Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 22

Historiography of the Enlightenment in The Dawn of Everything, Pt 2

Kandiaronk: For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment? ��� 
    You have observed that we lack judges. What is the reason for that? Well, we never bring lawsuits against one another. And why do we never bring lawsuits? Well, because we made a decision neither to accept or make use of money. And why do we refuse to allow money into our communities? The reason is this: we are determined not to have laws ��� because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them.

Given that the Wendat most certainly did have a legal code, this might seem disingenuous on Kandiaronk���s part. By laws, however, he is clearly referring to laws of a coercive or punitive nature. He goes on to dissect the failings of the French legal system, dwelling particularly on judicial persecution, false testimony, torture, witchcraft accusations and differential justice for rich and poor. In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:

Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can���t think of a single way they act that���s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ���mine��� and ���thine���. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one���s soul is like imagining one could preserve one���s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity,��� of all the world���s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?

For Europeans in 1703, this was heady stuff.---David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything, pp. 54-55

This is the second digression on The Dawn of Everything (here is the first); and here tweet impressions of each chapter (see here for links). When the book first appeared, David Bell (a historian of the French Enlightenment at Princeton) skewered the book for its misrepresentations of the French enlightenment, even going so far as to use "scholarly malpractice." Soon, this was followed by a generous and sensible, but at times critical review by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times. This review also strongly suggests that the characterization of Enlightenment thought is flawed. Meanwhile, Justin Smith (Paris), who arguably is the leading historian of early modern philosophy of my (now senior--shit times flies) generation, gave the book a very positive review (here). Smith notes, quite rightly that their achievement can be found in "their sympathetic plaidoyer for the singular reality of lives lived in the past, their commitment to the idea that these were real people, as weird and idiosyncratic and unfathomable by quantitative methods as you and I....It���s a weird thing to have to insist on: that there is something that it was like to be a member of the prehistoric leisure class, which is to say to have been a prehistoric human being." However, when he comes to their treatment of Lahontan's Dialogues avec le sauvage Adario, he expresses considerable skepticism about their insistence that 'Adario' just is expressing the views of the historical Kandiaronk (a Huron statesman).* I then read a critical (as of yet) unpublished review by Helen de Cruz (who among her specialities is an expert on the philosophy of anthropology and the cognitive sciences). 

As it happens the last few years, I have been reflecting a bit on the encounter of Europeans with the new world as reflected in early modern (political) philosophy. And so, before I say anything else, I think it is highly likely that European philosophy was shaped by the Jesuit Relations as Graeber and Wengrow suggest (p. 44ff), and that it makes a lot of sense to look for traces of (American) indigenous influence on European thought. Prompted by Ryan Hanley, my own focus has been on the Jesuit reports on China, but I noticed, while preparing this post, that Leibniz comments on Lahontas and 'Adario' in a letter from 1710, and does not treat him as fictional. (This letter is discussed in scholarship on Lahontas.) 

In various undergraduate courses, I teach Machiavelli's The Prince, which seems to have circulated as early as around 1513, but was published in 1532; I teach More's Utopia, which was first published in 1516, and I teach the Las Casas-Sepulveda (or The Valladolid) debate (1550���1551), centered on Las Casas' Defense of the Indians read at the Valladolid debate (and drawing on his earlier works). I mention these because they are very well known through the next few centuries; all of these texts are much earlier than Montaigne's Essays, which seems a common reference among Appiah, Smith, and Bell. Now, of these three works, The Prince is rather provincial. Even though it has quite a bit to say about Mediterranean politics, the Turkish barely register, and the other Islamic powers are ignored. It is a surprisingly Euro-centered book.

By contrast, More's Utopia is clearly responding to, and drawing on, another Florentine's adventures in the Americas, Amerigo Vespucci���s The Four Voyages. Utopia is important because, in passing, great civilizations of the Americas ("New Castille," that is, what we would call Peru) are mentioned in passing, "they came to towns, and cities, and to commonwealths, that were both happily governed and well peopled." And it is strongly implied that the locals have knowledge of navigation and astronomy (but lack a compass). In The Dawn of Everything, Utopia is mentioned in passing, as an exemplary work representing "civic prosperity and hierarchy," (p. 336) but little more. The fictional city that gives Utopia its name, is generally not treated as hierarchical because property is in common and money abolished (!), and it is in many respects rather egalitarian, but it does have a political hierarchy: in which the federation is governed by elected representatives.

In addition, the whole book, Utopia, is framed by a critique of the legal practices then current among Europeans (recall back in 2013). In fact, a stadial theory (with the Bible being the savage baseline!) is inscribed in this account! And the implication, as I noted a few years ago, is that the Europeans are the real savages (a point echoed by Montaigne and by eighteenth century legal reformers like Beccharia (recall) and Sophie de Grouchy). So, this precedes Kandiaronk's criticism by considerable  time. Now, some indigenous described in Utopia are treated as savages and ripe for colonialization, so I don't want to suggest More's book is unproblematic (recall here; here). 

Las Casas  was himself steeped in the Spanish conquest and control of the Americas. (By comparison, Justin Smith does mention Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote a generation after Las Casas.) He wrote detailed histories of the conquest (and its brutalities), and echoing the work by some fellow Dominicans, he famously attacked the Aristotelian view of natural slavery (in which the indigenous were natural slaves), from the (more biblical) perspective of natural equality. Throughout his adult life he attacked the manner of Spanish rule, and as a bishop refused absolution to slave owners. Las Casas was very famous for the next few centuries. (Unfortunately, he is the originator of the idea -- which he later much regretted -- of importing African slaves to the Americas.)

Now, Las Casas' rival, Sepulveda invents (recall) the disastrous trope that the natives are inferior, and like backward children: *"If you know the customs and manners of different peoples, that the Spanish have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World and the adjacent islands, who in prudence, skill, virtues, and humanity are as inferior to the Spanish as children to adults." This idea has a disastrous afterlife. In the Essay, Locke, who (alas) was rather invested in the colonial enterprise, frequently treats the savage mind as if a child's (see, especially, 1.2.27), and he suggests they don't think general propositions (1.2.12). The effect of this, and the tremendous influence of his anthropology, is -- as Chris Berry, Sandra Peart, and David Levy taught me--, that for some Enlightenment thinkers, it became natural to equate indigenous people with an earlier ('savage') age or stage of the development of the human species. It's this view that became influential among nineteenth century imperialists and their anthropological handmaidens, who draw on a contrast (which gets its most eloquent articulation, alas, in David Hume (recall here; recall here, drawing on Chirimuuta)) between civilization and savagery to justify conquest. Much of The Dawn of Everything is on the legacy of such views in anthropology and popular culture since.

But as plenty of scholars have noted, the Lockean anthropology, while influential, has notable critics including Adam Smith (recall, also with a passing comment on The Dawn of Everything) and Beattie (recall).  Hume and Smith both had stadial theories. But, as the previous sentence suggests, they have very different details. This is important because Graeber and Wengrow suggest -- and I was really fascinated and impressed by this -- that stadial theories are invented by Turgot (a contemporary of Smith) as a response to the "indigenous critique" (of the sort quoted at the top of this post), although presented by Madame de Graffigny in fictional form. And as the rightly suggest (p. 60), Turgot draws on what I have been calling a Lockean anthropology and so for him the earlier stages are vestiges of our earlier selves. (I think there is a direct influence of Locke on Turgot, but leave that aside.) This kind of thinking, inspired the earlier anthropologist mindset that studying indigenous types was kind of a window into our past (like the light of distant stars). But as I documented in my book, Smith's critique of this whole approach was well known in the nineteenth century (although some (recall) also treated him like a Lockean in these matters). While I am happy that Wengrow and Graeber are critical of the use that people like Pinker make of the Enlightenment, their own approach also flattens the intellectual landscape (and the intellectual roots of their own discipline).

Locke matters to the larger story in other way, and especially in light of the passage quoted above, but before we get there a brief detour with regard to  Las Casas, who is not mentioned in the book, but he is alluded to in the following passage:

Legal scholars in universities like Salamanca in Spain were not impressed by this expedient. At the same time, attempts to write off the inhabitants of the Americas as so utterly alien that they fell outside the bounds of humanity entirely, and could be treated literally like animals, also didn���t find much purchase. Even cannibals, the jurists noted, had governments, societies and laws, and were able to construct arguments to defend the justice of their (cannibalistic) social arrangements; therefore they were clearly humans, vested by God with powers of reason.
    The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human ��� that is, what rights could they be said to have ���naturally���, even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws? The matter was hotly debated. We need not linger here on the exact formulae that natural law theorists came up with (suffice to say, they did allow that Americans had natural rights, but ended up justifying their conquest anyway, provided their subsequent treatment was not too violent or oppressive), but what is important, in this context, is that they opened a conceptual door. Writers like Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius or John Locke could skip past the biblical narratives everyone used to start with, and begin instead with a question such as: what might humans have been like in a State of Nature, when all they had was their humanity? Each of these authors populated the State of Nature with what they took to be the simplest societies known in the Western Hemisphere, and thus they concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse). It���s important to stop here for a moment and consider why they came to this verdict ��� because it was by no means an obvious or inevitable conclusion.--The Dawn of Everything, pp. 32-33.**

But this story does no justice to the fact that people like Las Casas attributed genuine civilization to the Americans. And, in fact, when Suarez (in 1612), the greatest of the Salamanca school, develops his state of nature theory to justify a social contract (recall), his is ground in an account of the Fall, where political life originates in patriarchic clans (and this is by no means projected onto the Americas). So, the story that Graeber and Wengrow tell while not implausible skips a few steps. (In my own view it is more likely that Hobbes and Grotius are drawing on Book 3 of the Laws and Lucretius.)

So, Hobbes' choice, in chapter 13 of Leviathan, to project the state of nature on "many places of America" (not all) actually cries out for a better explanation. These Americans are treated as anarchist, but sadly find themselves in a war of all. But unlike the later Locke, Hobbes is a natural egalitarian and so his Americans are not children or idiots. For while they are savages, they "are not without some good Morall Sentences; also they have a little Arithmetick, to adde, and divide in Numbers not too great." (Chapter 46) It's true they not philosophers, but that's because, on his theory, the state of nature prevents the development of higher sciences.

So, where are we? There was a huge sixteenth discussion of the Americas in Europe. Thomas More's brother-in-law, John Rastell, has an interest in exploring Newfoundland (but the expedition ended near Ireland in a mutiny). It's a problem that this material has not been properly assimilated yet into scholarship of the Enlightenment (despite Pagden's efforts). And we see that from the start, that is the early sixteenth century, this is the occasion for stadial theories. But these are used to criticize the European (late Feudal) status quo.

I could stop here, but I want to offer a remark on the quoted passage from Lahontan. Kandiaronk's position is completely compatible with Locke's description of the state of nature in chapter 5 of the Second Treatise (1689). For Locke (recall) the invention of money facilitates accumulation of property (and of itself) (see sect 35-48), and the need for laws that can settle disputes (94). And then in section 49 he writes, "thus in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as money was any where known." (That is an important contrast with More's account of the Utopian abolition of money.)

 I have no reason to doubt the words attributed to Kandiaronk are his. But the position was not wholly original. (Remember Locke's state of nature is actually rather pleasant; that's part of his criticism of Hobbes.) The difference being that Locke thinks the institution of money and property have beneficial outcomes that are endorsed, whereas Kandiaronk sees in them (what soon became known as Mandevillian) vices. That is to say Lahontan's readers could assimilate what they read to an already familiar position. In addition, while it is true that Lahontan's work influenced other Enlightenment books that used and perhaps drew indigenous critiques of Europe, Lahontan himself was not wholly original. He had been preceded by a somewhat mysterious and wildly popular work (recall) Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (L'Espion Turc), which was written from the perspective of a Turkish visitor to France. Of course, that work did not offer an indigenous critique, but an oriental(ist) one! And finally, Fenelon's The adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulisses (1699) was widely influential (and overshadowed Lahontan) and offered a potent attack on European hierarchies founded in luxury. But it projected the ideal into the remote (Greek) past. 

None of this amounts to a charge of scholarly malpractice. I learned quite a bit from their critical treatment of Enlightenment stuff. I would happily give the book to a nerdy kid wanting to be inspired by intellectuals taking on big problems. And, as a scholar, I am glad they have re-opened the debate over the influence of indigenous views on European intellectual life in such a provocative way. My suggestion is that this influence is real, but that it should be pushed back into the early sixteenth century. And that many of the tropes (both bad and noble) that shape debates since, actually can be found already there. 

Okay, let me stop here for now. And leave the question of why we are stuck now, for future occasion. 

 

 

 

*Here's his summing up: "Still, we are surely better off looking to Lahontan���s fictional Kondarionk, along with any other sources we can get our hands on, in order to come to as full a picture as possible of the ���Columbian exchange of light���, of the full cultural impact in Europe of the encounter with Americans over the first 250 years or so, than we are simply dismissing a work such as this out of hands on the grounds that it is nothing more than an ideological construct and a sheer fantasy. We still need to know why and by what influences authors such as Lahontan came to have the fantasies they did, and it seems certain that Kondarionk, or someone like him, played a role in this history."

**Unfortunately, they cite 'Pagden 1986' in note 7 (on p. 533), but there is no Pagden 1986 in the bibliography (although three other works by Pagden are).

Freedom in The Dawn of Everything, Pt 1.

