Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 32

14 March 1979: Foucault's Science Fiction of Neo-Liberal Eugenics (XXX)

[I]n Gary Becker there is a very interesting theory of consumption, in which he says: We should not think at all that consumption simply consists in being someone in a process of exchange who buys and makes a monetary exchange in order to obtain some products. The man of consumption is not one of the terms of exchange. The man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer. What does he produce? Well, quite simply, he produces his own satisfaction. And we should think of consumption as an enterprise activity by which the individual, precisely on the basis of the capital he has at his disposal, will produce something that will be his own satisfaction. Consequently, the theory, the classical analysis trotted out a hundred times of the person who is a consumer on the one hand, but who is also a producer, and who, because of this, is, as it were, divided in relation to himself, as well as all the sociological analyses���for they have never been economic analyses���of mass consumption, of consumer society, and so forth, do not hold up and have no value in relation to an analysis of consumption in the neo-liberal terms of the activity of production. So, even if there really is a return to the idea of homo oeconomicus as the analytical grid of economic activity, there is a complete change in the conception of this homo oeconomicus.
So, we arrive at this idea that the wage is nothing other than the remuneration, the income allocated to a certain capital, a capital that we will call human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer. How is this capital made up? It is at this point that the reintroduction of labor or work into the field of economic analysis will make it possible, through a sort of acceleration or extension, to move on to the economic analysis of elements which had previously totally escaped it. In other words, the neo-liberals say that labor was in principle part of economic analysis, but the way in which classical economic analysis was conducted was incapable of dealing with this element. Good, we do deal with it. And when they make this analysis, and do so in the terms I have just described, they are led to study the way in which human capital is formed and accumulated, and this enables them to apply economic analyses to completely new fields and domains.
How is human capital made up? Well, they say, it is made up of innate elements and other, acquired elements. Let���s talk about the innate elements. There are those we can call hereditary, and others which are just innate; differences which are, of course, self-evident for anyone with the vaguest acquaintance with biology. I do not think that there are as yet any studies on the problem of the hereditary elements of human capital, but it is quite clear what form they could take and, above all, we can see through anxieties, concerns, problems, and so on, the birth of something which, according to your point of view, could be interesting or disturbing. In actual fact, in the���I was going to say, classical���analyses of these neo-liberals, in the analyses of Schultz or Becker, for example, it is indeed said that the formation of human capital only has interest and only becomes relevant for the economists inasmuch as this capital is formed thanks to the use of scarce means, to the alternative use of scarce means for a given end. Now obviously we do not have to pay to have the body we have, or we do not have to pay for our genetic make-up. It costs nothing. Yes, it costs nothing���and yet, we need to see ... , and we can easily imagine something like this occurring (I am just engaging in a bit of science fiction here, it is a kind of problematic which is currently becoming pervasive).
In fact, modern genetics clearly shows that many more elements than was previously thought are conditioned by the genetic make-up we receive from our ancestors. In particular, genetics makes it possible to establish for any given individual the probabilities of their contracting this or that type of disease at a given age, during a given period of life, or in any way at any moment of life. In other words, one of the current interests in the application of genetics to human populations is to make it possible to recognize individuals at risk and the type of risk individuals incur throughout their life. You will say: Here again, there���s nothing we can do; our parents made us like this. Yes, of course, but when we can identify what individuals are at risk, and what the risks are of a union of individuals at risk producing an individual with a particular characteristic that makes him or her the carrier of a risk, then we can perfectly well imagine the following: good genetic make-ups���that is to say, [those] able to produce individuals with low risk or with a level of risk which will not be harmful for themselves, those around them, or society���will certainly become scarce, and insofar as they are scarce they may perfectly well [enter], and this is entirely normal, into economic circuits or calculations, that is to say, alternative choices. Putting it in clear terms, this will mean that given my own genetic make-up, if I wish to have a child whose genetic make-up will be at least as good as mine, or as far as possible better than mine, then I will have to find someone who also has a good genetic make-up. And if you want a child whose human capital, understood simply in terms of innate and hereditary elements, is high, you can see that you will have to make an investment, that is to say, you will have to have worked enough, to have sufficient income, and to have a social status such that it will enable you to take for a spouse or co-producer of this future human capital, someone who has significant human capital themselves. I am not saying this as a joke; it is simply a form of thought or a form of problematic that is currently being elaborated.
What I mean is that if the problem of genetics currently provokes such anxiety, I do not think it is either useful or interesting to translate this anxiety into the traditional terms of racism. If we want to try to grasp the political pertinence of the present development of genetics, we must do so by trying to grasp its implications at the level of actuality itself, with the real problems that it raises. And as soon as a society poses itself the problem of the improvement of its human capital in general, it is inevitable that the problem of the control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction, will become actual, or at any rate, called for. So, the political problem of the use of genetics arises in terms of the formation, growth, accumulation, and improvement of human capital. What we might call the racist effects of genetics is certainly something to be feared, and they are far from being eradicated, but this does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment.--Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226-229 [emphasis added on 'inevitable'].

It is difficult to write this blog post because I am so in awe of Foucault's analysis. For, in these pages, and the ones that follow and precede it, Foucault basically articulates the whole paradigm in which economic analysis becomes incapable of self-limiting and, thus, totalitarian. The question becomes not just how the genetic endowment, but the "child���s family life will produce human capital?" (229) And as Foucault notes this means that everything that can be measured in this environment must be measured to uncover its effect on human capital formation. Deep learning was made, we might say, for human capital theory.

And this human capital will not just be the principle that generates (possible) income into the future, but also the skill to consume it. Foucault's analysis of Becker's treatment that consumption isn't merely a passive doing, a mere hedonic receptacle, but an effect of human capital is masterly. We must not merely acquire taste but must gain the skill to enjoy our acquired commodities. We might say, as a serious joke, that Becker and Mincer (and Schultz, etc.) re-discover Rousseau and Kames in the vernacular. Foucault alerts us to his own interest in this merging of the philosophy of culture and education with the logical of capital/computing by calling it 'very interesting' (226) which is a stark contrast to the 'banalities' when he discusses political history (216/218). 

As an aside, I noted last week the brilliant almost counterfactual history of economics inscribed in this ninth lecture. But it is also worth noting a bizarre lacuna. For in Foucault's hands it is immediately obvious that this strain of Chicago economics -- the human capital, economic imperialism one -- rediscovers and revives the eugenic features of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century economics most associated with names like Galton and Pearson, but visible and significant in wide variety of American and British progressives, such that it infected the foundation of the welfare state nearly everywhere.* 

That is to say, what Foucault misses, and with him many other well-meaning intellectual commentators, is that part of the neo-liberal reaction against "Keynesian policy, social pacts of war, and the growth of the federal administration through economic and social programs" which "formed the adversary and target of neoliberal thought, that which it was constructed against or which it opposed in order to form itself and develop" (217) had a further moral underpinning (other than the anti-war, anti-collectivism already explicit in Foucault's analysis) one that had high salience after the Nazi-era is that of human moral equality. And this fits even Becker and his Chicago allies/teachers because in their version of human capital theory, after the Robbins redefinition of the nature of economics, the individual agency of each (recall last week) of us matters.  

My language of 'misses' in the previous paragraph is misleading. Given Foucault's knowledge of the study of deviance, it is unlikely he is not aware of this. And, in fact, he clearly signals he is aware of it: "call the racist effects of genetics is certainly something to be feared, and they are far from being eradicated," but he tells us why he does not alert us to this in his treatment: it "does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment." This comment raises tough questions about the hermeneutics of Foucault. 

The whole lecture series is (recall) oriented around the liberal art of government. And foucault makes clear that in one sense his is descriptive treatment of praxis and theory, and in other sense he is constructing what we may call the optimal art of liberal government. Now, it comes as no surprise that Foucault is aware of his situatedness in a particular political context; I have tried to be alert in where he hints at this. But here he alerts us to the fact that his decisions about what to highlight are themselves a function of his judgment of what he takes to be a major political issue at that moment. But he does not tell us what -- to be reflexive for a moment -- what enters into the formation of, and what secures the ''output'' of this judgment, and what counts as political for him.

Okay, let's close with a final observation. Above I noted that Foucault rightly discerns a kind of totalitarian element in the neo-liberal turn of Becker, Mincer, Schultz because as a domain of enquiry it is incapable of self-limitation. What he discerns is that (nearly) everything that can become data or a data-set connected to human activity is, in principle, possible evidence (about genes, environment, learning, production, risk, etc.) in this theory. (The remainder of the lecture Foucault spells this out nicely and ambitiously--very much worth re-reading for its significance to theories of capitalism, imperialism, and development.) In so far as there are constraints these are determined more by search costs than by the nature of the paradigm. This is really a contrast to how many other forms of enquiry function, where the paradigm limits severely what may count as possible evidence. 

But, of course, one may object that the totalitarian tendency in enquiry is not sufficient to count something as totalitarian in political praxis. The objection misses the point here. For Foucault is clearly committed to the idea once certain questions become intellectually pertinent -- not to an individual but (notice the bourgeois or at least Weberian terminology of Gesellschaft) "society"* -- then they become also necessarily ("inevitable") pertinent to, and actionable for, political practice ("control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals.") He does not explain why he believes in this kind of weirdly friction-free market in ideas such that the social problem must generate its own social praxis. It is notable that he does not offer a mechanism for why this is inevitably so, and a critique of the present must originate here. But that's for another time.  

To put the more arresting point of the previous paragraph as a serious joke, if one raises the question of what Plato [Republic 546d] calls the marriage number (viz. "the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction"), then even in a liberal society (focused on "individuals") there is, contra the hopes of Bacon no self-restraint on its pursuit.* That is to say, Foucault accepts the kind of Heideggerian/Thomistic critique of modernity without their moralism or, despite his latent political "fears," existential angst. 

 

 

 

*"Et d��s lors qu'une soci��t�� se posera �� elle-m��me le probl��me de l'am��lioration de son capital humain en g��n��ral, il ne peut pas ne pas se produire que le probl��me du contr��le, du f��trage, de l'am��lioration du capital humain des individus, en fonction bien s��r des unions et des procr��ations qui s'ensuivront, ne soit pas fait ou ne soit en tout cas exig��."

+

On Tuck Everlasting

"Know what happens then?" said Tuck. "To the water? The sun sucks some of it up right out of the ocean and carries it back in clouds, and then it rains, and the rain falls into the stream, and the stream keeps moving on, taking it all back again. It's a wheel, Winnie. Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it is."--Natalie Babbit (1975) Tuck Everlasting

When my son, now almost 11, first went to school, I had to get used to the fact that he was not especially forthcoming with what happened during the day. I learned that certain directed questions might make a difference, but he quickly and repeatedly alerted me to the fact that I ask too many questions. (Another way my occupation deforms me, I thought ruefully many times.) 

Since, I have been well trained to accept any information about his day from any source with gratitude. I have also learned to read signs of distress or success in oblique fashion. 

