Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 33

14 March 1979: Foucault on Programming Human Capital (XXVIII)

I would like to bring out some aspects of American neo-liberalism, it being understood that I have no desire and it is not possible to study it in all its dimensions. In particular, I would like to consider two elements which are at once methods of analysis and types of programming, and which seem to me to be interesting in this American neo-liberal conception: first, the theory of human capital, and second, for reasons you will be able to guess, of course, the problem of the analysis of criminality and delinquency.
First, the theory of human capital. I think the interest of this theory of human capital is that it represents two processes, one that we could call the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic.
First, an extension of economic analysis within, as it were, its own domain, but precisely on a point where it had remained blocked or at any rate suspended....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.--Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 219-220.

Perhaps, some other time I return to neoliberal history of classical economics that Foucault summarizes in the part I skipped in this quote. And in what follows I also ignore Foucault's acuity in grasping the inner meaning, as it were, of intellectual trends in a different rather technical discipline in real time. 

In the first quoted paragraph, Foucault introduces the central theme of the lecture and, perhaps, of the whole book without alerting his audience (or himself) that he has done so. There are features of American neo-liberalism (in his discussion he mostly confines himself to Chicago economics) that are "methods of analysis and types of programming." That papers and books in economics contain methods of analysis is no surprise. But Foucault insists, without initially making a big deal about it, that they are simultaneously types of programming. And so the question is what (or who) is being programmed and what counts as a program in this context?

While Foucault uses programming (and its cognates) throughout the lecture, Foucault only offers his answer in the final two sentences of lecture nine: "programming of policies of economic development, which could be orientated, and which are in actual fact orientated," toward the development of human capital. (233) So, it is humans and, perhaps, whole societies that are to be programmed. The purpose of this programming can be varied. For, example the focus on developing human capital is to stimulate economic development (locally and internationally) from which many things may follow. (The analysis of delinquency may serve other ends.) 

I do not know if in the 1970s, a French audience, would have heard 'programming' as the thing we do to write software or make computers and robots run. Perhaps, they heard it terms of scheduling. Or perhaps they heard it as an ironic counterpart to the programmatic political projects ordinarily associated with five year social planning. But it is quite clear that Foucault treats these economists not merely as offering (who?) new kinds of descriptions of society, but also offering a new kind of praxis. 

Foucault's claim here sits uneasily with the self-understanding of many Chicago economists of the period; they, following Milton Friedman's lead , generally claim that they make a sharp description between the descriptive ('positive') and prescriptive ('normative') elements in their work; while leaving practice ('art') largely to the side. So, for example, 

THE new economic approach to political behavior seeks to develop a positive theory of legislation, in contrast to the normative approach of welfare economics. The new approach asks why certain industries and not others become regulated or have tariffs imposed on imports or why income transfers take the form and direction they do, in contrast to asking which industries should be regulated or have tariffs imposed, or what transfers should be made.
Both the normative and positive approaches to legislation, however, generally have taken enforcement of laws for granted, and have not included systematic analyses of the cost of enforcing different kinds of laws. In separate studies we recently formulated rules designed to increase the effectiveness of different laws. We proposed that offenders convicted of violating laws be punished by an amount related to the value of the damages caused to others, adjusted upwards for the probability that offenders avoid conviction. Gary S. Becker & George J. Stigler. "Law enforcement, malfeasance, and compensation of enforcers." The Journal of Legal Studies 3.1 (1974): 1.*

Stigler and Becker (both Chicago Nobels eventually) present themselves as doing something on the 'positive'/descriptive side of things. In their work they explore the costs of enforcements. Yet, even if one grants that their work is firmly grounded in empirical analysis, it is not so odd that Foucault thinks they are doing what he calls programming. For, they offer a rule of punishment intended to decrease 'cost' of punishment and increase the 'effectiveness' of these. To an outsider that does seem prescriptive.  Why do Becker and Stigler not call that normative analysis? To an outsider this seems like obscurification. 

The beauty of Foucault's treatment in lecture 9, is that he shows that part of the confusion stems from the way Robbins' definition of what economists do gets (ahh) operationalized in economics. I quote Foucault (initially quoting Robbins):

���Economics is the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses.��� You can see that this definition of economics does not identify its task as the analysis of a relational mechanism between things or processes, like capital, investment, and production, into which, given this, labor is in some way inserted only as a cog; it adopts the task of analyzing a form of human behavior and the internal rationality of this human behavior. Analysis must try to bring to light the calculation���which, moreover, may be unreasonable, blind, or inadequate���through which one or more individuals decided to allot given scarce resources to this end rather than another. Economics is not therefore the analysis of processes; it is the analysis of an activity. So it is no longer the analysis of the historical logic of processes; it is the analysis of the internal rationality, the strategic programming of individuals��� activity. (222-223)

Economics stops being the large scale study of historical processes. Rather, economics becomes the study of the scarce means given ends. As Foucault notes in the passage I quoted at the top of this post, this definition is topic neutral. And facilitates what (already (recall) back in 1934) Talcott Parsons called 'economic imperialism' (that is, "the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic.") The setting of ends is treated as normative or prescriptive activity. And so when one studies means in light of scarcity one is doing descriptive work.

So, in the just quoted passage, the rules offered by Stigler and Becker are rules that govern the means, but not the ends criminal laws are supposed to serve. They are a form of instrumental rationality or conditional/hypothetical rationality. 'Programming' is an excellent term to capture what is going on here because these 'rules' offered by Becker and Stigler are, in fact, supposed to be legally binding on subjects.

Now, a critic may well worry about the immaculate conception of the ends. Who decides what they are? And by what right do Stigler and Becker assume them as given? (Answering these questions has informed my own work on them.) But Foucault, however notices or is interested in something else. (I think this is really spectacular.) I continue with Foucault's analysis of human capital theory:

This means undertaking the economic analysis of labor. What does bringing labor back into economic analysis mean? It does not mean knowing where labor is situated between, let���s say, capital and production. The problem of bringing labor back into the field of economic analysis is not one of asking about the price of labor, or what it produces technically, or what is the value added by labor. The fundamental, essential problem, anyway the first problem which arises when one wants to analyze labor in economic terms, is how the person who works uses the means available to him. That is to say, to bring labor into the field of economic analysis, we must put ourselves in the position of the person who works; we will have to study work as economic conduct practiced, implemented, rationalized, and calculated by the person who works. What does working mean for the person who works? What system of choice and rationality does the activity of work conform to? As a result, on the basis of this grid which projects a principle of strategic rationality on the activity of work, we will be able to see in what respects and how the qualitative differences of work may have an economic type of effect. So we adopt 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)

To put the point as a paradox: the very theory that seems to objectify humans as capital and that is often accused of treating citizens as optimizing paws in engineering problems, is in fact a theory that treats humans as subjective agents. Now, as my former colleague John Davis has shown in a number of books, as this theory gets developed (in ever more subtle mathematical ways), it becomes difficult to see where, in the effervescent moments of a second derivative, agency ends up being located. But that's for a different time.