But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ���freedom��� as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ���Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!���). Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one���s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
   What we can now see is that the first two freedoms ��� to relocate, and to disobey commands ��� often acted as a kind of scaffolding for the third, more creative one. Let us clarify some of the ways in which this ���propping-up��� of the third freedom actually worked. As long as the first two freedoms were taken for granted, as they were in many North American societies when Europeans first encountered them, the only kings that could exist were always, in the last resort, play kings. If they overstepped the line, their erstwhile subjects could always ignore them or move someplace else. The same would go for any other hierarchy of offices or system of authority. Similarly, a police force that operated for only three months of the year, and whose membership rotated annually, was in a certain sense a play police force ��� which makes it slightly less bizarre that their members were sometimes recruited directly from the ranks of ritual clowns.
    It���s clear that something about human societies really has changed here, and quite profoundly. The three basic freedoms have gradually receded, to the point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehend what it might be like to live in a social order based on them.--David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything, p. 503.

After live-tweeting my impressions of each chapter (see here for links) of The Dawn of Everything, I wasn't sure if I wanted to blog about it. But the last few weeks the book has been popping up in various Digressions. So, it's time to confront it more directly. And since I have actually not seen yet a substantive discussion of their account of freedom (a topic I also have modest amount of expertise), I thought I start there. My treatment is mostly expository, but I will share a few reservations along the way.

The quoted passage is from the conclusion and actually nicely reveals some key features of the (anarchist) political philosophy that is immanent in the work. Just so that you don't think I am cherry-picking, earlier in the book, they called these "the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships." (p. 426)

The first freedom  -- (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one���s surroundings -- is familiar as exit. (It is bit strange that it is not discussed in the terms made familiar by Albert Hirschman in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty back in the early 1970s.)+ Crucially in The Dawn of Everything, when this freedom is discussed, it is in the context of the social infrastructure that makes it possible. An especially memorable treatment is the way in which people can wander in and out of tribes and societies over enormous distances in turtle island (North America). I quote their own summary:

It would seem, then, that kinship in such cases is really a kind of metaphor for social attachments, in much the same way we���d say ���all men are brothers��� when trying to express internationalism (even if we can���t stand our actual brother and haven���t spoken to him for years). What���s more, the shared metaphor often extended over very long distances, as we���ve seen with the way that Turtle or Bear clans once existed across North America, or moiety systems across Australia. This made it a relatively simple matter for anyone disenchanted with their immediate biological kin to travel very long distances and still find a welcome. (p. 280)

What this shows is that the kind of political/social exit they are interested in requires a pre-existing social infrastructure (a scaffolding in their terms) to allow people to enter somewhere else. And this infrastructure (in this case the Turtle and Bear clans) functions orthogonally to the political units that people are exiting from and entering into. If I understand the larger argument of the book correctly this infrastructure is partially the effect of myths and narratives that generate collective teaching on important political events of the past. (I say partially because other practices must sustain the infrastructure.)

In fact, one of the neatest elements on the book is how often what I would like to call longue dur��e memory is salient. (See, especially, their treatment of Teotilihuacan in chapter 9 and Cahokia in chapter 11.) Their longue dur��e can be centuries long! The politically salient memory is often encoded in myths and shared narratives as a reservoir for important political choices.  This is one way in which (1) enters into (3). 

In this sense, Graeber and Wengrow contribute to the overcoming of what I once called (recall) two classical conceptions of myth: first, myth is associated with superstition and something to be overcome by modernity and rationalization. On this view, which takes myth seriously as the necessary stepping stone toward a political or ethical decision that removes us from the state of myth. The other, second, classical conception is that myth just is the stuff of everydayness, an ordinary comportment or way of being in the world. But as they show myth can also be constitutive of debates involving rational political choice. And those of us trained in the classical conceptions of myth have to unlearn our biases against myth. As regular readers know I came to the view through my encounter with Aaron Tugendhaft's beautiful (2017) Baal and the Politics of Poetry,* which nicely complements their chapters 7-8.*

But to have a shared myth and to share in social infrastructure orthogonal to political units means one shares significant features of (ahh) a culture. So, one does not get this kind of exit -- Neil Levy alerted me to this -- simply. Admittedly this is a feature not a bug of their approach. Today, too many states are creating lots of severe obstacles to entry and exit. (Strikingly more than in, say, the nineteenth century.) 

Before I move on to the second freedom, it is worth noting that some of  the most interesting features of the book for political philosophy are the way these collective choices are themselves effects of a process of large scale cultural schismogenesis; that is, the tendency of whole peoples to define themselves against each other. And while I was sad they ignored all the modern political science literature on polarization, I thought their examples truly fascinating and will discuss them again in the future (see also below).

The second freedom (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others -- is rather important to the anarchic project of The Dawn of Everything. It is also really a breath of fresh air. For, one annoying feature of the scholarly debate within political philosophy (about liberal democracies) is that many bread and butter journal articles basically involve arguments about what and when states and their officers may legitimately compel their citizens (and even more their non-citizens). The impulse behind these articles is basically noble -- they always involve arguments that conclude considerable limitations on what folk can be compelled to do --, but I have to admit these discussions prevented me from self-identifying as a political philosopher for a long time. It basically turns our devotion to our disciplinary projects as ahh the nicest functionary of the modern state. (This is also visible in discussions on civil disobedience and immigration.)

The second freedom is really incompatible with statehood. Even the freest modern states compel lots of actions (not just taxation), and raise enormous costs to even relatively trivial disobedience. Much of this is completely internalized by their citizens. In part because they thereby solve endless coordination problems and avoid unpleasant friction with their neighbors. The small number of commands that are politicized and matters of controversy should not obscure these facts. That is to say, while I think (public) opinion is far more important in such matters than Graeber and Wengrow allow, one should not ignore the violent underpinnings (including the many small fines) of the system.

It's pretty clear from The Dawn of Everything that in societies in which one may ignore commands, there are fewer of them and that they involve considerable pre-existing discussion. But these come at a cost they themselves note (about all kinds of local governments), "resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair." (p. 426) As I noted yesterday (recall here; which includes a section on their book, but is not presupposed here), societies in which the division of labor is advanced tend to avoid this approach. And, in reasonably well functioning liberal societies, the right and luxury to ignore politics are one of its great blessings. Of course, this comes at the price of bureaucracy.

Throughout The Dawn of Everything, there is a polemic against bureaucracy. I don't think they ever have a nice thing to say about it, and they often say bad things about it. And this is because at bottom they see it as a species of "domination" grounded in "knowledge," and buttressed by a domination based on (state) "violence." Interestingly enough, the word 'impartial' or its cognates never appears in the book! So, what fairness  (decoupled from norms of impartiality) means for Graeber and Wengrow always involves some kind of local, particular judgment. In most contexts I myself prefer impartiality over particular judgment, but since bureaucracies are themselves shaped by unequal background conditions, I can understand why others might demur. 

The third freedom -- (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones -- is a collective one. For those who are entirely unfamiliar with the book (and the discussion about it), the book is full of examples in which whole societies switch major social organization (often seasonally). As I noted on Twitter, such collective switching when it really matters (so not traditions of carnival) are familiar to early twentieth century Europeans, who switched dramatically between collective mobilization and peace-time economies.

But the more important point is that for Graeber and Wengrow this third freedom also involves the collective rejection of the trappings of statehood (and its violence and hierarchy) altogether by particular groups. For readers of the Hebrew Bible this is not unfamiliar because the early narrative is (as Yoram Hazony notes in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture), all about shepherds trying to avoid empire a theme discussed with scientific rigor in James C. Scott works. But they add huge number of examples, and -- most interestingly -- also point to large urban settlements as examples.  

In fact, their understanding of such collective freedom to shape new social realities often comes close to what we political theorists call, republican features of self-governance familiar from (ahh) Rousseau and Machiavelli. (Rousseau's Discourses on Inequality is mentioned a lot to motivate the discussion (about that some other time perhaps), but The Social Contract isn't at all.) In fact, as the book proceeds popular assemblies are mentioned with greater frequency and as a positive alternative to democracy as understood in modern representative/elected democracies. A key passage is this one: "Yet democracy, in modern states, is conceived very differently to, say, the workings of an assembly in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems. Rather, democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlooker." (p. 367)

They go on to explain that the 'larger-than-life' individuals are modeled on the (anti-urban) aristocratic values. They present this as wholly original, and indeed their discussion is fresh. But the eighteenth century scholar in me is amused; in my introductory lecture courses on the history of political theory, I always make a big deal about the contrast between direct and indirect democracy, and I always add for good measure that what we would call 'democracy' would have have been called 'aristocratic' by the Greek ancients (sometimes mentioning Madison in passing). [Update: on twitter David Wengrow pointed out, correctly, that on p. 311-312, they credit the idea to Munro Chadwick and their "contribution is to trace the opposition back to the very origin of cities (and aristocracies) in the fourth millennium BC." My presentation misrepresents their view here, and so I am happy to correct it.]

Kidding aside, the significance of the quote from p 367 is that it kind of offers a window into the ways they view assemblies which oddly sound like Habermasian affairs and -- while I enormously respect Graeber and Wengrow -- is wholly at odds with what we know about most documented urban assemblies from literary sources not just in the ancient world but also medieval European world (or the New England town hall). They rightly reject the idea that we should treat reports of indigenous assemblies as plagiarisms from Livy. But it is worth reading Livy (amongst others), who is (for all of his inventions) a pretty useful source on the ways in which assemblies are turbulent and raucous affairs. And even when calm, often such assemblies are dominated by a few figures (often aristocratic in some pertinent local sense) in which many others have a much smaller role to play. In fact, their own (again fascinating) treatment of the decision by the Ayuntamiento (city council) of Tlaxcala to ally itself with Cort��s fits this pattern.

I don't mean to deny that sometimes assemblies can avoid results that involve winners and losers, but that's true of representative parliaments. To put the point conceptually, assemblies and parliaments are mechanisms for collective decision-making and they both have features that promote ways to avoid zero-sum outcomes, but they also have features that generate it. (For example, in popular assemblies without secret ballot, it is very difficult to stand against 'the consensus.') That is to say, I was not at all convinced they have started to offer a compelling argument here. What they have done, and this is no mean feat, is to sketch the anarchist position in lively and appealing colors (see Justin Smith's essay on the book). But they do not offer a sober comparative analysis.

The previous paragraphs may hide what's crucial here. The freedom to shape entirely new social realities is not itself incompatible with liberal democracy (as I already remarked above with the terrifying example of the world wars). To illustrate this I quote an anecdote apparently due to ��lie Hal��vy, but which I read in Ortega y Gasset. I use this anecdote because thanks to BLM the topic is highly salient again, and in their terms the adoption of a real police force is a major disaster for a community (see the quote at the top of this post).  I use Ortega y Gasset because he is an elitist liberal (I have not edited away his class biases), and so far removed from Graeber and Wengrow. Since at the time France and England were great rivals, I think the anecdote also illustrates their notion of schismogenesis:

It might be well to take advantage of our touching on this matter to observe the different reaction to a public need manifested by different types of society. When, about 1800, the new industry began to create a type of man- the industrial worker-more criminally inclined than traditional types, France hastened to create a numerous police force. Towards 1810 there occurs in England, for the same reasons, an increase in criminality, and the English suddenly realise that they have no police. The Conservatives are in power. What will they do? Will they establish a police force? Nothing of the kind. They prefer to put up with crime, as well as they can. "People are content to let disorder alone, considering it the price they pay for liberty." "In Paris," writes John William Ward, "they have an admirable police force, but they pay dear for its advantages. I prefer to see, every three or four years, half a dozen people getting their throats cut in the Ratcliffe Road, than to have to submit to domiciliary visits, to spying, and to all the machinations of Fouche."  Here we have two opposite ideas of the State. The Englishman demands that the State should have limits set to it.--The Revolt of the Masses, 123-124.

What is worth reflecting on, in light of their book, is why such large scale social decisions seem so rare in liberal democracy.  And this is connected to what they describe in terms of the question "How did we get stuck?" That's actually a very important question for political philosophy.  To be continued.

+Some of Hirschman is cited in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, including his collection, Rival views of market society and other recent essays, which has a good treatment of 'exit.'

*See also my own work on what I call philosophical prophecy.

Kuhn, Ortega y Gasset, Adam Smith and Mental Mutilation (and even a side comment on Graeber and Wengrow)

Who is it that exercises social power to-day? Who imposes the forms of his own mind on the period? Without a doubt, the man of the middle class. Which group, within that middle class, is considered the superior, the aristocracy of the present? Without a doubt, the technician: engineer, doctor, financier, teacher, and so on. Who, inside the group of technicians, represents it at its best and purest? Again, without a doubt, the man of science...

And now it turns out that the actual scientific man is the prototype of the mass-man. Not by chance, not through the individual failings of each particular man of science, but because science itself-the root of our civilisation-automatically converts him into mass-man, makes of him a primitive, a modem barbarian. The fact is well known; it has made itself clear over and over again; but only when fitted into its place in the organism of this thesis is does it take on its full meaning and its evident seriousness...

But the development of physics introduced a task opposite in character to unification. In order to progress, science demanded specialisation, not in herself, but in men of science. Science is not specialist. If it were, it would ipso facto cease to be true. Not even empirical science, taken in its integrity, can be true if separated from mathematics, from logic, from philosophy. But scientific work does, necessarily, require to be specialised.