I don't want to suggest that I never learn anything at all about what goes on in school. For instance, a recent book they read in class -- Peter Pan -- was deemed boring and stupid. 

It is not because he dislikes reading. Our son is a voracious reader. While we are a rather bookish family, I have been, in fact, astonished by the speed with which he reads and the complexity of the material he assimilates. (Okay, I am a proud dad!) He reads so fast that he is perpetually running out of things to read. But despite the fact that he frequently faces a serious search problem, he is quite adamant that our suggestions won't do. (So, he and I most frequently bond over films and football, not books.)

The other day I was, thus, quite surprised that he recommended a book to me: Tuck Everlasting. I learned they also are reading it in class. When I asked him why he recommended it to me, his answer surprised me: it's very philosophical. But after that enticing morsel little else was forthcoming. 

I had never heard of the book. And I was amazed to learn that it had sold millions and was turned into numerous feature films. I suddenly felt very sheltered. It turns out my spouse was convinced she had read it and still owned a copy. After a fruitless search, and a repeated nudging from our son to me to read it, I ordered it online and read it Saturday.

Now, nearly all books I read I encounter with a reputation attached to it. I either know the author personally or by reputation; it's a classic I should have read or a work central to debates in my field; or it's a novel I have heard about (through reviews or word or mouth) or that has been gifted to me with some kind of comment. And in writing these sentences I realized it is, in fact, incredibly rare that I read a book without any sense of what I might expect.  

When I was a late teen-ager a family friend, Marion Zilversmit, gave me a paperback copy of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. I am not sure whether it was for my birthday or a goodbye gift for my departure for college Stateside. For some reason I did not read it initially. And so it stayed in my room in Amsterdam, where I found it after I returned my freshman year. I took it with me in a backpack following the Dutch team around Italy for the world cup in 1990. 

After the (horrible) game against England in Cagliari, where all fans were treated as dangerous animals -- the police used tear-gassed indiscriminately --, I found myself alone on the deck of a freight boat returning some of us to Palermo. The fans were packed in and the boat reeked of alcohol and piss. I found a spot on the upper deck, and started reading Auster through the night under the mediterranean sky. When I look back on it, I only see the romance because Auster took me into a vastly more fascinating and stimulating world than the one I was sailing; the smell and disgust are evaporated. 

The first major surprise of Tuck Everlasting is the incredibly abstract, even mythical style that is achieved at once:

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

Yes, my brain knows that this is strictly false in the Southern hemisphere and, in some sense, unintelligible prior to the building of the first ferris wheels. But simultaneously it feels like I have just assimilated a truth eternal. This sense is heightened by the next sentence with starts with an "Often..."

After I read the book my son pointed out to me, while we were on an errand, that Babbit's descriptions are simultaneously lively ("glaring noons") and austere ("silent," "blank"); that when you read it, you have to do a lot of work imagining what's going on, but this work of imagining does not feel like work. I recognize part of the point and whisper, we co-construct the story, as it were, with the author. He squeezes my hand. 

A second major surprise of my reading Tuck Everlasting is when I recognize (I hope he forgives me for sharing this) my son's recent bedtime questions to me in a passage early in Chapter 1:

The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?���

At the time he did not disguise his disappointment with the inadequacy of my responses (something about local jurisprudence, scarcity, innate commitments) to his questions. I hope to do better some day.

The other day, I asked him if he wants to talk about Tuck Everlasting (which is a rather violent book). No. Did he identify with the main protagonist (also a single child around his age). No. I could tell I was risking asking too many questions. We eventually negotiated a compromise that I could write a digression about it.

That concessions feels like a pyrrhic victory here; what to say now?

You, perceptive reader, will have noticed that eternal return and heracleitan flux are key themes Tuck Everlasting. And I don't share any spoilers if I say that the plot is accelerated by ordinary decisions about what to do with dangerous secrets that take on weight in virtue of the possibility of eternal return. 

And then, as I am contemplating a post about how Frodo has to leave Middle Earth, and wondering if I have written that already, and before I realize what's happening, I recognize something else my son was telling me, but hadn't heard; if he and I both co-construct the story while reading it, there is a sense we have not read the same story at all. And while I reflect on this, I discern that asking about the version he is constructing with Babbit would be a way of grabbing illicitly what's now his. 

 

 

 

On Nagel vs Neurath on the Icy Slopes

While Frank and his institute began to lose favor at the Rockefeller Foundation, increasing numbers of his colleagues in philosophy ��� besides Kallen and Hook, who had led the way in the 1940s ��� began to voice public sympathy with some of the dominant anticommunist themes and postures of Cold War intellectual life. With regard to the questions of whether and how science (or scientific philosophy) should treat matters regarding values ��� political, social, or ethical ��� two general stances were popular. The first called for disengagement and held that philosophy of science should abstain from such debates. The second held that philosophy of science should at least support the view that absolute moral and social values exist, if not also the partisan view that those of the West are plainly superior to those of the Soviets. In the early 1950s, Ernest Nagel and Martin Gardner touched on these issues and illustrated these stances.
In an obituary for Felix Kaufman, Ernest Nagel referred to ���the acute issue whether questions concerning public and individual moral values are capable of being settled scientifically and objectively.��� Nagel approved of Kaufman���s position, one that gingerly sided with Frank���s: If our ���rules of application��� of moral terms are made explicit, Nagel explained, then ���moral questions are as much capable of objective decision as are questions in physics and biology��� (Nagel 1950, 467). When it came to politics and the problem of international peace and stability, however, Nagel was skeptical that science or philosophy had any relevance. Reviewing a book by Lewis Mumford, in which he insisted that we must ���learn to participate in a durable universal communion with the whole of humanity,��� Nagel wrote in the anti-Stalinist New Leader,

It is extremely doubtful whether such a reorientation by every human being constitutes a necessary condition for the disappearance of the cold and hot wars that [Mumford] so fervently desires. There are surely respectable grounds for believing that this objective could be realized within the framework of current political organizations of men and on the basis of current moral ideals.

Nagel did not accept Mumford���s utopianism because history did not support it:

As for Mr. Mumford���s suggestions concerning the establishment of intimate neighborhood organizations, of public-work groups, or of international travel fellowships, there is little evidence to show that such devices have contributed much in the past to the creation of a world community, or that without fundamental political and economic reorganization on both a national and international level they are likely to do so in the future. (Nagel 1951, 22)

Nagel agreed with Kaufman and others (including Frank, Morris, and Dewey) that science and philosophy of science could illuminate values and related questions about human conduct. But with respect to the Cold War, he was resigned to quietism and disengagement. Only political and economic restructuring, and not resources offered by philosophy, could advance a ���world community��� or reduce international tensions.
Martin Gardner followed Hook and Kallen more closely  than Nagel. When he reviewed books in the New Leader, he urged philosophers of science take up the cause of anticommunism and not retreat to any apolitical posture. George A. Reisch (2005) How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (CUP) 310-311

I was a PhD student when I first encountered Reisch's brilliant, archive based demolition of conventional wisdom and self-serving myths in the profession often based on anecdotal evidence or hearsay. His book (hereafter Icy Slopes) is one of the towering achievements of various intellectual communities (HPS, HOPOS, History of Analytic, 'the fans of Carnap' etc.) that I have self-identified with over a good chunk of my professional life. Unlike much history of analytic philosophy it unsettles comforting narratives. And like many much nobler souls, I applauded and continue to admire his intellectual rehabilitation of those that gave analytic philosophy its original moral and political purpose. 

So, with an intro like that, you know I am going to disagree with Reisch.

Icy Slopes has a rise and fall structure. The passage I quoted is part of one of the key turning points in the book where the unity of science program (initiated by Neurath and left Vienna, and then still promoted by Frank) collapses. And while Nagel is not portrayed as himself a villain, he is treated as an exemplar ("illustrated these stance") of a certain retreat from more ambitious and nobler aspirations. I think Reisch misunderstands Nagel's position, and the misunderstanding is illustrative of a wider problem of his conceptual framework. But at the end of this post I am also going to suggest that in a certain sense Reisch's misunderstanding is not surprising given the way the profession evolved.

So, Reisch is absolutely right that Nagel is an anti-communist (recall; and here on his reviews of Cornforth); see also his withering 1939 review in The Nation of Haldane's The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences which Nagel republished in Logic Without Metaphysics (1956; hereafter LWM). But it is worth noting, first, that Nagel was not just an anti-Communist. His polemical targets in this period, also include folk who may now classify as sympathetic to the right: these include not just an assortment of neo-Thomists and the obscurantism popular in Nazi Germany, but also harshly negative reviews of the realist theorist Hans Morgenthau's Scientific Man vs Power Politics (in The Yale Law Journal 1952) and (recall) the rhetorically devastating review in (1952) The Journal of Philosophy  of Hayek's The Counter-Revolution of Science both re-published in LWM.

So, even in his anti-communism Nagel did not give fellow critics of Marxism a pass. In that sense Nagel does not fit the stereotype of a cold war intellectual. This gets me to second point. Reisch is, thus, a bit misleading to imply that anticommunist themes and postures shaped Nagel's thought or that he conformed to them. His philosophical politics, if we may call them that, were not centered on anti-marxism as such. Rather his anti-marxism is an expression of his underlying views about philosophy and political life.

As I have discussed (here and here), Nagel's political stance in the period echoes the liberal ideal of rule by discussion. In Nagel's case his political position was ground in and mirrors his metaphysics and, in particular his philosophy of science. While science contains differential expertise and skill, Nagel views it as an open-ended conversation responsive to public criticism and reasons and, thereby, self-corrective. Crucially for Nagel over time the norms and criteria change, even improve. Not unlike say, Polanyi, he treats this idealized conception as a useful model for a political life worth having. This is a progressive conception of the possibilities of political life that, in practice, recognizes many improvements are the consequence of local, accumulating incremental change.

Nagel indicates something like the image I have just sketched in many places, including, I should note in the rather moving (!) memorial to Felix Kaufman quoted by Reisch! Here is a passage I have in mind:

[Kaufman] was impressed by the fact that empirical science is a potentially ceaseless process of evaluating propositions in the light of changing evidence for them. And very early in his own intellectual development he recognized as an essential feature of scientific method the tacit use of the principle he came to call the principle of permanent control, according to which no proposition dealing with matters of fact is beyond criticism and revision. He employed this principle, which admirably expresses the self-corrective nature of modern science, in his trenchant criticism of atomistic sensationalism, of philosophies of self-evidence, and of dogmatic claims to finality. The principle was indeed an expression of an essential trait of the man himself: of his native abhorrence of authoritarianism, of his readiness to receive as well as to give criticism, and of his disciplined humility in recognizing the difficulties that stand in the way of obtaining warranted knowledge...(466)

And while the point of Nagel's description is to characterize Kaufman's position, and he sometimes disagrees with Kaufman, this part, as Reisch recognizes, he clearly endorses ("admirably expresses...") I know of no reason to assume Nagel ever gave up on this. 

