck, had nominated Ted for a special Sarton Chair at the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Sarton Chair, and Ted came to Ghent for a few fantastic days, where I got to enjoy his witty stories and to pick his brain on lots of arcane knowledge. (One of the highlights of my intellectual life is to witness the logician Dirk Batens and Ted debate Descartes' alleged Spinozism.)

After that Ghent visit he always greeted me with a clear fondness as we kept crossing paths on the Newton circuit. He helped sponsor and put together a conference on Newton and Empiricism that Zvi Biener and I hosted at Pitt. I finally got to see the Cathedral of Learning inside, as well as some terrific bars. And I kept sending my draft Newton papers to him for comments. Since he was often in Poland with his partner Barbara Tuchanska at Lodz University (where Ted also did some teaching--I hope the lecture notes show up some day), it was easy for him to come over to Belgium or Holland and I enjoyed sparring with him.

Since this post is already long, and I realize I have not told you anything yet about Ted's many substantive contributions to Newton scholarship (other than that my own work is greatly indebted to it), I'll start doing a series of Ted-mania posts in the next few weeks to invite some of you to join in the fun that is scholarship, but also to appreciate some of Ted's towering contributions to it. He will be missed. A giant has passed.*

 

*HT James Lennox for sharing the news of Ted's passing away a few days ago.

An Alternative to the Marxist-Liberal Debate, Belloc and The Servile State (pt 1)

A peasantry eager to purchase might have gradually extended their holdings at the expense of the demesne land, and to the distribution of property, which was already fairly complete, there might have been added another excellent element, namely, the more equal possession of that property. But any such process of gradual buying by the small man from the great, such as would seem natural to the temper of us European people, and such as has since taken place nearly everywhere in countries which were left free to act upon their popular instincts, was interrupted in this country by an artificial revolution of the most violent kind. This artificial revolution consisted in the seizing of the monastic lands by the Crown.
It is important to grasp clearly the nature of this operation, for the whole economic future of England was to flow from it.
Of the demesne lands, and the power of local administration which they carried with them (a very important feature, as we shall see later), rather more than a quarter were in the hands of the Church ; the Church was therefore the ���Lord��� of something over 25 per cent., say 28 per cent., or perhaps nearly 30 per cent., of English agricultural communities, and the overseers of a like proportion of all English agricultural produce. The Church was further the absolute owner in practice of something like 30 per cent, of the demesne land in the villages, and the receiver of something like 30 per cent, of the customary dues, etc., paid by the maller owners to the greater. All this economic power lay until 1535 in the hands of Cathedral Chapters, communities of monks and nuns, educational establishments conducted by the clergy, and so forth.
When the Monastic lands were confiscated by Henry VIII., not the whole of this vast economic influence was suddenly extinguished. The secular clergy remained endowed, and most of the educational establishments, though looted, retained some revenue; but though the whole 30 per cent, did not suffer confiscation, something well over 20 per cent, did, and the revolution effected by this vast operation was by far the most complete, the most sudden, and the most momentous of any that has taken place in the economic history of any European people.
It was at first intended to retain this great mass of the means of production in the hands of the Crown: that must be clearly remembered by any student of the fortunes of England, and by all who marvel at the contrast between the old England and the new.
Had that intention been firmly maintained, the English State and its government would have been the most powerful in Europe.
The Executive (which in those days meant the King) would have had a greater opportunity for crushing the resistance of the wealthy, for backing its political power with economic power, and for ordering the social life of its subjects than any other executive in Christendom.
Had Henry VIII. and his successors kept the land thus confiscated, the power of the French Monarchy, at which we are astonished, would have been nothing to the power of the English.
The King of England would have had in his own hands an instrument of control of the most absolute sort. He would presumably have used it, as a strong central government always does, for the weakening of the wealthier classes, and to the indirect advantage of the mass of the people. At any rate, it would have been a very different England indeed from the England we know, if the King had held fast to his own after the dissolution of the monasteries.
Now it is precisely here that the capital point in this great revolution appears. The King failed to keep the lands he had seized. That class of large landowners which already existed and controlled, as I have said, anything from a quarter to a third of the agricultural values of England, were too strong for the monarchy. They insisted upon land being granted to themselves, sometimes freely, sometimes for ridiculously small sums, and they were strong enough in Parliament, and through the local administrative power they had, to see that their demands were satisfied. Nothing that the Crown let go ever went back to the Crown, and year after year more and more of what had once been the monastic land became the absolute possession of the large land-owners...Hilaire Belloc (1912 [2nd edition] The Servile State, Chapter IV ("How the Distributive State Failed")

Hayek mentions The Servile State in The Road to Serfdom., and so I was curious about the connection. (I had never heard Beloc before.) The book is very brief and written in an engaging style, and it's full of stimulating observations. It's a bit peculiar I had never chanced upon it before because it is quite clearly one of the founding texts of what shortly thereafter came to be known as property owning democracy. (I was pleased to find Ben Jackson claim this a decade ago, too here.) In addition, Belloc does really anticipate a road to serfdom thesis (although surely does not originate it--it's in Tocqueville and probably earlier), but it's clearly not Hayek's (or Mises') version (Edward McPhail has a lovely paper explaining that it here). I intend to blog a bit about in the future -- not the least because of his description of biopolitics and his analysis of corporate welfare state.

But today, I want to do a more lighthearted piece. As is well known Marxists and Liberals have a fierce debate over the origin of capitalism (which on the liberal side is treated as the origin of mercantilism to which liberalism is a response.) On the Marxist side -- recall (here) my digression on Meiksins Wood and Adam Smith (and this follow up) --, capitalism emerges when term-limit leases are introduced in agriculture and the price of these leases are determined by an estimation by surveyors of the value of that land after improvement in light of prevailing, or at the least the abstract perception of prevailing, market conditions. And this, in turn, sets a landgrab in motion in which enclosures are forced on a politically weak rural population who live out a kind of natural communism. And this violence generates the 'productivity of property,' which gets capitalism going (which liberals will call Mercantilism).

As an aside, some Liberals have a tendency to treat the 'productivity of property' in consequentialist fashion as unequivocally a good thing. The other day, for example, I noticed that in The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek mentions, in passing (while discussing mid twentieth century agriculture), that "there can be little question that the consolidation of dispersed holdings inherited in Europe from the Middle Ages or the enclosures of the commons in England were necessary legislative measures to make improvements by individual efforts possible." (p. 488-489 [Hamowy edition]; emphasis added). It's the kind of passage that gives critics and even friends of Hayek pause--he clearly thinks that some transitionary violence can be justified for the end it serves (but will not dwell on it).

Okay, if we turn to Belloc, he posits a kind of golden age (he calls it an "excellent state of affairs"): the distributed state: in which property was very widely distributed and guilds and country customs conspired to keep income and property inequality to a relative minimum. And the first quoted paragraph above gives his very schematic model for the natural course of events of the evolution of the distributed state. It's not a pure counterfactual (as in Smith's natural course in Book 3 of Wealth of Nations) because Belloc also suggests this natural evolution happened in France. (That's an odd claim, but let's ignore it.) But in England this natural evolution was interrupted by an artificial revolution: Henry VIII's landgrab of the monasteries.

Now, because of the weakness of the sixteenth century English royal family, the landgrab ends up reinforcing and creating a more durable oligarchy with a weak monarchy and a more powerless rural population.* Belloc tells what happens next:

All over England men who already held in virtually absolute property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of a further great section of the means of production, which turned the scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and extra-fifth. They became at a blow the owners of half the land! In many centres of capital importance they had come to own more than half the land. They were in many districts not only the unquestioned superiors, but the economic masters of the rest of the community. They could buy to the greatest advantage.

The world-historical significance of this is as follows meant that before the industrial revolution, England was already an oligarchic state. 

Take, as a starting-point for what followed, the date 1700. By that time more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he could not be turned off.
Such a proportion may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the means of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business was very far from completion in or about the year 1700, yet by that date England had already become Capitalist. She had already permitted a vast section of her population to become proletarian, and it is this and not the so-called ���Industrial Revolution,��� a later thing, which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves to-day.

Now, I want to offer four observations about Belloc's story. First, it is an unintended consequence explanation: in which structural forces (pre-existing social arrangements and webs of local corruption) and historical contingency (Henry VIII's rupture with Rome) conspire to upend English economic development.

Second, in so far enclosures figure into his story, they are a late nineteenth century development in which oligarchic capitalism is performing a mopping up operation and they figure in tales of futile resistance by the old and their fathers. 

Third, in Belloc's account there never really was an early revolution in the productivity of property as an engine of history. Rather, it's the application of technology by entrenched wealthy landowners (who also become industrialists).

Fourth, and finally, Belloc is no liberal. But his origin story is a natural one to embrace by liberals who, while distancing themselves from capitalists as a class, want to explain why due to initial conditions capitalism turned mercantile (in which violence was part of its DNA), as (say) R��pke argues. And such liberals might wish to suggest that in so far as there were original sins of capitalism, they were performed by a capricious monarch. Of course, such liberals are scarce on the ground.

*I actually think this is also David Hume's view. But will have to check that.