It would be of great interest, and of greater utility than at first sight appears, to draw up the history of physical and biological sciences, indicating the process of increasing specialisation in the work of investigators. It would then be seen how, generation after generation, the scientist has been gradually restricted and confined into narrower fields of mental occupation. But this is not the importantpoint that such a history would show, but rather the reverse side of the matter: bow in each generation the scientist, through having to reduce the sphere of his labour, was progressively losing contact with other branches of science, with that integral interpretation of the universe which is the only thing deserving the names of science, culture, European civilisation.--Jos�� Ortega y Gasset (1932) The Revolt of the Masses (anonymous translator), pp. 108-110.

One the least flattering elements to science of Tomas Kuhn's philosophy of science is his insistence that most normal science is akin to puzzle-solving of a very specialized kind. And as Kuhn reminds his audience, "it is no criterion of goodness in a puzzle that its outcome be intrinsically interesting or important... intrinsic value is no criterion for a puzzle." It follows from this view, that science -- broadly viewed as a social institution -- selects for a certain kind of narrow, to-be-disciplined ingenuity. Of course, that's compatible with, as Kuhn hastens to add, a whole range of nobler motives in the scientist to join in science and stick with it. Kuhn's treatment of science is a functional analysis not psychological. But at bottom, science flourishes on a socially useful mental mutilation--and if you think that phrase too strong, Kuhn himself, more modern (and so medicalized) uses the euphemistic language of "addiction.

Kuhn leaves unaddressed whether society, which, let's stipulate, largely benefits from the fruits of scientific activity, owes the scientists any concern. Certain kinds of addiction may well be compatible with individual happiness after all. But if one takes a more expansive view of human flourishing, there is something disconcerting about the picture Kuhn draws for the scientist qua individual.

Writing a generation ahead of Kuhn, Ortega y Gasset emphasizes a mental mutilation (notice the 'barbarism') in the vicinity of puzzle-solving: hyper-specialization as an effect of the cognitive division of labor. To underlying claim is pretty clear: in order to advance on the research-frontier, one must focus on increasingly esoteric material disconnected from most other features of one's discipline and the other science. Kuhn himself captures the idea in terms of the effect of 'subdivision.'

Now, earlier in the (short) book than the passage I quoted (from chapter 12), Ortega y Gasset had offered an earnest plea for the continued significance of pure science as the fount of all technical advance (see chapter 9). And on his view this requires that the larger society embraces a set of ideals and mores conducive to people wanting to become scientists. (He recognizes that with rising affluence would be scientists have lots of other opportunities. Although his real interest is in culture.) So, Ortega y Gasset is not a critic of science or scientists as such. 

But, anticipating James Burnham and echoing themes also familiar from Hayek, he thinks both that modern "men of science" ((112)) his is a very gendered view) are the exemplary element in (to use Burnham's terminology) the ascendant managerial class, and that their mental mutilation -- their hyper-specialization -- makes them wholly unsuitable to the task of political and cultural leadership. Because while the "specialist "knows" very well his tiny corner of the universe, he is radically ignorant of the rest." (111) He is an "learned ignoramus." (112) 

The problem is, however, that while most specialists understand their own limitations and stay in their lane, the ones that stray into "politics, art, religion, and the general problems of life and the world" are likely too impressed by their own skills and smarts. (I need not remind you here of the pontificating popular scientist who makes elementary philosophical blunders and seems oddly unread.) Interestingly enough, Ortega y Gasset is not especially interested in the policy failures this may engender. Rather he thinks once these kind of people are empowered to shape society, they will fail to reproduce a culture worth having. And while he understands himself as a liberal democrat, this part of Ortega y Gasset's project is clearly very indebted to Nietszche's musing about the last man.

What Ortega y Gasset, himself a scion of Marburg Kantianism, failed to foresee is that in his own age, philosophy would also turn professional under the leadership of Carnap and Ernest Nagel, And that we, too, have become increasingly a  discipline of specialists. So, by his light (and Kuhn's) we, too, are likely to be mentally mutilated.

Because alienation is associated with Marxism, I am using 'mental mutilation.' Ortega y Gassett's interest in the political significance of mental mutilation is anticipated by Adam Smith.  I don't know whether Smith was the first person to diagnose mental mutilation as a side effect of employment, but his version of it remains striking (recall):

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. Adam Smith Wealth of Nations WN 5.1.f 50

Smith is explicit that the structural cause of the underlying problem is the division of labor. And while the example of those who are confined to a few very simple operations is a limiting case, ,Smith leaves no doubt that social advancements come at the expense of most of our individual capacities. Unlike most members of 'team progress,' he thinks, as he puts it in the next paragraph, that people in 'backward' civilizations actually have better trained and cultivated judgments, including most notably political judgments:

It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures, and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people. In those barbarous societies, as they are called...Every man too is in some measure a statesman, and can form a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of the society, and the conduct of those who govern it.  

I used this very passage (recall) in responding to an essay by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and could re-use it in light of their recent The Dawn of Everything. They attribute something like this insight to Marshal Sahlins, and it informs a lot of the most glorious passages in their book when they describe the statesmen and women of native society in colorful detail. I mention the book, because one effect of their argument is to make me see that for Smith what we may call republican self-government (of the sort promoted by Graeber and Wengrow) of society becomes every more problematic as the division of labor advances to encompass all.* And so there is a sense in which we should not be surprised by the near disappearance of such practices of deliberative self-governing citizen assemblies (that Graeber and Wengrow like): it's a prediction that follows naturally from Smith's theory. Our representative assemblies should then be viewed as a necessary, second best.

That Smith is also concerned with the effects on self-government is clear from the next paragraphs where he holds up as exemplar "Greek and Roman republics." (His main interest is, however on 'martial spirit.') Notice, that size of population or scale are not the issue on limits of self-government. (This is rightly attached by Graeber and Wengrow.) Rather, it's the division of labor that makes us collectively smarter, but individually stupider. 

Now, Smith himself thought that to combat life-long mental mutilation, the state should creative conditions in which kids needed to be taught alongside literacy, the "principles of geometry and mechanics." And in context it is clear that he thinks this, can promote self-government. It's unfortunate that Smith does not explain what the virtues of geometry and mechanics are such that they combat mental mutilation, but he does think that even in extreme division of labor the kind of principles one can discern in them would be regularly re-activated. 

Before one suspects that Smith's criticism of the 'working' classes is meant to open the door to the interest of capital, Smith himself thought the merchant classes could not be trusted with government because they would be too self-interested. But he takes for granted that  landowners and philosophers have room to take in a wider frame and develop good judgment (an important theme in Sam Fleischacker's interpretation of Smith). But since Smith's philosophy of science is broadly proto-Kuhnian, and the Wealth of Nation pretty much starts with the observation that philosophy has become incorporated into the division of labor, he cannot be sanguine about its future.

As an aside, even though Kuhn draws attention to the analogy between political and scientific revolutions, he himself thought that judgments were paradigm relative: "neither a decline nor a raising of standards." So, for Kuhn the problem that is immanent in his work never fully arises.

Writing just as the Great Depression is about to start, Ortega y Gasset's analysis implicitly suggests that Smith was too optimistic. That as the market grows and the division of labor becomes wider, as society becomes complexer, we should not expect good judgment among what passes for the educated classes at all. Because our universities will increasingly churn out hyper-specialists (including specialists in 'governance'); and even where there is book-learning as part of a liberal arts curriculum, political judgment can never be properly cultivated in a society like ours because all of us are always too distant from the conduct of those who govern us until it's too late.*

I should stop here. Yet, I want to add one more comment. The reservoir of nineteenth century bourgeois culture has been emptied. Despite the political implosion of Europe in the 1930s, liberal democracy recovered while the cognitive division of labor (and the economy) expanded greatly. We now have lots of tools that even expert practitioners have to black box (and arguably contributed to causing the Great Financial Recession). Yet our political process muddles through. This raises the suspicion that there is more judgment in our society than Ortega y Gasset has any right to expect, or that judgment is not needed. One cannot help but suspect that the unfolding environmental crisis will test both options severely.

 

 

*This is basically Schumpeter's point (who like Burnham and Ortega y Gasset also drunk from the Pareto cool aid).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ortega y Gasset (and Lerner, even Burnham) vs Schmitt: a note on political theory of the 1930s,

    Restrictions, standards, courtesy, indirect methods, justice, reason! Why were all these invented, why all these complications created? They are all summed up in the word civilisation, which, through the underlying notion of civis, the citizen, reveals its real origin. By means of all these there is an attempt to make possible the city, the community, common life. Hence, if we look into all these constituents of civilisation just enumerated, we shall find the same con1mon basis. All, in fact, presuppose the radical progressive desire on the part of each individual to take others into consideration. Civilisation is before all, the will to live in common. A man is uncivilised, barbarian in the degree in which he does not take others into account. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation. Accordingly, all barbarous epochs have been times of human scattering, of the pullulation of tiny groups, separate from and hostile to one another.
   The political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavour towards common life is liberal democracy. It carries to the extreme the determination to have consideration for one's neighbour and is the prototype of "indirect action." Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. Liberalism-it is well to recall this to-day-is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy ,which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so antinatural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.
    Share our existence with the enemy! Govern with the opposition! Is not such a form of tenderness beginning to seem incomprehensible? Nothing indicates more clearly the characteristics of the day that the fact there are so few countries where an opposition exists.--Jos�� Ortega y Gasset (1932) The Revolt of the Masses (anonymous translator), p. 75-77. [HT Jeffrey Bernstein]

Regular readers know I am not a fan of the use of a barbarism/civilization contrast in social theory and political life because it facilitates the domination of the barbarians by the self-proclaimed civilized. It is pretty clear that for Ortega y Gasset the barbarous are in a Hobbesian state of nature, and so one may well suspect that he advocates their submission to a civilizing authority. And many humane critics of liberalism are eager, not wholly unfairly, to tie it to the evils of imperialism and colonialism. Even so, I want to convince you there is something important in this passage.

Not unlike James Burnham (recall here; here), Ortega y Gasset accepts the diagnosis of the Italian Elite school that in political life necessarily some minorities rule. And because of his relentless cultural and meritocratic elitism, Ortega y Gasset is an unlikely friend of democracy. But while no martyr to the ill-fated Spanish republic, he served, I think, it with honor (see for some hints to the contrary here). In fact, alongside his friend Johan Huizinga, he was one of the people invited to the Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, although both declined to attend.*

That it is constitutive of liberal democracy to permit systematic opposition to authority is, of course,  a clich�� by now. Theoretically it originates in eighteenth century British parliamentary life and its classical theorists are Hume and Burke (writing as a Whig).  It is generally articulated in terms of a loyal opposition or party competition with the opposition being a government in waiting. In parliamentary systems the leader of the opposition is granted all kinds of privileges including not infrequently considerable access to state secrets. In some Presidential systems, the opposition can even be in control of the government or major legislative chambers. 

Okay, with that in place I want to make two observations on Ortega y Gasset's approach. First, as the relentless repetition of 'enemy' suggests, he is clearly responding to an argument or position we now associate primarily with Carl Schmitt. I can't prove that Ortega y Gasset read  the (1927) journal article version of Schmitt's "The Concept of the Political" (published in Archiv f��r Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 58(1), pp. 1���33). But since Ortega y Gassett was partially educated at Berlin and Marburg, he certainly knew German well. But I leave this to the specialists.

And Ortega y Gasset is quite clear that the enemy remains an enemy within some political unities. So, his defense of liberalism, which relies on some Christian tropes, does not require that the opposition is treated as (agonistic) friends (or -- if one takes Schmitt's self-revisionism at face value -- as foes). In fact, he is quite adamant that a liberal state can constitute a radical pluralism with a majority and a minority people 'who neither think nor feel as it does.' In my view he anticipates Popper here (recall). 

Now, one may well wonder how this is supposed to work beyond bald assertion. And I don't think Ortega y Gasset has all that much to say about it other than stating it as a (rare) fact. (One may well suggest that some linguistically and religiously diverse federations  -- canonically Switzerland -- provide some evidence for the kind of forbearance that Ortega y Gasset has in mind.) So, that's disappointing. But near the end of Revolt of the Masses, he does offer a kind of historical explanation of the possibility of living with the enemy. And here he anticipates an observation by Foucault (recall in Birth of Biopolitics): that the European state system, which provides the context for the development of nation-states, actually taught Europeans to accommodate themselves to, and even trade regularly with, enemies, and recognize at least fellow Europeans  as fundamentally equal (pp. 177-178). This is a remarkably optimistic point to take from the wreckage of the first world war. 

But I think Ortega y Gasset is right that there is an important line between forbearance to a domestic enemy and allow for some kind of common life, and a desire to crush enemies. And within liberalism this line should not be crossed.** And this gets me to the second point. Given Ortega y Gasset's rhetoric I quoted one must think that that the view I have attributed to him is kind of idiosyncratic, a foolish high minded aristocratic liberalism whose time has passed. But this point is actually more common in the 1930s across the political specter. 

Take, for example, Max Lerner, a self-described liberal collectivist, who in It is Later than you Think: the need for a militant democracy (1939) writes eloquently in favor of the "majority principle" and defends the utility of (at least some) demagogues, and who treats defenses of 'minority rights' as thinly disguised efforts to promote "oligarchical rule." He advocates collective planning, technocracy, and explicitly rejects separation of powers. His "insurance against tyranny must be placed...squarely on the party system." (233ff) The necessity of an "opposition" must be cherished. (237 with positive claims about British parliamentary practices.) And he thinks that only collectivist planning can allow for a functional true opposition system.