Now it is worth noting that Nagel's view of science was less naive then it may seem now. At the time science was much smaller and the government's role in shaping science underdeveloped. In addition, while Nagel emphasizes the self-corrective nature of science (and may seem to buy into a kind of efficient market in ideas hypothesis), he is not unaware, and calls attention to the fact, that correcting for social and political bias, even in the natural sciences, is often not easy in practice (as he notes in well known material excerpted from The Structure of Science (and circulating as "the value-oriented bias of social inquiry.")* 

Okay, with that out of the way, let's look at Reisch's analysis. It is notable the for Reisch the two (anti-communist) alternatives to the unity of science are (i) quietism or disengagement; (ii) extolling of objective superiority of the West and its values. This leaves a lot of alternatives unexplored. 

For, the point of establishing the possibility of, and reflecting on the form of the of, objective values is not, in Nagel's hands, intended as an uncritical vindication of the status quo. They also provide the possibility of standard of criticism from which one can evaluate (and now I use one of Nagel's favorite words) the "warrant" of one's beliefs. That is to say, the question of, say, demarcation between science and not science is supposed to be able to be mirrored in social and political sphere. And, say, unlike conservative anti-communists, Nagel (and again he praises Kaufman this) firmly believes that tacit rules and commitments of our social practices, including science and induction, must be made explicit and articulated in order to allow for rational evaluation, justification, and correction/improvement.

Now if we turn to Reisch's treatment of Nagel's review of Mumford, something odd happens. A casual reading of Reisch may leave one with the impression that Mumford is a spokesperson for the kind of utopian thought we might associate with the unity of science movement. But Mumford's approach is, and now I quote Nagel himself, more consistent with being a "spokesman for one phase of intellectual and moral liberalism." (LWM 409) Mumford (who is fascinating) is as non-marxist as Nagel is (as Nagel recognizes LWM 410). And Nagel leaves no doubt he is quite familiar with Mumford's wider views.

And if we look at the passage that Reisch quotes in light of that, it is clear that they are criticized not for being politically wrong-headed. But rather that they do not help solve the (recall) transition problem from here to there and so are, at bottom, a "counsel of dark despair," (LWM 411). Such transition problems do not merely beset marxists, but as Nagel clearly recognizes, liberal thinkers too (something recently emphasized (recall) by Scott Scheall). If one's solution to the transition problem requires "wholesale and simultaneous victory over all problems" (LWM 411) then by Nagel's lights (and i am inclined to agree) that's no solution at all. (One can agree to that without always caving to demands of feasibility!) That is to say, a political philosophy that cares about changing the world is bound to confront the transition problem and take it seriously. This fits with Nagel's larger views on (recall) the "demands of responsible discourse."

For, more subtly, Nagel recognizes, thus, that a certain kind of revolutionary stance is not political at all, but a species of "moralizing exhortations." And, in fact, Nagel is explicit that the quetism is Mumford's: "He therefore proposes....the cultivation of the personal withdrawal and solitary reflection." (LWM 412, he then goes on to quote Mumford). So, the very criticism Reisch lodges against Nagel is Nagel's criticism of Mumford!

Now, Reisch and the friends of revolution, inspired by Neurath, need not agree with Nagel's incrementalist position, which embraces a "realizable process of indefinite approximation" (LWM 413, quoting Plato approvingly!) And I recognize that for some Nagel's charge that Mumford does not offer a "serious contribution to the solution of our present social dilemmas" may be unfair or unduly 'realistic' in a conservative way. But Nagel's willingness to work "within the framework of current political organizations...and on the basis of current moral ideals" (414) it is not a withdrawal from the world or a quietest, complacent stance even in international affairs.** (In 1951 the United Nations had been founded, and the Bretton Woods structure was being developed.) It is neither glorification of the American way nor antipolitical.

There is an important issue that ends up obscured by the limitations of Reisch's particular criticism (and may help explain them). One may well wonder, fairly, how Nagel's approach to philosophy of science, and the professionalism that it helped promote, may contribute to the solution of social dilemmas. And from the other end, the philosophical profession Nagel helped shape and bequeath does seem a fair target for Reisch's criticism. We may still wonder how Nagel's "convictions of a people confident that a bold but disciplined intelligence is still a creative power in the world" is actualized in a life of philosophy of science... 

 

 

*I thank Anna Alexandrova for recently reminding me of it. 

But they also resurface again in his discussion of Felix Kaufman on questions pertaining to demarcation problems in "Truth and Knowledge of the Truth" (1943/44); see LWM 167-177.

**It is not beyond criticism, of course! 

14 March 1979: Foucault on the Neo-Liberal Criticism of Ricardo and Marx (XXIX)

[T]he American neo-liberals say this: It is strange that classical political economy has always solemnly declared that the production of goods depends on three factors���land, capital, and labor���while leaving the third unexplored. It has remained, in a way, a blank sheet on which the economists have written nothing. Of course, we can say that Adam Smith���s economics does begin with a reflection on labor, inasmuch as for Smith the division of labor and its specification is the key which enabled him to construct his economic analysis. But apart from this sort of first step, this first opening, and since that moment, classical political economy has never analyzed labor itself, or rather it has constantly striven to neutralize it, and to do this by reducing it exclusively to the factor of time. This is what Ricardo did when, wishing to analyze the nature of the increase of labor, the labor factor, he only ever defined this increase in a quantitative way according to the temporal variable. That is to say, he thought that the increase or change of labor, the growth of the labor factor, could be nothing other than the presence of an additional number of workers on the market, that is to say, the possibility of employing more hours of labor thus made available to capital. Consequently there is a neutralization of the nature itself of labor, to the advantage of this single quantitative variable of hours of work and time, and basically classical economics never got out of this Ricardian reduction of the problem of labor to the simple analysis of the quantitative variable of time. And then we find an analysis, or rather non-analysis of labor in Keynes which is not so different or any more developed than Ricardo���s analysis. What is labor according to Keynes? It is a factor of production, a productive factor, but which in itself is passive and only finds employment, activity, and actuality thanks to a certain rate of investment, and on condition clearly that this is sufficiently high. Starting from this criticism of classical economics and its analysis of labor, the problem for the neo-liberals is basically that of trying to introduce labor into the field of economic analysis. A number of them attempted this, the first being Theodore Schultz, who published a number of articles in the years 1950���1960 the result of which was a book published in 1971 with the title Investment in Human Capital. More or less at the same time, Gary Becker published a book with the same title, and then there is a third text by Mincer, which is quite fundamental and more concrete and precise than the others, on the school and wages, which appeared in 1975.
In truth, the charge made by neo-liberalism that classical economics forgets labor and has never subjected it to economic analysis may seem strange when we think that, even if it is true that Ricardo entirely reduced the analysis of labor to the analysis of the quantitative variable of time, on the other hand there was someone called Marx who ... and so on. Fine. The neo-liberals practically never argue with Marx for reasons that we may think are to do with economic snobbery, it���s not important. But if they took the trouble to argue with Marx I think it is quite easy to see what they could say [about] his analysis. They would say: It is quite true that Marx makes labor the linchpin, one of the essential linchpins, of his analysis. But what does he do when he analyzes labor? What is it that he shows the worker sells? Not his labor, but his labor power. He sells his labor power for a certain time against a wage established on the basis of a given situation of the market corresponding to the balance between the supply and demand of labor power. And the work performed by the worker is work that creates a value, part of which is extorted from him. Marx clearly sees in this process the very mechanics or logic of capitalism. And in what does this logic consist? Well, it consists in the fact that the labor in all this is ���abstract,��� that is to say, the concrete labor transformed into labor power, measured by time, put on the market and paid by wages, is not concrete labor; it is labor that has been cut off from its human reality, from all its qualitative variables, and precisely���this is indeed, in fact, what Marx shows���the logic of capital reduces labor to labor power and time. It makes it a commodity and reduces it to the effects of value produced. Now, say the neo-liberals���and this is precisely where their criticism departs from the criticism made by Marx���what is responsible for this ���abstraction.��� For Marx, capitalism itself is responsible; it is the fault of the logic of capital and of its historical reality. Whereas the neo-liberals say: The abstraction of labor, which actually only appears through the variable of time, is not the product of real capitalism, [but] of the economic theory that has been constructed of capitalist production. Abstraction is not the result of the real mechanics of economic processes; it derives from the way in which these processes have been reflected in classical economics. And it is precisely because classical economics was not able to take on this analysis of labor in its concrete specification and qualitative modulations, it is because it left this blank page, gap or vacuum in its theory, that a whole philosophy, anthropology, and politics, of which Marx is precisely the representative, rushed in. Consequently, we should not continue with this, in a way, realist criticism made by Marx, accusing real capitalism of having made real labor abstract; we should undertake a theoretical criticism of the way in which labor itself became abstract in economic discourse. And, the neoliberals say, if economists see labor in such an abstract way, if they fail to grasp its specification, its qualitative modulations, and the economic effects of these modulations, it is basically because classical economists only ever envisaged the object of economics as processes of capital, of investment, of the machine, of the product, and so on. Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 219-222. [emphasis added)

For readers familiar with Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics, it may be thought strange I have resisted plunging into his account of the relationship between genetics, development, and human capital theory which are at the heart of Lecture 9. For what seemed like a "bit of science fiction" (227) has finally arrived and will become more salient in the aftermath of the pandemic and asymmetric response(s) to unfolding climate change. (I don't wish to avoid it, but in re-reading Foucault I am always struck by moves that seem recurrently timely.) Rather, I return to material I partially quoted and skipped last time.  Today, I focus on his rational reconstruction of a historical debate that can help us situate a lot of debates about neoliberalism.

Foucault is very clear that from the perspective of Chicago economics (the American neo-liberalism of Schultz, Becker, and Mincer), the classical economics that comes out of Ricardo is a garden path (or degenerative research program). When it comes to the implied anthropology of capitalism, and, especially the significance of human capital in it, Chicago is closer to the earlier Adam Smith in some respects than Ricardo and other classical and neo-classical economists. This is why George Stigler is often quoted as saying "it's all in Adam Smith." 