 

Hayek, Colonialism, Kantian Perpetual Peace, and a bit of Foucault

It is true that with the formation of such regional federations the possibility of war between the different blocs still remains, and that to reduce this risk as much as possible we must rely on a larger and looser association. My point is that the need for some association of those countries which are more similar in their civilisation, outlook, and standards. While we must aim at preventing future wars as much as possible, we must not believe that we can at one stroke create a permanent organisation which will make all war in any part of the world entirely impossible. We should not only not succeed in such an attempt, but we should thereby probably spoil our chances of achieving success in a more limited sphere. As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve.--Hayek (1944 [2001] The Road to Serfdom (Routledge), pp. 243-244

The quoted material are the final paragraph of the final chapter of The Road to Serfdom before Hayek's brief conclusion. It helps explain why, for example, in his account of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault spends so much time on the history of European federalism with special attention  to Kant (recall here; here).

That certain kinds of regional federations can reduce the risk of war among member states and even between federations is a Kantian idea familiar from Perpetual Peace--a book Hayek quotes in (the later) The Constitution of Liberty (but surely familiar from the many allusions and references to it in Mises work). The Kantianism, with its emphasis on gradual growth of commercial republics, is even more explicit in the sentences preceding this final paragraph quoted above:

I believe that these considerations still hold and that a degree of co-operation could be achieved between, say, the British Empire and the nations of Western Europe and probably the United States which would not be possible on a world scale. The comparatively close association which a Federal Union represents will not at first be practicable beyond perhaps even as narrow a region as part of Western Europe, though it may be possible gradually to extend it. (p. 243)

I do not mean to suggest the sources are exclusively Kantian. Lurking in these comments are also the Smithian ideal of a transatlantic federation articulated in the Wealth of Nations, and an ideal revived in the context of (and now I quote Hayek again) "the propaganda for the "Federal Union"" (p. 239) which produced "the flood of federalist publications which in recent years has descended on us" (p. 239 n 1). For an overview of what Hayek may have in mind (and a lot more), I warmly recommend (recall; and here) The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and The United States by Or Rosenboim. (I return to this below.)

The Kantianism is not superficial in The Road to Serfdom. There is a huge emphasis on the significance of a Rechtstaat (see, especially, chapter 6) and its Kantian provenance recognized (see p. 85). And, in fact, politically, Hayek defends in The Road to Serfdom what Kant would have called a 'commercial republic.' It is no surprise, then, that in the Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault traces a lineage from Kant to the ordoliberals and Hayek. (The only awkwardness is that Foucault, while not blind to the Scottish sources on Kant, also treats Kant, not unreasonably, as inspired by Rousseau, whereas Hayek has a tendency to treat Rousseau as the source of bad/French rationalism.)

There is also a hint of Mill in these passages because Hayek seems to be presupposing a kind of civilization evolution or development ("more similar in their civilisation, outlook, and standards.") He clearly thinks it would be bad to have a federation that included the Soviet Union, and perhaps much of the former Austrian-Hungarian empire (not all of it foreseeably in the Soviet sphere in 1944). The question is to what degree this also includes Mill's ideas about civilizational superiority.

Now, because of the inclusion of the "British Empire" it is natural to read Hayek  here in light of the his then recent, and recently much discussed, Hayek (1939) "The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism." In that essay, Hayek explicitly wishes to keep out socialist countries from the more Atlantic oriented federation. In addition (recall), I have argued that in it (the 1939 essay), Hayek's remarks are naturally read as endorsing continued colonial rule by the federation. So, it is natural to read The Road to Serfdom as echoing this position. And through the founding of the EU, many projects of European federation explicitly or tacitly assumed continued European rule over its colonies (and market access to its dominions).

But there is clear evidence that on the question of colonialism and even (although more ambigiously) racial hierarchy, Hayek's views did evolve non-trivially. This becomes clear in light of two (successive) footnotes earlier in the chapter. I quote and discuss them separately. Both notes are meant to support and illustrate an argument against global planning lead by (an enlightened) Great Britain. There is no doubt that Hayek's main target is global planning (and other forms of 'collectivism'). The first note reads as follows:

The experience in the colonial sphere, of this country as much as of any other, has amply shown that even the mild forms of planning which we know as colonial development involve, whether we wish it or not, the imposition of certain values and ideals on those whom we try to assist. It is, indeed, this experience which has made even the most internationally minded of colonial experts so very sceptical of the practicability of an "international" administration of colonies. (pp. 229-230)

Hayek acknowledges at least two important claims: first, even if a good faith effort is made to assist and develop colonized economies, this is experienced as an "imposition of certain values and ideals on" the colonized by the colonized. Of course, in practice there also was wholescale plunder and unequal privileges. Mises, is (recall) much more outspokenly critical of colonialism. Mises is, not unlike Smith, a fierce critic of the violent extension of liberal society. And Mises has no fondness at all for the idea for the civilizational mission of European colonialism and imperial projects. I mention Mises' (1927) Liberalism 124-125, with its really outspoken critique of colonialism because Mises ends up defending (alas) some kind of role for the league of nations to secure property rights in former colonies (by way of a mandate system).

And, so second, it looks like Hayek now accepts the sceptical position of the practicability of an "international" administration of colonies of the sort that Mises might have favored in a qualified way. So, Hayek goes beyond the position of Mises. And that's not strange because Hayek is a critic of the League of Nations and its expansive ambitions; that is, in fact, the main message of the second to final page of the chapter (p. 243) In 1944 Hayek clearly rejects something like a mandate/trust system. And so, this note both explicitly rejects the settler, colonial enterprise and the trust/mandate enterprise. (I don't mean to suggest that Hayek advocates removal of settlers from places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc.)

The placing of the note also suggests that Hayek thought that colonialism is as bad as what Nazi-Germany tried to impose with their "highly immoral" Grossraumwirtschaft on their European sphere of influence (229). And since that is in line of the main argument of the book, Hayek's note actually hints at an implication of the argument that is not a mere aside. If anything, while Hayek's rhetoric is certainly very cautious about the future of the British empire, I think it's pretty clear he now thinks it's immoral and probably doomed.

In fact, the second note is attached to a claim to an argument that is intended to attack the idea that "idealistic and unselfish" (230) planning by the British on a global scale is a desirable possibility. This note reads as follows:

If anyone should still fail to see the difficulties, or cherish the belief that with a little good will they can all be overcome, it will help if he tries to follow the implications of central direction of economic activity applied on a world scale. Can there be much doubt that this would mean a more or less conscious endeavour to secure the dominance of the white man, and would rightly be so regarded by all other races? Till I find a sane person who seriously believes that the European races will voluntarily submit to their standard of life and rate of progress being determined by a World Parliament, I cannot regard such plans as anything but absurd. But this does unfortunately not preclude that particular measures, which could be justified only if the principle of world direction were a feasible ideal, are seriously advocated. (p. 230)

Hayek clearly recognizes that most attempts to impose an Enlightened plan on others are in bad faith (primarily designed to secure advantages to European industry), and will certainly be regarded as such by the colonized world. 

I don't mean to ignore the fact that Hayek casts his argument here in racial terms such that the majority principle (and non-Europeans will outnumber Europeans), which might well disadvantage Europeans, is rejected on a global scale not just from obvious self-interest, but also from a kind of racial consciousness. I think Hayek's intention here is to call attention to such racial and racist consciousness among European populations not to advocate for it (although I completely grant that others may reject this.)

And so while one may well suspect that Hayek's rejection of a world state with planning powers has racist motives or is at least shaped by awareness of the significance of racist views,  the actual position in the footnote, and the previous one, is inimical to colonialism and imperialism that goes well beyond his earlier view. 

And, if anything, this understates Hayek's position. The broader context of the chapter is a defense of the viability and significance of "small countries" (his favorite examples are Holland and Switzerland). He is explicit that "we shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in." (242) These two notes suggest that he is at peace with the possibility of a decolonized world of small states.

I do not mean to suggest that Hayek wishes to promote a decolonialization without constraints. For, he foresees a global order shaped by the rule of law as the Western states understand it. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian has shown how Hayek and Mises, and the ordoliberals, embraced the idea of a global legal order to defend markets (recall here; here). That's clearly right. But I think this understates how the market order is itself a bulwark to preserve the rechtstaat (and human rights) for these neoliberals. Either way, and in in fact, lurking in this material is the ideal of a pax Americana, for Hayek writes "the great opportunity we shall have at the end of this war is that the great victorious powers, by themselves first submitting to a system of rules which they have the power to enforce, may at the same time acquire the moral right to impose the same rules upon others." (242, emphasis added) 

Hayek does not spell out if this moral right then implies, say, Hume's position who (I  think) clearly advocates the violent extension of the rule of law (as a civilizational enterprise), or if this moral right should be understood more as a duty that cannot be denied once the victors of the war are called upon by their present imperial subjects to secure the fruits of law's empire into their independent future. Either way, Hayek's turn away from colonial empire is not a turn away from civilizational, that is, law-governed, supremacy.

 

 

Hayek's concealed conflict argument (and Foucault), and a bunch of other pro-market arguments

I have been reading more widely in Hayek, and also re-reading stuff I thought I was familiar with (in light of some of Foucault's stuff).. And I want to write about one of his arguments for markets -- I call it the 'concealed conflict argument' below --, and then I realized that it might be helpful to distinguish among his pro-market arguments. So, first I'll list seven of his arguments that one can encounter fairly frequently in his work. I won't scrutinize or evaluate these arguments. I hope to say just enough about them that even novice readers of Hayek have a sense of what I am talking about, and that those familiar with his work have a 'aha' moment. The list is not ranked in importance, and probably not exhaustive. In Hayek, the arguments tend to be contrastive with attempts at top-down planning or what he calls 'collectivism' (so this includes straight up Marxism, market socialism, and Keynesian kinds of planning).