Admittedly, the cognitive content of such agency is reductive in character because human motivation is treated in fairly simple fashion. Quoting Foucault again,

People like Schultz and Becker say: Why, in the end, do people work? They work, of course, to earn a wage. What is a wage? A wage is quite simply an income. From the point of view of the worker, the wage is an income, not the price at which he sells his labor power. Here, the American neo-liberals refer to the old definition, which goes right back to the start of the twentieth century, of Irving Fisher, who said: What is an income? How can we define an income? An income is quite simply the product or return on a capital. Conversely, we will call ���capital��� everything that in one way or another can be a source of future income. Consequently, if we accept on this basis that the wage is an income, then the wage is therefore the income of a capital. Now what is the capital of which the wage is the income? Well, it is the set of all those physical and psychological factors which make someone able to earn this or that wage, so that, seen from the side of the worker, labor is not a commodity reduced by abstraction to labor power and the time [during] which it is used. Broken down in economic terms, from the worker���s point of view labor comprises a capital, that is to say, it as an ability, a skill; as they say: it is a ���machine.���And on the other side it is an income, a wage, or rather, a set of wages; as they say: an earnings stream.
This breakdown of labor into capital and income obviously has some fairly important consequences. First, if capital is thus defined as that which makes a future income possible, this income being a wage, then you can see that it is a capital which in practical terms is inseparable from the person who possesses it. To that extent it is not like other capitals. Ability to work, skill, the ability to do something cannot be separated from the person who is skilled and who can do this particular thing. In other words, the worker���s skill really is a machine, but a machine which cannot be separated from the worker himself, which does not exactly mean, as economic, sociological, or psychological criticism said traditionally, that capitalism transforms the worker into a machine and alienates him as a result. We should think of the skill that is united with the worker as, in a way, the side through which the worker is a machine, but a machine understood in the positive sense, since it is a machine that produces an earnings stream. An earnings stream and not an income, precisely because the machine constituted by the worker���s ability is not, as it were, sold from time to time on the labor market against a certain wage. In reality this machine has a lifespan, a length of time in which it can be used, an obsolescence, and an ageing. So that we should think of the machine constituted by the worker���s ability, the machine constituted by, if you like, ability and worker individually bound together, as being remunerated over a period of time by a series of wages which, to take the simplest case, will begin by being relatively low when the machine begins to be used, then will rise, and then will fall with the machine���s obsolescence or the ageing of the worker insofar as he is a machine. We should therefore view the whole as a machine/stream complex, say the neo-economists���all this is in Schultz is it not���it is therefore a machine-stream ensemble, and you can see that we are at the opposite extreme of a conception of labor power sold at the market price to a capital invested in an enterprise. This is not a conception of labor power; it is a conception of capital-ability which, according to diverse variables, receives a certain income that is a wage, an income-wage, so that the worker himself appears as a sort of enterprise for himself. Here, as you can see, the element I pointed out earlier in German neo-liberalism, and to an extent in French neo-liberalism, is pushed to the limit, that is to say, the idea that the basic element to be deciphered by economic analysis is not so much the individual, or processes and mechanisms, but enterprises. An economy made up of enterprise-units, a society made up of enterprise-units, is at once the principle of decipherment linked to liberalism and its programming for the rationalization of a society and an economy. (224-225)

So Foucault understands human capital theory as a theory focused on agents, which are simultaneously programmable machines, that is, as possible generators of income streams. Given the recent focus on risk and uncertainty, and the many social and political challenges (pandemic, climate, financial instability) which lay in the future, it is natural to wonder about how we should think of possible income of these machines with, as the logicians teach, necessarily finite time spans. And this is also natural because Foucault (correctly) treats Chicago economics as a return to the radical utilitarian program of Bentham (248) and given that utilitarianism is as a technique of decision-making resolutely oriented toward the future (and spectacularly useful to forget crimes from the past).

Even so, agents don't fall like manna from heaven ready to produce income streams; they need to be educated and cultivated, and constituted by norms and institutions. Capital-ability is the product of history, and the machine-stream ensemble is built over time in society. So, lurking in this theory is a complex analysis relating past and (possibly discounted) future time. And while from one perspective wages merely reflect supply and demand at a given time, in other perspective they become a way to connect individual decisions over time to larger social ends (e.g., development). And as Foucault recognizes, the irony is that a relatively libertarian, intellectual community with distrust of collective planning, pioneers a set of analytical techniques by which policy-makers may come to shape (if not program) human agents toward collectively imposed ends.  

 

 

*The paper I am quoting from is not discussed by Foucault. But the papers Stigler and Becker are summarizing are also discussed by Foucault in a later lecture.

Marx on Ideology Critique and Social Explanation in the Jewish Question

Nevertheless, North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton unanimously assure us. The North American states, however, serve us only as an example. The question is: What is the relation of complete political emancipation to religion? If we find that even in the country of complete political emancipation, religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality, that is proof that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the perfection of the state. Since, however, the existence of religion is the existence of defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself. We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore, we explain the religious limitations of the free citizen by their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological ones. History has long enough been merged in superstition, we now merge superstition in history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular form, apart from its weaknesses as regards religion. The contradiction between the state and a particular religion, for instance Judaism, is given by us a human form as the contradiction between the state and particular secular elements; the contradiction between the state and religion in general as the contradiction between the state and its presuppositions in general. Karl Marx (1843/1844) On The Jewish Question, Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant and Matthew Carmody, republished at marxists.org.

I returned to the early Marx of Zur Judenfrage after nearly thirty years because of a discussion in my department about the nature of ideology critique. And I did so because in the intervening years I had picked up somewhere that it is the original Marxist ideology critique. And indeed it anticipates, as Jo Wolff notes in his SEP entry, a standard criticism of liberalism: that the political project that is supposed to emancipate us both presupposes and promotes our separation and, thereby, promotes a false view of life (that is, greed) and a false (Hobbesian) view of freedom (that is, security from threats). It also anticipates the line of argument that liberal democracy just is a species of applied or debased christianity. I leave to others to trace the link of influence from this piece to Max Weber, Nietzsche, Freud, and Carl Schmitt and all the luminaries of modernity.

In re-reading the argument I was struck by the claim that the "existence of religion is the existence of defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself." In particular, the causal claim this presupposes -- viz., social defects are the effects of the nature of the state [hereafter: the causal claim] -- can be made best visible "where the political state exists in its completely developed form." It is no surprise that Marx quotes The Social Contract further down, because this kind of causal claim that deviations from human flourishing in social life can be explained by social even political causes is articulated in The Social Contract.+

The United States is then the main instance of such complete development because it, or at least some of its states, allows pure freedom of religion even granting that all political rights (including holding office) can be gained without a formal religious requirement.* Marx does not deny that the causal claim operates in other (post-Feudal) political contexts, but in those contexts there are interfering social mechanisms (so Marx is intuitively thinking of the causal claim in terms of its instantiation of a law with ceteris paribus conditions). 

The way Marx traces out the argument suggests something like the following: that there continue to be religious individuals is the effect of the liberal state's promotion of capitalism and individualism (since it does not promote a religion). Their religiosity is essentially a byproduct of this. And because religious association is constituted by individual choice it generates not community, but growing difference and differentiation (and so, as Weber notes, value pluralism). Now, in context this fact is used to criticize Bauer's argument that Jewish emancipation is only possible on the condition that Jews give up their Judaism. While the main criticism of Bauer is that he has an incomplete understanding of emancipation, the conceptual argument is that Bauer aims for the impossible (because the liberal state effectively promotes religious diversity). 

While Bauer's argument is developed in a Prussian context (where relations of subordination are christianized), Marx's criticism of Bruno Bauer remains of interest in light of the militant secularism of French la��cit�� (which is effectively anticipated by Bauer), which is the true Atheist state described by Marx. (More than the United States, France evacuates traditional religiosity from the public sphere.) From a Marxist perspective, even more than the US, French secularism (which presupposes our separateness in civil society) is doomed to fail in virtue of its effective tendency to promote religiosity among (sovereign) individuals, and simultaneously to insist that the French state itself is the only legitimate political tie in common.

But the proposed site of religiosity, civil society, is incapable of being truly heavenly according to Marx because it presupposes our separateness and promotes our greed. But because our religiosity has not been extinguished, it has in fact been stimulated, its only effective site is the state (which presents itself as striving for eternality). Thus, the state is effectively an idol not just from the perspective of the Marxist, who recognizes that the state continues the (essentially Christian project of) estrangement of abstract citizens from themselves (by secular means), but also from the perspective of those citizens who reject an individualist (i.e., protestant) conception of religion (and state).

In fact, if we think about the causal claim it is accompanied by a further claim (which Marx explicitly asserts): "the imperfection even of...politics [in the perfected state] becomes evident in religion." So, the presence of religious fundamentalism among citizens of a state that understands and presents itself as atheist, is indicative of the fact that the state itself has taken on the character of a supreme idol. So, rather than seeing fundamentalism as something archaic or atavistic it is a distinctly modern effect of a society that is capitalist and with a secular public sphere. 