As an aside, what I have said in the previous paragraph is clearly not true of Milton Friedman who was very much inspired by Marshall. But Friedman does not figure in Focuault's analysis of Chicago at all, and, unlike Stigler, also cannot be simply assimilated to it. To the point jokingly, despite the importance of (recall) Simons to Foucault's narrative, in Foucault's hands Friedman is not a characteristic (Chicago school) neoliberal.*

But as Foucault notes (225), by building on (recall) the Robbins definition of economics (as optimization under given constraints and in light of scarcity), Chicago also re-establishes the significance of a utilitarian homo oeconomicus who maximizes utility or Max U (in McCloskeys' memorable phrase). And this echoes the Benthamite (so-called English radical) tradition (recall lecture, p. 41) that merged with classical economics in the wake of Ricardo and James Mill. That is to say, a major sub-theme of Foucault's whole lecture series on the Birth of Biopolitics is a kind of natural history of the changing conceptualizations of homo oeconomicus: (i) in the classical period starting with Ricardo he is the man of exchange or man the consumer in terms of satisfaction/pursuit of needs (p. 225); (ii) in the neoliberal period, especially in the (recall) ORDO senses, "he is the man of enterprise and production." (147, lecture 6) And (iii) at Chicago he is also "an entrepreneur," but now, especially, "an entrepreneur of himself," who develops and produces/maintains his own human capital as a source of earnings (226), even a possible earning stream into the future (230). The previous sentence simplifies in a crucial way: because as the Chicago program develops, as Foucault shows in the remainder of the lecture, it starts to be able to calculate the contribution of the family, culture, schooling, and (yes) genetics into the constitution of this auto-entrepreneur.

And so, what Chicago does, on Foucault's account, is to merge this re-invented utilitarian homo oeconomicus with a kind pre-Ricardian Smithian sensibility about human nature. And, to look ahead a bit beyond Foucault, this synthesis turns out to be both fertile and unstable as the experimental and behavioral psychologists explore the Smithian sensibility and see how at odds it is with the given utilitarian framework. (This previous sentence is most manifest in the work of Vernon Smith and his school, who understands himself as returning to the Smithian tradition.)

Now, recall that the distinct element of the ORDO response to Marxism is, in part, to say that even if the Marxists are right that monopoly is inevitable under the logic of pure capitalism, society -- and especially an independent state -- can prevent this outcome by an expansive understanding of anti-trust law whose twin aims are to prevent economic monopolies and to prevent rent-seeking behavior from would be powerful economic agents. (I am not claiming that is the whole story.) By contrast, one effect of the Chicago critique of Ricardian classical economics is, as Foucault notes, that it simultaneously can accept the Marxist critique of Ricardo/classical economics and de-fang its significance so much that it can practically ignore it.**

And the way it defangs it, on Foucault's creative account, is by way of a (implicit--since this is all Foucault's rational reconstruction) genealogy of error (this is the highlighted part above) in which the Marxist critique of capitalism is itself shaped by the classical elements, which it understands as ideology, it has inherited. And both classical economists and their marxist critics look at large scale processes that make value a kind of abstraction (even though they disagree over the source and nature of this abstraction.) And in response, the neo-liberals change the topic: and focus on "what they call
substitutable choices, that is to say, the study and analysis of the way in which scarce means are allocated to competing ends, that is to say, to alternative ends which cannot be superimposed on each other." (222) And rather than explaining (the source of) value, or thereby the exploitation of a class, the focus now becomes "how the person who works uses the means available to him." (223)

The effect of this, as I noted last week, is an important moral pay-off. In the Chicago neo-liberal approach, there is a methodological and epistemological perspective that takes the "point of view of the worker and, for the first time, ensure that the worker is not present in the economic analysis as an object���the object of supply and demand in the form of labor power���but as an active economic subject." (223) That is to, the Chicago school manages to bring its tools into line with important moral and political commitments of liberalism. 

To put the point in previous paragraph in moral and rhetorical terms. The utilitarianism of the radical tradition has a tendency to treat economic agents as means. But in the neo-liberal Chicago school economic individuals are treated as agents with their own distinctive aims. And so the scientist can take their choices seriously as choices and the moralist, society, or policy-maker can hold them accountable for their choices. That this shift in perspective also generates serious moral and political problems once policy aims to program/nudge it is evident.  But in the short term it has the rhetorical advantage that when the Marxist says 'exploitation,' and has to invoke a whole conceptual structure to explain why, the neo-liberal says 'choices' and can respectfully point at what we do. And, perhaps unexpectedly, this rhetorical move turned out to be attractive not just to the traditional economic right, but also politically to all those (but now I am echoing Melinda Cooper here; and here) who wished to emancipate from the hegemony of the 'traditional' wage-earning family structure.

 

*By Foucault's lights, Friedman is surely also not an Ordo or Austrian neoliberal. But see here.

**Whether this has to with snobbery, the after-effects of McCarthy, or the more plausible sense that engaging with Marx was best left to mathematical erudites like Samuelson (1971), I leave for another time.

On Being a Boring/Bored Academic (Via Huemer and Ernest Nagel)

It wasn���t until much later that I started to get annoyed with the field of philosophy. We give the good stuff to undergraduates ��� free will, the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, etc. The boring, unimportant material is saved for the academic journals, meant to be read by professors ��� arguments about whether professor x���s objection to y���s version of such-and-such argument shows that that version of the argument fails to establish its conclusion, etc. The issue of free will, for example, is super-interesting, but the free will literature is some of the boringest stuff you���ll ever encounter. I feel drowsy just thinking about it.--Michael Huemer (Colorado) "What's good and bad about philosophy" [HT DAILYNOUS]

During the past year Huemer wrote a number of blog posts that inspired much buzz (approval and scoffing) in the philo-blogosphere. But while they were on topics of interest to me and known to provoke me into digressions, I did not feel much urge to chime in. In part, my reticence was due because it seemed that his underlying sensibility was one of misery. And I was imaging Yoda telling me to stay away from the dark side. But because I have been miserable during the pandemic, and to the best of my knowledge I had never met Huemer, I also worried that I was projecting my state of mind on to his blog persona. I don't mean to suggest I thought it was merely projection: my virtual diagnosis of him was prompted by his post on the terrible nature of academic writing, in which he writes (inter alia) "academic style isn���t fun to read, and it isn���t fun to write. So who is making us do this?" That reads like an authentic expression of misery to me (perhaps -- now I am glancing over the details of his argument -- prompted by justified rage at referee 2).

Now, continental philosophers have fine theories about the role of boredom in late, or very late, capitalism, say, as a species of alienation for a parasitic class. One can find such theories ending up being marketed in the spectacle of the art world. And it is also easy to become satirical about self-help books that tell us that boredom is the condition of creativity and that letting kids not be bored at all stunts their development. It is also easy to be belittle the sad reality that the very conditions of philosophy are undermined by the dread and nihilist despair of reading the literature. 

For some of you Huemer's diagnoses may not resonate. I have had colleagues for whom digesting and writing for Analysis is sufficient condition for flourishing,--bless their soul. If that's like you, nothing I say is intended to make you feel unhappy about this.

But Huemer's remarks quoted above and his conclusion -- "what we we get is discussions of niggling details, which make no sense and have no interest to you if you haven���t read the specific academic literature from the last 10 years; discussions focused on the literature rather than the issues, filled with qualifications and digressions into potential misunderstandings and errors that you probably would never have been tempted toward in the first place ��� and all to get to some anodyne, highly qualified claims about incredibly circumscribed questions" -- resonated with me. By contrast, I adore my undergraduate teaching in large part because the material we explore together is so glorious and I love where the students take me as their minds expand. I rarely feel anything like this in reading even the scholarly papers I admire most.* 

As it happens, yesterday I read the following passage in Ernest Nagel back in 1935:

Santayana remarks in one of his books that he would be ashamed to hold views in philosophy which he did not believe in daily life, and that he would deem it dishonest and cowardly to sail under colors in an argument which were not those under which he habitually lived. The precept implied by these comments can serve as a criterion for evaluating the quality of integration which a thinker achieves in his own life but more significantly, it helps to fix the subject matter and task of philosophy, and so to disclose the relevance of the philosophic pursuit to the society which nourishes it. It is a precept which I take for my own wholeheartedly, and one which I wish were taken as a guide in all philosophic inquiry. "Notes Toward a Naturalistic Conception of Logic, republished in Logic Without Metaphysics (1956), p. 39.

Now, 1935 was in the midst of the great depression. And so the question of nourishment was not merely a metaphor. Nagel himself was about to embark on a funded tour of Europe where he would discover and partially help, as I have argued, legislate a very different philosophical scene. 

Even so, it is pretty clear that the conception of philosophy inspired by Santayana, fairly or not, is less likely to be boring than the pointless and dull activity memorably described by Huemer in his post. Nagel discerns a way in which existential concerns with integrity between thought and deed (recall here) are connected to the social purposes of one's society. I recognize that Nagel has anticipated an idea that I have digressed on (and distinguished from other notions in the neighborhood), that a philosopher's philosophical integrity involve the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere. 

I do not mean to deny that there are tensions in Nagel's position. His views are (recall here; here) resolutely pluralist, and, if his "all philosophic inquiry" is not meant to refer to his own, he may be thought inconsistent with his other views here. And he is a bit quick, too quick, to assume that the disclosure to society of the relevance of one's philosophical pursuit will be met by approval of that society. Even a democratic philosophy may irritate, even bore, the masses, after all. 

Now, Nagel is relevant here because there is a sense in which he gave up, in practice, on the commitment he just described. And, there is a further sense that, together with Carnap, as Abe Stone has emphasized (here; here), he helped inaugurate the professional turn of philosophy so familiar to us now and that drives the Huemers among us to existential despair (okay, that was over the top; sorry). Nagel himself recognized all of this, and he discusses it un-sparingly, and appropriately, at the start of a presidential address to the APA in December 1954, where he discuss this feature of "recent analytical literare":

The past quarter century has been for philosophy in many parts of the world a period of acute self-questioning, engendered in no small measure by developments in scientific and logical thought, and in part no doubt by fundamental changes in the social order. In any event, there has come about a general loss of confidence in the competence of philosophy to provide by way of a distinctive intellectual method a basic ground-plan of the cosmos, or for that matter to contribute to knowledge of any primary subject-matter except by becoming a specialized positive science and subjecting itself to the discipline of empirical inquiry. Although the abysses of human ignorance are undeniably profound, it has also become apparent that ignorance, like actual knowledge, is of many special and heterogeneous things; and we have come to think, like the fox and unlike the hedgehog of whom Mr. Isaiah Berlin has recently reminded us, that there are a great many things which are already known or remain to be discovered, but that there is no one "big thing" which, if known, would make everything else coherent and unlock the mystery of creation. In consequence, many of us have ceased to emulate the great system-builders in the history of philosophy. In partial imitation of the strategy of modern science, and in the hope of achieving responsibly held conclusions about matters concerning which we could acquire genuine competence, we have tended to become specialists in our professional activities. We have come to direct our best energies to the resolution of limited problems and puzzles that emerge in the analysis of scientific and ordinary discourse, in the evaluation of claims to knowledge, in the interpretation and validation of ethical and esthetic judgments, and in the assessment of types of human experience. I hope I shall not be regarded as offensive in stating my impression that the majority of the best minds among us have turned away from the conception of the philosopher as the spectator of all time and existence, and have concentrated on restricted but manageable questions, with almost deliberate unconcern for the bearing of their often minute investigations upon an inclusive view of nature and man.
Some of us, I know, are distressed by the widespread scepticism of the traditional claims for a philosophia perennis, and have dismissed as utterly trivial most if not all the products of various current forms of analytical philosophy. I do not share this distress, nor do I think the dismissal is uniformly perspicacious and warranted. For in my judgment, the scepticism which many deplore is well-founded. Even though a fair-sized portion of recent analytical literature seems inconsequential also to me, analytical philosophy in our own day is the continuation of a major philosophic tradition, and can count substantial feats of clarification among its assets. Concentration on limited and determinate problems has yielded valuable fruits, not least in the form of an increased and refreshing sensitivity to the demands of responsible discourse.