A few more things before I start. Below the arguments are presented as kind of ideal types with a lot of implicit Ceteris paribus conditions; and I won't actually try to spell out or reconstruct Hayek's position as arguments. If that annoys you, you can read them not as 'arguments' but as 'commitments.'  In addition, in many cases the argument actually presupposes well functioning state institutions (connected to law and patents), and Hayek is actually surprisingly explicit about the limitations of each of the arguments (so don't treat my versions as his!) And, in practice, the arguments may be blended. Okay, here goes:

The efficiency argument . (See, chapter 7, of The Road to Serfdom, p. 102 in the 1944 edition reprinted by Routledge.) I am always a bit surprised to find this argument in Hayek because I tend to think it fits uneasily with his Austrian commitments. And it's not an argument he rolls out much. But it's pretty clear that he thinks that over time markets are more efficient than various alternatives, especially in the context of multiplicity of ends. This is also an argument attributed to defenders of markets by their critics and not infrequently conceded by the critics.
The (epistemic) Engine of discovery argument (recall). This is one of my favorites. And I love the version in his Hayek (1945) The Use of Knowledge in Society The American Economic Review. A well functioning "price system" is a "mechanism for communicating information." (527) In particular, the information is (i) dispersed, and (ii) often hidden from other market participants and spectators (in some versions even the agents principally concerned), (iii) and it may be costly to elicit it. And lurking in here is (iv) the idea that prices are effects of what may be the totality of salient-to-human-causes that relieve any agent from the need to keep track of all these causes, or at least their relative significance. I don't want to overstate what can be discovered according to Hayek because on his official view, prices also collapse a rich modal structure of possible causes ("anything that happens anywhere in the world that might not have an effect") into relatively coarse-grained dimensions. (And, in fact, today's post is also about the information that is occluded by the market.) Anyway, this argument is often presupposed in his other arguments, and some version of it got Hayek the Nobel.
The catallactic argument. (I think I first encountered the argument in The Fatal Conceit, but the most elaborate, clear version is probably in chapter ten of volume 2, The Mirage of Social Justice, of his trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty.) Hayek tends to credit Whately with originating it, and it was especially influential on (recall) James Buchanan (and the Virginia school of public choice). It's the argument that in markets there is voluntary and pacific exchange. (I actually think the spirit of the argument is very Lockean.) And, in particular, that it allows enemies to be friends of a certain kind. (I don't know if Hayek ever mentions Schmitt in this context, but it's pretty clear that it is also part of a battery of different arguments directed against Schmitt one can find in Hayek.) The argument does not require that consumers are sovereign, but it does presuppose that within really competitive markets, agents can shape their own ends without being coerced to some degree. 
The coordination argument. (This argument and the following three can also be found in chapter ten of volume 2, The Mirage of Social Justice.) Competitive Markets are mechanism to coordinate the plans of people with very different, even conflicting ends especially in the context of division of labor and large population sizes. Prices act as signals or indicators that facilitate, even guide the coordination. 
The (cost-effective) want satisfaction argument. In markets strangers may discover that it's profitable for them to satisfy the needs of people they may never meet in person. 
The non-zero-sum argument. The idea that over time, dynamically markets create more wealth for everyone than counterfactually any other system of organization. Despite the fact that at a given time there may be winners and losers in the market-place, and that some people's expectations are necessarily disappointed, over time the pie gets enlarged (such that people who arrive later can benefit from progress) and all benefit.
The adaptation argument. Relative changes in supply and demand feed into price changes rather quickly. This means that markets allow one to start adjusting to changing circumstances rather quickly. Market societies are then rather capable of dealing with 'shocks' or sudden changes in external circumstances.

Okay, with those in place I want to get to the trigger of today's post. For, I want to show that in Hayek, there is also (8.) the concealed conflict argument, viz., that markets conceal the latent conflict in a pluralistic society with value conflict. I think that once one is aware of the concealed conflict argument one can probably discern it in the catallactic and coordination arguments, so I don't want to suggest it's entirely free-standing. Anyway, let me quote the passage in The Road to Serfdom that alerted me to it, and then I'll elaborate:

The illusion of the specialist that in a planned society he would secure more attention to the objectives for which he cares most is a more general phenomenon than the term of specialist at first suggests. In our predilections and interests we are all in some measure specialists. And we all think that our personal order of values is not merely personal, but that in a free discussion among rational people we would convince the others that ours is the right one. The lover of the country-side who wants above all that its traditional appearance should be preserved and that the blots already made by industry on its fair face should be removed, no less than the health enthusiast who wants all the picturesque but insanitary old cottages cleared away, or the motorist who wishes the country cut up by big motor roads, the efficiency fanatic who desires the maximum of specialisation and mechanisation no less than the idealist who for the development of personality wants to preserve as many independent craftsmen as possible, all know that their aim can be fully achieved only by planning-and they all want planning for that reason. But, of course, the adoption of the social planning for which they clamour can only bring out the concealed conflict between their aims.--Hayek (1944) The Road to Serfdom, Chapter 4 (The Inevitability of Planning), pp. 56-57. 

The wider context of this passage is a theme to which Hayek returns over and over again throughout his career: that it is the educated and, especially, those with technical knowledge (e.g., engineers, and skilled functionaries) that are likely to favor collective planning and collective or deliberative decision making by way of discussion (which also favors their discursive advantages). My own view is that In the Managerial Revolution (a book Hayek cites later in The Road to Serfdom and which he had reviewed respectfully in Economica in 1942), Burnham had nailed this wider point. 

But my interest here is really only in the final sentence of the quoted passage. For, it clearly implies that in a market economy our conflicting values can stay latent, and (crucially) can be hidden from each other and ourselves. 

Notice, by the way, that the argument can be agnostic on the source of the conflicting values. It can accommodate either the Weberian point that such value conflict is an effect of the advanced division of labor and the diversity of social interests, or the more Platonic point that it is the diversity of our natures and our unruly passions that causes such conflict. It can also accommodate the Marxist point that markets generate class conflict. 

And the mechanism that is lurking here is that the market order prevents certain conversations from happening that are required when there is collective decision-making. That is to say, somewhat jokingly, the market creates a veil of ignorance about other people's aims and so suppresses conflict about these.

To avoid confusion, the argument should not be conflated with the (Kantian) claim that trade generates peace because of shared interest in enrichment or the Doux Commerce thesis that suggests that trade softens or pacifies passions. Rather, it anticipates (as Stefan Kolev reminded) Milton Friedman's (and Rose Friedman's) point (1962) that "the market reduces the strain on the social fabric by rendering [mutual] conformity unnecessary with respect to any activities it encompasses" (Capitalism and Freedom, fortieth anniversary edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 24 (see also pp. 117-118)).

Let me close. The concealed conflict argument does not deny that competitive markets may produce conflict of their own. Hayek recognizes that they stimulate groups to seek protection against competition through the political process, and they may induce resentment over riches obtained through the market or fuel wider class conflict. 

Rather, the concealed conflict argument is a reminder that sometimes politics is well-served by -- and now I quote Hayek who in the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty (p. 354) tacitly quotes Walpole -- Quieta non movere (which I prefer to translate as 'let sleeping dogs lie'), that is, don't disturb settled things. Hayek recognizes that the maxim has little standing in (political) philosophy, but that it is often a wise maxim for, and a crucial part of the art of government of, the statesman.*

Foucault pretty much starts the Birth of Biopolitics with this quote (recall), and does name Walpole. And I think the concealed conflict argument helps explain one reason why Foucault treats Hayek and the ORDOs as providing a response to a problematic left to them by Max Weber (recall here), that is (what Foucault calls) 'irrational rationality of capitalist society.' For, part of its rationality is to find ways of non-politicizing what cannot or, perhaps, may not be resolved by politics (even if, in his account of neo-liberalism the market requires constitution by politics).

 

 

Kate Manne, Himpathy, and some Adam Smith, Part 1.

[H]impathy, as I construe it, is the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpetrator over his similarly or less privileged female targets or victims, in cases of sexual assault, harassment, and other misogynistic behavior. Given that misogyny often involves punishing and blaming a woman for her ���bad��� behavior���bad by the lights of patriarchal norms and expectations, that is���you can understand himpathy as the flip side of misogyny; its understudied mirror image; its natural (albeit highly unjust) complement. Misogyny takes down women, and himpathy protects the agents of that takedown operation, partly by painting them as ���good guys.���

Himpathy goes hand in hand with blaming or erasing the victims and targets of misogyny. When the sympathetic focus is on the perpetrator, she will often be subject to suspicion and aggression for drawing attention to his misdeeds. Her testimony may hence fail to gain the proper uptake. Instead, those who are himpathetic find endless excuses for the perpetrator.--Kate Manne (2020) Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

Early in her (2018) Down Girl: the Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne introduces himpathy as "the flow of sympathy away from female victims toward their male victimizers." (p. 23; see also this (2016) Huffington Post essay). According to Manne himpathy is itself an instance of injustice, but also a mechanism of maintaining an unjust, hierarchical social structure (patriarchy).