Let me return to the building blocks of Marx's argument: his causal claim presupposes a proper functioning view of human nature. In his account of the effects of history this proper functioning is deformed/undermined by economic practices which are, in turn, secured by state power. (Again, note the echo of Rousseau here.) So, Marx here already anticipates features of his later view (recall) that is more articulated in (say) The Communist Manifesto and the Critique of the Gotha Program. Crucially, Marx's argument (in terms of social defects) in The Jewish Question does not get off the ground without such a proper functioning view of human nature. 

Now one may well wonder why from the perspective iof such a proper functioning view of human nature religion is a defect. Presumably because it is seen to undermine an authentic, communal life that belongs to our essence. It is possible Marx could allow that a non-individualistic religion -- one that glories our communal life in shared joyful activity (recall Plato's natural religion) -- wouldn't be thought defective. But perhaps he treats all religion as instances of superstition (there is language in the Jewish Question that suggests this). I am not sure.

Let me wrap up. Recall that for Mill ideology is the product of a system of hierarchy or domination in which the ruling classes promote falsehoods which justify their rule. Along the way this ideology undermines the proper functioning of the moral sentiments of the rulers and the ruled. In general the ruled see through these falsehoods, even if at times the ideology effectively promotes servility. What makes something ideological is not just that it is false and corrosive of our nature, but (and here Mill echoes Smith) that it serves a particular (factional/class) interest. (This sounds, in fact, like the kind of thing one would expect from a vulgar marxist.) So, we may say that the liberal idea of ideology requires the false to serve ruling faction and undermine our capacity to political and moral judgment. From a liberal perspective, one can always smell/rat out the existence of ideology if we ask 'cui bono?' and follow the trail. 

One attractive feature of the liberal conception of ideology is that the victims of it can see through it (and this eventually leads to standpoint epistemology). They generally do not need ideology critique to learn the truth of their situation. In this liberal conception if we could make our ruling ideas more impartial and reinforce our natural capacities, ideology can be overcome. And one natural route, although not the only one, to the undermining of ideology (and this (recall) anticipates Jason Stanley) (and here) is according to the liberal the flattening of hierarchy, which would undermine the 'demand' for such false justifications (and also undermine its supply by making it less profitable). Another route is to make sure that people flourish within a liberal polity.

If we go beyond Bauer's own aims, we can see that in Zur Judenfrage Marx, in effect, criticizes this liberal idea of ideology as itself a species of ideology. And Marx's main point is not that it serves the interest of capital (although clearly this is implied). But rather because the political emancipation implied by impartiality in the context of liberal state is, while worth having if you lack it, itself a defective ideal of emancipation. It is emancipation into a fragmentary and inauthentic life, and so no genuine emancipation at all.++ 

The explicit role of the Jews in Marx's analysis is, as is well known, not too flattering to Jews (or Christians). But the role they play in his analysis is also to show that on Marx's account it is by no means obvious that the subordinated victims of an ideology will see through the ideology. And so we see here already the rudiments of the need for a project of consciousness raising. That is to say, ideology critique takes on the shape of unmasking so that the victims of ideology can be oriented to a better ideal. This clearly has, although Marx does not alert his reader to it, the character of a kind of religious conversion.

I do not wish to try to settle the debate between Marx and liberalism. I just note that modern liberals may claim that such an ideology critique misses the mark. After all the proud modern liberal is, when legislating public reason, agnostic about the good life; this only works if the defectiveness of modern life is not widely felt. Such agnosticism does not tempt the older perfectionists like Smith and Mill, who have a conception of human flourishing that is a partial rival to Marx's. But I have gone on long enough today.

 

 

+I do not mean to suggest Rousseau invents this; it's clearly visible in Mencius (recall) and also in lines of argument influenced by Isaiah 32:17 and Spinoza's Political Treatise 5.2. 

*I don't think Marx needs to be committed to the thought that the United States is in all respects completely developed politically (given the existence of slavery, and its gendered franchise). He later admired Lincoln greatly, so this could fit his position. But perhaps there are reasons he must be.

++I am thinking of this passage:

"Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his ���own powers��� as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished."

On How Public and Experimental Philosophy Disappears (as Philosophy), and Reappears

Dewey, this most public intellectual and advocate of progressivism in American politics during its most activist age, repeatedly said that science and technology are the engines of not just material but moral progress. His theory of inquiry is robustly objectivist, and he advocates throughout his career not just the objective value of science but the fostering of the values of objectivity right through all human concerns. Here is Dewey in 1938, writing in the first volume of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, as the storm clouds of fascism formed over Europe:

[T]he scientific attitude and method are at bottom but the method of free and effective intelligence. . . [I]t is intensely desirable and under certain conditions practicable that all human beings become scientific in their attitudes: genuinely intelligent in their ways of thinking and acting. It is practicable because all normal persons have the potential germs which make this result possible. It is desirable because this attitude forms the sole ultimate alternative to prejudice, dogma, authority, and coercive force exercised in behalf of some special interest. (LW 13:279���280)

Indeed, already in 1920, in the wake of the First World War, Dewey argued in Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW 12) that bringing the scientific attitude into ethical and social thought was the task of the twentieth century.
This was a widespread understanding of the task of pragmatism around 1930. There were groups who sought to discharge the tasks Dewey had set. If I were to argue that there was a robustly ���objective��� pragmatist tradition that was active in American philosophy right into the 1960s, I would not point to the analytic luminaries Misak points to but rather to Edgar A. Singer, Jr., and his students and colleagues and their students: C. West Churchman, Russell Ackoff, Richard Rudner, and Bob Butts. This group was a ���hard pragmatist��� (Singer���s term) community of scholars who were central members of the American philosophy of science community before and during the time of the alleged dominance of logical empiricism in the philosophy of science. It was a group with its own technical projects���largely in probability, statistics, and experimental inference���but whose technical interests remained robustly within the general purview of the ���theory of inquiry��� that formed Dewey���s conception of logic and trained on socially useful ends. In the end, Churchman, Ackoff, and Rudner all sought a science of ethics as well.
Singer was an undergraduate engineering student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1890s who went on to work with James at Harvard and then went back to Penn where he was on faculty for about 50 years. He and his students and colleagues���especially the biochemist William Malisoff, who worked for Atlantic Oil in Philadelphia and lived in the University City neighborhood���were the founders in 1934 of the journal Philosophy of Science; Malisoff, Churchman, and Rudner were the journal���s first three editors, over a time period lasting roughly thirty years. They sought to promote the understanding of science, especially of the details of increasingly technical regimes of statistical techniques in experimental inference, and sought to understand how to mobilize science for social good. They thought of themselves as pragmatists who knew the details of what people like Dewey could only gesture at in phrases like ���the scientific habit of mind.���
Unlike Misak���s narrative, the story of these scholars is not that of a continuing pragmatist tradition in American philosophy involving central philosophical figures. Just as pragmatist philosophers like George Herbert Mead ended up being much more influential in American anthropology than American philosophy, Churchman and Ackoff left academic philosophy entirely and took up the cause of establishing new social sciences at leading American business schools: Ackoff at Wharton, Churchman at Berkeley. They were founders of operations research, systems science, management science, the measurement of consumer preference, etc. This is how they sought to bring the methods of science into social and ethical philosophy.
If I were to write a book called Some More American Pragmatists, I would offer a different narrative, then. Not a narrative of a continuing, important strand of pragmatist thought in American academic philosophy, but a narrative of a far-reaching impact of American pragmatism in the new features of the American post-Second-World-War university and the growth of an American ���scientific-technological elite������in education schools, business schools, new social sciences, and new methods in old social sciences. This is neither a story of academic philosophy nor one of academic anti-philosophy but of philosophically-inflected social science, a fitting setting for pragmatism as a mature project.--Alan Richardson (2013) "What Good is a (Indeed, This) History of Pragmatism?"  Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49:3: 411-412.

A few weeks ago I noted (recall) that Feigl's and Sellars' (1949) Readings in Philosophical Analysis. was reviewed in Philosophy of Science by Russell L. Ackoff. I had no idea who Ackoff was, and so looked him up. He became one of the founders of operations research (hereafter OR) and systems thinking in management science. Since I have an interest in the complex interactions between philosophy and economics I made a mental note to investigate further. Also because it reminded me of something I had once picked up, presumably from Alan Richardson, that the institutional founding of philosophy of science, and the journal with that name, Stateside was connected to people who became important in OR.