Nagel reminds us that the very best criticisms of analytic philosophy have been stated within the tradition. More subtly, his idea that ignorance is not univocal strikes me as worthy of ongoing rediscovery. More pertinent here, Nagel grants de facto that philosophical professionalization and specialization necessarily involves generating the conditions of mental mutilation. Huemer's spleen was foreseen by the legislators/prophets of our tradition and - oh amor fati --  willed eternally in the name of the greater good and responsibility. 

Nagel thinks the bitter medicine worth our pain. He does offer some remedy: "a philosopher...owes it to himself to articulate, if only occasionally, what sort of world he thinks he inhabits, and to make clear to himself where approximately lies the center of his convictions." Allowing for the unfortunately gendered language, this is salutary advice. I suspect the readability of many philosophy papers would be helped, and the sanity of their authors enhanced, if it were normal to add a paragraph, say at the end of the introduction, that linked the minute arguments to follow to the geography and significance of their philosophical convictions. While this would be undoubtedly comical too, I hope referee 2 can get behind this as an innocent convention. With online publishing the political economy of this modest proposal should be not too constraining.

*Having said that, during the pandemic I have devoured academic books.

 

Contextual Naturalism, Ernest Nagel, and The Philosophy of a Free Society.

It follows that the human scene is as much an integral part of nature, and as valid a subject for the philosopher's concern with basic features of existence, as is any of its other sectors. As contextualistic naturalism views them, man and his works are not inexplicable occurrences, incomparable in every respect with other natural processes. Men come into being and act the way they do only because of the operations of natural forces, and they perish or cease to behave as men when forces no less natural disrupt the normal organization of their bodies and of their fields of behavior. On the other hand, though the conditions of man���s life are thus continuous with the rest of nature, his behavior exhibits features which are discontinuous with other parts of existence. For man is not simply another odd item in the inexhaustible catalogue of created things. He possesses the apparently unique gift of an inquiring mind, which enables him not only to act under the compulsion of internal springs of action and external pressures, but also to direct his impulses and to master many of the forces in his environment.

This gift of intelligence man owes to the organization of his body and the character of his environment, and no supernatural agency or disembodied soul is required to explain it. It is this organization, complicated by the structure of his surroundings, which also accounts for men���s moral and evaluative behaviors. The possession of needs and preferences, and the exercise of reflection upon them in the interest of fulfilling and harmonizing them, are as natural to man as is, for example, the property of a magnet to repel or attract another magnet. In any event, it is in the radical plurality of men���s needs and in the limitations which their physical and social environment impose upon their fulfillment, that contextualistic naturalism locates the source and urgency of moral problems. Accordingly, it does not conceive the primary moral problem to be that of discovering or actually instituting some fixed set of ethical norms valid everywhere and for all time. For basic moral problems are plural in number and specific in character, and are concerned with the adjustment, in the light of causes and consequences, of competing impulses occurring in specific environmental contexts. There can therefore be no general or final solution to the moral predicaments of mankind; the moral problem is the perennial one of finding ways and means for eliminating needless suffering and for organizing in a reasonable manner the energies of men.

The advocacy of a responsible intellectual method, especially in matters pertinent to social and ethical issues as well as in philosophy, is thus an emphatic strain in the writings of contextualistic naturalists. For reliable knowledge is the end-product of a reflective process, involving the use of experimental controls over ideas which initially have the status of tentative hypotheses; and it is this procedure which must be employed if reliable knowledge and reason- able evaluations are to be attained in the settlement of social and moral conflicts. This method of science supplies no guarantees against error, it does not preclude alternative solutions to problems, and it certifies none of its conclusions as eternally valid. But since it is in essence a self-corrective method, and involves the continued criticism of its findings in the light of evidence capable of public inspection, it is a method which can discover its own errors. It is in any case the sole method which has historically shown itself able to yield intellectual and practical mastery over various segments of nature. From the systematic extension of the use of this method to the problems of men, contextualistic naturalists confidently anticipate an increased moral enlightenment. Compared with many fashionable philosophies contextualistic naturalism is almost prosaically sober. It contributes to the current intellectual scene no apocalyptic visions, no thunderous absolutes, no unshakeable certainties. It offers no spectacular promises of salvation. It is essentially scientific and secular in temper, but confident that the concentration of scientific methods upon specific problems will yield a rich harvest of genuine knowledge. It is sane and reasonable at a time when the tides of irrationalism run high in the world and when substitutes for the Appolonian virtues are at a premium. It expresses the convictions of a people confident that a bold but disciplined intelligence is still a creative power in the world.--Ernest Nagel (1947) "Philosophy and the American Temper" reprinted in Sovereign Reason (1954), pp. 56-7 (emphases added).

The other day, I called attention to Ernest Nagel's vision for philosophy of science (which is how he is remembered, if remembered at all). I wouldn't call his (1961) The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation especially lyrical. But even if we leave aside his role in constructing what became analytic philosophy, his essays -- mostly reviews, polemics, and serious studies of the major intellects of his day -- are full arresting asides and rhetorical gems (below I quote a few more).

The passage quoted above was written for a "European audience, and appeared in a French translation in the Chronique des Etats-Unis, a bi-monthly publication of the American office of Information in Paris, In April 1947" (309). I have found almost nothing about this periodical, but it stands to reason it was an instrument of the US State Department or the CIA. But I assume here that it was written before the cold war was a reality, although Nagel was already (recall) hostile to Marxism. In the following years he would publish withering reviews (in the Partisan Review; and ) of Cornforth's Leninist attempts at refuting Carnap, logical empiricism, and pragmatism. So, while anachronistic, it would not be misleading to call "Philosophy and the American Temper" (hereafter: American Temper) a philosophy for cold war liberalism.

American Temper is a short essay. Part of the argument of the essay is a denial that there is a distinctive American philosophy. (Nagel shows no interest in indigenous thought.) He claims this follows straightforwardly from commitment to a "democratic way of life," which shows itself in a restraint from top-down imposition of an authorized philosophy and the expectation of pluralism that is, that the freedom to develop "alternative conceptions of nature and man" will be pursued (50). 

While I tend to think of Nagel as the leader of the scientific wing of twentieth century pragmatism, in American Temper, Nagel describes pragmatism as a decaying research program (53). That here Nagel is describing his own commitments as a 'contextual naturalist,' we can accept on no less authority than Isaac Levy (writing in the Routledge Encyclopedia). I mention this because while Nagel's association with contextual naturalism was noted by contemporary readers and reviewers of Nagel's essay (see here; here), the term never caught on. In a beautiful essay, Lawrence Cahoone makes an excellent case that Nagel's contextual naturalism is very indebted to Morris Cohen. In American Temper Nagel himself grants (53-4) that it grows out of later writings of Dewey, Sheldon's (1942) America's Progressive Philosophy, which is a species of process philosophy, and a collection edited by Krikorian (1944) Naturalism and the Human Spirit, which includes many philosophers associated with Columbia at mid century.

The cardinal thesis of contextual naturalism is "the essentially incomplete fundamentally plural character of existence, in which no overarching pattern of development can be discerned, and which qualitative discontinuities and loose conjunctions are as ultimate features as are firm connections and regular cycles of change." (54) This is clearly now an unfashionable, metaphysical doctrine. But we can hear in its pluralism echoes in the (dappled world, disunity) commitments of those associated with the Stanford School of the Philosophy of Science.* Since Nagel was Suppes' supervisor the connection is not wholly coincidental. 

The point of calling it 'contextual' is explained by the "emphasis upon the contextual conditions for the occurence and for the manifested properties of everything whatsoever--upon the fact a quality an objective constituent of nature even though its existence depends on the relations in which it stands to other things." (55) This generates an anti-reductionism and a general mistrust of eliminativist strategies. (How this fits with so-called Nagel reduction is not my present concern.)

Now, I noted recently, that Nagel's philosophy of science is not attracted to the idea that science is a means of silencing others in the name of a unified authority. Kuhn's philosophy of science is not just a methodological alternative, but also a political alternative. And while science contains differential expertise and skill, Nagel views it more as an open-ended conversation responsive to criticism and reasons. This point is echoed in American Temper: "involves the continued criticism of its findings in the light of evidence capable of public inspection." And in this sense Nagel views science as a model for democratic society worth having. To what degree the science of our day would still be thought of as such an apt model is worth asking.

Alongside this is a rejection of ethics as a monistic, authoritative discipline imposing normative rules on the rest of us. Rather Nagel views ethics more in the spirit of what is now known as mechanism design. Its task is to find local, temporary ethical solutions to practical problems in light of our plural commitments in "specific environmental contexts." If there is an overarching theme it is the elimination of needless suffering. Obviously this slogan does not settle important questions (whose suffering will count; by whose light needless; and at what cost elimination?, etc.), but it gives the sense of the spirit of the project which is really about the never final organization of energy of men. The liberalism on offer is one with affinity to the New Deal.

We can also see that Nagel's vision for the philosophy of science as a template for a democratic society is itself ground in a pluralist metaphysics in which no single perspective is ultimately privileged. In addition this metaphysics provides a kind of template for society: each individual has objective existence, but is simultaneously socially embedded. 

Given that circumstances are constantly changing this is a philosophy of forever-unfinished-business, self-conscious of the fact that any proposed solution in the moment will seem archaic at a later date. As I wrap up, Nagel's comment on this point is worth quoting: 

contextualistic naturalists exhibit a profound distrust of philosophic systems which attempt to catch once for all the variegated contents of the world in a web of dialectical necessity. They are keenly conscious of the limitations of purely formal analysis even when they engage in it. For they recognize that a logic, no matter how subtle, provides no warrant concerning matters of fact unless it is supported by controlled observation. Indeed, they sometimes show an almost pathological fear that those concerned with formal analysis may be deceived into supposing that nature is as coherently organized and as simple as are their intellectual constructions. (54)

I hope readers have noticed that Nagel calls his own contextual naturalism 'sane and reasonable' and a 'sober' alternative to more fashionable and fanciful philosophies. There is an unapologetic willingness to develop the  apollonian edifices of civilization. But this way of framing it, and the acknowledged pathology -- the fear that controlled technique may facilitate a form of intellectual self-deception --, suggests recognition of the fact that some forces in our environment, including our own impulses, have dionysian roots that may haunt us. Nagel's analytic head is conjoined to the heart of a disciplined romantic.  