And, again, moving to another angle of the political spectrum, James Burnham who (having left his Trotsky-ism behind) is an adamant and eloquent critic of liberalism. In re-founding modern conservatism,  he argues, in a book that draws heavily on the Italian Elite school, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943) that liberty involves "above all...the existence of a public opposition to the governing elite....it is the only effective check on the power of the governing elite." (223) For him, "the existence of an opposition means a cleavage in the ruling class." In fact, for Burnham opposition need not be only party opposition--what a free society requires is a clash of social forces to generate what I called (recall), in my own reading of Machiavelli, 'creative turbulence" (recall also this post on Popper). This, too, requires a certain forbearance against those that one may well see as the enemy.+ 

Okay, when confronted with one-party totalitarian states and calls for direct action, very different theorists in the 1930s discerned that it is crucial to maintain a more than merely formal mechanism of internal opposition. And this provides us, I  think, with a useful heuristic when looking at contemporary political movements and parties and leadership-cults that self re-present as defenders of freedom and liberty (often speaking in the name of the people against corrupt elites). Do they actually recognize a place for opposition to their future rule? If not, they are mortal enemies of liberty. 

 

 

 

*See p. 9 & 12 of the Introduction by Jurgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier to the translation of the colloquium.

**As Popper recognizes, it does not follow that one must turn the other cheek when domestic enemies signal their desire to end such mutual forbearance altogether.

+In the Managerial Revolution, Burnham suggests that while internal opposition existed in the early socialist phase of the Russian revolution, it was soon abolished and with it true socialism.

On Withdrawing from Life (Covid Diaries): Seneca Letter 55

3. As my habit is, I began to look about for something there that might be of service to me, when my eyes fell upon the villa which had once belonged to Vatia. So this was the place where that famous praetorian millionaire passed his old age! He was famed for nothing else than his life of leisure, and he was regarded as lucky only for that reason. For whenever men were ruined by their friendship with Asinius Gallus whenever others were ruined by their hatred of Sejanus, and later by their intimacy with him, ��� for it was no more dangerous to have offended him than to have loved him, ��� people used to cry out: "O Vatia, you alone know how to live!" 4. But what he knew was how to hide, not how to live; and it makes a great deal of difference whether your life be one of leisure or one of idleness. So I never drove past his country-place during Vatia's lifetime without saying to myself: "Here lies Vatia!"

But, my dear Lucilius, philosophy is a thing of holiness, something to be worshipped, so much so that the very counterfeit pleases. For the mass of mankind consider that a person is at leisure who has withdrawn from society, is free from care, self-sufficient, and lives for himself; but these privileges can be the reward only of the wise man. Does he who is a victim of anxiety know how to live for himself? What? Does he even know (and that is of first importance) how to live at all? 

...

8. The place where one lives, however, can contribute little towards tranquillity; it is the mind which must make everything agreeable to itself. I have seen men despondent in a gay and lovely villa, and I have seen them to all appearance full of business in the midst of a solitude. For this reason you should not refuse to believe that your life is well-placed merely because you are not now in Campania. But why are you not there? Just let your thoughts travel, even to this place. 9. You may hold converse with your friends when they are absent, and indeed as often as you wish and for as long as you wish. For we enjoy this, the greatest of pleasures, all the more when we are absent from one another. For the presence of friends makes us fastidious; and because we can at any time talk or sit together, when once we have parted we give not a thought to those whom we have just beheld. 10. And we ought to bear the absence of friends cheerfully, just because everyone is bound to be often absent from his friends even when they are present. Include among such cases, in the first place, the nights spent apart, then the different engagements which each of two friends has, then the private studies of each and their excursions into the country, and you will see that foreign travel does not rob us of much. 11. A friend should be retained in the spirit; such a friend can never be absent. He can see every day whomsoever he desires to see.

I would therefore have you share your studies with me, your meals, and your walks. We should be living within too narrow limits if anything were barred to our thoughts. I see you, my dear Lucilius, and at this very moment I hear you; I am with you to such an extent that I hesitate whether I should not begin to write you notes instead of letters.--Seneca, Letter 55. Translated by Richard M. Gummere (with minor changes)

The political undertones of this letter are not hard to spot. An active life means a political life. And a political life means danger to oneself and one's friends in an age of empire with its arbitrary, paranoid power and quick changes of fortune. Asinius Gallus died alone, hungry in a cell. And so it seems wise to withdraw into a life of leisure [otio] and house-building when one has the wealth to do so. (Perhaps one could buy a football team, too.) The many will consider you fortunate [felix] if you make into old age. But Seneca is clear: hiding is not living. In fact, if understand Seneca correctly, the mere fact of such withdrawal, from fear of entanglement in political intrigue, is evidence of one's anxiety; and being anxious means one is is not flourishing. 

Seneca starts the letter by calling attention to his physical frailty and to his own decadent wealth (his 'exercise' is to be carried about in the fresh air by his servants). Even so, he reminds Lucilius that even in his weakened state he uses the occasion to be instructed by what he encounters as he apparently has habituated himself to do (treating what is good for him -- quod mihi posset bono esse -- as a starting point for reflection). So rather than enjoying natural beauty or beautiful sights, he reflects on other people's choices and how he can benefit from them (including architectural tips). Interestingly enough, the benefit can be something to avoid.

Before I get to the emotional core of this digression, I do want to address one potential worry. One may think that Seneca isn't really learning from Vatia's choices; that the encounter with the (lovely) remnants of his villa is just an occasion to pontificate on his pre-existing views. That cannot be ruled out, of course. But I think we can read Seneca as suggesting something different. That Vatia was admired by the many and treated as kind of wise is clearly for Seneca a clue that he was not living well. (Recall that Seneca has many grounds to discount the applause of the marketplace.) And this is what prompts him to recognize that anxious withdrawal is by definition incapable of securing flourishing.

As it happens, I have had to withdraw from all social life not just because of  the pandemic, but as regular readers know from my 'covid diaries' also because I am trying to manage my 'long haul' symptoms. (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; and here). At the moment I suffer no major symptoms, unless I engage in (even minimal) social activities (or find myself in an environment with background noise or which requires any kind of cognitive multitasking). I swim daily, and suffer no pains. But as Grotius put it, "amongst the Things peculiar to Man, is his Desire of Society, that is, a certain Inclination to live with those of his own Kind." And while like many of my professional brethren I flourish in long hours of solitude reading and writing about philosophy, I also used enjoy the company of others (not the least my family).

And so now I am often mentally conversing with absent friends (alongside real email and whatsapp correspondences). Some of them have, much to my mortification, taken to including me in their bcc's. I am mortified that I will betray their secret by accidentally pressing replay all. This shows that some of my intellectual friendships are still too caught up in professional worlds of zero-sum advancement and angling for prestige and/or jobs. (We can't all have Seneca's independent sources of wealth.) But I have been really astonished by how many people have taken the time to share with me they sympathy and converse about shared sources of interest.

Of course, there is an ambiguity. A natural way to translate 'Amicus animo possidendus est' is 'a friend must possess courage [or spiritedness]." And given that Seneca has repeatedly suggested that such animo/spiritedness is worth cultivating, one can see how he might be suggesting  However, Gummere, taking his from immediate context, suggest (as noted above) 'A friend should be retained in the spirit.' And, if we follow Gummere's translation the sentence becomes a kind of allegory for the whole Letters and a plausible motto for any amicable correspondence. And clearly in context Seneca is suggesting that the best or least most pleasing friendships are constituted by physically absent friends [see: Magis hac voluptate, quae maxima est, fruimur dum absumus]. 

And it is not hard to see what Seneca has in mind. Such absent friends became like a Smithian impartial spectator, and correct our selfishness and self-absorption, and prompt in us useful reflections on our encounters with the world (recall the earlier passage in the letter). Our imaginary friends become prompts for philosophy (in the sense of permanent self-improvement). And I recognize the experience of imagining what a philosophical friend would say and thereby improve an argument or exegesis. (Some of you are in my mind as I write these paragraphs.)

I have to admit that my philosophical education is from Seneca's vantage point unfinished. I prefer real conversation to the imaginary one. And one of my great regrets is that I cannot point to a literary example of the joy of philosophical comradery in action, of the long hours trying to figure out an argument or position from many different angles in a non-competitive spirit of the moment where who we are is subsumed by a common pursuit  that does not efface our individual personalities but transforms them into a spoke of a turning wheel that is gaining speed. And, of course, this means that sometimes the conversation, as it were, derails.

Yet, as I noted, there is a chilling political undercurrent to the letter. Even without our knowledge of Seneca's end, it is dangerous to be friends with him who orbited imperial power so closely. I don't want to suggest that Seneca is warning Lucilius to back off (it probably is too late for that, anyway), because that would make the whole letter kind of self-undermining. But I do heis suggesting that the kind of intimacy he is proposing requires courage. And this courage is not just the vulnerability of intimacy -- although it is that, too --, but because there is also a genuine risk in philosophizing together. This risk is partially political, but also metaphysical; one might lose one's own sense of self or individuality once one starts inhabiting one's social life in imaginary conversations with others. It is no surprise that hearing imaginary voices and talking out loud to invisible strangers are often taken as signs of madness. And those of us most used to solitude learn quickly enough that it's best to guard what one says.

 

The Haifa Republic and the Future of Liberal Zionism, Pt: 2: On Zionist Theodicy

The liberal intellectual narrative and the suppression of the Nakba that accompanies it is beginning, however, to face challenges. Ari Shavit���s 2013 My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, for example, does break a certain amount of new ground. A major best seller in North America, the book was celebrated as a conversation changer: The New Yorker excerpted it; and The New York Times ran three glowing reviews. Shavit���s main thesis is that the occupation���deplorable and pernicious as it may be���isn���t Israel���s main problem. The country has deeper historical and existential reckonings to make. First, the historical fact of the expulsion of the Palestinians must be openly admitted. Second, it is necessary to recognize that the demographic problem that led to this expulsion continues to be the main threat to Israel���s existence. ���Today 46 percent of all of the inhabitants of greater Israel are Palestinians,��� Shavit writes. ���Their share of the overall population is expected to rise to 50 percent by 2020 and 55 percent by 2040. If present trends persist, the future of Zion will be non-Zionist.��� Lastly, Shavit warns of the danger of being ���blinded by political correctness.��� The Tel Aviv elite, he argues, ���instilled ad absurdum a rigid political correctness by turning the constructive means of self-criticism into an obsessive deconstructive end of its own������that is, through excessive self-criticism, Israel has lost its national unity and sense of justification. Americans and Europeans can perhaps afford the luxury of being ���politically correct��� about things, Shavit contends, but Israelis cannot: only by the sword can Jews survive in the Middle East. They have no choice but to get their hands dirty.
Shavit, in short, is a liberal Zionist who recognizes the Nakba���s role in Israel���s national narrative, and this is no mean achievement. We see this most clearly in the book���s Lydda chapter���the one that gave it its fame���in which Shavit retells the city���s story of expulsion and massacres....

In describing Lydda as Zionism���s ���black box��� and ���dark secret,��� in recognizing that ���substantial contradiction,��� Shavit accomplished something that Israeli liberal intellectuals like Oz et al. had refused to even attempt.
The acknowledgment, however, only goes so far: throughout his book, for example, Shavit carefully avoids even using the word ���Nakba.��� In such a book, this cannot be an accident but rather a conscious decision: the refusal to name the occurrence is a refusal to recognize it as history....not mentioning the Nakba is in line with Shavit���s later argument, which is to concede the expulsions and massacres happened and to embrace that hard truth for the sake of Israel. Thus, he writes, ���if need be, I���ll stand by the damned������referring to those Israeli war criminals who are responsible to Lydda. ���If it wasn���t for them,��� he explains, ���the State of Israel would not have been born. . . . They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.���
Despite appearances, this isn���t a courageous confession of Israel���s existential tragedy. On the contrary: such statements are designed to disarm the tragedy���s impact on Israeli consciousness���dismissing its relevance to current Israeli concerns or the future of liberal Zionism. To think otherwise, we are told, is to yield to political correctness. Far from incorporating the Nakba into liberal Zionist consciousness, Shavit transforms that into the consciousness of the right, which has never had any need to repress the facts.
The left���s relation to memory and tragedy is relatively easy to distinguish from that of the right. Being on the left consists in the understanding that a people must change, sometimes radically, in order to come to terms with the tragic past. By contrast, being on the right consists in endorsing your people���s history and tragedy as givens���embracing them as the inescapable preconditions of who you are. Under a pretense of liberalism, Shavit does just that. ���The choice is stark,��� Shavit concludes: ���either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.��� Somehow, the one reasonable possibility remains unmentioned: that Zionism need not be rejected because of Lydda, nor ever, absolutely never, accepted along with it; that confronting Lydda, and Haifa, and Deir Yassin, and Safsaf���and so many other names of places in our country and our past���means that Zionism must be transformed.
Susie Linfield, in an interview she conducted with Shavit, gets to the root of his confusion. Shavit is ���essentially arguing,��� Linfield points out, ���that war crimes can be committed even in the course of a just war.��� The war���s justness ���is not erased by such crimes; conversely, the criminality���the barbarism���of the acts in question cannot be mitigated by the justness of the cause.��� That���s how Shavit would like his argument to be seen, but we must ask what he considers to be a just war. For Shavit the Nakba is about Israel���s survival, but this is misleading���misleading in the same way that not mentioning the Palestinians in the 1944 Atlantic City Resolution was. As Arendt knew then, what���s at stake isn���t bare survival, but ensuring the ethnic Jewish majority that���s necessary for a Jewish democracy. In other words, and Shavit is clear that this is Zionism���s ���dark secret,��� the violent mass expulsions of Palestinians did not just happen in the course of the war. They were intrinsic to the war���s aims, yet still he deems them just. Hopefully the future���s liberal Zionists will look at this reasoning and refuse to budge: if you���re willing to accept ethnic cleansing as a just cause, no doubt you will end up thinking that your war���s ���justness��� isn���t diminished by war crimes committed in its midst. Logically, this is consistent, but this is the logic of the right���the violent far right even���rather than of what anyone would recognize as the left.
But Shavit will have none of it: that is all ���political correctness,��� or what Zangwill, a hundred years earlier, dismissed as ���grandmotherly
sentimentalism.��� With the demise of the two-state solution, the ���dirty, filthy��� work Shavit justifies as a necessary part of Israel���s past may now be invoked as necessary to secure its future. The chauvinist willingness to dismiss human conscience as grandmotherly sentimentalism threatens to degrade Zionist politics into a form of barbarism.--Omri Boehm (2021) The Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel, pp. 118-123,

Last week (recall), I explored Menachem Begin's (1977) ill-fated plan for a kind of confederation involving Jordan, Israel, and a Palestinian Council at the instigation of Boehm's extended pamphlet, The Haifa Republic. And while Begin's plan has some genuine limitations, it has been, to the best of my knowledge, the only truly liberal peace plan rooted in individual rights and individual choice (and if you are unfamiliar with it go read that Digression first). But inspired by it, Boehm (a leading scholar of the history of philosophy) proposes an outline (not a blueprint) of a "one-state" bi-national "single federation." (150) And it is worth exploring the details of Boehm's plan before long.