I like how Manne puts it in the sentence I quoted from Down Girl because attention is essentially a scarce, zero-sum phenomenon. And while some attention can be shared to some degree, this itself requires great art and often is imperfect. (Think of how celebrities try to generate attention for their favored social causes.) So attention challenges many of our most refined moral sensibilities not just because it is often bestowed on frivolous objects, but especially because it tends to rest on unworthy ones; when this happens it quite often, as Manne suggests, reinforces, worsens, or enables existing injustice. 

In her work, Manne understandably tends to treat himpathy as gendered. And nothing I say challenges that. But it's worth exploring the mechanisms that generate and stabilize himpathy. In reflection on this, I returned to a number of passages in Adam Smith's (1759/1790) The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS).* Smith wrote in an age of great patriarchal social hierarchy. 

As an aside, while Smith's work was very useful to Wollstonecraft and Grouchy, and not characterized by gratuitous sexism (as one can find, say, in Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Kant), I don't think of him as an early male feminist (in the manner of, say, Poullain de la Barre or Toland) nor was he especially interested in the construction of gender (as Mandeville was) or a gendered critique of law (as one can find in Hobbes and Mary Astell). So, in coupling Smith with Manne, I do not intend to turn him into some kind of proto-feminist. 

Okay, with that in place, I quote and then comment.

The poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of the sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers. He is mortified upon both accounts; for though to be overlooked, and to be disapproved of, are things entirely different, yet as obscurity covers us from the daylight of honour and approbation, to feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most ardent desire, of human nature. The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel. Those humble cares and painful attentions which occupy those in his situation, afford no amusement to the dissipated and the gay. They, turn away their eyes from him, or if the extremity of his distress forces them to look at him, it is only to spurn so disagreeable an object from among them. The fortunate and the proud wonder at the insolence of human wretchedness, that it should dare to present itself before them, and with the loathsome aspect of its misery presume to disturb the serenity of their happiness. The man of rank and distinction, on the contrary, is observed by all the world. Every body is eager to look at him, and to conceive, at least by sympathy, that joy and exultation with which his circumstances naturally inspire him. His actions are the objects of the public care. Scarce a word, scarce a gesture, can fall from him that is altogether neglected. In a great assembly he is the person upon whom all direct their eyes; it is upon him that their passions seem all to wait with expectation, in order to receive that movement and direction which he shall impress upon them; and if his behaviour is not altogether absurd, he has, every moment, an opportunity of interesting mankind, and of rendering himself the object of the observation and fellow-feeling of every body about him. (TMS 1.3.2.1, p. 51 in the Glasgow edition)

Smith here diagnoses an especially calamitous feature of social life: [I] in a society characterized by inequality, the flow of sympathy tends greatly upward and monopolizes it ("every moment"). This is so even when evaluating analogous behavior: "In equal degrees of merit there is scarce any man who does not respect more the rich and the great, than the poor and the humble." (TMS 1.3.3.4, p. 62)**

And, so this produces, [I*] in an unequal society, the effect that those at the bottom of a social hierarchy naturally have a great deficit in sympathetic attention. This creates all kinds of emotional and social harms to the those at the bottom (including shame, lack of self-respect, and mortification). We are reminded that recognition is a human need. But [II] this deficit gets worse when they are in distress, because [IIA] their suffering does not receive the sympathetic engagement it might merit ("scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers") or [IIB] it actually generates antipathy ("if the extremity of his distress forces them to look at him, it is only to spurn so disagreeable an object from among them.") [IIA&B]  are both instances in which the lack of sympathy actually compounds injury. Because for Smith "we desire both to be respectable and to be respected" (TMS 1.3.3.2, p. 61) and the unfair flow of sympathy undermines both desires in a hierarchical society.

It's worth noting (a propos [IIA&B]) that for Smith the sympathetic resentment with the fury of an injured party is merited: because that fury is aimed at making the perpetrator  "repent of that conduct, and to make him sensible, that the person whom he injured did not deserve to be treated in that manner. What chiefly enrages us against the man who injures or insults us, is the little account which he seems to make of us, the unreasonable preference which he gives to himself above us, and that absurd self-love, by which he seems to imagine, that other people may be sacrificed at any time, to his conveniency or his humour." (TMS 2.3.1.5, p. 96) And so on Smith's view, as Darwall (1999) emphasized, [III] when we withhold sympathy from a victim, or those in need, we withhold recognition of their (equal) dignity. And this, in turn, can reinforce the sense of shame and lack of self-worth, etc. For a recent excellent treatment, I warmly recommend Michelle Schwarze's monograph, Recognizing Resentment: Sympathy, Injustice, and Liberal Though.

Now, above I have emphasized that these malfunctioning mechanisms of sympathy are the effect of social inequality (of status, of wealth, and of rank/honor). But, as we have seen, it is pretty clear that it also reinforces such inequality (at least of attention) and helps generate it. In fact, Smith himself is elsewhere also explicit that the unequal flow of sympathy is a motive for many to try to grow rich and famous (including the 'poor man's son'). And, as I show in my book (p. 14o), Smith is also explicit that this mechanism is a source of some social stability in a hierarchical society, even though we ourselves do not necessarily benefit from our "obsequiousness" to social superiors (TMS 1.3.2.3, p. 52).

At one point, Smith notes a particularly egregious example of [I]: when [IV] the inequality of the flow of sympathy is orders of magnitude larger when misfortune occurs to the rich and powerful than to ordinary folk: "Every calamity that befalls them, every injury that is done them, excites in the breast of the spectator ten times more compassion and resentment than he would have felt, had the same things happened to other men." (TMS 1.3.2.2, p. 52)+ As Grouchy notes critically (see her fourth Letter in Letters on Sympathy) Smith thinks we commiserate more with the fall from grace of the powerful because we already have an enhanced sympathetic identification with them (that is [I]). Grouchy, by contrast, thinks we have a natural tendency to envy the powerful, and rather thinks our inordinate sympathy with the rich and powerful when they encounter misfortune is [IV*] caused by our imagining that the mighty are ordinarily preserved from misfortune, and so when they fall they experience it worse conjoined with the fact that we sympathize more with such emotional pain (than either physical pain or any pleasure].

Now, Smith treats all of this as a "corruption," in fact, the disposition to "admire, almost to worship the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition," is "the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." So, it is evident that Smith is by no means endorsing the mechanisms here he is describing, and actually finds fault for our inability to correct these corruptions. 

It's pretty clear that the social hierarchy Smith is describing is gendered (the actual examples of "The man of rank and distinction" are nearly always a man in Smith's account). But Smith himself pays too little attention to the fact. And as I show in a follow up post this lack of sensitivity to gendered nature of these mechanism creates problems in his account of chastity and rape (although these passages are also a bit tricky because they occur in a critique of casuistry).

But since I have gone on quite a bit already, I will close today's post with the observation that it is fair to say that if we take Smith's moral psychology seriously, himpathy piggy-backs on the kind of corrupted mechanisms that Smith has diagnosed exist in hierarchical societies and -- this is very much in line with Manne's position -- that it reinforces these hierarchies.  

*Credit where credit is due, Paul Cider links Smith's moral psychology to himpathy here.

**Smith continues: "With most men the presumption and vanity of the former are much more admired, than the real and solid merit of the latter."

+ And, connecting it to the problem of tragedy, he thinks this is why "the misfortunes of Kings only which afford the proper subjects for tragedy." 

On the Crisis of Liberalism (IX): the normative/positive split

The second wave of liberalism (recall) has ended and liberalism may not survive. Some readers will say, good riddance, and to you I say, I hope you do better. This is the ninth post (recall here (I);  here (II); here (III); here (IV); here (V); (VI); (VII); and (VIII) in an open-ended series (see also here, here, here,  here; and here).

In the late nineteenth century or early twentieth, roughly between Sidgwick and Robbins, there was a split -- a cognitive and institutional division of labor within utilitarianism --, in which the economists (and also some psychologists) got the empirical (or ['positive'] side of the enterprise, and the philosophers obtained the normative side of the project (see here for scholarship). Of course, in practice bits of economics were certainly explicitly or implicitly normative (think of welfare economics, bayesian or rational decision theory, etc.), and naturally the normative, philosophical side of the enterprise drew on and, perhaps, sometimes even constituted empirical material (e.g., decision theory, formal epistemology, etc.). Utilitarianism is by no means that hegemonic anymore in philosophy, but the split has, despite (say) PPE scholarship largely persisted.  In addition, not all utilitarianism is intrinsically liberal (I return to that below).

This division of labor has had an unintended effect on liberalism as a governing political ideology, or its art of government. For, it is characteristic of long stretches of liberalism, as a would be art of government, that it integrates normative and empirical stances in a particular way. In particular, that a receptivity toward non-zero-sum constitutional arrangements and policy strategies in which normative and (enlightened) self-interested or prudential arguments tend to reinforce and be mixed with each other. An enduring example of this kind of receptivity is the openness toward immigration and open borders, which are good for economic growth and the right thing to do for individuals (especially vulnerable ones). 