 

 

 

That Nagel himself took it very seriously, can be seen in his long polemical article 'Sovereign Reason' -- it supplies the whole collection with its ironic title -- directed at Blanshard's defense of internal relations (and monism). That it is ironic, is clear from the quote from Thucydides attached to the top of the essay.

*In youthful hubris, I have been dismissive of the idea that there is such a school. So, this post also involves a recanting of sorts.

David Hume, Intellectual Arbitrage, and the Grounds of True Freedom

On the other Hand, Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that Means, every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir'd by Conversation. Even Philosophy went to Wrack by this moaping recluse Method of Study, and became as chimerical in her Conclusions as she was unintelligible in her Stile and Manner of Delivery. And indeed, what cou'd be expected from Men who never consulted Experience in any of their Reasonings, or who never search'd for that Experience, where alone it is to be found, in common Life and Conversation?

'Tis with great Pleasure I observe, That Men of Letters, in this Age, have lost, in a great Measure, that Shyness and Bashfulness of Temper, which kept them at a Distance from Mankind; and, at the same Time, That Men of the World are proud of borrowing from Books their most agreeable Topics of Conversation. 'Tis to be hop'd, that this League betwixt the learned and conversible Worlds, which is so happily begun, will be still farther improv'd to their mutual Advantage; and to that End, I know nothing more advantageous than such Essays as these with which I endeavour to entertain the Public. In this View, I cannot but consider myself as a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation; and shall think it my constant Duty to promote a good Correspondence betwixt these two States, which have so great a Dependence on each other. I shall give Intelligence to the Learned of whatever passes in Company, and shall endeavour to import into Company whatever Commodities I find in my native Country proper for their Use and Entertainment. The Balance of Trade we need not be jealous of, nor will there be any Difficulty to preserve it on both Sides. The Materials of this Commerce must chiefly be furnish'd by Conversation and common Life: The manufacturing of them alone belongs to Learning.--David Hume "Of Essay-Writing"+

I quote from one of Hume's withdrawn essays. I was reminded of this essay by Emily Nacol's An Age of Risk; she makes the important point that Hume "frames this exchange as a risk-free, positive-sum one that issues in profit on both sides, in a metaphor that prefigures the kind of argument he will make about the positive-sum experience of free trade in his essays on commerce." (86-7) Today's digression is a further elucidation of this thought.

The title of Hume's essay may mislead those expecting instruction in writing essays. It's not a how-to, self-help manual of that kind. Rather, the official theme of the essay is to explain the utility or advantageousness of the genre. (I return to that below.) Much of the subtext of the essay is devoted to the explicit shaping of the judgment of his implied audience -- learned and conversable women -- into seeing how worthy his works (and works like it) are. And it is an open question how much of this is servility or (or commercially prudent) flattery, and how much of it is sincere (I return to this below.) This is a stark contrast to the more youthful Hume, who in the "advertisement" to the Treatise where he was more willing to claim that he allowed himself to be instructed by the judgment of his public ("the approbation of the public I consider as the greatest reward of my labours; but am determin'd to regard its judgment, whatever it be, as my best instruction.") Unfortunately "Of Essay-Writing" involves Hume in sexist stereotypes (some of which thinly disguised by attempts at wit), and so one hopes this is the reason why Hume thought it better to withdraw it.

On a different day I would reflect a bit more on how in the nature of a speech act of withdrawing a text in circulation, or not reprinting it in later editions of a text, in the age of printed and electronic publication. Doomed to failure, but, perhaps, not intending to fail. But here I want to focus on three of Hume's very striking claims. 

First, Hume views his essays as a form of what we would call arbitrage between two relatively closed domains: that of specialist learning and that of semi-public conversation (the "learned and conversible Worlds"). And Hume thinks this arbitrage is useful to both domains ("their mutual Advantage"). 

The question Hume leaves hanging is to what degree this arbitrage gives rise to a third domain. Now sometimes arbitrage does not give rise to anything new: it is merely a mechanism to facilitate commerce that would perhaps not happen or occur less efficiently (rapidly, etc.) without the arbitrage. But arbitrage can also generate new products; the instruments that facilitate trade (money, optical fiber cables, mammoth tankers, etc.) may themselves become thriving industries with their own technicians, after all.   

That a third domain is generated by Hume's arbitrage is partially obscured by the fact that in addition to commercial and economic tropes, Hume also uses language of diplomacy (in which he represents himself as an ambassador from the learned). Diplomats are primarily representatives and so it is unnatural to think of them as somehow productive of new kinds. But even Hume notes, explicitly, that diplomates generate treaties and federations ("League, offensive and defensive,") that may take on a life of their own.

So, Hume's essays are not merely arbitrage between other domains, they also are intended to help reinvigorate, perhaps constitute, the domain of what he calls "polite Writing" and Belles Lettres. That he sees his arbitrage activity as more than just facilitation of trade, is clear in that he hopes to shape the judgment of his audience of it. He is not asking his audience to become better judges of the world of learning -- they require his arbitrage for that! -- not better judges of the conversible world (whose criteria are immanent in common life). He does hope, of course, that his arbitrage will improve both domains, so indirectly criteria of judgment in these may be shaped by his activity.

As an aside, as regular readers know I am not un-attracted to the idea of philosophy as a form of intellectual arbitrage. (It's the kind of thing I associate with Liam Kofi Bright's writings bringing together formal tools with topics in fields previously unconnected.) One important difference since the time of Hume's writing is that (recall my musing on synthetic philosophy here; and here with a nod to Lewens) given the fracturing of the learned world into many esoteric domains, intellectual arbitrage can now take place among many specialist sciences as well as among the specialist sciences and the manifest image along many (to use Galison's phrase) trading zones.

So, with the growth of sciences arbitrage opportunities have grown, too. I leave it to a sociologist of science to formulate the law that accounts for the proportion of arbitrage to underlying intellectual developments!* Either way, Hume strikes me as an important role-model for the very possibility of intellectual arbitrage and theorizing about it. In particular, such arbitrage promotes a liberal civilization: one that ends the zero-sum cycle of winners and losers.

Second, Hume makes a striking, easily missed claim about the significance of conversation. It is necessary (can only be acquir'd) for the acquisition of "Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression." I think Hume is here more radical than one may recognize. It is easy to assume for those shaped by Descartes' meditator, or the recurring image of an arm-chair in a quiet study found in philosophical writing, to assume that what the mind needs to be prepared for genuine ('facility') and independent ('liberty') thinking is a withdrawal from the noisiness of everyday and the stupidity of common sense and public opinion. 

And while Hume certainly allows that some thinking requires silence and withdrawal, the mind gets prepared for this by being socially engaged in discussion with others. We can see recognition of this insight in such institutions as the oxbridge high table, the public seminar, and the social club. Hume would certainly include the coffee house and dinner table in this category. It also follows that for Hume the world of learning is even in an intellectual sense not wholly self-sufficient.

Hume does not quite explain why the mind's emendation toward liberty has to be socially embedded. That's in part because here he does not explain what he means by liberty of thought (a phrase that echoes Cicero, Spinoza, and the freethinkers). Presumably the idea is that in conversation we are practiced in encountering the viewpoints of others on a variety of topics, of listening, and of sharpening our argumentative and rhetorical skills. Hume also seems to think that in conversation we are exposed to more variety of human life/experience. 

I could stop here. But I want to note a third feature. For Hume's claim echoes (recall) an important passage -- which he himself claims is free from "servility and flattery" -- in his dedication (to the tragedian Home) of his Four Dissertations:

Another instance of true liberty, of which antient times can alone afford us an example, is the liberty of thought, which engaged men of letters, however different in their abstract opinions, to maintain a mutual friendship and regard; and never to quarrel about principles, while they agreed in inclinations and manners. Science was often the subject of disputation, never of animosity. Cicero, an academic, addressed his philosophical treatises, sometimes to Brutus, a stoic; sometimes to Atticus, an epicurean.

Liberty of thought is characterized by the possibility of mutual friendship and conversation among those that may differ in ideology (abstract opinions). That is to say, liberty of thought is a virtue in the context of political and theoretical polarization. So, strikingly, the very social institution that make freedom of thought possible (conversation, itself (recall) the grounds of civilization) are also the site of its expression, while simultaneously vulnerable to implosion. 

The pandemic makes the effects of the absence of conversation visible. On a personal level it reduces a sense of connection (see this moving post by Helen de Cruz). But if Hume is right then one of the long-term social casualties of the past year is the absence of a fertilizer of freedom. But, perhaps, if i understand Hume correctly, the writing of essays, to engage in arbitrage, which involves finding the opportunity for mutual gain, presuppose some such liberty of thought and is intended to contribute to it. And so maybe we have others means to encourage it.

 

 

*It's an interesting question to what degree the sociology of finance (e.g., MacKenzie), which is very interested in arbitrage, carries over into the sociology of knowledge.

 

 

Ernest Nagel's Meta-philosophy of science (and politics)

Scientific knowledge does not depend on the possession of an esoteric capacity
for grasping the necessary structure of some superior reality, nor does it require
modes of warranting beliefs which are discontinuous with operations of thought,
identifiable and effective in the ordinary affairs of human life. The achievements
of science are the products of a cooperative social enterprise, which has refined
and extended skills encountered in the meanest employments of the human
intellect. The principles of human reason, far from representing the immutable
traits of all possible being, are socially cultivated standards of competent
intellectual workmanship. The life of reason as embodied in the community of
scientific effort is thus a pattern of life that generates an autonomous yet
controlling ideal. That ideal requires disciplined dedication without servitude to
any ultimate authority, imposes responsibility for performance upon individual
judgment but demands responsiveness to the criticism of others, and calls for
adherence to a tradition of workmanship without commitment to any system of
dogma. To many commentators, the ideals realized in the enterprise of science are
also the ideals which areindispensable to the successful operation of any society
of free men. Many thinkers, indeed, like John Dewey in America, have based their
hopes for the future of mankind upon the extension of the habits of scientific
intelligence to every stratum of communal life and to every form of social
organization. --Ernest Nagel (1954), "The Perspectives of Science and the Projects
of Man," in Sovereign Reason 306

In analytic philosophy fame is transient. For example, Ernest Nagel is now largely forgotten; a few contemporary philosophers of science are familiar with his writings on reductionism and a few others are familiar with his work on function statements. But I doubt he is the subject of many graduate seminars, and I suspect almost none of his papers are taught regularly. That Nagel was once an academic celebrity in the sciences, the leader of what we may call the scientific wing of pragmatism for a generation, influential supervisor, prolific author across many philosophical topics, introducing countless students and their teachers to G��del���s Proof, and an intellectual polemicist of the first order is now merely a historical footnote.

So, for example, Misak calls "Nagel, perhaps Dewey���s best graduate student" (116) in her influential, The American Pragmatists. She discusses  him as "the paradigm of an analytic, logically inclined, philosopher of science in America," (150). But while she uses some of Nagel's writings throughout her work in discussing other thinkers, and hints that he may be responsible for the synthesis between logical positivism and pragmatism, (163) at bottom she devotes little space to him. 