But before I get to that, in this post, I address some features of Boehm's argument. One important strain of the argument is about the nature of historical memory (and forgetting) in nationalism, Zionism in particular. Here he draws on Renan and Yehuda Elkana. Some of his views on this are hinted at in the excerpt (paragraph 5) quoted above from chapter 3 (aptly titled "Remembering and Forgetting: The Nakba"). But the second strain of this argument is that these views are inscribed in a polemic -- as the quoted passage reveals, from "the left" -- against what Boehm calls 'liberal Zionism.' That Boehm is interested in this polemic is familiar to readers of this blog (recall) because I wrote on it back in 2016. 

Now, to put some of my cards on the table, 'liberal Zionism' is primary an American (and formerly British) construction. (As regular readers know, I  claim that Zionism is the effect of the failure of liberalism (and this is why it's interesting to political theory) and that there never was a truly liberal Zionism in Israel ((recall here and here), especially here and here; and here),) By this (that is, "construction) I mean its audience is Anglophone public opinion (not just exile Judaism, but also gentile editorialist and politicians). To be clear, it does not just have merely propaganda value, but it also plays a role in the never ending public relations debates (and fundraising) that surround nearly all discussion of Israel and Zionism in leading American outlets. Within the history of Zionism and Israeli political life, liberal ideas played a marginal role (recall this post on Franz Oppenheimer), primarily associated with Chaim Weizmann (the first President of Israel). Yes, there have been liberal Zionist intellectuals and some small parties that are liberal in some broad sense. I actually suspect Boehm agrees with this observation (see his comment about The New Yorker and The New York Times in the quoted passage above). And this is one reason why I stressed the uniquely liberal characteristics of Begin's "Home Rule" plan.

Now, it's worth noting that my claims are illustrated by Shavit's position, which even leaving aside his views on the Nakba, are markedly illiberal. Self-criticism is the life-blood of liberalism; and the focus on relative demographic strength between groups completely ignores the moral priority of individual rights and choices. As critics of liberalism never tire of complaining, liberalism's focus on minority rights, proceduralism, and legal review are mechanisms by which the majority is tamed. The whole point of having a liberal institutional structure is that one does not have to fear the majority--in fact, one can be absent from political life (so maddening to many of its critics). The obsession with demography is, in fact, nearly always a sign one is dealing with illiberal arguments. Finally, it is constitutive of liberalism to reject zero-sum frameworks and the glorification of open-ended war ("only by the sword can Jews survive in the Middle East").* What does happen, alas, is that Israelis (like Shavit) that reject settlement programs and that are, in some sense, pro-peace tend sometimes to be lionized as 'liberals' abroad.

The claim "only by the sword can Jews survive in the Middle East" is a self-fulling prophecy (and self-justifying of many crimes) that dooms Zionism to failure. What's needed, both for the health Zionism and to give liberalism a chance in Israel, is a program that gets Israel's borders recognized and peaceful. (I think Boehm and I agree about this.)  The constructive ambiguity over Israel's final borders that has been so characteristic of Israeli political life for so long creates and sustains the conditions for open-ended warfare.

I do not mean to suggest that Boehm is wrong to take Shavit (and Benny Morris) to task for the consequentialist justification for ethnic cleansing (Boehm also uses 'expulsion' and 'transfer politics') during the Israeli War of Independence. One of the great merits of Boehn's Haifa Republic, is its relentless unwillingness to let many of Israel's most cherished public intellectuals, who have enabled a culture of silence surrounding the Nakba, off the hook for their participation and construction of a culture of silence. Again, as Boehm notes the culture of silence is only partial, and given the dominance of Israel's Right, not very successful. But Shavit is no liberal, so (ipse facto) no liberal Zionist.

A much more liberal approach -- which the German Federal Republic recognized in a treaty with Israel -- is to recognize Palestinian claims on property and lives lost, and pay out generous compensation to individuals and their offspring. In practice, Israel has sometimes recognized this fundamental fact, but often in the context of pushing (the legitimate) claims of Jews who had to flee Arab (and Persian) lands, and often in the context of demanding a final settlement. In my view such compensation should be offered ahead of a final settlement, and regardless of Arab reciprocity, especially because living claimants will not live forever. (It would also unfreeze a lot of discussions among Palestinians, and show good faith.) Notice that such compensation does not imperil Israel or changes facts on the ground.

As an aside, I admit I am taking no stance on the question of bare survival. Unlike Boehm, I don't think it was completely foregone conclusion that Israel would survive war with the Arab Legion and Egypt simultaneously. Boehm does not mention, I think, that Jews were expelled from the West Bank -- some of which very long standing Jewish settlements -- and the Old City conquered by the Arab Legion during the war of Independence.

A consequentialist may wonder why I sided with Boehm against Shavit. Why not see -- with a nod to Kant -- such ethnic cleansing as the necessary unsocial sociability that drives history? As it happens here I do not object to what we may call secular theodicy as such. But there are two important features of Shavit's argument that make me side with Boehm. First, as Boehm notes Shavit's stance is basically a carte blanche for war crimes (including these in the future). The problem isn't just the brute fact of war crimes, as Boehm notes, but also (and here I echo Plato (recall) and Kant (recall)) that the way one fights a war also signals something about one's attitude toward peace (or lack thereof). An unwillingness to acknowledge the Nakba and to pay compensation for its misdeeds, signals a fundamental unwillingness to consider true peace to one's enemies. This point does not require any wishy washy views about human nature but is ground in self-interest and realpolitik.

Second, it's an important constraint on secular theodicy that those that are harmed by progress or one's political goals are victims on your own side. (I am not sure what to call this principle.) There is nothing wrong with glorifying those that freely sacrificed or martyred themselves (in some sense) on your behalf. Of course, in practice there can be a lot wrong this, but that's generally because of the manner of glorifying or remembering the sacrifice. But sacrificing or harming others on your behalf turns a problem of evil into (ahh) a legitimacy of evil. The fact that people like Morris and Shavit miss this really simple distinction is evidence of the corrosive effect of their nationalism on their judgment.

Again, what I am saying is orthogonal to the question of dirty hands (or even Left/Right distinctions--reading Lenin is not for the faint hearted). I am not suggesting that dirty hands can be avoided in political life. Rather, I am suggesting that if one takes the problem of dirty hands seriously (qua liberal, but not just a liberal), one must also accept the need for atonement and reparations and a way to find a place for one's injustices in one's historical memory. As noted, Boehm has intriguing proposals on how to do this, and to these I will turn next (and then conclude my series by looking at his political proposal). To be continued.

 

*Some of you might feel that my account of liberalism cannot do full justice to liberalism's complicity with imperialism and colonialism in the late nineteenth century. Fair enough.

 

 

 

On the Implosion of Liberal Democracy in 1940, and the Roots of the European Union (Burnham, Pt 1)

Only the hopelessly na��ve can imagine that France fell so swiftly because of the mere mechanical strength of the Nazi war machine that might have been sufficient in a longer run, but not to destroy a great nation with a colossal military establishment in a few weeks. France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship, from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts. Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals�� but they must at least believe in those ideals.

Nowhere is the impotence of bourgeois ideologies more apparent than among the youth, and the coming world, after all, will be the youth's world. The abject failure of voluntary military enlistment in Britain and this country tells its own story to all who wish to listen. It is underlined in reverse by the hundreds of distinguished adult voices which during 1940 began reproaching the American youth for "indifference," "unwillingness to sacrifice," "lack of ideals." How right these reproaches are! And how little effect they have!--James Burnham (1941) The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, pp. 35-36 (New York John Day).

Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, alerted me to the significance of Burnham as "a central figure in the history of American Conservatism" (118). And since Alex Aragona, who is no conservative at all, recently mentioned The Managerial Revolution in favorable terms to me, I decided it was time to read Burnham's three major works, The Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964), The Machiavellians: the Defenders of Freedom (1943), and The Managerial Revolution, in reverse order. Unfortunately, while The Suicide of the West is the most accessible of the three and of continued interest because it develops major political tropes that still structure political debate, it's also a work that defends civilizational (and racial) hierarchy and its racism (and homophobia, etc.) is intrinsic to the argument. (The racism is not 'scientific,' but primarily cultural in character.) The Machiavellians, by contrast, reads Machiavelli as republican defender of freedom and builds on it a concise, but important introduction to the Italian Elite school (recall). While the claims about civilizational hierarchy are undoubtedly lurking in the background, The Machiavellians deserves a place in the small cannon of twentieth century conservative and realist political theory; it offers a sensible alternative to liberalism without ending up in Schmitt's camp (no small feat). And I expect to return to it.

The passage I quoted above introduces a subsidiary theme that runs through the Managerial Revolution. Before I get to that let me offer a superfical summary of this book, which made Burnham -- then an ex-Trotskyite philosopher at NYU -- famous, is primarily diagnostic in character. And in light of his later works we can see that it diagnoses a major trend in order to warn the public against it. While Burnham is scathing of liberals like Hayek and Lippmann, in many ways his diagnosis (and the genre) is very similar: what they call "collectivism" is unfolding in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the New Deal America and this will empower what he calls 'managers' everywhere. Socialism and Capitalism are both doomed, and instead there will states in which those (managerial) technocrats, whose major role is to coordinate production (and distribution), will become the dominant class.

Okay, now back to the quoted text. This is meant to illustrate the idea that by the end of crisis of the 1930s, the young have given up on liberal democracy in the face of mass unemployment, negative growth, and terror by Fascists and Soviets alike. And importantly, Burnham claims that this was not just the case in Nazi Germany (where social democrats and communists basically folded in 1933), but also in the more established liberal democracies in which he also notably includes various attempts at popular fronts (e.g., France and Spain). On his view by the end of the 1930s, true socialism had been tried in the first few years after the 1917 October revolution and had been transformed into managerialism by the time of Lenin's death. And in "a large number countries-Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, England, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France-the reformist Marxist parties have administered the governments, and have uniformly failed to introduce socialism or make any genuine step toward socialism." (54)

One reason why managerialism is the way of the future, on this account, is that "we know, without waiting for the future, that managerial economy
can do away with mass unemployment or reduce it to a negligible minimum. This was done, by managerial methods, in Russia and Germany at the same time that England, France, and the United States proved incapable of doing it by capitalist methods." (133) He also clearly thinks managerialism will develop better "fighting machines" too (134). And while Burnham is careful not to endorse the violent methods of really existing managerialism, it is pretty clear he treats those (and the world wars) as transitional phenomena as birth-pains of a new world order (akin to the wars that gave rise to bourgeois-capitalist civilization at the end of feudalism). As he puts it, "as has happened in the other comparable historical transitions, managerial society does away with the representative political institution of the old society, not merely because a new type of institution is technically better for
the new society, but precisely because the old institution represents the old society; it becomes despised and hated, and the resentment of the masses is turned against it (look at France in the early summer of 1940); psychologically, ideologically, it is not suited for the new rule." (149; see also: "The masses in France could not be stirred to enthusiasm for a war for "democracy" (that is, capitalism) . They rejoiced at Munich. They were passive when the war started, and all through the war. They did not have the will to fight....It is incredible that the defeat should have been so swift unless we admit, what is undeniably true, that the masses in France did not want to fight the war. They did not want to because the capitalist slogans no longer could move them." (189-190))

My present interest here is neither to defend or criticize Burnham's main thesis, but to call attention to his treatment of the significance of the collapse of France in the 1940s, which as my citations show, runs through the book (despite, compared to the elaborate analysis of developments in Russia and Germany, general lack of interest offering a careful treatment of the French situation). For as it happens the French collapse also imperils the future of the British empire and prefigures European federation:

From the war of 1939 are coming at least two more of the major political leaps toward managerial society : first, the political consolidation of the European Continent, which involves also the smashing of England's hold on the Continent ; and, second, the breakup of the British Empire, chief political representative of capitalist world society. Though it is not yet understood in this country, both of these steps were assured when France surrendered in June, 1940. The dominant position of capitalist England has always depended upon its acting as middleman between the European Continent and the rest of the world, including most prominently its own great Empire. From this dependence followed the "balance of power" policy which England has been compelled to uphold during the entire capitalist era. This policy demands that no single nation shall dominate the European Continent; or, rather, that England shall dominate the Continent through balancing Continental nations against each other. England's domination can be achieved in no other way, since its comparatively meager national resources and its small population make impossible direct domination through its own force. But the balance of power on the Continent is possible only when the Continent is divided up into a number of genuinely sovereign and powerful states. Such a division ended, for all time, when France surrendered. Consequently, whatever happens during the remainder of the present war, whether or not Hitler's regime is overthrown, whether or not new revolts take place, the old system is finished, and England can never again be dominant in Europe or the controlling political center of a vast world empire. (177-178)

In a famous (1946) essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham." George Orwell had a lot of fun showing that many of Burnham's predictions turned out to be falsified. (The essay is the preface to my paperback edition of The Managerial Revolution.) And, in fact, Orwell makes fun of the passage that I quoted at the top of the post (and some of the other passages I have mentioned). But Orwell grudgingly admires Burnham's attempt to "plot the course of the ���managerial revolution��� accurately on a world scale" and this clearly influenced, as is well known, his treatment of the inner party and the global competition of three world states portrayed in 1984. 