What made such receptivity toward a non-zero-sum art of government so valuable is that it also allowed politicians and social movement leaders to cobble together potentially enduring coalitions and winning majorities in different local contexts. And because it is also a trans-national doctrine it provides a framework for international collaboration and win-win activities. And while perpetual peace is rather utopian, enduring alliances and friendships are worthy pay-offs.

Yes, I know some of you are fierce critics of liberalism, and you are eager to emphasize liberalism's fatal complicity in imperialism and racialized, settler colonialism, its permissiveness of oligarchic tendencies, its one-sided obsession with revolutionary movements which defend the have-nots, or (more recently) its fusionist embrace of religious nationalists (Stateside), and the carceral state (with law and order sliding into a for-profit prison industry complex). In each case your criticism is probably well taken. More subtly, these tactical, even strategic mistakes are the effect of the fact that liberalism intrinsically pursues a diversity of ends, and receptivity toward non-zero-sum strategies provide space for genuine policy/political mistakes. For, of course, liberalism's lapses in principle are nearly always the same side of the coin of pursuing non-zero-sum strategies, they are the roots of what gave liberal ideology its vitality within political and social life. And (looking ahead to my book on Foucault and neoliberalism) I am pretty confident that this is what attracted Foucault to neoliberalism warts and all at the end of his life.

But my interest today is not to persuade the critic of liberalism or to justify my political inclinations to her. (And so in this post I also ignore the objection that liberalism is intrinsically finished; that the material and sociological conditions that  give rise to it have been completed.) Rather, I want to diagnose a problem for liberalism as a would be social movement and political ideal. For, with the split, philosophical liberalism has become increasingly normative in a moralistic, and relatively one-sided way such that theory tells us that [A] from the status quo baseline, movements toward a more just world or an environmentally sound world demand enormous changes and sacrifices from not the least liberalism's core political constituencies--trapping would be policy-makers in zero-sum environments.* Turning political philosophy into applied ethics also has had the tendency to make it primarily a symbolic, oppositional project not fit for real governance.

And, yes, philosophical radicalism -- the specific English political branch of utilitarianism --, has been revived in recent times by Peter Singer with great vigor feeding into effective altruism and animal rights movements catching the imagination of educated citizens who want to make a difference. But in its contemporary manifestation this radicalism is self-consciously anti-liberal (see its special fondness for government house politics) and it often pursues its ends with seats at technocratic tables where the lives it wishes to reform or impact are not properly represented (e.g., emission trading schemes that disproportionally hurt the already poor), and where due to its lack of interest in how we got to the particular status quo major social injustices go unrecognized (and uncompensated). 

Of course, I am not the first to notice any of this. Marxists have discerned that liberal political philosophy is dominant in the academy, and provides financial and status rewards to its practitioners (including participation in NGOs, government advice councils, international organizations), but leaves everything pretty much untouched. (As I have noted this is the message of In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019) by Katrina Forrester.) So-called realist critics of this tendency of symbolic moralizing have tried to carve out a space, even one with lexical priority, in which certain kind of demands of political life can override the moralization of public life pursued by liberal political theory. 

Before I wrap up, I want to forestall an objection. Given the way the academy works, we should expect continued drift toward, and increasing significance of, applied ethics; and, so the objection goes, a lot of such applied ethics takes the stance of the government bureaucrat (who must, say, ration, or allocate benefits). And, while sometimes [see my paragraph on philosophical radicalism above] this slides into illiberalism, often such applied ethics is self-consciously liberal in all kinds of ways (with an embrace of autonomy, fairness, liberal egalitarianism, etc.). So, in this technocratic sense liberalism is not dead at all in applied ethics and the ways it infiltrates governance. (This objection also applies to my work I was intending to do on financial credit before I got long covid.)

But such technocratic projects are by definition elite; they do not form a sound basis for mass politics (try thinking about the political consequences of embracing a carbon tax). And while liberalism may not aspire to being a majoritarian stance, in its most flourishing periods it certainly had the capacity to mobilize pluralities.

It may be too late to recover a strictly philosophical flank for a liberal movement that is not focused, in one-sided fashion on, or privileges, ethics. Disciplines get entrenched and they find topics of study that are intrinsic to them, and the felt needs of its members. With working conditions in the academy become so mediocre for so many, it is no surprise that it is becoming a feeding ground among the young for more radical political ideologies than the sober non-zero-sum liberalism I advocate. That the academy becomes a bastion of countercultural thought may well be healthy for society (and perhaps the academy).

But I do not see these trends as a reason to despair for my ilk (although I am on the skeptical, non-dogmatic end of such non-zero-sum liberalism). Such liberalism promises individual emancipation, mutual enrichment, freedom, and sings the praises of prudence, and in many perhaps undiscovered combinations this remains a powerful drug on politicians and their followers; it gains it vitality from the daily experiments in living on the margins of society and in the daily conflicts of our multicultural societies. And, as I expect, once non-zero-sum liberalism is the minority in the academy certain lazy habits of thought will be challenged and this will improve it; and if the formation of liberal political ideology moves out of the academy and closer to social movements/interests and political parties that would be a blessing in disguise. 

*There are ways of reading (say) Rawls' difference principle as win-win, but to get to circumstances where this is so requires massive social changes/redistribution. And so as a guide to transition (say to property owning democracy), it's a zero-sum philosophy.

 

On Hayek, Entrepreneurs, Elites and Social Change [Guestpost by Erwin Dekker]

[This is an invited guest-post by Erwin Dekker.--ES]

The Austrian tradition in economics/political economy is known for its theory of entrepreneurship. In its Schumpeterian version the entrepreneur is a heroic character who can break routines, innovate, and persuade others to go along in their endeavor. The Mises and Kirzner version of the entrepreneur is a more mundane figure ���alert��� to profit opportunities which are not yet exploited by others (recall here and here). Both versions of the entrepreneur emphasize the conscious and intentional nature of the innovative acts. Although the entrepreneur���s behavior cannot be captured in a simple maximization framework, it does fit within the teleological means-ends framework of human action which Mises (Hayek���s teacher) developed.

Intentionality fades slowly from Hayek���s later work. In the Constitution of Liberty (1960) he argues: ���Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen��� (29). Hayek contrasts the ���countless number of humble steps taken by anonymous persons in the course of doing familiar things��� with ���major intellectual innovations which are explicitly realized��� (28). Change in his social philosophy is more a process of adaptation to changing circumstances than the result of human imagination or alert actions to improve the everyday run of things.

It has always struck me as surprising that the most famous Austrian thinker is essentially silent on the theme of entrepreneurship. One plausible explanation is that Hayek was worried about a typical version of romantic individualism, which attributed too much uniqueness to the individual mind and will, as Eric has recently suggested here. A contributing factor is that Hayek was always more of an evolutionary thinker who emphasized the market process rather than the actions of individuals within such a market. His famous critique of the static nature of (perfect) competition in neoclassical models therefore does not blame it for lack of attention to entrepreneurship, but for its lack of attention to the dynamic interactive process of competition. More generally he emphasizes mutual adjustments rather than social change through intentional agency.

And yet, upon rereading the Constitution of Liberty for a recent weekend of the Adam Smith Fellowship program I could not help but being struck by the elitist nature of the theory of social change in Hayek. The key chapter in this regard appears to be the innocuously titled ���The Common Sense of Progress��� (chapter 3), in which he first argues that the rich bear most of the costs of experimentation, because they are the first to buy new goods which come to the market, initially in limited quantities. Hayek, as is typical for him, does not dwell on examples or empirical substantiation, but at least up to this point we might understand this as a stylized empirical fact: new products are first offered to a small elite which adopts them, and if successful the product will be produced in larger quantities at lower costs, and become available to the middle classes.

But Hayek is aware of the fact that economic inequality in this way breeds social inequality, because: ���most of what we strive for are things we want because others already have them��� (45). The effects of which he calls cruel, but inevitable: ���[in a] progressive society, some must lead, and others must follow��� (45). To drive the point home as it were, he turns his more narrowly economic argument into a social argument, by suggesting that it is the rich who engage in experimentation with ���new styles of living���, which over time will make these new styles ���accessible to the poor���, without which the poor would advance much slower. It is important to see that we have moved here from a narrower argument about differences in purchasing power to a broader argument about the role of the rich in advancing society.

Hayek then develops this argument into the political realm by suggesting that a similar dynamic plays out among nations. Just like the poor in a given society benefit from the experiments in buying and living of the rich, so the populations of other countries benefit from the experiments in buying and living of those in leading countries. Both the British labor classes and the rest of the world benefitted from ���a rich class with old traditions [which] demanded products of a quality and taste unsurpassed elsewhere��� (48). It is an argument that Tyler Cowen has occasionally made about the way in which European regulated welfare states benefit from innovation and permissiveness in the United States.

The flipside of the argument that the rich are those who experiment and therefore bear the costs of social change, is that it is only the rich which are truly free. An implication which would bring Hayek surprisingly close in outlook to Schumpeter, who believed that the masses were merely following rules and customs, while entrepreneurs were those who could psychologically break free from these everyday constraints and imagine better alternatives. One might suggest that such a reading is somewhat uncharitable, but Hayek himself asks the reader at the start of chapter eight ���Employment and Independence��� to wonder whether the arguments he developed still holds in modern times: ���in which a relatively larger part of the people, and most of those who counted in the forming opinion, were independent in the activities that gave them their livelihood��� (118).