This neglect is a shame because in addition to being technically among the more competent philosophers of his generation, Nagel was widely read, fiercely sought out opposing views, and always makes clear that philosophical disagreement may matter to the fate of civilization. As regular readers know I think Nagel decisively shaped the character of contemporary analytic philosophy, including its orientation on puzzle solving (even though in some senses we have not been as ambitious as he hoped as we'll show below). But today I assume that in the background. Here I focus on his own sense that in the wake of Einstein the "classical conception of scientific knowledge" (302)* had to be replaced with something new.

For Nagel, science shapes the broader culture in two distinct ways: first, as the fount of technologies and medicines. Second, by challenging established beliefs and intellectual habits (297). And while the former is more emphasized, not the least by scientists in their appeals for resources (296), the latter can also help re-shape (amongst others) our "basic aspirations," our "moral commitments," and "the principles" by which "actions" are evaluated (297).

These facts generate a "threefold task" for philosophy: (i) clarifying the bearing of trends in scientific inquiry upon pervasive conceptions of our place in nature; (ii) of making explicit the intellectual methods by which responsibly held beliefs are achieved; and (iii) of interpreting inherited beliefs and institutions in the light of current additions to knowledge. (297-298) This has an interest implication. For all three involve philosophy of science. And while we tend to think of philosophy of science as a fairly focused enterprise (characterized by (ii)) -- e.g., "the clarification of scientific procedures" (307) and the stress testing of concepts (306) --, for Nagel, philosophy of science becomes first philosophy: "the boundaries of the philosophy of science are in fact the boundaries of philosophy itself." (298) And while (i) speaks to what we may call the existentialist call to philosophy, the third (iii) involves, more dangerously, philosophical activity with the life of her (imagined) community. 

The quoted passage at the top of this post leaves it unclear to what degree Nagel agrees with his mentor, Dewey, that society needs to be modelled on the post-classical conception of science (which is fallabilist, embraces the significance of what is now known as Duhem-Quine, and which is aware of possible incommensurabilities). Nagel rejects the cult of genius and thinks that science is a collaborative enterprise, which involves the systematic and socially sustained refinement of ordinary cognitive processes. So, rather than seeing a scientific society as a means toward a technocratic elite, the idea that society needs to be modeled on science is thought be democratic in a non-trivial sense.

Crucially, on this model science is not a method of silencing others behind an authoritative consensus, but a mechanism by which one becomes responsive to reasons and participates in a social division of labor that is in some sense self-legislating. And so, this helps generate (through its spokesperson in philosophy of science, and in lived experience) an "attitude, at once critical and experimental, toward the perennial as well as the current issues of human life." (307)

And, in fact, Nagel is explicit that philosophy of science so understood, is "a champion of the central values of liberal civilization." And while in the early 1950s the survival of liberal civilization was more secure than it had been in a generation, it is clear that securing such a civilization is one of Nagel's main aims in all his polemics (recall; and here). And, of course, by providing freedom of thought, liberal civilization is conducive to a humane philosophy of science (understood as first philosophy):

The basis for a general outlook on the place of man in nature is supplied by detailed knowledge of the structure of things supplied by the special sciences��� an outlook that contemporary philosophy of science has helped to articulate and defend. In the perspective of that outlook, the human creature is not an autonomous empire in the vast entanglement of events and forces constituting the human environment. Nevertheless, no antecedent limits can be set to the power of scientific reason to acquire theoretical mastery over natural and social processes. Every doctrine which pretends to set such limits contains within itself the seeds of intolerance and repression. Moreover, in the perspective of that scientifically grounded outlook, human aspirations are expressions of impulses and needs which, whether these be native or acquired, constitute the ultimate point of reference for every justifiable moral judgment. The adequacy of such aspirations must therefore be evaluated in terms of the structures of human capacities and the order of human preferences. Accordingly, though the forces of nature may one day extinguish the human scene, those forces do not define valid human ideals, and they do not provide the measure of human achievement. But an indispensable condition for the just definition and the realization of those ideals is the employment and extension of the method of intelligence embodied in the scientific enterprise. A judicious confidence in the power of reason to ennoble the human estate may seem shallow to an age in which, despite the dominant position in it of scientific technology, there is a growing and pervasive distrust of the operations of free intelligence. It may indeed be the case that the temper of mind essential to the exercise of such intelligence has no immediate social future. But the cultivation of that intellectual temper is a fundamental condition for every liberal civilization. By making manifest the nature of scientific reason and the grounds for a continued confidence in it, contemporary philosophy of science has been a servant of men���s noblest and most relevant ideals. (307-8)

It would be tempting to give Nagel the last word. But it is notable that he assigns to philosophy of science also (iv) the task of making manifest "the grounds for...continued confidence" in the nature of scientific reason. The future orientation of this task is quite striking. What could merit that?** So, lurking in Nagel's "naturalist" program is the presupposition that either skepticism can be defeated or, well, that we can be persuaded to it ignore its challenge. 

 

*This classical conception involves three commitments: "(1) Genuine scientific knowledge is demonstrative knowledge, and science seeks to ���save the phenomena���... (2) there must be transparently luminous universal truths which the intellect can grasp as self-evident. (3) the basic premises of a science must be necessary truths, which are better known and more certain than anything explained by them."

** This goes well beyond (ii) (recall) whether the grounds for responsibly held beliefs are achieved. That is backward-looking; (iv) is forward looking.

Locke, Usurpation (and Trump)

Sect. 197. AS conquest may be called a foreign usurpation, so usurpation is a kind of domestic conquest, with this difference, that an usurper can never have right on his side, it being no usurpation, but where one is got into the possession of what another has right to. This, so far as it is usurpation, is a change only of persons, but not of the forms and rules of the government: for if the usurper extend his power beyond what of right belonged to the lawful princes, or governors of the commonwealth, it is tyranny added to usurpation.

Sect. 198. In all lawful governments, the designation of the persons, who are to bear rule, is as natural and necessary a part as the form of the government itself, and is that which had its establishment originally from the people; the anarchy being much alike, to have no form of government at all; or to agree, that it shall be monarchical, but to appoint no way to design the person that shall have the power, and be the monarch. Hence all commonwealths, with the form of government established, have rules also of appointing those who are to have any share in the public authority, and settled methods of conveying the right to them: for the anarchy is much alike, to have no form of government at all; or to agree that it shall be monarchical, but to appoint no way to know or design the person that shall have the power, and be the monarch. Whoever gets into the exercise of any part of the power, by other ways than what the laws of the community have prescribed, hath no right to be obeyed, though the form of the commonwealth be still preserved; since he is not the person the laws have appointed, and consequently not the person the people have consented to. Nor can such an usurper, or any deriving from him, ever have a title, till the people are both at liberty to consent, and have actually consented to allow, and confirm in him the power he hath till then usurped.--John Locke, Second Treatise. 

One of the oddities of what passes for learned public discussion of American politics since the rise of Trump, is the near total absence of John Locke. The one exception also proves the point: in a New York Times editorial (back in 2019), Locke is mentioned but then set aside for "James Madison, who was as committed as either Locke or Smith to the supremacy of individual liberty but was acutely aware of the inherent tension between liberty and democracy."* It is a peculiar reason to set aside Locke (in the name of saving liberalism) for, of course, that is one of Locke's great themes. Anyway, here I use Locke because he gives us the words we need. And while Locke never acts smarter than his readers, Locke actually thought hard about circumstances when checks and balances may fail. And, while I yield to few in my admiration for Madison, it is not entirely clear the founders can help here (recall this post on Federalist 70; and see also the strange optimism in Federalist 28--although both were probably written by Hamilton). 

So, ahead of the election President Trump started to signal he was willing to become an usurper. His present unwillingness to concede the obvious -- that he was defeated in the election -- and, more important, his legal actions and the behavior of some of his political partisans (I am thinking of Senator Graham's phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State and the attempts to prevent certification of results in Wayne Co. in particular) all are properly conceptualized in terms of usurpation.

Now, it is clear that Locke assumes that usurpation is extra-legal, although note that this is compatible with it being non-violent. And part of the trickiness of the present situation is that Trump and his partisans are not subtle about signaling that they expect, and clearly actively try, to get others to bend the law in their favor. For the rule of law is (recall) fragile when (what we may call) the agents and upholders of the law lack integrity or courage. But even if Trump could prevail with some and obtain formal legal recognition for his actions, it is clear his actions are by no means in the spirit of the laws. And, given that the constitution prevents a further re-election, he would remain an usurper (since the people lack  the "liberty to consent," and opportunity to "confirm in him the power he hath till then usurped").

As an aside, when the Senate refused to convict President Trump after the House had impeached him, it was said, for example by Senator Lamar Alexander,  that 'the consequences of the president's actions should be decided in the next election.' I believe, as I write this, Sen. Alexander has not yet congratulated the President-elect or acknowledged his victory.+

Of course, it is natural to read Locke as kind of assuming that the usurper is not already a legal ruler eager to overstay his welcome. But I think it says something of his foresight that his analysis is compatible with our circumstances. And I doubt this is a coincidence. Because Locke is pretty sensitive to the fact that legal authority, which holds power in trust, can degenerate; he notes all "forms of government are liable to it." (201)

For Locke degeneration starts "when the governor, however intitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule." (199) And this shift from the rule of law to rule by will is necessary to be considered tyrannical. It is not sufficient because sometimes the laws are broken for the good of the population. As Locke put its on the frontispiece of the work, Salus populi suprema lex, and explains, while quoting it, in sect 158: "whatsoever shall be done manifestly for the good of the people, and the establishing the government upon its true foundations, is, and always will be, just prerogative." So, for Locke a tyrant is a law-breaker acting in his own interest (and generally also likely "to impoverish, harass, or subdue" the people "to the arbitrary and irregular commands of those that have" power. (201; (202)))

Above, i noted that certain political acts like some kinds of usurpation may not formally break the law, even though they bend it greatly against their proper intent. Locke alerts the reader to the significance of this; undermining of the spirit of the law systematically discourages redress through the law. And once such redress is thought impossible, or very discouraged, the door to political violence is opened; as Locke puts it "where the injured party may be relieved, and his damages repaired by appeal to the law, there can be no pretence for force, which is only to be used where a man is intercepted from appealing to the law." (207) That is to say, seriously corrupting the spirit of the rule of law is a return to a (Hobbesian!) state of nature.