But in 1946, in victory, Orwell refuses to acknowledge what Burnham got right: that with the collapse of the European balance of power, the British approach to a concert of Europe -- which, with a nod to Foucault (recall), goes back to Hume's era and writings -- is finished. As an aside, in June 1940, with French resistance to Germany collapsing (and after the Dunkirk withdrawal), there was briefly a window for a "Franco-British Union" offered by the British cabinet (Wikipedia has a brief overview of the story). And so while Burnham's analysis may be thought fanciful, it's not unlikely that Churchill saw matters in the same way.

For Burnham, capitalist liberal democracy, the balance of power in Europe, and the success of British imperialism are all inter-related. And so with the first in retreat and the second collapsed, the third has no future. While it certainly had dawned on the British by 1941 that they were going to be overshadowed by the Americans, as subsequent history proved, it took them at least to the (1956) Suez fiasco to fully realize that their imperial days were over.* 

However, what it means for the "old system" to be finished means in Europe, is that Europe will be an integrated industrial economy (under German leadership):

This phase, the consolidation of the European base, was completed with France's surrender. It is completed irreversibly and can no longer be undone whatever the outcome of the succeeding phases of the war, which are really other wars. This consolidation, fundamental to the world politics of managerial society, is not going to be dissolved, not even if the present German regime is utterly defeated. In fact, no one expects it to be, not even the English statesmen. The day of a Europe carved into a score of sovereign states is over; if the states remain, they will be little more than administrative units in a larger collectivity. Any attempt to re-divide Europe would collapse, not in the twenty years it took the Versailles system to collapse, but in twenty months. (246; emphases added.)

That is to say, that for Burnham it's obvious that the days of independent European states, who had ruled the world for a few centuries, are over. Given the new political and economic realities, Europe would have to develop into a continental wide integrated, industrial area (akin to the United States of America) in what he calls a "European super-state". (247) From his perspective Nazi-Germany was merely accelerating that which had become inevitable. What Burnham ends up missing is that this would occur eventually much slower under American guidance with European states reduced to satellites (in the manner of Canada, in his account). I leave it for another time to evaluate how the partial vitality of capitalist liberal democracy was so underestimated.

Even so, we might say that on Burnham's account that the (real possibility of a) technocratic European Union was born with French surrender in 1940.* One might be have to be a Koj��ve to see in this the cunning of history. 

 

 

*In fact, Burnham argues that Hitler offered Great Britain peace terms precisely in order to forestall the collapse of the empire, which he did not want to fall in American and Asian hands (246-247), but be part of a European sphere. On some accounts a similar motive was behind the Treaty of Rome (which then still included non-trivial African possessions).

Philosophers on Rawls' project; Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, pt 2

If one understands political philosophy as an enterprise whose goal is to guide political action, then I think Forrester is absolutely correct that the abstractions and idealizations need to go...

But not all political philosophy need be understood as intending to guide our action in this very direct sense. Importantly, I do not think Rawls understood his project like this, though his acolytes seemed to have, as Forrester demonstrates in detail. Instead, Rawls understood the goals of political philosophy very differently, and how he understood the nature of his project may render some of Forrester���s criticisms inert. To this end, it is worth exploring this in more detail. 

In the introduction to the paperback version of Political Liberalism, Rawls concludes by discussing what the overarching point or goal of his project is. He writes:

Philosophy may study political questions at many different levels of generality and abstractness, all valuable and significant. It may ask why it is wrong to attack civilians in war either from the air by ordinary bombs or atomic weapons. More generally, it may ask about just forms of constitutional arrangements and which kinds of questions properly belong to constitutional politics. More generally still, it may ask whether a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy is possible and what makes it so. I don���t say that the more general questions are the most philosophical, nor that they are more important. All these questions and their answers, so far as we can find them, bear on one another and work together to add to the knowledge of philosophy.[2] 

Though he clearly thinks that all sorts of philosophical questions and projects have value, it is the latter inquiry���political philosophy at its most general and abstract���that Rawls takes as his focus in Political Liberalism. In particular, the guiding question is whether a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy is possible, and what makes it so.

Notice how political philosophy in its most general and abstract form seems to be quite different from the underlying account of political philosophy that Forrester presumes, where the goal of the philosopher of public affairs is to offer concrete advice to remedy pressing problems such as global inequality or overpopulation. Instead, the task is to construct a sort of possibility proof of the kind mathematicians or theoretical economists might pursue. Just as a mathematician tries to show that a certain mathematical object with interesting properties exists, or a theoretical economist might try to show that there exists a certain kind of equilibrium solution for a particular class of games, Rawls is trying to show that a certain kind of society���a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy���can, in fact, exist. As Burton Dreben, one of Rawls���s friends and a great interpreter of his work describes the project: ���What Rawls has primarily been doing for the last twenty years is engage in a certain kind of very complex conceptual analysis, namely, he has been investigating the question, Is the notion of a constitutional liberal democracy internally consistent or coherent? Is it conceptually and logically possible to have as an ideal���it���s not even a question of how to bring it about.���--Brian Kogelmann reviewing In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019), by Katrina Forrester in The New Rambler [HT Matt Lister]

Yesterday (see here) Matt Lister nudged me toward Kogelmann's fascinating review of Forrester. Unlike Freeman's review, Kogelmann's provide a sufficiently accurate and helpful summary so that the reader can decide whether they ought to read the book. In addition, without actually stating the book's official aim, recall [I] "the book is about the politics of political philosophy and the political implications of conceptual choices," (xxi), Kogelmann's review actually says quite a bit about the book such that the second half of that aim comes into clear view such that the reader of Kogelmann's essay has a sence of what Forrester is up to. Below I return to discuss the substance of that.

Despite appearances to contrary, it's not my life's mission to 'score' philosophy book reviews. But I do find it interesting that a book that states prominently and early that it is about the "politics of political philosophy" fails to elicit discussion among philosophers about her analysis of the politics of political philosophy. I have now read five reviews by philosophers of the book, and of these only Lea Ypi mentions it (here) in her very interesting review without really exploring Forrester's views on the politics of political philosophy. Whereas non-philosophers (political theorists and intellectual historians, etc) have no trouble engaging with this theme. Feel free to call my attention to reviews by philosophers that I have missed that do engage with what she has to say about the politics of political philosophy.

As an aside, I find this state of affairs baffling. Philosophers of science (Liam Kofi Bright, Cailin O'Connor, etc) and feminists (e.g., Dotson) have brought different kinds of versions and models of (what we may call) the sociology of knowledge to bear on philosophy itself in journals and even in widely read blogs. And even those who don't write or read these works, are familiar enough in thinking about philosophy in Kuhnian terms. And given that many political philosophers teach in PPE programs, it is odd that they would be so unwilling to engage with scholarship that suggests that a philosophical status quo is itself the effect of the complex interaction between arguments and social environment (recall my treatment of p. 257 in yesterday's post), and what we might call the attractor effects of an established paradigm, as Forrester suggests.

In fact -- and now back to Forrester -- Forrester explicitly and repeatedly treats Rawlsianism as a philosophical paradigm (xx, 150, 174--I am sure I have missed a few (she also uses 'framework' sometimes); she also very often talks of a "distributive paradigm."). And she suggests that the uptake of Rawls' book was facilitated by the network he was in and their efforts. In fact she suggests her book will show two distinct further theses:

Just as often, rival political visions or arguments were not rejected outright, but domesticated and accommodated within the liberal egalitarian paradigm���often in a way that diffused their force. As subsequent generations built on the arguments of their forebears, a philosophical paradigm took on a political shape that none of its discrete theorists might have intended. (xx)

That is, first, once Rawlsianism become hegemonic it was capable of diffusing challenges by incorporating some of their insights (on domestication, see also p. 207 & 230). In a different context I have claimed (recall here; here) this sponge-like quality is not just a feature of the liberal egalitarian paradigm, but of analytic philosophy as such once it was safely ensconced in philosophy departments without serious rivals. The politics of analytic philosophy rarely figure in the book (except when she is discussing Wittgensteinian influence on early Rawls) under that guise, but Forrester alerts the reader in a few footnotes to work by Joel Isaac that she is aware of its significant to her story (but see also p. 131; 244). My own view is that Rawlsianism became hegemonic has a lot to do with the character of analytic philosophy in the 1960s. (About that soon.)

And second she claims in rather deflationary fashion that even if Rawls were a self-conscious philosophical legislator (something she is really rather mum about--she does not discuss the significance of his lectures and his PhD training to the formation of a Rawlsian 'school'), most of what became Rawslianism is the unintended effect of philosophical debates with critics and alternative approaches in light of shifting contexts. This (I almost called it a 'Hayekian') theory of the intellectual market place helps explain why after she has discussed  the period leading up to the 1971 of Theory of Justice,  in her treatment Rawls himself often disappears in his own shadow.  

Okay let me now turn back to Kogelmann. He notes perceptively that whatever the aims of Forrester's approach to Rawls are, and like all readers he has picked up on important strains of criticism, she may not be doing justice to Rawls' own views. To put it in terms of the historian's craft, if she were writing about Rawls' aims then she has violated the injunction to use actor's categories. (I think that's neat aspect of his criticism quoted above.) But Forrester is not very interested in Rawls' intentions, but in the construction of a Rawlsian paradigm by a community of scholars. And Kogelmann charitably reads her as claiming to be following norms of that paradigm (namely that political philosophy shouldn't merely clarify political problems but also "bring them to a resolution."*) The first sentence of his review I quoted above comes after a paragraph in which he grants that "this general vision of what the philosopher should do is widely adopted among the discipline���s practitioners." 

Kogelmann is a bit too charitable here. I really wish Forrester had added a chapter in which she had come more clean on her own (normative) framework in evaluating the success or failure of Rawlsianism. Because it is not entirely clear what the rules of the game are here. After all, as she demonstrates in all kinds of ways, Rawlsianism was a resounding success within the politics of political philosophy: as she shows, even philosophers that rejected the content and methods of Rawls' project did end up using his vocabulary (and vice versa). As I joked yesterday, as she shows, Rawls' achievement is akin to the claim that in economics Koopmans, Marschak, Arrow, or Debreu got economists to use convex analysis; and it is no doubt that this acted as a formal constraint on what kind of economy could be imagined, or at least the vocabulary in which one must speak in order to advance in professional economics. (I return to this below.) So, it's not entirely transparent how her empirical work in (say) the sociology knowledge connects to her critical strain. 

The purported political failure of Rawls according to her is that -- to simplify -- after Theory of Justice appeared, political life increasingly shifted away from Rawls' moral (and political) vision (chapter 7 is really a masterful treatment of this theme). Now, this is a very interesting general fact. This is one reason, for example, why I am myself much more interested in liberal programs that did sometimes manage to shape in some ways political outcomes (ordoliberalism, chicago school, public choice, law and economics, third way, etc.) But for all my great admiration for her book, Forrester really has not earned this conclusion because she has not really studied how Rawlsians tried to shape health care (e.g., Norman Daniels), the law (Nussbaum barely registers), and other areas of public policy. (She acknowledges this in response to critics here.) If the two parts of [I], "the politics of political philosophy" and "the political implications of conceptual choices," are connected it is not obvious from her book how. To make a (Schumpeterian) joke: winning the philosophical argument may be the worst possible predictor of the capacity to shape politics. And if Plato, Madison, and Smith are right one should not expect that at all (okay, sorry that was advertisement for my book).

It's also not clear why she thinks political philosophy can shape political outcomes given that she generally seems to think and argue it's the social environment that shapes and even partially determines political philosophy (and so makes it un-dangerous to the status quo), especially at the "elite institutions" (xvii) she is primarily interested in (again this exchange is very good about this).** And, to be fair, we don't criticize Hobbes for not preventing the messy mixed constitution of the Glorious Revolution (be grateful for small mercies, I say) nor do we criticize Olympe de Gouges for not preventing that mass democracy was gendered male for centuries (we praise her for her prescience and courage!).

Okay, let me wrap up with a three comments on Kogelmann's Rawlsian counter proposal from the paperback version of Political Liberalism, and then one on the significance of this to Forrester's argument. (Only the third will be critical.) Now, at first sight it seems Kogelmann is begging the question against Forrester's approach; for Rawls' own views have no special standing here (see above). Yet, I have come to think it is actually a fair response to Forrester's argument, but not convincing. For, it's fair because it actually presupposes something important about how in [I] "the politics of political philosophy" and "the political implications of conceptual choices," could be connected. (And as we will see I don't think Forrester herself has a compelling story.) For, one can reformulate Kogelmann's position in light of Forrester's book as follows: winning the politics of political philosophy, and by building on A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, allows a community to establish with its tools that it is "possible in a world of reasonable yet nonetheless insurmountable and irreconcilable disagreement for a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy to exist[.]" And, for Kogelmann (and Rawls) this will have beneficial political implications.