One might expect Hayek to make the argument that rising living standards mean that more individuals are now in a position to engage in economic and social experimentation. Quite to the contrary he suggests that when the franchise was extended to workers, they quite naturally looked to limit the freedoms of the rich for they could not imagine what these were good for. There are moreover important sociological consequences of the fact that wage-laborers do not assume risks or personal initiatives: ���A man who works under direction for a fixed salary or wage may be as conscientious, industrious, or intelligent as one who must constantly choose between alternatives; but he can hardly be as inventive or experimental��� (120).

In what follows Hayek continues to systematically distinguish two classes in society, the dependent wage-laborers, and the men of independent means, who have ���an indispensable role to play in any civilized society.��� They are of particular relevance beyond the market: ���in the field of cultural amenities, in the fine arts, in education and research, in the preservation of natural beauty and historic treasures, and above all, in the propagation of new ideas in politics, morals, and religion��� (125). So essential does Hayek consider the role of this social class, that if it did not exist, he suggest it might have to be created through a kind of lottery which would free a certain group of individuals to exercise true independence and freedom, although these individuals might lack the education and familiarity with wealth that the children of the rich have. In the absence of such a lottery, the merits of this social class provide an argument in favor of inheritance for Hayek.  

The Austrian tradition, Hayek included, is typically known for its emphasis on the heterogeneity of individuals. But in his theory of social change Hayek suggests that such heterogeneity is in fact largely limited to a small subset of individuals who are free of many of the (material) obligations that life in contemporary society brings with it. His own theory that changes come about through a response to changing circumstances which necessitate adjustments for individuals all over society is seemingly contradicted by his suggestion that only the rich are truly free to experiment. Hayek���s plea for the importance of local and contextual knowledge of time and place next to, or even above, general scientific knowledge, has strong democratic undertones, which completely disappear in the way he talks about the generation of new knowledge through market and social experimentation. This surprisingly makes Hayek theory of social change elitist in a way not too dissimilar from that of Joseph Schumpeter, Hayek even refers repeatedly to the rich as an avant-garde, a favorite metaphor of the maverick Schumpeter. Although, it must be said that Schumpeter, like John Stuart Mill before him, puts more emphasis on differences in character and energy between individuals, while Hayek stresses differences in material circumstances.

Another notable difference with John Stuart Mill is that the experiments in living which both he and Hayek discuss, have no intrinsic value for Hayek. In Mill they foster a spirit of individualism and turn human beings into a ���noble and beautiful object of contemplation���. Hayek worries that such individualism might upset the social order and the process of coordination, but more importantly he is not at all concerned with the value that individuals might derive from experimentation and deviance, or how it might reinforce a liberal spirit.

If there is a real tension between the broader Hayekian tenets of dispersed knowledge, mutual adjustment, and process theory and his theory of social change, this implies that a Hayekian theory of social change is still to be developed. In my book on the Viennese Students of Civilization I noted similarities between the work of Norbert Elias, who essentially developed a trickle-down theory of social change through imitation of the superior ways of the aristocracy and that of some Austrian economists. Later social theorists, including sociologists originally inspired by Elias, have suggested social change originates from the fringes of society, where individuals have either less pressure to conform (and so the costs of deviant behavior are lower) or oppressed so that individuals stand relatively more to gain from experimentation and protest. Especially since Hayek is explicitly progressive on social liberal issues, he praises: ���the abolition of slavery, penal and prison reforms, the prevention of cruelty to children or to animals, and a more humane treatment of the insane��� (127).

This tension is also relevant for a political economic analysis of power in society. One might expect that those with independent means will primarily be interested in protecting the status quo, rather than changing it. Hayek admits that this class is more likely to produce ���bons vivants than scholars and public servants���, but he never entertains that they might abuse their economic and social power to corrupt the political system in their favor. Whereas Schumpeter praised the rotation of elites in one of his characteristic metaphors which spoke of the elite as the top floor of a hotel which is always full, but always with different people. Hayek seems more concerned with the disappearance ���of a cultural elite��� which resulted from the combined effects of inflation and taxation (129).  

Hayek���s own emphasis on heterogeneity and his plea for maximizing the chances for accidents to happen, could equally well be developed into a social theory which suggests that social change is more likely to occur when opposing groups or individuals with different values meet each other, and the necessity for mutual adjustment emerges. This is also what Mill concluded about the reason why pressures for social conformism have not led to social stagnation among the European family of nations. This was not due to the superior excellence in any one nation or class, but a result of: ���their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable, their.��� This is in line with more recent work in (cultural) economics which suggest that more social diversity is good for growth and  development.

Closer to Hayek���s own epistemological liberalism there is increasing attention in the philosophy of science for the benefits of cognitive diversity (see Ryan Muldoon's overview). Most importantly, it would take more seriously the stylized facts which Deborah Coen in her Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty made central to Viennese liberal thought: the increasing heterogeneity between all individuals in an increasingly complex society, spurred on by the division of labor and the resulting division of knowledge. I think with Mill that a liberal should find such heterogeneity on its own desirable, but it also supplies a better starting point for theorizing social change, than the one that Hayek provides.

Page numbers refer to the 1960 edition.

This chapter draws heavily on Hayek���s ���Freiheit und Unabh��ngigkeit��� published in the Schweizer Monatshefte 39 published in 1959.

Foucault, Max Weber, and Hayek

Similarly, we can produce the conditions for the formation of an order in society, but we cannot arrange the manner in which its elements will order themselves under appropriate conditions. In this sense the task of the lawgiver is not to set up a particular order but merely to create conditions in which an orderly arrangement can establish and ever renew itself. As in nature, to induce the establishment of such an order does not require that we be able to predict the behavior of the individual atom���that will depend on the unknown particular circumstances in which it finds itself. All that is required is a limited regularity in its behavior; and the purpose of the human laws we enforce is to secure such limited regularity as will make the formation of an order possible.
Where the elements of such an order are intelligent human beings whom we wish to use their individual capacities as successfully as possible in the pursuit of their own ends, the chief requirement for its establishment is that each know which of the circumstances in his environment he can count on. This need for protection against unpredictable interference is sometimes represented as peculiar to ���bourgeois society.���26 But, unless by ���bourgeois society��� is meant any society in which free individuals co-operate under conditions of division of labor, such a view confines the need to far too few social arrangements. It is the essential condition of individual freedom, and to secure it is the main function of law.--Hayek (1960) The Constitution of Liberty, p. 140-141.

The quoted passage is the end of chapter 10 of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. If the main task of the lawgiver is "to create conditions in which an orderly arrangement can establish and ever renew itself" then the task is to maintain what Michael Polanyi calls (as Hayek notes in context) a "polycentric order" or a law-governed "spontaneous order." (140) The lawgiver's laws, which create a limited regularity in individual behaviors will guide expectations ("which of the circumstances in his environment he can count on") and, so, presuppose publicity (they are known) and (relative) stability ("can count on"). The laws also have a generality and impartiality because the laws (now quoting Hayek quoting Polanyi), "uniformly apply to all" agents. (140)

The generality and impartiality of laws of a polycentric order have, according to Hayek an abstract even formal character. In fact, when in the start of Chapter 10, Hayek discusses what he has "called the ���abstract character��� of true law." (p. 133) He adds a footnote (8): "If there were no danger of confusion with the other meanings of those terms, it would be preferable to speak of ���formal��� rather than of ���abstract��� laws, in the same sense as that in which the term ���formal��� is used in logical discussion." (p. 394-395)+ And the reason why Hayek avoids using 'formal' in the main body of the text here is because, as becomes clear near the end of the note, Max Weber uses "formal justice" in a different than Hayek's sense: "he [Weber] means justice determined by law, not merely formal but in the substantive sense" (p. 395) In fact, throughout The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek does go on to use 'formal' when he means 'abstract law.'

This is probably all familiar enough. In the final paragraph of chapter 10, which is quoted in full above, Hayek confronts an objection which claims that the formal structure of such a polycentric order just is a special feature of bourgeois society. Without any further information, one can infer that lurking in the background is a kind of historicist idea that the characteristics of bourgeois society are peculiar to a particular age/time and material context. Hayek responds to the objection, in part, by de-historicizing the claim, and universalizing it (to repeat): "unless by ���bourgeois society��� is meant any society in which free individuals co-operate under conditions of division of labor." (emphasis added this time.)

In note 26, the objection is attributed to Max Weber.* The note reads as follows:

Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization (London: W. Hodge, 1947), p. 386, tends to treat the need for ���calculability and reliability in the functioning of the legal order��� as a peculiarity of ���capitalism��� or the ���bourgeois phase��� of society. This is correct only if these terms are regarded as descriptive of any free society based on the division of labor. [p. 397 in the 1960 edition]

The note basically repeats the claim in the main body of Hayek's text except that it specifies calculability as part of the legal order that needs to be secured by the lawgiver.