I couldn't find much written on that from the perspective of the history of philosophy, but there is neat (2006) volume, Rescuing the Enlightenment from Itself, that gives a sense of how the rather influential school inspired by Churchman and Ackoff understands itself retrospectively. In the most philosophical chapter, "Pragmatism meets systems thinking: the legacy of C. West Churchman" by D Matthews, one can find a lovely account of how Ackoff took a philosophy class with Churchman at Upenn, and how that was the germ of their decades of collaboration.* I was especially struck by the claim that after the war, and after several fruitless attempts at institutional building, that at Case Western, "Churchman and Ackoff established a multidisciplinary faculty group (complete with postgraduate programs for Masters and Doctoral students) for specifically studying the philosophy, methodology and practice of tackling complex organisational and societal problems. By borrowing the
appellation. Operations Research, from the wartime British and American analysis units set up to help plan operational tactics. Churchman, in effect, established the first post-war academic OR group in the US." (Matthews 2006: 184) For several years Churchman and Ackoff kept publishing in professional philosophy, but eventually their professional self-identification and legacy become more and more identified with their academic appointments (outside of philosophy).

Now, Richardson's argument is part of a critical extended review essay of Misak's excellent (2013) The American Pragmatists. And part of the debate between Richardson and Misak is not just about the self-understanding of pragmatism but also analytic philosophy. Regular readers know I am interested in those issues, and so I have to disappoint that in what follows I will not take a stance on their many layered disagreements. But I do think it is interesting Churchman and Ackoff have been nearly forgotten within philosophy, even the history of philosophy. (Rudner is if not still read, at least cited, in the  inductive risk literature rehabilitated by Heather Douglas. Butts became an important historically sensitive philosopher of science.)

And this forgetting holds lessons for us, especially those with an interest in the fortunes of experimental philosophy, public philosophy, and interdisciplinary/integrative projects now associated with (say) PPE. For initially, Churchman and Ackoff didn't just understand themselves as pragmatists, but also as adherents of Singer's pragmatist version of experimentalist philosophy (for a philosophical introduction see here). Now what Singer meant by experimental philosophy is not quite what contemporary XPHI has become. But that's for another occasion, perhaps.

Okay, let me turn to the heart of the matter: so one way to understand an important strain of pragmatism just is a species of what we may call public facing philosophy. And the public here is not just the wider democratic culture (for which Dewey is still famous), but also other forms of knowing. And rather than adopting the philosophy of X model (with X being a special science [POX]), which came to be dominant in philosophy of science generally, Churchman and Ackoff sought not just to shape the special sciences, but to constitute them philosophically alongside the 'technical' machinery mentioned by Richardson. This can be seen in their rather successful efforts at institution building which extended to textbook writing.  

It would be wrong to think of what Churchman and Ackoff did as applied philosophy. Because as Richardson hints (okay so this may be taking sides in his debate with Misak), there is a sense in which what they are doing -- public facing, progressive, socially consequential -- just is what pragmatism is, from a teleological perspective, supposed to be.** How to think of their achievement in the context of higher education in American empire is no easy matter and it would require some comparison with another systems thinker (Talcott Parsons), who was shaped by philosophy and in some sense carried it forward within social theory and sociology.+

From the perspective of philosophy's institutional self understanding today this reminds us of something salutary. It is quite possible that the very best (let's stipulate), public facing, even high profile ones, can become of little interest to other philosophers or invisible to other philosophers as philosophy. I am not suggesting great originality here. Writing from an entirely different angle, the insight is fully present in Kristie Dotson's "How is this paper Philosophy?" Dotson argues for valuing multiple forms of disciplinary validation within philosophy to make space not just for those that have been excluded from its ranks, but for different kinds of (what she calls) cultures of praxis. (We can see hints of this, too, in Srinivasan's call for "more capacious notion of both philosophy and brilliance.") And, perhaps if Dotson and Srinivasan have their way, the future of philosophy will be able to be public facing and socially consequential without a choir of disciplinary influential naysayers. History need not repeat.

But if we think about the issue outside of institutionalized [!] philosophy, but from the perspective of public facing and integrative philosophy or synthetic science-- say in the way it's possible PPE can develop --, then it's possible that a form of philosophy can just be a certain intellectual practice of the sort that Churchman & Ackoff's OR became. Now, to avoid misunderstanding I do not mean to remind us of the self-serving and widespread myth that philosophy is the mother of science, and that a special science just is an empirically successful discipline that has liberated itself from philosophical roots.

Rather, these new forms of public and experimental philosophy, or integrative PPE (etc.), aim to fuse recent philosophy with special sciences that themselves are the product or sedimentation, at least in part, of past philosophical constitution or shaping. And so today's public philosophy encounters in its integration with the sciences after many what we may call afterimages of forgotten philosophy and, perhaps, not even recognizable as philosophy. 

 

 

*I thank Trevor Pearce for calling my attention to it.

**Since I am myself not invested in pragmatism, I realize I may have no standing to say this.

+There are problems of reflexivity lurking here because Thomas Kuhn, who did actively shape philosophy's current self-conception (despite ongoing philosophical hostility) was himself influenced by ideas circulated by Parsons and Parsons critics (for hints see here; here; here).

On Plagiarism in History of Philosophy

The current affair, which extends far beyond the pages of Vivarium, raises the traditional concerns of academic plagiarism, as well as some novel considerations. As with many cases in the past, the theft of material denies the rightful author of the credit deserved and unfairly gives the pretending author an advantage in an increasingly competitive market. As editors, we are bound first and foremost to maintain the integrity of the journal, and that requires us to document, clearly and extensively, cases where that integrity has been compromised. At the same time, the practice of academic stealing is constantly evolving alongside the countermeasures deployed to catch it, and making public the methods and techniques used in contemporary cases of unattributed copying should help future editors and scholars identify the cases that we collectively missed.
We do not enjoy performing our duty. For marginal fields such as those served by Vivarium, we have seen from experience that the damage wreaked by plagiarism extends to institutions, bringing vulnerable positions, departments, and institutes to the attention of administrators eager to let the rationale of collective punishment direct the evisceration of budgets in Social Sciences and the Humanities. Our colleagues in adjacent fields will seize upon public cases of misconduct as an opportunity to reallocate scarce resources in their favor, thereby ensuring that those who previously lost out to plagiarists in competition for fellowships and positions lose out once again. Yet we believe that it would be worse for the field were we to ignore the accusations, cast doubt on the charges, and claim that the damage done were minimal.
For these reasons, we present examples of what we know about the incidents of unattributed copying in Vivarium.-- The Editors of Vivarium "Notice The Retraction of Articles Due to Plagiarism" 256-257 [emphases added; see also: Dailynous]

Let me start with a note of appreciation. The editors of Vivarium, C. Schabel and William Duba, were contacted in July this year about the suspicion of plagiarism of papers in the journal. It is a good thing that, despite all the strains of the pandemic, they quickly decided to investigate, to take action, and to report. Their clearly written report leaves no doubt that retraction was merited. In fact, since they limited themselves "to verbatim copying of material available to us in digital form" (256) it stands to reason their report understates the problems they found or could have found.* I am grateful for their speedy and forthright Notice. As a regular reader of retractionwatch, my impression is that this is not always the norm, alas.

Their Notice reveals that two of the retracted papers were re-published (now retracted) in a collected volume of papers, The Instant of Change in Medieval Philosophy and Beyond, co-edited by the plagiarist and published at Brill (the same press that publishes Vivarium). This volume also includes a chapter by one of the co-editors of Vivarium. While these details do not justify the claim that the field is (and now I use the editors' language) "marginal," they do give a sense of some of the relatively narrow overlapping circles in the field. While I think of myself as being in an adjoining field, I did host the author of these plagiarized papers in a seminar series back in 2015. 

In the emphasized part of the Notice, the editors of Vivarium present the zero-sum, cut-throat nature of academic life in incredibly stark terms of political economy. In fact, I think (and hope) unintentionally they convey the thought that their decision to publish the retraction and the details of the case as itself the product of cost-benefit analysis of alternative possibilities ("it would be worse for the field were we to ignore the accusations, cast doubt on the charges, and claim that the damage done were minimal.") I assume they primarily acted from duty.