For, second, and in fact, by 'possibility' Kogelmann interprets Rawls to mean something like what the economist means by an 'existence proof.'+ (I return to that below.) And then he glosses this as follows: "it is possible generally speaking for a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy to exist, regardless of the particularities of a county���s circumstances and history. But proving the general claim requires we abstract away from current political realities, contra Forrester...Rawls���s project is not to show that a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy is possible for a society populated by knaves. Rather, he wants to show that such a political order is consistent with human nature when at its best...[without] to idealize away all our blemishes." And this possibility, when established by the Rawlsian paradigm, can influence people: "citizens will be influenced by the arguments of political philosophers, and this will have a down-the-road and very distant impact on the kinds of policies and laws that are eventually implemented."++ It's not entirely clear if we are supposed to believe that citizens will be expected to be influenced by reading Rawls (like the citizens of a Hobbesian commonwealth must read Leviathan, etc.) or, perhaps more likely, if the influence is supposed to trickle down through mediators.

Third, what is odd about Kogelmann's position is that nobody alive thinks that the economists' existence proofs or their arguments will convince citizens of anything. And since the analogy to existence proofs in game theory is so important to Kogelmann, let me quote a pre-eminent game-theorist on why he avoids using Rawls' framework; when confronted by Theory of Justice, even economists noted that as a model of political life it left out something very important. Aumann (who I usually do not cite approvingly) writes:

Criteria of equity that do not take power considerations into account have a pleasing air of symmetry and abstract perfection; they appeal to our philosophical, ethical senses. But what would make society adopt such criteria? And even if adopted, what chance do they have of surviving the attacks of pressure groups, large and small? For better or for worse, economic realities are dictated not by ethical considerations, but by the exercise of economic power. (Robert J. Aumann (1976) "Values of Markets with a Continuum of Traders," 621; notice that this does not require that everyone is a knave, but that the rich and other rent-seekers may well be.)++

Notice that I am not treating Aumann  as an authority on philosophy. Rather, to put this in jargon: I take what Aumann is suggesting is that while it is true that "belief in what is possible or impossible affects [citizens'] thoughts and attitudes," the transmission mechanism that Kogelman assumes from Rawls' arguments to citizen influence goes in the face of everything we know about political life. So, rather than inspiring political hope, Rawls' can only be appreciated aesthetically, as it were, for the artistry of the proof. Again, to put it as a serious joke: Kogelman's Rawls assumes a kind of invisible hand mechanism such that right arguments magically or mysteriously will win out in political life. I actually mention this because I also suspect this criticism can be lodged against Forrester's own views.

In a way, the remark by Dreben quoted by Kogelmannactually suggests the same. Rawls' possibility proofs are disassociated from "how to bring it about."  Quite right. (I should note that a natural reading of Political Liberalism suggests that Rawls is highly aware that local political traditions  can matter greatly to the conceptual engineer. But this does not fit Kogelmann's proposal.)

Third, Kogelmann recognizes something like this objection. And he has an implied response by way of a quote from Rawls on the fall of Weimar: "A cause of the fall of Weimar���s constitutional regime was that none of the traditional elites of Germany supported its constitution or were willing to cooperate to make it work. They no longer believed a decent liberal parliamentary regime was possible." Friends have repeatedly quoted this to me, too. And I can see why people find it beautiful and tragic (as Kogelmann does). But while something like this may have been true of German Marxists -- they thought that the fall of Weimar was demonstrated by science --, this claim is not true of the 'traditional elites' in the sense required for Rawls and Kogelmann. In so far as German traditional elites then ever believed a decent liberal parliamentary regime was possible (and it's not obvious many did), these gave up on it for reasons having nothing to do with philosophy but everything to do with the state of the economy, the street violence, the intimidation (including assassination), reparations required by Versailles' treaty, and a host of other issues not least that it was unclear to them how democracy could defend itself against its enemies while staying democratic. (Popper, of all people, gets this right.) 

So, finally, while Kogelmann has a serious response to Forrester's position, and even thereby finds a way of showing how the elements of [I] might be connected, I don't think anyone ought to be persuaded by it, especially if one takes Forrester's approach seriously. But this leaves as an open question what, if one takes her historical arguments seriously, the lessons of her argument are for a political philosophy worth having in light of the necessity of the politics of political philosophy and an interest in having these conclusions shape political life. To be continued. 

 

*Kogelmann is quoting the founding statement of Philosophy and Public Affairs here, quoted on p. 73 of Forrester's book. I agree it's very important step in her argument.

**Also do read Alyssa Battistoni's essay which also includes this gem: "The paradox is that the book at times performs elements of what it critiques, reinscribing the centrality of Rawlsian approaches even as it aims to question them."

+If one were interested in Rawls' views on this, it is worth asking if this conception of his project really is in Theory of Justice.

++I thank Ali M. Khan for calling my attention to this Aumann article.

On Freeman's Review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, pt 1

Katrina Forrester's book is an engaging history of John Rawls's intellectual development and the outpouring of work in political philosophy his ideas have engendered. She focuses on the evolution of Rawls's theory of justice and the historical conditions from which it purportedly grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She discusses the responses of Rawls's notable critics and reviews alternative positions by significant philosophers and political theorists of the era. These include Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Goodin, H.L.A. Hart, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, Susan Okin, Onora O'Neill, Derek Parfit, T.M. Scanlon, Amartya Sen, Peter Singer, Judith Shklar, Charles Taylor, Judith Thomson, Michael Walzer, Bernard Williams, and other leading figures. Forrester concisely summarizes their core ideas and discusses how their work responds to or is critical of the left-liberal position Rawls advocated, liberal egalitarianism. The book provides a significant summary, with few distortions, of the philosophers' ideas it reviews, and is a notable contribution to the history of ideas.

The development and critical response to liberal egalitarian theories of justice has been a central concern within political philosophy since Rawls's Theory of Justice. This is the "shadow of justice" Forrester invokes in her book's title. Her primary thesis is that for the past fifty years, Rawls and the liberal egalitarianism he inspired have defined the intellectual environment of political philosophy, coloring the work of political philosophers of all persuasions. Rawls's shadow also defines the terms of engagement that must be adhered to by political theorists who reject justice as the proper place to begin, or even end, discussions in political philosophy and theory. "The Rawlsian framework came to act as a constraint on what kind of theorizing could be done and what kind of politics could be imagined." (p. 275)--Samuel Freeman reviewing Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 2019 at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

When back in the day I first read Samuel Freeman's review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, I was a bit puzzled by it. If the thesis of the book was really, as he reported, that [A] "The Rawlsian framework came to act as a constraint on what kind of theorizing could be done and what kind of politics could be imagined," why, from Section II onward, which starts with the observation that "We are in a period of heightened criticism of Rawls's views," did he spend most of the review defending Rawls' theory from criticisms? For the thesis attributed to Forrester [A] is a thesis in the sociology of knowledge or the historical epistemology of philosophy. It's an empirical (with an accompanying modal) claim orthogonal to criticisms of Rawls' views.

Taken as reported, and at face value, [A] is akin to, neither strictly analogous or identical I hasten to add, the claim that [B] in economics Koopmans, Marschak, Arrow, or Debreu got economists to use convex analysis and that this acted as a formal constrain on what kind of economy could be imagined, or at least the vocabulary in which one must speak in order to advance in professional economics.  [A-B] are claims about professional frameworks -- oh damn you Kuhn, I almost wrote 'paradigm' [Forrester uses "philosophical paradigm" [xx].* And while claims like [A-B] are never innocent -- they might well function in unmasking projects or limit theorems -- by themselves they cannot do the work of criticizing claims discussed within the framework or even about the framework.  Yet most of Freeman's review is a defense of the framework (and some of its specific commitments).

From the review I could not infer how Forrester's argument was supposed to work or what it really is. And when I re-read the review, I noticed that most of Freeman's references to Forrester's book where from the start and end of the book. (I now know they are nearly all from her preface and epilogue.) I left it at that. 

Well, that's not quite true. As regular readers know, back at NewAPPS I have blogged a bit about Rawls' annotations in his books (recall here;) and so knew he had read Robbins and Knight carefully (recall also here), and so back in 2015 I had some fun pointing to Rawls' esotericism in The Theory of Justice (really, go read the post). And yes, I lectured and blogged more about Rawls (especially on Knightian uncertainty and how his lectures on history shaped our perception of the past and present (recall), but except for contextualizing Rawls a bit in this essay (here), I held off on doing scholarship on him. Meanwhile, ever since I heard about a historicizing Rawls conference (2017) at Oxford that culminated in this special issue of Modern Intellectual History, edited by Sophie Smith, Teresa Bejan, and Annette Zimmermann, and with the appearance of Forrester's book, I knew that my time to pontificate about Rawls was up. There were now legitimate experts out there who had put the the pearls I had briefly touched but had put away in a safe, to work in important scholarship. (Not my first academic blunder.)

But then I read Ol��f�����mi O. T����w��'s fascinating review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, in The Nation (here), which prompted a response from me (recall here). That review (which does not mention Freeman's review) attributes to Forrester a mechanism that might support an inference from [A] to a conclusion worth attacking by Freeman: [X] "By redirecting us from both history and sociology and premising justice on abstract game theory, Rawls���s book and its liberal vision of justice ended up promoting a political philosophy that was ill-equipped for the era of sustained academic and popular attention to historical injustice." But from T����w��'s review it's unclear if that claim [X] is in Forrester or T����w��. [X] could at least explain why the constraint(s) mentioned in [A] would be taken as a criticism of the framework.  But as I noted in my response to T����w��, Rawls' work had been (repeatedly) used to tackle historical injustice at least in journal articles.

Now, in reading T����w��'s review I had come under the impression that Forrester's book is a kind of intellectual biography. (He doesn't say this, but a lot of the material he discusses is presented in terms of Rawls' biography.) And in going back to Freeman's review after reading and blogging about T����w��'s, I realized that I could not triangulate from both reviews what Forrester's book was about. And since I felt a bit guilty in blogging about T����w��'s review without having read the book, I read the awe-inspiring book over break and even 'life-tweeted' my impressions by chapter. 

The book is difficult to summarize, but Forrester is admirably clear about its main aim: [I] "the book is about the politics of political philosophy and the political implications of conceptual choices." (xxi) Notice that Rawls is not mentioned in [I]. (The whole paragraph that explains [I] does not mention Rawls!) So, strictly speaking the thesis of the book is not about Rawls or his framework at all. Rather, Rawls is an example of [I] or is supposed to illustrate it [I]. Now, if one were to quote [I] out of context it would be puzzlingly ahistorical. The politics of political philosophy has shifted as philosophy has shifted sites and ages. We will never know exactly the circumstances of how Speusippus ended up succeeding Plato and not, say, Aristotle, and it is hard for us to grasp fully if this had effects on the important conceptual choices in the way political philosophy was pursued in (say) Hellenistic times, but we can know that it is institutionally different from the far-reaching effects (as Forrester shows) of the founding of Philosophy and Public Affairs by a then relatively close-knit group connected to (a reading group known as) Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy (SELF). So, we cannot take [I] at face value like that. But in context it is pretty clear what she means; the first words of the book -- "political philosophy in the English speaking-world today" -- supply the required context that makes precise the implied reference of [I].

It should be noted that it is by no means obvious one needs to discuss the politics of philosophy in order to discuss the political implications of conceptual choices. One can, for example, discuss inductive risk of a scientific theory without discussing the way science is organized. But plenty of philosophers of science (myself included) have discussed the two alongside each other. So, I understand the pull to do so. Implied in [I] is a non-trivial and controversial causal assumption that [a] the structure of academic discussion (at least in political philosophy), or at least the way such structure shapes the content of what is taken to be authoritative, has some downstream effects on the way the content of academic discussion is taken up in political life. And while I called it a causal assumption, one might equally suspect that lurking in [I] there is a more normative claim [b] that (a) political philosophy [worth having] ought to guide politics in some sense (and in a good way).  And, in fact, in Forrester's book [b] or something close to it is attributed to Stuart Hampshire (in his critique of utilitarianism, 82 & 242), and Alisdair MacIntyre (p. 82), and at times she is clearly tempted by it herself. 

In the book, the political implications of conceptual choices are primarily or perhaps I should say most recurringly investigated through left-leaning Oxford philosophers (many of whom influenced Rawls and, in turn, were influenced by him) and their aspirations to shape the British Labor party's politics. But is not limited to that, we also get a number of American case studies about how Rawlsian ideas were taken up in areas of applied and global ethics (but oddly not Norman Daniels' attempt to shape Hilary Clinton's healthcare plan along Rawlsian lines). We also learn how these fields came to be known as 'applied' (see, for example, 73).

As an aside, and briefly returning to my remarks on T����w��'s review, 'historical injustice' is indeed one of the cases Forrester discusses. But her argument is that it was Nozick who put historical injustice on the agenda for Rawlsians. For, the need for reparations' for historical injustice(s) falls out rather neatly from his argument because original ownership matters a lot to Nozick (see Forrester's pp. 130-135). And by using Bedau, who stands in as a 'left-liberal' (but whose intellectual formation precedes Rawls' main works), as a kind of guide to the debate, she helps explain why it took so long for Rawlsians to really develop an account of historical injustice (perhaps still insufficiently so to T����w��). To put it as a joke: Rawlsians had to be invented first before an approach to historical injustice could be articulated by them.