When we turn to Weber's Theory of Social and Economic Organization, the passage that Hayek refers to can be found in the context of Weber's discussion of representation and ways in which "the governing powers of representative bodies may be both limited and legitimized," (419) and, especially "the relations of the different forms of representation to the economic order." (420):++ I quote the wider context of the material that Hayek had quoted in his footnote (and highlight it):

1. One factor in the development of free representation was the undermining of the economic basis of the older estates. This made it possible for persons with demagogic gifts to pursue their own inclinations without reference to their social position. The source of this undermining process was the development of modern capitalism.
2. Calculability and reliability in the functioning of the legal order and the administrative system is vital to rational capitalism. This need led the middle classes to attempt to impose checks on patrimonial monarchs and the feudal nobility by means of a collegial body in which the middle classes had a decisive voice, which controlled administration and finance and could exercise an important influence on changes in the legal order.
3. At the time when this transition was taking place, the proletariat had not reached a stage of development which enabled it to become an important political factor which could endanger the position of the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, there was no hesitation in eliminating any threat to the power of the propertied classes by means of property qualifications for the franchise.
4. The formal rationalization of the economic order and the state, which was favourable to capitalistic development, could be strongly promoted by parliaments. Furthermore, it seemed relatively easy to secure influence on party organizations.
5. The development of demagogy in the activities of the existing par��ties was a function of the extension of the franchise. Two main factors have tended to make monarchs and ministers everywhere favourable to universal suffrage, namely, the necessity for the support of the property��less classes in foreign conflict and the hope, which has proved to be un��justified, that, as compared to the bourgeoisie, they would be a conserva��tive influence.
6. Parliaments have tended to function smoothly as long as their com��position was drawn predominantly from the classes of wealth and culture, that is, as they were composed of political 'amateurs.' Established social status rather than class interests as such underlay the party structure. The conflicts tended to be only those between different forms of wealth, but with the rise of class parties to power, especially the proletarian parties, the situation of parliaments has changed radically. Another important factor in the change has been the bureaucratization of party organiza��tions, with its specifically plebiscitary character. The member of parlia��ment thereby ceases to be in a position of authority over the electors and becomes merely an agent of the leaders of the party organization. This will have to be discussed more in detail elsewhere. (Weber, pp. 420-421).

It's pretty clear why Hayek treats Weber as offering an alternative count. Weber is offering a historical development in which a Hayekian free society risks being understood as a transitory stage to be undermined once parliament and parties are professionalized and subject to class warfare. 

The reason I have quoted so much is that Hayek's response to Weber can help illuminate Foucault's treatment of ordoliberalism and its conception of the rule of law. For, Foucault treats (recall) the ORDOs as applied Husserlians who are essentially responding to a problematic bequeathed by Max Weber  (and competing with the Frankfurt school). I quote the Birth of Biopolitics, the fifth lecture of 7 February 1979:

What I mean is that Max Weber was a starting point for both schools and we could say, to schematize drastically, that he functioned in early twentieth century Germany as the person who, broadly speaking, displaced Marx���s problem. If Marx tried to define and analyze what could be summed up as the contradictory logic of capital, Max Weber���s problem, and the problem he introduced into German sociological, economic, and political reflection at the same time, is not so much the contradictory logic of capital as the problem of the irrational rationality of capitalist society...The decipherment of this irrational rationality of capitalism was also the problem for the Freiburg School, but people like Eucken, R��pke, and others try to resolve it in a different way, not by rediscovering, inventing, or defining the new form of social rationality, but by defining, or redefining, or rediscovering, the economic rationality that will make it possible to nullify the social irrationality of capitalism. (p. 105-106)

Now situating ordoliberalism in terms of this Weberian starting point is a bit awkward because it's not how the ORDOs present themselves. In fact, in an important recent paper, "The Abandoned ��bervater: Max Weber and the Neoliberals," Stefan Kolev has demonstrated (and now I quote from his conclusion) "the curious disregard of Max Weber in the writings of the neoliberal generation. While certainly a towering figuring during his lifetime, after his passing in 1920 Weber successively fell into oblivion." As it happens, in his exercise, Kolev had also treated Hayek's response to Weber, but ignored The Constitution of Liberty (which for his purposes is fine).

But for Foucault the way the ordoliberals resolve this Weberian starting point is by advocating for the rule of law in the service of constituting a market order. And when Foucault explains what the rule of law means in such a context he says the following in his seventh lecture on 21 February 1979:

What does applying the principle of the Rule of law in the economic order mean? Roughly, I think it means that the state can make legal interventions in the economic order only if these legal interventions take the form solely of the introduction of formal principles. There can only be formal economic legislation. This is the principle of the Rule of law in the economic order. What does it mean to say that legal interventions have to be formal?
I think Hayek, in The Constitution of Liberty, best defines what should be understood by the application of the principles of l�����tat de droit, or of the Rule of law,* in the economic order. Basically, Hayek says, it is very simple. The Rule of law, or formal economic legislation, is quite simply the opposite of a plan.....if we want the Rule of law to operate in the economic order, it must be the complete opposite of this. That is to say, the Rule of law will have the possibility of formulating certain measures of a general kind, but these must remain completely formal and must never pursue a particular end. (171-172)

Now, as the editors of Birth of Biopolitics note, Foucault is here alluding to chapter 15 of The Constitution of Liberty, but the actual definition that Foucault quotes is from The Road to Serfdom. But as they also note, in the previous pages of the lecture, Foucault had just repeatedly cited without making this explicit chapter 13 of The Constitution of Liberty (���Liberalism and Administration: The ���Rechtsstaat������).

So, here's my proposal. It is pretty clear that in preparing these lectures, Foucault had read The Constitution of Liberty, which he explicitly mentions and cites including without attribution. In fact, as the editors of Birth of Biopolitics notice, Hayek's postscript -- "Why I am Not a Conservative" -- to The Constitution of Liberty is alluded to in the very beginning and near end of Foucault's 1979 lectures. (See note 3 of p. 23 and note 11 on p. 234 of The Birth of Biopolitics.) I return to this fact before long. In Particular, it is very clear that in addition to the postscript, Foucault had assimilated Part II of The Constitution of Liberty on Freedom and the Law (which includes chapter 9-16 that Foucault explicitly cites in Birth of Biopolitics).

And, in fact, when in lecture 7, Foucault illustrates the nature of the rule of law for Hayek, he also cites Michael Polanyi's Logic of Liberty: "Or again, Polanyi, in his The Logic of Liberty, writes: ���The main function of a system of jurisdiction is to govern the spontaneous order of economic life. The system of law must develop and reinforce the rules according to which the competitive mechanism of production and distribution operates.��� (21 February 1979, p. 174) And Hayek and Polanyi are treated as representing, or articulating, characteristic features of the ordoliberal rebirth of the liberal art of government. [To bring Hayek and Polanyi so close to the ORDOs is not in all respects right, but for Foucault's purposes in chapter 7, it's okay.]

And if one reads The Constitution of Liberty, it would be silly to suggest that Weber looms large over it. However, Hayek does end the first chapter with a very Weberian claim, that because coercion cannot be avoided in a free society it has conferred "a monopoly of coercion on the state." (The accompanying footnote cites inter alia Weber's Essays in Sociology.) But more important, Hayek does engage critically with Weber in Part II in The Constitution of Liberty. In particular, as we have seen above, Hayek treats Weber's historicist account of the rule of law in bourgeois society as a key target. But Weber is also an important source.

For example, in chapter 14, when articulating "systematically  the essential conditions of liberty under the law," (180), the "second chief attribute"...of "true laws is that they be known and certain." (182) In fact, Hayek immediately adds that there is "probably no single factor which has contributed more to the prosperity of the West  than the relative certainty of the law which has prevailed here." (183) And Hayek drops a footnote to a number of works including "the extensive discussion in Max Weber, Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society." 

So, when Foucault tried to contextualize and situate ordoliberal thought, he recognized or attributed a fundamental similarity with Hayek on the conceptualization of the rule of law. (I think this is especially likely to occur if one reads Ropke's works of the 1940s alongside Hayek's Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty.) And this part of Hayek is quite explicitly a critical response to Weber. And in Hayek (and by implication the ORDOs) this step/stage/era in Weber's developmental account is, as it were, constantly frozen in time, or not allowed to be corrupted, by the the proper understanding of the rule of law as formal and as directed, even actively, at the maintenance of a competitive order.**

 

 

+ In the 2011, "definitive edition" edited by Hamowy this is note 9 (p. 220). 

*In the 2011, "definitive edition" edited by Hamowy this is note 27 (p. 231). The main change in Hamowy's version of the note is the addition of Talcott Parsons as editor (and the German subtitle).

++While I am also using the 1947 edition of the translation, the pagination is different because I have access only to the Free Press (Glencoe, IL) edition, while Hayek is citing a copy published in London. 