Even so, the editorial notice is also a missed opportunity. For, this is the second major plagiarism case (see also here) to hit the field in less than a decade. Back in the day,  I blogged quite a bit about the case (e.g., here). At the time I noted that given the egregiousness of that case, "the referee process is broken in rather serious fashion." As several high profile hoaxes, and the pages of retractionwatch, suggest refereeing is unlikely to catch all forms of fraud. But it is less likely to catch it, I fear, in a field that feels itself under threat in a low trust environment (as the editors describe) and with relatively small and potentially competitive networks that do not just compete for status and journal space, but also for scarce positions.

In particular, since scholars in the field must have familiarity with an enormous span of history of primary and secondary sources in multiple languages, it stands to reason that staying on top of the field is very difficult. Since referees are themselves stretched for time and, if my experience is anything to go by, swamped with referee requests (while writing this blog post I received two!), I wonder if I could catch the plagiarism or am myself stretched too thin to miss it. (I have often suggested in my reports that papers are ungenerous to others, but I do not recall catching outright plagiarism as a referee whereas as a teacher it is not uncommon, alas.) 

The issue is structural, and it is not just overworked referees or the side-effects of possible journal capture.

In particular, my university has incredibly fine-grained book-keeping for my 'output.' It also tracks my hours spent on teaching, admin, and research. (Yes, really. It's meant to be a fairness issue so that we all do our fair share.) But refereeing goes almost entirely uncredited in this system. (Stateside it may count a bit as service to the profession.) Even though in many ways universities, and not to forget grant agencies, which play a huge role even in the Humanities in Europe, free-ride on the evaluative judgments of anonymous journal referees (and less anonymous, editors) in a lot of their decisions. One often feels that judgments of quality are largely outsourced to referees of, especially, high status journals. That itself tells you quite a bit (go read Trust in Numbers) about how low-trust the environment is.

I have mentioned grant agencies in the previous paragraph. These greatly amplify the zero-sum nature of academic life in European humanities. Since grant funding in the humanities (and social sciences) is incredibly tight (with very low chances of success and with a tendency to reward bullshitting), these agencies pick winners whose careers get an enormous boost (jobs, invites, more research time, etc.), while those that are passed over find themselves without resources to pursue ordinary research. For much of the past decade, there was also a clear bias toward quantity of publication. (Supposedly that's changing.)

So, the credit structure of the academy is a very steep prestige and economic hierarchy where the agencies most responsible for accelerating one's move up or down the hierarchy farm out the evaluation of the 'input' into their analysis (journal publication) to the nearly uncredited work by overworked and anonymous referees. And these referees often have an indirect incentive to promote the work of people they trust and admire and who enhance their own work/states or their network in the field. This predictably leads to possibly unfair rejections and, perhaps, too much benefit of the doubt in other cases. In the past I have offered suggestions to improve the process, but with little noticeable effect. So much for political economy.

In a famous piece, Agnes Callard claims, drawing on a paper by Brian L. Frye that I have not read, that "in academia the immorality of plagiarism is one of the few principles everyone converges on." Not unlike Seneca, Callard wants to reject the (what she calls an "extralegal") principle or "convention." With Callard I agree that it is a mistake to confuse this principle/convention with morality. And I am open to the idea that in some areas of intellectual life, things might go better without giving credit. As a scholar I am familiar with robust practices of anonymous and pseudonymous publication (and I have been very uneasy about recent practice of unmasking pseudonymous publication in instances where the only fraud is the fake name.) And, not to put too fine point on it, these Digressions are all written not just without advertisement, but also without attribution (although I have never made it difficult to guess my identity).

Callard has a tendency to treat the norm (that she rejects) against plagiarism as a violation of intellectual property, which is another feature of the political economy of higher ed. (Brill is a for-profit press.) And she points out that this sits uneasily with university life more generally which she, not unfairly, treats as a deformed honour culture. And in fact she offers a tempting genealogy of error: "We academics cannot make much money off the papers and books in which we express our ideas, and ideas cannot be copyrighted, so we have invented a moral law that offers us the ���property rights��� the legal system denies us." In her genealogy of error, the norm (mistakenly treated as moral) against plagiarism is correction to a kind of market failure ("cannot make much money").

Perhaps Callard is right about this for much of academic life. But some areas of intellectual life, especially those influenced, in part, by (of course evolving norms and standards of) philology, are constituted by scholarship and the art by which one conveys that scholarship. And plagiarism is, then, not, as it were, a second order effect of market failure, but a violation of the rules that do not merely constrain, but constitute the field. It's not just cheating (breaking the rules) or disrupting the market in ideas and the wider academic credit economy, but one has decided to play an altogether different game or to act in a different play. 

To put the point I am driving at by way of analogy. Lots of philosophers think that argument is constitutive of philosophy. I have protested this, but I know I am in the minority. If there is no argument there is no philosophy. This is why much wisdom, or insight, or intellectual history is not treated as philosophy by professional philosophers.

So, much the worse for professionals, Callard might say, and for good measure she might make fun of Max Weber, too. It's clear she thinks, and again this echoes Seneca (who undoubtedly is echoing true sages), that what matters in one's intellectual life is not the proper apportioning of credit. She suggests plausibly that to appropriate is to change one's identity, possibly, for the better. Philosophically and morally that's often true. 

But it is not true in scholarship. For all I know none of the functional arguments for proper citation can withstand scrutiny. Perhaps scholarship would be socially more productive and less dangerous for the psyche if competitive emulation (recall my response to Hitz) that characterizes it would disappear. I certainly recognize that intellectual fraternity is made difficult by oligarchic organization of academic life today.

But true scholarship owes nothing to anybody; its allegiance is to truth and to the standards of excellence, including beauty, that constitute it. And these standards allow one to escape, in thought, the political and cultural economies that condition it materially and, simultaneously, experience the recognition by and, more commonly, one's recognizing of the skill of fellow scholars.

And if time permitted me I would offer you a proof of all of this in the margins of this Digressions. Sure, given the challenges facing humanity, it is comical to demand, as an existential matter, proper footnoting.

At this point the reader, if still awake, may suspect something religious. And, as is well known, footnoting has, as scribbling in the margins, or hyperlinking, a complex relationship with revelation, that is, scripture. And this, in turn, has been well deployed and satirized by Bayle and Swift (among the magisteria). Herman Hesse wrote a long, irritating and oddly moving novel, Glass Bead Game, -- which (recall) I read because of a suggestive footnote in Hugo Drochon's Nietzsche's Great Politics (see here), -- to try to convey even hints of this to a culture that cannot bring itself to confront such religiosity. 

I mentioned Zina Hitz, who is better equipped than I am to talk about religiosity, because she criticizes, not unfairly, the academy (and now I simplify) for its surrender to a fundamentally base political economy. And when one reads the vocabulary of the editors of Vivarium -- "countermeasures" -- it is easy to think she is right--that something essential has gone missing. That we have lost sight of what truly matters. 

But this is a mistake. Philology, with its roots in love of logos, expresses this love, in fact, from the start by the unmasking of forgery. It is because we recognize that human nature is weak, and that even extremely modest details might matter, sometimes greatly, to the life of many communities that we rest our faith in civilization, in part, by securing the integrity of the small print.

 

*I do not just mean that there may have been copying of material unavailable to them in digital form, but also the possibility of uncredited rephrasing and other important distinctions.

 

On the Convergence of Economics and Computer Science (with comments on the role of moral reasoning in AI)

We can generalize this idea across our entire model space. Suppose we enumerated all the possible numerical pairs <error, unfairness> achieved by the models we are considering (e.g., SAT cutoffs)....

The Pareto frontier of accuracy and fairness is necessarily silent about which point we should choose along the frontier, because that is a matter of judgment about the relative importance of accuracy and fairness. The Pareto frontier makes our problem as quantitative as possible, but no more so.

The good news is that generally speaking, whenever we have practical algorithms for ���standard,��� accuracy-only machine learning for a class of models, we also have practical algorithms for tracing out this Pareto frontier. These algorithms will be a little bit more complicated���after all, they must identify a collection of models rather than just a single one���but not by much... 