Now, my interest in Locke here is to discuss a passage which is exactly on the undermining of what I have been calling the spirit of the rule of law; Locke calls this 'to elude the law' and he uses it in a passage that evokes (and responds to) Plato's ship of state analogy:

210. But if all the world shall observe pretences of one kind, and actions of another; arts used to elude the law, and the trust of prerogative (which is an arbitrary power in some things left in the prince's hand to do good, not harm to the people) employed contrary to the end for which it was given: if the people shall find the ministers and subordinate magistrates chosen suitable to such ends, and favoured, or laid by, proportionably as they promote or oppose them: if they see several experiments made of arbitrary power, and that religion underhand favoured, (tho' publicly proclaimed against) which is readiest to introduce it; and the operators in it supported, as much as may be; and when that cannot be done, yet approved still, and liked the better: if a long train of actions shew the councils all tending that way; how can a man any more hinder himself from being persuaded in his own mind, which way things are going; or from casting about how to save himself, than he could from believing the captain of the ship he was in, was carrying him, and the rest of the company, to Algiers, when he found him always steering that course, though cross winds, leaks in his ship, and want of men and provisions did often force him to turn his course another way for some time, which he steadily returned to again, as soon as the wind, weather, and other circumstances would let him?

As Emily C. Nacol observes in chapter 3 of An Age of Risk, which prompted the present digression, Algiers was then a notorious slave market. She writes, "Locke wants his citizens to be vigilant subjects who guard against tyranny."  (60-1). And as Nacol notes, Locke is quite explicit that there is a right to preventive rebellion, he writes that "men can never be secure from tyranny, if there be no means to escape it till they are perfectly under it: and therefore it is, that they have not only a right to get out of it, but to prevent it." (220) Here we see that Locke anticipates Popper (recall) and allows that a kind of defensive violence against creeping usurpation and tyranny is permitted.

Let me wrap up. One might think that by talking about "the people," Locke assumes -- in proto-Rousseauian fashion -- too much civic unity. One might worry that he misses that in practice, in the context of polarization, eluding the law is a factional affair. And one may think that Locke, thus, misses that an usurper can count on plenty of support while undermining the constitutional order. But this, too, is anticipated by Locke. Sometimes "factions have been fatal to states and kingdoms" (230).

So, here's the bottom line, the longer it's genuinely thought possible that Trump's usurpation might succeed, and that sufficient number of his more prominent supporters are willing to allow it to succeed, the more likely and more legitimate political violence becomes Stateside on Locke's analysis.  Ideally sooner rather than later -- as Trump's legal strategy has clearly run aground--, as states certify results, leading Republicans must signal publically that Trump has genuinely lost the election and it is time to move on to secure a peaceful transfer of power.

Even the fact that one must write such sentences is symptomatic of a deeper problem. Trump's initial rise to power demonstrated that the trust between Republican party elites and their primary voters was broken. The current party elites are clearly loath to re-open such wounds even though after four years of his Presidency, the American electorate has opted for a partial restoration of the situation ex ante. I say 'partial' because few Republican politicians paid an electoral price for their continued support of Trump. And while we're not quite at the precipice yet, we're starting to inch very close to it. And this is, thus, the most dangerous period because, as Locke notes, not only once one falls over it, it's too late, but because one now must face -- and this is the great theme of Nacol's argument -- the uncertainty in judging how other citizens will act, if one acts to prevent such collapse. 

 

 

*Here is the whole paragraph:

What I have in mind is a liberalism more of means than of ends, a belief that individual and minority-group rights can be protected only in a society governed by the rule of law, neutral institutions and secular, rational debate. This broader doctrine, which encompasses both the modern left and the modern right, has a disputed genealogy. Some begin their story with John Locke, with the idea of government created by individuals for their own benefit. Others begin with Adam Smith, the first exponent of the doctrine of the free market. I start with James Madison, who was as committed as either Locke or Smith to the supremacy of individual liberty but was acutely aware of the inherent tension between liberty and democracy.

+It is worth noting that Senator Romney's main argument to convict is incredibly Lockean: "Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust...Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine."

  

Ambedkar on Bertrand Russell

The laws of consumption, it may be noted, are simply certain deductions from the economic doctrine of the utility theory of value Formulated, as a reaction to the classical theory by Cournot, Gossen, Walres [sic]Menger and Jevons, it no longer thinks of utility as a quality inherent in the objective thing or condition but as dependent upon the capacity it possesses to satisfy human wants. This being so, the utility of an object varies according to the varying condition of the organism needing satisfaction. Even an object of our strongest desire like food may please or disgust, according as we are hungry or have over-indulged the appetite. Thus utility diminishes as satisfaction increases. In other words as satisfaction is the pleasurable activity of a particular organ or a group of them, the curve representing the relation of the organ to the object of its satisfaction varies inversely with the condition of the organ.
If Mr. Russell had carefully gone into the implications of this psychological analysis, he would certainly have avoided the misconception in question. For what does the psychological analysis really mean ? Why does the utility of an object tend to be zero or even negative ? This takes place it may be argued either (1) because at some point in the process of satisfaction the particular organ irritated ceases to derive any further satisfaction by feeding itself on the object of its craving or (2) because other organs needing a different kind of satisfaction clamour against the over-indulgence of some one organ at their expense. Prof. Giddings holding the latter view says ��� if the cravings of a particular organ or a group of organs are being liberally met with appropriate satisfactions, while other organs suffer deprivation, the neglected organs set up a protest, which is usually sufficiently importunate to compel us to attempt their appeasing. The hunger of the neglected parts of our nature normally takes possession of consciousness, and diverts our attention and our efforts from the organ which is receiving more than its due share of indulgence���.13 Of the two alternative explanations that of Prof. Giddings is probably the more correct. Having regard to the behaviouristic hypothesis, of the organism as an active entity, it is but proper to suppose that there does exist this hunger of the entire organism for a varied satisfaction appropriate to each of its organ which would engender such a protest. It is this protest that compels obedience to what is called the law of variety in consumption. If this is a fact it is difficult to understand how one organ by perpetual dominance can mutilate the whole organism. On the other hand, though one at a time, all the appetites have their turn. Human nature is, thus, fortunately, provided by its very make-up against a one-sided development leaving no doubt as to its promise for an all-round development in a congenial environment. Whether it will be able to obtain the miscellaneous food-material, intellectual or spiritual it craves for is a matter beyond its control. If it is mutilated by the lack of variety of food, it will be through social default and not its own. B.R. Ambedkar (1918) "Mr. Russell and the Reconstruction of Society," in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches: Vol. 1 Compiled by Vasant Moon, 490-491

A moment of google enhanced, idle speculation -- would Russell and Ambedkar have known each other? -- prompted by a fascinating essay by Meena Krishnamurthy on Ambedkar's early writings (1916) on caste that I had recently edited brought knowledge (see here) of the existence of Ambedkar's review of Russell's (1916) The Principles of social Reconstruction. (also known as Why Men Fight).The review was initially published in the Journal of the Indian Economic Society in 1918.* 

Ambedkar is that rare world-historical figure -- among his many legacies one can single out the authorship of the Indian constitution -- who, as one starts to read his writings, turns out to be a serious intellectual, too. So, I was thrilled to see he wrote on Russell. And while it is, perhaps, true to say that Russell's star is fading within professional philosophy -- I doubt he is much taught or studied outside of history of analytic -- in virtue of being the rhetorically most gratifying founder of analytic philosophy who shaped our ways of thinking, returning to him always is rewarding. When he wrote the review he had just obtained two MAs at Columbia University, and was on leave from the LSE back in India while writing a dissertation in economics (conferred by UCL after the war). His learning shines through the review despite the orientation of, and self-limitation on,  the "review...meant for an economic journal" is a focus on Russell's analysis of the institutions of property and the modifications it is alleged by Mr. Russell to produce in human nature." (484)

Despite this self-limitation, there is plenty of (political) philosophy in the review (Nietzsche and Dewey are discussed cleverly). And, in fact, one of his main polemical targets, which he discusses while treating Russell's philosophy of war, is the idea that Indian identity is (or ought to be) tied up with "the gospel of quieticism and the doctrine of non-resistance." (486; I am not an expert on these matters, but I do note that Gandhi had returned to India a few years before, although was not yet leader of National Congress.) Ambedkar wishes to decouple Russell from pacifism. And he treats Russell approvingly, I think, as a liberal reforming advocate of (what we may call) non-violent agonism as the key to social progress (see, especially, p. 487). Some other time I hope to return to this.

Okay, let me turn now to the bit I quoted from the review at the top of the post. The target of Ambedkar's argument is Russell's claim (itself partially influenced by James) that love of money in human nature mutilates itself by stimulating one appetite at the expense of all others. Ambedkar has the following passage in mind (which he quotes partially):

It is the worship of money that I wish to consider: the belief that all values may be measured in terms of money, and that money is the ultimate test of success in life. This belief is held in fact, if not in words, by multitudes of men and women, and yet it is not in harmony with human nature, since it ignores vital needs and the instinctive tendency towards some specific kind of growth. It makes men treat as unimportant those of their desires which run counter to the acquisition of money, and yet such desires are, as a rule, more important to well-being than any increase of income. It leads men to mutilate their own natures from a mistaken theory of what constitutes success, and to give admiration to enterprises which add nothing to human welfare. It promotes a dead uniformity of character and purpose, a diminution in the joy of life, and a stress and strain which leaves whole communities weary, discouraged, and disillusioned. Chapter 4. [emphasis in original]

Now, Russell here echoes Hobson's view that conditions of modern life homogenize. But in a clever inversion of Adam Smith -- who famously claimed that it was excessive division of labor on the factory floor that mutilates our nature -- Russell thinks this homogeneity is an effect of widespread avarice, which in turn, is the effect of the consequence of market and especially property owning society more generally even if (Russell goes on to contrast the United States and England on this point) how this general avarice manifests itself, and is motivated, may be culturally conditioned.  

Ambedkar tackles Russell's claim from both the production side and the consumption side (to which the passage quoted above this post). What's noteworthy about Ambedkar's argument is not his psychological interpretation of the law of diminishing marginal returns. But rather that he takes this law itself to be caused (most likely) by a kind of internal balancing/competition among organs of the organism (the whole human). And the appetites and desires of the general organism, and its direction/orientation, is  caused by the relative strength of the various internal organs subject to this internal balancing/competition. 

Ambedkar's model was derived from Giddings, who he probably encountered at Columbia. Giddings himself is notable figure because he is a key figure in American early social science. The model anticipates, in rough outline, the mathematical models of decision making (with utility curves) as an internal to our brains/nervous system conflict over resources in the brain made popular by behavioral and neuro-economists in the 1990s or so.  

The interesting twist Ambedkar gives to Giddings' model (perhaps it is in Giddings) is that by denying that homogeneity is normal, he can claim that if one does observe one-sided mental development this is the effect social environment. One may think this just is Russell's point. But Ambedkar had already denied (from the production side) the plausibility of Russell's claim on other empirical grounds. (To summarize and simplify: Ambedkar thinks that all things being equal, the richer one becomes the more risk averse one becomes.) But the upshot of Ambedkar's argument is that if one does encounter a homogeneous society all one needs to do, if society has the resources, is to provide an outlet for, and satisfaction of, diversity of human passions; then a rich human diversity will reassert itself. 

 

*I thank Shruti Rajagopalan for helping me find a digital copy of Ambedkar's review.