**At the end of lecture 7, Foucault treats the ORDOs and Hayek as having a principled program to maintain this stage as their goal of a free society because they deny it is self-contradictory, and the rule of law can (recall) solve the problem of monopoly as diagnosed by Lenin:

the ordoliberals, and the ordoliberals like Weber, think that Marx, or at any rate, Marxists, are wrong in looking for the exclusive and fundamental origin of this rationality/irrationality of capitalist society in the contradictory logic of capital and its accumulation...the ordoliberals think that there is no internal contradiction in the logic of capital and its accumulation and consequently that capitalism is perfectly viable from an economic and purely economic point of view. (21 February 1979, 177)

Macron, Disenchantment, and Charismatic Leadership

The disenchantment of politics, that is to say, the gradual elimination of politics as an instrument of this-worldly salvation (once embodied in the enchanting political projects of Nation-State Building, Democracy and the Welfare State, and the elite mission of European Integration), is causing the decline of political allegiance, that is to say, a deteriorating relationship of exchange and power between the rulers (political elite, government) and the ruled (people, citizens, voters). Disenchantment occurs, because of the failure, the growth beyond limits, the success, and the unintended effects of interaction of the projects.
Pondering over the possible consequences of waning political allegiance, we might hypothesize that the disenchantment of politics causes a political void in contemporary democratic societies, an emptiness of collective power, which exerts a pull on various political enterprises, experiments and escapades. Some of these, such as Obama���s charismatic leadership and his impressive performance so far (as of June 2009), may be beneficial to democratic governance and an inspiration for politicians and citizens around the globe. Still, his unspecified conception of ���change��� and his overemphasis of political primacy and capacity (���yes we can!���) may have generated expectations that are hard if not impossible to satisfy and are therefore bound to disappoint.
Other political ventures ��� to a lesser or greater extent ��� could imperil the very existence of democracy. We could think of the decomposition of the political center and the increasing importance of fringe (flank) politics that many advanced democracies are currently experiencing. As a result of this, coalition building, and effective government on the basis of beneficial exchanges are becoming increasingly difficult. The resulting ungovernability not only would contribute directly to the further disenchantment of politics, but would also reinforce the image of a, by and large, impotent elite that seems to have only one rationale left to govern: the protection of its own petty profitable position.
Here, both the toothless elite and the frustrated public become an easy victim for populist entrepreneurs. Populists effectively turn around the blame-the-citizen explanations of political disaffection and when these political adventurers manage to link the existing general frustration about politics with concrete problems of social and cultural integration, an explosive mix occurs that seriously stirs up normal democratic politics as we know it.-- Kees van Kersbergen (2009 [2010] "Quasi-Messianism and the Disenchantment of Politics," Politics and Religion, 3(1), 49-50 [HT Gijs Schumacher]

One notable feature of Macron's recent, successful election is the implosion of the main political parties that have defined France's fifth republic. In 2017 this implosion was masked by the so-called Fillon affaire, which undermined the standard bearer of the French republicans (Les R��publicains, formerly known as UMP) the main center right party in recent years. This year its candidate, Val��rie P��cresse, ranked fifth in first round voting.

French national politics is now largely organized around charismatic leadership with sizeable groups admiring Macron and (Marion) Le Pen more than their movements/parties. According to the prediction of Van Kersbergen (a Dutch distinguished political scientist now at Aarhus in Denmark) such charismatic politics is what remains when projects of this-worldly salvation are abandoned (or completed). The passage quoted above is the start of his concluding section.

While the French case is, perhaps extreme, in most continental European countries the parties that helped define the post WWII mainstream electoral system have seen steady (and correlated) erosions of support and membership of over the last few decades. In many places (Italy, Belgium, Holland, and now Germany) once powerful Christian Democratic parties are a shell of their former selves. Social democratic parties have been doing worse for longer. 

According to Van Kersbergen (who is clearly and explicitly indebted to Max Weber and Mair's "Ruling the Void"), the politics of this-worldly salvation is characteristic of modernity; it is the effect of secularization in which "something of the religious past is transcribed into the secularized political ventures of modernity." And such projects re-enchant politics. Often, Christian democracy was a vehicle for this (such that the enchanting project was itself explicitly motivated by religious commitments), but that's not required.

And while the enormous sympathy for Ukraine suggests that nationalism has not run out of steam as a this-worldly project, the only new existing this-worldly salvation project that has some continent-wide resonance is the Green project. The German Greens are part of the German coalition government (where they got about 15% of the votes), which is the heart of European power. So they are by no means irrelevant. In addition, with most European governments reconsidering their dependence on Russian energy sources after Putin's attack on Ukraine, it stands to reason that clean energy will grow in importance during the next decade. But we're still far from seeing the greens as a truly popular movement anywhere; even though the old main-stream parties collapsed, the candidate of the French Greens scored under 5% in the first round, which actually is less than during the 2017 Presidential election.

And while, say, in the UK and USA, there are structural barriers to the rise of green parties, this is not the case in proportional representation systems. So, as the effects of climate change become harder and harder to miss, the absence of a massive green movement and rising Green parties, suggests the (somewhat worrisome) possibility that it might become another elite mission alongside the European Union driven by technocratic solutions and popular rejection (think of the Yellow jerseys). 

Europe's cathedrals are a useful reminder that widespread shared commitments can engender centuries' long (building) projects. I have long thought that the Greens need to find a way to orient their project not in terms of diminishment (less consumption, less growth, less fun), but in terms of something that can be created (clean air, but then visible).

Other than such a Green project, I am unfamiliar with new this-worldly projects that might create mass mobilization and long term political movements. Writing more than a decade ago (and really before the series of financial crises that paralyzed the EU), Van Kersbergen himself is rather pessimistic:

the success of contemporary Western populism insinuates that popular sentiments and political enthusiasm predominantly hover around the edges of the radical right. In the context of the imperfect integration of religious and ethnic minorities and continuing migration, there is no guarantee that political firebrands will not find ways to tap into xenophobic undercurrents too. (50)

His way of expressing this undoubtedly earnest concern already reveals ("imperfect integration") the success of these xenophobic undercurrents infecting purportedly dispassionate analysis. For this is the frame that is de facto victim blaming, and unable to specify and locate the true sources of the problems in the political system (see Lea Klarenbeek's work on relational integration here, here, here). The idea that migration is the source of the problem leads more or less without remainder to the radical right's this-worldly project: closed borders and deportations, that is, a police state. 

Okay, let me wrap up. First, after a decade of financial crisis and low growth, Brexit, pandemic, the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Hungary (and Poland!), European democracy has turned out to be surprisingly resilient. Even so Van Kersbergen has been fairly prescient. My own suspicion, second, is that alongside the elite projects of the EU and Green future, we'll see a lot of charismatic politics often authoritarian and nationalist in character but mostly within democratic institutions.* Third, what Van Kersbergen misses, I think, is that we're also living in an age of great experimentation with sexual, family, personal, and technological identities and that these experiments in living may well -- once attacked by an overconfident, overreaching nationalist (hierarchy embracing) authoritarians -- give rise to a new, more liberal inclined great society. Or so, I'll argue soon.:)

*While the academy is seeing a true, fascinating revival in Marxist thought, I don't think it is resonating in the wider culture. But maybe I am wrong about this.

Covid Diaries: Covid Induced Migraine

It's time for another Covid Diaries update. (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; and here, and here).
 
It's been about a month since my last covid update. Unfortunately, the news is that it's been challenging. The last update coincided with the end of teaching and my return to London. And I figured that I would take ten days off, get back into a swimming routine, and then start working on some small projects before I would return to major research.
 
As you may recall I also saw the NHS long covid clinic neurologist, who diagnosed me with covid induced migraine. I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by her diagnosis because I thought my headaches were only triggered by social interactions beyond thirty minutes and i didn't have any other major characteristics of migraine. (In fact, the interactions first induce a weird fatigue and not always a headache.) On the other hand, she was optimistic I would continue to improve because on the whole I keep improving slowly.
 
But as it happened, my family left for a US trip and I was alone for a week without any social interactions at all (except very small talk at the swimming pool, supermarkt, and British Library). In their absence, I lost two days to debilitating headaches while they were away. Looking back over the month I have clocked six days of headaches--and my current best guess is that bad sleep and social interactions are possible triggers. I do find that days when I swim well and am well rested it's less likely to happen.
 
What's annoying about this is that in some respects the pattern of long covid has been that every two to three months the major symptoms shift. And this time is no different. Luckily on the non headache days I can swim, and do my reading and writing. But my social life is very limited, although my spouse has said I am in much better general mood than last year (which she takes as evidence that I am suffering much less). I still can't enjoy terraces, and even joint hiking. (There is a weird issue that walking and talking/coordinating with another while walking totally floors me--same with biking. It's as if cognitive load is too much.)
 
Unfortunately, the migraine meds I received have contraindications with pre-existing conditions/meds, so it's been a bit challenging to find the palliatives when the headaches hit. I know lots of people who manage migraines with varying degrees of success, so in a strange way I feel less alone with my condition. (It has made me wonder about the medical pathway from post-viral infection to migraine.)
 
Anyway, thanks to Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans, we finished one paper, and thanks to Nick Cowen we finished another. (Both under review.) And I wrote a book review. And then a week ago I did start my Foucault project, and while I lost one day through headaches, I have a nice writing rhythm and folks are even recognizing me again in the British Library. And I am really excited about the project--which started as a kind of therapy last year, but now feels like it might become a very neat book. I am lucky I have a work related passion that can be done in relative solitude for long chunks of time.
 
Before I left Amsterdam my occupational physician thought it was a good idea if I can figure out a research leave this Fall. So now I am in touch with various places which might sponsor a visit (you know who you are and I am very grateful for your help), so that I can take an unpaid leave. Hopefully I can sort something out that ticks various boxes and not be away from home too long.
 
That is it, I feel very grateful I have such supportive family, and the kind of job that is relatively secure and also so flexible now that teaching is done. I am still hoping that in six months i can attend workshops again and enjoy going out on dates with my better half, but I also thought that six months ago. So now I am mostly taking one day at a time.