While the idea of considering cold, quantitative trade-offs between accuracy and fairness might make you uncomfortable, the point is that there is simply no escaping the Pareto frontier. Machine learning engineers and policymakers alike can be ignorant of it or refuse to look at it. But once we pick a decision-making model (which might in fact be a human decision-maker), there are only two possibilities. Either that model is not on the Pareto frontier, in which case it���s a ���bad��� model (since it could be improved in at least one measure without harm in the other), or it is on the frontier, in which case it implicitly commits to a numerical weighting of the relative importance of error and unfairness. Thinking about fairness in less quantitative ways does nothing to change these realities���it only obscures them.

Making the trade-off between accuracy and fairness quantitative does not remove the importance of human judgment, policy, and ethics���it simply focuses them where they are most crucial and useful, which is in deciding exactly which model on the Pareto frontier is best (in addition to choosing the notion of fairness in the first place, and which group or groups merit protection under it, both of which we discuss shortly). Such decisions should be informed by many factors that cannot be made quantitative, including what the societal goal of protecting a particular group is and what is at stake. Most of us would agree that while both racial bias in the ads users are shown online and racial bias in lending decisions are undesirable, the potential harms to individuals in the latter far exceed those in the former. So in choosing a point on the Pareto frontier for a lending algorithm, we might prefer to err strongly on the side of fairness���for example, insisting that the false rejection rate across different racial groups be very nearly equal, even at the cost of reducing bank profits. We���ll make more mistakes this way���both false rejections of creditworthy applicants and loans granted to parties who will default���but those mistakes will not be disproportionately concentrated in any one racial group. This is the bargain we must accept for strong fairness guarantees.

A few weeks ago, after I started blogging (here and here) about the ethics of algorithms,* I received a Facebook advertisement-notification from Amazon that Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth (the authors of The Ethical Algorithm) had become Amazon scholars. "What an interesting way," I thought, "to advertise books to me." I clicked on the link and read the corporately sponsored interview with them. Perhaps because my expectations were low , but I was surprised how thoughtful -- "the main thesis of our book, which is that in any particular problem you have to start by thinking carefully about what you want in terms of fairness or privacy or some other social desideratum, and then how you relatively value things like that compared to other things you might care about, such as accuracy" -- they sounded and how relevant to my own project. It was clear theirs was a project about thinking about trade-offs (a favored phrase of theirs) about social values in algorithm design. More important to me, since I had just argued that thinking about the ethics of algorithms seems to replicate the very social problems familiar from thinking about ethics in economics, I wanted to see if my hunch was correct. Two clicks later I ordered the book, and a day later it was delivered.

A few years ago (well back in 2012), I used to joke that as even theoretical economists become more applied, becoming (thanks to increasingly cheap computer power) experts at massaging results out of giant "administrative data-sets,"+ economics ran the risk of being displaced by statisticians and, especially, computer scientists. While then I was largely ignorant of deep learning, it was clear to me that fruitful searches for robust and surprising correlations in data didn't require (as Justin Wolfers then suggested) the restrictive assumptions of economic theory. (Think about it: econometrics and economic theory artificially restrict the search space that can be more fully explored with deep learning machinery.) And indeed deep learning can dispense with economic theory.**

But in reading their interview and their splendid The Ethical Algorithm I realized that back in 2012, I had missed a crucial issue: that algorithmic design is conceived in terms of optimization problems under constraints. Since Lionel Robbins (back in the 1930s) this just is the definition of economics (and it enabled a split between ethics and economics). And once in algorithmic design you are interested in more than predictive accuracy, and so have to deal "with multiple competing criteria," a whole set of mathematically precise diagnostic tools familiar from economics can be imported into algorithmic design (as the passage quoted above suggests). So, I now realize that increasingly computer science and economics will merge (as presumably is happening already in finance-notice the passing mention of "portfolio management" in the block quote above). 

The previous is sufficient for a digression. But I also want to call attention to how moral issues are conceived, and not, in the (ahh) paradigm articulated by Kearns and Roth. And, in particular, I want to call attention to four levels, or sites, where they enter in. So, formally moral issues enter into two sites of algorithmic design: (i) first a choice in setting a goal (such as privacy or fairness) or success criterion for the algorithm. In general, Kearns and Roth view this as a constraint on accuracy that generates a trade-off among accuracy and other possible criteria. Kearns & Roth are very good at explaining that the way one makes precise these moral goals need not be univocal or can be very context sensitive. (So, there are different ways to think about fairness or privacy in algorithmic settings.) 

In turn, these trade-offs can be modeled in terms of pareto frontiers. And this generates the second site: (ii) at the level of a decision about ''which model on the Pareto frontier" to use in practice. Conceptually that's a distinct choice from how to encode 'fairness' into an algorithm, but obviously one can imagine that in practice, in the spirit of experimentation, there are going to be interactions between (i) and (ii) within a general goal-oriented design process. (Recall that an algorithm can be understood, even identified, in terms of the functions and goals it serves--something I have promised to return to.) 

Some time soon, I hope to write some more critical posts about their hope of turning algorithm design into a kind of dream of turning ethics into an optimization problem. (That way of putting it is indebted to Kathleen Creel, a young scholar who has written a gem of a paper on opacity in computational systems.) And one can see how the combination (i) and (ii) lend themselves, despite the situationism in (i), to a form of moral reasoning familiar from (and analogous, if not identical to) utilitarianism. Of course, one can let other values enter into the decision of (ii). 

Now, in their argument (ii) tends to happen in algorithm design/development process within, say, a company. But the choice one makes about which model on the Pareto frontier to inhabit generates (ahh) consequences to wider society. Some of these wider consequences -- laws, regulations, social norms, etc. -- are already internalized as constraints, but some are simply outside the company's mission/attention and not anticipated by the legislature.

The point in the previous paragraph fits their general argument. Because the "core concern" of their book is that "optimizing" on some explicit social goals, predictably and foreseeable, has (even in the relatively short term) unintended and perhaps ex ante unknowable side effects. (188) There is, thus, not just (as Kearns & Roth note) a (iii) a prior moral and political decision to be made whether or the extent to which algorithms are permitted or primarily responsible for decisions in a domain or (as they often describe it) norm enforcement (177). In the book they offer as an example, of the former "automated warfare," (175; 178).  But there is also (IV) a question how society should think about, and perhaps compensate for or mitigate, these entirely unintended and perhaps unknowable side effects that are a foreseeable outcome pattern from embracing algorithmic practices. This matters especially if such outcome patterns (recall) create  asymmetric harm patterns to vulnerable populations.

And, not unlike the economists, the way Kearns & Roth have set up their conceptual scheme (IV) turns out to be delegated to policy and so is not part of the ethical algorithm at all (or the responsibility of the firms that profit from them). To put this in their terms, we (now) know that a system with the very best portfolio management can create unexpected, general externalities. Something similar is now foreseeable in their field. (I am not sure what the equivalent term of true Knightian uncertainty in AI is, but they need it!) So given (IV), it would be good to prevent regressive forms of socialization of risk while privatizing profit.

*Disclosure: together with Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans, I work on a project (see here)" Towards an Epistemological and Ethical ���Explainable AI���, funded by Human(e) AI. 

**Actually that's false about the state of play today. Many of Kearns and Roth's chapters are about the application of ideas from game theory and so-called mechanism design scaled up in very large dimensions in deep learning.

+The term was then Raj Chetty's whose work I have been blogging regularly about since.