In its arguments, Freeman's review ignores the politics of political philosophy. And so fails in the minimal requirements of reviewing; it does not accurately convey what the book is about. It is not a work in the "history of ideas" as he claims. By this I mean it is neither the history ideas in the technical sense of Arthur Lovejoy (and now barely practiced), the history of tracing unit-ideas (we would say, Memes) through different historical epochs (recall), nor is the presumably  more informal sense that Freeman intends by the the phrase, that is, a work of tracing influence or, as he implies, the evolution of a debate.

I do not mean to imply that Freeman's review isn't shaped by the politics of political philosophy. Note that in the first paragraph Freeman lists an alphabetized group of names he treats both as "significant philosophers and political theorists" and "leading figures." Those honorifics suggest we are not far from today's politics of political philosophy. But his first paragraph fails to convey how when Forrester is practicing history -- which to repeat is in the service of an a-historical claim [I] -- she does it.  

As I noted, Forrester's method, when she is practicing something like history of ideas (in the informal sense--it's more common to call it 'contextual history of philosophy' or 'history of political thought'), is to use a privileged well informed contemporary of Rawls to shed light on how Rawls transforms the debates within political philosophy and even establishes a new vocabulary or register for the field. And while some of the names Freeman mentions are, of course, important to her story, her methodological strategy is not to focus on the all-stars in depth. Rather she uses particular guides, most notable she uses Brian Barry for this very purposes. Not infrequently (but not as prominently as Barry) she uses Hugo Bedau (who is clearly not significant enough for Freeman to be listed among the leading figures). When she focuses on her Oxford theme, she uses Richard Titmuss' work to fascinating effect (and David Miller's). And as I hinted above, Stuart Hampshire shows up throughout the book for such illuminating purposes too. 

Because I have run on long as is, let me note one other aspect of how she understands [I]. She does not treat the politics of academic disciplines as autonomous. By this I mean, that she sometimes suggests that academic influence is itself a consequence of larger social forces. The most explicit example of this is after noting the malleability of communitarianism, her claim that "communitarianism...became influential within political theory because it did not seriously threaten the assumptions of the postwar liberal order." (257; emphasis added). The fuller significance of this is, and it is another way in which 'shadow' in the title of the book functions (and Freeman almost gets this right), is that in Forrester's analysis political theory as distinct from political philosophy becomes constituted, at least for a while, as a field that is un-Rawlsian.

Here she leaves hanging what the source of this status quo bias is (is it ideology, subtle disciplinary pressure from political scientists on appointments, is it funding sources within universities, etc.)? While she is very interested in themes like journal capture, and the way centers promote fields, Forrester is relatively quiet on such mechanisms. But I'll postpone my own more substantive criticisms of the book until I engage with more of the actual argument of the book (and perhaps I'll also return (eventually) to Freeman's effort to refute some of the claims of the epilogue). To be continued.

*Regular readers know I consider this a contradiction in terms.

Michael Polanyi on the collapse of liberalism and the Rise of Fascism: Religion and Liberty

Anglo-American liberalism was first formulated by Milton and Locke. Their argument for freedom of thought was twofold. In its first part (for which we may quote the Areopagitica) freedom from authority is demanded, so that truth may be discovered. The main inspiration of this movement was the struggle of the rising natural sciences against the authority of Aristotle. Its programme was to let everyone state his beliefs, and to allow people to listen and form their own opinion; the ideas which would prevail in a free and open battle of wits would be as close an approximation to the truth as can be humanly achieved. We may call this the anti-authoritarian formula of liberty. Closely related to it is the second half of the argument for liberty, which is based on philosophic doubt. While its origins go back a long way (right to the philosophers of antiquity) this argument was first formulated as a political doctrine by Locke. It says simply that we can never be so sure of the truth in matters of religion as to warrant the imposition of our views on others. These two pleas for freedom of thought were put forward and were accepted by England at a time when religious beliefs were unshaken and indeed dominant throughout the nation. The new tolerance aimed pre-eminently at the reconciliation of different denominations in the service of God. Atheists were refused tolerance by Locke, as socially unreliable.

On the Continent, the twofold doctrine of free thought ��� anti-authoritarianism and philosophic doubt ��� gained ascendancy somewhat later than in England and moved on straightaway to a more extreme position.--Michael Polanyi (1951) "Perils of Inconsisency" in The Logic of Lberty, p. 117 (in the Libertyfund edition.)

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi popularized (recall here; and here) for many Marxists and progressives a fairly straightforward narrative about the rise of fascism, totalitarianism, and national-socialism (sometimes I'll just use 'fascism' for this whole group): by undermining social cohesion the markets promoted by liberalism give rise to fascism. And (echoing a trope from Adam Smith himself) the workplace in the capitalist economy undermines cognitive proper functioning and the functioning of wider culture (this is especially so when it is accompanied by violence as it was under imperialism and even domestic development). In particular, because markets are also inherently fragile, they generate disruptive crises which fatally undermine the authority of ordinary politicians and open the doors to strongmen of various types (or 'fascism') who take advantage of a wider sense of despair and humiliation.

Sometimes people also add an idea (recall) derived from Lenin to this argument: that is, that capitalist economies naturally become monopolistic. And (partially drawing on the liberal Hobson) such monopoly promotes violent imperialism and/or militarism (and not to mention opens the door to the a concentration of power in the hands of few oligarchs). And from there it is small step to a strongman (if a worker's revolution doesn't stop the process). 

By contrast, market friendly liberals (e.g., Austrians, Ordoliberals, and neoliberals) when confronted with the collapse of liberal civilization after World War I and the aftermath of the Wall Street crisis, offered a different analysis one that also harkened back to Hobson's views: while on the surface the nineteenth century looks liberal, liberals were never so powerful as to defeat mercantilism (which historically preceded it). And depending on the liberal thinker the details will differ, but all agree that in its political guise liberalism suffered setback after setback from the 1870s onward (or even earlier). On this view the early partial success of liberalism actually enhanced the rent-seeking and militaristic forces of mercantile imperialism. On this view, monopoly is not a necessary byproduct of market economies, but the effect of political decisions (tariffs, especially). And one may add, even if monopolies were the consequence of market economies left to themselves, this only shows the need for robust antitrust (ordoliberals especially argued this). The problem for this 'solution' is that it has to prevent rent seeking even though the view itself predicts its likelihood.

It should be noted that both explanations suggest that democracy (broadly conceived) cannot save itself if the economic circumstances are dire enough. And it is no surprise that some theorists thought that democracy inevitably led to Bonepartism (or military dictatorship by plebiscite), also sometimes known as caesarian democracy (recall here). Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon offers a nice expression of the idea, and as I recently learned (recall) it became a staple of the so-called Italian Elite school. 

In particular, as James Burnham notes, while drawing on Michels' (1911) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy in his (1943) The Machiavellians, because of mechanisms that drive elite capture (recall) and because of the doctrine of the general/popular will, it is actually fairly predictable that a leader of a democracy can turn himself into the true representative of the general will of the people. And so rather than Bonepartism being at odds with democracy it is actually its "logical culmination," (Burnham, p. 145). To be sure Bonepartism itself is not totalitarianism, but the step to it may not be so difficult.

But all these explanations suffer from an obvious problem: some states managed to remain broadly liberal warts and all (Switzerland, Holland, the United Kingdom and many of its Dominions, as well as the United States), despite suffering many of the same evils as the countries that did succumb to various strongmen. And this opens the door to alternative approaches.

As I noted before (recall), Karl Polanyi's brother, Michael Polanyi went in a different direction, one of the attendees of Lippmann Colloquium in 1938. (Today he is primarily known for ideas about tacit knowledge in the philosophy of science. In what follows, i will first be alluding to his (1941) "The Growth of Thought in Society, Economica). He noted that in places where fascism (now broadly conceived) succeeded, there had been a previous successful ideological and violent campaign attacking society's intermediaries: these partially self-governing intermediary societies (within science, art, law, the crafts, engineering, medicine, the press, etc.) are for him constitutive of liberal society. This form of liberalism partially harkens back to features we now more often associate with Burke's little platoons and with continental corporatism. But in his Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, Jacob T. Levy has shown that what I here call Michael Polanyi's move is, in fact, a recurring theme within liberalism (that we can also find in Adam Smith).

And in fact Michael Polanyi thereby provides a mechanism for an observation that had figured prominently in Karl Polanyi's argument: that liberal authority seemed to collapse in the face of an organized but not especially threatening minority.  The collapse may look sudden, but it builds on a period of successful intimidation of the ordinary functioning of lots of intermediaries that stabilize liberal society. And if I can glance obliquely to our own time, one crucial lesson of this is that it is really important to bring the rule of law down on those that intimidate these intermediaries. It's to be feared that our own governments have not really learned Michael Polanyi's lesson.

Michael Polanyi himself must have felt that this account leaves out a crucial bit: motivation. Where do the would-be-elites and early cadres of fascists come from in a liberal society? In "Perils of Inconsistency," first published in his collection The Logic of Liberty (1951), Michael Polanyi tackles this question. Echoing and anticipating themes one finds in Hayek, Polanyi thinks that the difference maker is to be found in differential uptake of certain philosophical ideas. (And this also echoes Russell's views in The History of Western Philosophy then recent.) 

For Michael Polanyi, liberalism has its roots in a rejection of religious fanaticism and Church authority (p. 116). Both were replaced by a conception of liberty involving intellectual freedom. And for Polanyi this conception was internally contradictory (see above).* He claims one cannot simultaneously obtain a market place of ideas in public opinion -- notice that he does not attribute this idea to Mill -- and profess a mitigated skepticism at the same time. 

And simply put: on Polanyi's view, because of the demands of religious toleration (p. 122), Locke taught some places how to live with this inconsistency, while maintaining the authority of conscience and ideals pertaining to reason and justice formerly associated with church authority. (This is the bit, I think, is also in Russell--apologies that I lack an exact reference.) To put this amusingly, Locke taught the virtue of hypocrisy to Anglo-Saxon political culture--one continues to pay more than lip-service to certain ideals and so prevent their popular collapse. (On Polanyi's view this one also sees in Utilitarian practice.) As Polanyi puts it (again echoing Russell): "I believe that the preservation up to this day of Western civilization along the lines of the Anglo-American tradition of liberty was due to this speculative restraint, amounting to a veritable suspension of logic within the British empiricist philosophy." (121) One person's shallowness, is another's heroic self-command.

But, by contrast, under the influence of the French Enlightenment, other places tried to remove the inconsistency and replace Church authority with the authority of a public and objective reason. And to simplify greatly, nineteenth century continental philosophy -- special animus is directed by Polanyi at Hegel and Fichte, and then Marx and Nietzsche -- showed that this cannot be done, and that a species of nihilism is a result:

The process of replacing moral ideals by philosophically less  vulnerable objectives was carried out in all seriousness. This is  not a mere pseudo-substitution, but a real substitution of  human appetites and human passions for reason and the ideals  of man.

This brings us right up to the scene of the revolutions of the twentieth century. We can see now how the philosophies which guided these revolutions and destroyed liberty wherever they prevailed, were originally justified by the anti-authoritarian  and sceptical formula of liberty. They were indeed anti-authoritarian and sceptical to the extreme. They set man free  from obligations towards truth and justice, reducing reason to its own caricature : to a mere rationalization of conclusions, pre-determined by desire and eventually to be secured, or already held, by force. Such was the final measure of this liberation: man was to be recognized henceforth as maker and master, and no longer servant of what had before been his ideals.

This liberation, however, destroyed the very foundations of  liberty. (p. 126)

And this opened the door, on Polanyi's view to fanatics that could mobilize the serious moral passions of individuals who had been taught contempt for public morality. So, crucially, rather than seeing the varieties of fascism as inherently "savage," Polanyi sees fascism as building on a moral inversion  developed by Marxism. On this view, where public reason and public morality are seen as ideological, or merely a fig leave for the operation of power, fascism and authoritarianism can appeal to the moral sensibility of dissatisfied (and ambitious) individuals.

The important point here is that rather than seeing the success of strongmen as merely the success of cynicism, Polanyi glimpses that they can win in contexts where liberal society has lost its inner faith because they (the fascists) manage to channel moral grievance and moral disgust into a politics of violent renewal. 

Polanyi's own conclusion is that that liberalism and certain forms of religion are natural allies. (He is greatly cheered by the Christian Democratic defeat of Communism in Italy, and elsewhere.) Historically this was an important move because it prefigures the fusionism (of market friendly and religious conservative types) that made the Republican Party so successful in the latter half of the twentieth century (and so interestingly studied by Melinda Cooper in Family Values). And confronted by the success of Trumpism, I have been tempted by the idea (recall), in dialogue with Thomas Pink, that liberalism needs the help of religion, a revitalized Catholic Church, especially.+ 

Okay, let me wrap up. I don't mention all of this because I think Polanyi's history of philosophy is especially accurate or insightful. Nor do I mention it because I think we should go back to fusionism Stateside or Christian Democracy in Europe. But rather, I think Polanyi, is insightful that a successful public culture must do some justice to, or find a way to channel to proper public ends, the moral sensibility of the population. This means, I think, that liberal neutrality needs to be rethought without giving up on the virtues of liberalism.

 

*I leave aside here to what degree Polanyi is actually correct in claiming that they are inconsistent.

+Feel free to make your Habermas joke here.