14 March 1979: Foucault on Two Contexts of Neoliberalism, Shallowness, and Hayekian Utopia (XXVII)

There are some major differences between European and American neo-liberalism. They are also very obvious, as we know. I will just recall them. In the first place, American liberalism, at the moment of its historical formation, that is to say, very early on, from the eighteenth century, did not present itself, as in France, as a moderating principle with regard to a pre-existing raison d�����tat, since liberal type claims, and essentially economic claims moreover, were precisely the historical starting point for the formation of American independence.  That is to say, liberalism played a role in America during the period of the War of Independence somewhat analogous to the role it played in Germany in 1948: liberalism was appealed to as the founding and legitimizing principle of the state. The demand for liberalism founds the state rather then [sic?] the state limiting itself through liberalism. I think this is one of the features of American liberalism.
Second, for two centuries���whether the issue has been one of economic policy, protectionism, the problem of gold and silver, or bimetallism, the question of slavery, the problem of the status and function of the judicial system, or the relation between individuals and different states, and between different states and the federal state���liberalism has, of course, always been at the heart of all political debate in America. We can say that the question of liberalism has been the recurrent element of all the political discussions and choices of the United States. Let���s say that whereas in Europe the recurrent elements of political debate in the nineteenth century were either the unity of the nation, or its independence, or the Rule of law, in the United States it was liberalism.
Finally, third, in relation to this permanent ground of liberal debate, non-liberalism���by which I mean interventionist policies, whether in the form of Keynesian style economics, planning, or economic and social programs���appeared, especially from the middle of the twentieth century, as something extraneous and threatening inasmuch as it involved both introducing objectives which could be described as socializing and also as laying the bases of an imperialist and military state. Criticism of this non-liberalism was thus able to find a double foothold: on the right, precisely in the name of a liberal tradition historically and economically hostile to anything sounding socialist, and on the left, inasmuch as it was a question not only of criticism but also of daily struggle against the development of an imperialist and military state. Hence the ambiguity, or what appears to be an ambiguity in American neo-liberalism, since it is brought into play and reactivated both by the right and the left.
Anyway, I think we can say that for all these completely banal reasons I have just mentioned, American liberalism is not���as it is in France at present, or as it was in Germany immediately after the war���just an economic and political choice formed and formulated by those who govern and within the governmental milieu. Liberalism in America is a whole way of being and thinking. It is a type of relation between the governors and the governed much more than a technique of governors with regard to the governed. Let���s say, if you like, that whereas in a country like France disputes between individuals and the state turn on the problem of service, of public service, [in the United States] disputes between individuals and government look like the problem of freedoms. I think this is why American liberalism currently appears not just, or not so much as a political alternative, but let���s say as a sort of many-sided, ambiguous, global claim with a foothold in both the right and the left. It is also a sort of utopian focus which is always being revived. It is also a method of thought, a grid of economic and sociological analysis. I will refer to someone who is not an American exactly, he is an Austrian whom I have spoken about several times, but who then lived in England and the United States before returning to Germany. Some years ago Hayek said: We need a liberalism that is a living thought. Liberalism has always left it to the socialists to produce utopias, and socialism owes much of its vigor and historical dynamism to this utopian or utopia creating activity. Well, liberalism also needs utopia. It is up to us to create liberal utopias, to think in a liberal mode, rather than presenting liberalism as a technical alternative for government. Liberalism must be a general style of thought, analysis, and imagination.--Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 217-219.

I noted recently, in a comment on the lecture 8 that Foucault has a kind of historicist sensibility toward neoliberalism. There, without explanation, Foucault treats original ORDO-neoliberalism as a kind of organic political solution to circumstances.  Whereas the application of the copy of neoliberalism in France during the apparently more ordinary political crisis of the 70s is treated as disruptive and radical. In this ninth lecture he explains his conceptual decision. The Ordos and Chicago-school neo-liberalism are in a political-cultural sense indigenous to the national art(s) of government because liberalism is a 'legitimizing principle' in their national contexts. Of course, in the German context the Ordos also help invent the very, particular kind of idea as legitimizing principle in state formation whereas in the American context the Chicago school inherits it from a pre-existing semi-national tradition. I use 'semi-national' in the previous sentence because American liberalism, with its founding fathers and Lincolnesque re-founding is itself, at least partially, cosmopolitan in character and draws richly from Roman writings, native-American practices (see here;* recall), English, French (Montesquieu!), and Scottish thought (etc.).

So, Foucault offers a distinction between two contexts in which neo-liberalism is practiced: (i) where liberalism is itself an indigenous legitimizing principle of government--that is, political jurisdictions where liberalism is a constitutive principle of political life; (ii) where liberalism merely plays a moderating or ameliorative role in political life. 

And while I am primarily interested in how this distinction impacts Foucault's analysis, it is important to see how polemical this claim is in the French context since it rejects the idea that any of the French revolutions (note the plural) form a genuine rupture with what came before. And Foucault treats the rich history of French liberal theorizing as continuous which pre-existing French political life. It also means that French neo-liberalism will be understood as a rupture or radical (as Foucault does).

One other effect of the distinction is that in places where neo-liberalism is indigenous in the sense used above, it need not concern itself with foundational questions about its own legitimation. For "Liberalism in America is" and can presuppose "a whole way of being and thinking." (How quaint that reads now!) By this I do not mean that it is merely economic in character. As noted in the same lecture (recall), on Foucault's view, Chicago economics understands itself not merely as a critique of the welfare state, but it understands itself also as a critique of a kind of illegitimate social contract that underpins it. But in its criticism of 'collectivism,' it can take for granted -- and this gives it at times a seemingly shallow character -- certain background commitments to liberalism inherited from its semi-national tradition. Interestingly enough, as Ordo-liberalism became confident about the survival of the Bonn settlement, it takes on more characteristics of this apparent shallowness. 

I do not mean to deny there is something reductive about Foucault's interpretation of American liberalism which subtly get identified with economic claims ("since liberal type claims, and essentially economic claims moreover, were precisely the historical starting point for the formation of American independence.") The Bill of Right are here downgraded relative to the right to property and the Commerce Clause.

Be that as it may, I do not mean to suggest that American liberalism becomes shallow in Foucault's hands because he recognizes, almost alone among twentieth century commentators (and something missed by nearly all his would-be-followers and those that use 'neoliberalism' in the sense popularized by David Harvey; recall here, too) that the Chicago criticism of of Keynesianism is not just economic in character but, driven by concern over its role in "laying the bases of an imperialist and military state." It's for this reason Foucault's emphasis (recall) on Simons as the founder of Chicago must be explained. And part of the drama of the Chicago school's evolution is how this was lost.

And this means, in practice, that what looks like a public goods problem in France, will be understood in terms of competing freedoms Stateside. Now, one fascinating feature, and here I anticipate some of Foucault's later lectures, is that the later rise of law and economics and the re-invention (via Robbins) of homo oeconomicus at Chicago (which in some senses is a break with Simons and Hayek), and its revival and re-interpretation of, as Foucault noted in lecture 2, English (post-Benthamite) radicalism (that is, utilitarianism) also changes the character of how public services are understood in America. And, oddly enough, as we will see, by analyzing governmental practice in terms of maximizing utility, by generating a 'technical alternative' the Chicago school's effect on American public life is to turn it into being more like the French administrative state! 

And just as Foucault is about to launch into his much more concrete analysis of then contemporary Chicago economics, with a focus on Becker, he reminds his audience of the significance of Hayek.  And, again, rather than turning to polemics (which his audience wants), Foucault mentions Hayek (who had then already visited Chile for the first time) not to discredit Chicago or neoliberalism, but rather to note that if one one wishes to understand why -- even in a period of stagflation, and crisis -- liberalism as "living thought" a globalizing manner of thinking "with a foothold in both the right and the left" the contemporary author most salient to understand is Hayek. Foucault is freely quoting from Hayek's (1949) "The intellectuals and Socialism." 

This is an essay in which Hayek confronts the influence of intellectuals on public life in democracies in the long run. For Hayek intellectuals are not philosophers or scientist/experts (who invent and test ideas), but "secondhand dealers in ideas." In the essay, Hayek tracks a distinction, also familiar from Arendt, between the public real of opinion, in which intellectuals act as opinion-makers, and other institutions (justice, science, perhaps markets, etc.) where truth is produced. The production of intellectuals is one of the tasks of universities (even if they can become populated by intellectuals).+

Now, one reason to mention Hayek's (1949) essay in this context is also clear. For it is the place where Hayek explicitly confronts the kind of shallowness of thought characteristic of liberalism on behalf of liberalism. For Hayek the call to a liberal utopia means that "the philosophic foundations of a free society" must be made "once more a living intellectual issue." It is somewhat extraordinary that Foucault inserts this call into his lecture just before he starts describing the manner in which (late) Chicago school liberalism becomes a matter of technique. And one cannot help but wonder if Foucault is alerting his audience to his own double role, as intellectual and philosopher

 

*A belated thank you to Kyle White for calling my attention to Young's essay years.

+Hayek writes, "Nobody, for instance, who is familiar with large numbers of university faculties (and from this point of view the majority of university teachers probably have to be classed as intellectuals rather than as experts) can remain oblivious to the fact that the most brilliant and successful teachers are today more likely than not to be socialists, while those who hold more conservative political views are as frequently mediocrities. This is of course by itself an important factor leading the younger generation into the socialist camp." Increasingly, universities have become sites of expertise.

C.L.R. James' case against Moderation

Toussaint on February 8th [1802] did not yet know the fun extent of his reverses, but as the blows fell upon him he braced himself not for surrender but for resistance. The dream of orderly government and progress to civilisation was over. He had held on to the last shred of hope for peace, but as he saw the enemy closing in, then and then only did he prepare to fight. Grievous had been his error, but as soon as he decided to look the destruction of San Domingo fairly in the face, he rose to the peril, and this, his last campaign, was his greatest. He outlined his plan to Dessalines. "Do not forget, while waiting for the rainy season which will rid us of our foes, that we have no other resource than destruction and fire. Bear in mind that the soil bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies with the smallest sustenance. Tear up the roads with shot; throw corpses and horses into all the fountains, burn and annihilate everything in order that those who have come to reduce us to slavery may have before their eyes the image of that hell which they deserve." It was too late. Events were to show that if he had but mobilised the masses before and purged his army, the French attack would have been crippled at the start. His desire to avoid destruction was the very thing that caused it. It is the recurring error of moderates when face to face with a revolutionary struggle.--C.L.R. James (1938) The Black Jacobins, pp. 243 (in the 2001, Penguin edition) 

In the quoted paragraph, three sub-themes of The Black Jacobins come together: first, the book is a study in revolutionary leadership. By this I do not just mean it's a study of the leaders and leadership of revolutionaries (which it is), but it's also a more general study on the nature of leadership, including counter-revolutionary leadership, during revolutions. It is truly majestic study in this respect. 

Second, the book as a whole is a fierce and insightful polemic against moderates in a revolutionary context. Not all of the moderates dissected by James are leaders and only a few end up on the side of the revolution.  The third feature is that James treats all of his agents sharing in a fundamental nature. And, in general, he is very critical of race-specific explanations (below I give some further evidence of this).

My interest here today is primarily in this second feature. Because James' treatment of moderation illuminates his overall argument and is instructive to would be moderates and their critics. The theme of moderation is set up, almost surreptitiously, at the start of the book, where he notes, while discussing the nature of slave society of San Domingo, that "The regular clergy of San Domingo instead of being a moderating influence were notorious for their irreverence and degeneracy." (26) While there is no reason to believe that James is a friend of organized religion or clerical privilege, the comment reveals that he also thinks that in some pre-revolutionary and/or hierarchical societies some institutions or classes can play a proper moderating functional role. And one of his criticisms of the clergy of San Domingo, one might say a naturally moderating force, is that they failed to do so. Slave society has thoroughly corrupted their humanity and religiosity and, thereby, they end up reinforcing society's ills.

The previous paragraph may be thought a bit forced. But this analysis of moderation runs through James' treatment of the mulattoes. Many of these were property owning. And as the revolution unfolds in France their-would-be leaders "claimed for [their] people social and political rights." (52) These claims are described as "moderate" (52) by James. One of these leaders was "hanged...on the spot" and the other "lynched" by the whites. "Leaders in this terror were the small whites: the managers and stewards of the plantations and the mass of the townsmen." (52)

As the a-synchronous revolutions in France and San Domingo unfold, we see the "moderate" (82)  mulattoes regularly trying to through their lot in with either the local property owners and/or with whoever is in charge in Paris against the slave population.* This turns out to be a disaster for all the mulattoes.

Their error is not merely tactical. It is fundamentally, in James' telling, ideological. For, the underlying problem is that the revolution itself -- which James views, in part, as a mechanism for consciousness raising into discovering what one's true interests are -- fails to do its proper job. This becomes clear in a passage devoted to its effect on the San Domingo blacks which prepares the way for the judgment (from p. 243) quoted in the passage at the top of this post:

For the moment the blacks did not know where their true interests lay. And if they did not, it was not their fault, because the French Revolution. being still in the hands of Liberals and "moderates," was clearly bent on driving the blacks back to the old slavery. (101)

James is quite clear there are exceptions to his class analysis. But generally, moderates during the French revolution are incapable of breaking with slavery because their fortunes are tied to seeing slavery as a species of property. (In fact, James makes clear he thinks that it is fortunes from slavery that made possible a bourgeoisie capable of the initial phases of the French Revolution.) And in James' argument the very forces that benefit initially from revolutionary advances (the Bordeaux slave-owners in France; the petty whites in San Domingo) are the very forces that prevent further emancipation of slaves. In France this is due to loss aversion from economic privilege; in San Damingo it is due to a desire by the not rich (petty) whites to advance in an hierarchical society without abolishing the general (racialized) hierarchy. James echoes without fully realizing it, perhaps, Gouges' insight that (recall; and here with my debt to Eileen O'Neill) French revolutionary mass democracy is no advance for women if it means that enfranchised men can rule over women.

Now, James is clear that, in revolutionary moments, moderation always leads to ruin in virtue of the actions of (what for a lack of a better term, I'll call) reactionaries, who, rather than settle for modest loss of status, end up gambling it all in continued defense of privilege:

The current legend that the abolition of slavery resulted in the destruction of the whites is a shameless lie, typical of the means by which reaction covers its crimes in the past and seeks to block advance in the present. In May 1792 the whites were all tumbling over each other to give rights to the Mulattoes, and Roume says that when the decree of April 4th arrived, they published it the day after. It was too late. If they had done it a year before, at the outbreak of the slave revolution, they would have been able to master it before it spread. Why didn't they? Race prejudice? Nonsense. Why did not Charles I and his followers behave reasonably to Cromwell? As late as 1646, two years after Marston Moor, Mrs. Cromwell and Mrs. Ireton had tea with Charles at Hampton Court. Cromwell, great revolutionary but great bourgeois, was willing to come to terms. Why did not Louis and Marie Antoinette and the court behave reasonably to the moderate revolutionaries before August 10th? Why indeed? The monarchy in France had to be torn up by the roots. Those in power never give way, and admit defeat only to plot and scheme to regain their lost power and privilege. Had the monarchists been white, the bourgeoisie brown, and the masses of France black, the French Revolution would have gone down in history as a race war. But although they were all white in France they fought just the same. The struggle of classes ends either in the reconstruction of society or in the common ruin of the contending classes.--Black Jacobins, 103-104 (emphasis added)

It is important to recognize that James' intent here is not to justify terror or genocide. By this I do not mean he moralizes against them. He clearly thinks terror and genocide become inevitable in certain circumstances and are pretty much the expected outcome when the (previously) privileged use terror to defend their hierarchy. 

Rather, the emphasized part is important because it is the key feature of James' view on political life that moderates -- be they Girondists in Paris or Toussaint in San Domingo -- fail to grasp. And the reason why on James' view the moderates fail to grasp this, is that they are (i) too interested in generating the (economic) fruits of post-revolutionary peace and (ii) mistakenly assume all others are similarly motivated; the moderates, thus, do not grasp (iii) that those that have benefitted from tasting being on top of the hierarchy cannot be bought off easily with the (expansive) fruits of peace. Toussaint's "desire to avoid destruction" was motivated by his interest in keeping financial and human capital on the island so that prosperity could be maintained (even if shared more widely).

It is an interesting question to what degree (ii-iii) really fit James' Marxist scheme of history. In addition, not all extreme social hierarchies are undone by revolution. One can think of instances of relatively peaceful regime transitions (South Africa, Chile, etc.) that may vindicate the moderate's belief that violent revolution is not always inevitable. I do not wish here to dispute James' believe that at some moment the moderate must choose sites, and inevitably will choose wrongly. Rather, what James can teach the moderate, or at least has taught this skeptical liberal, perhaps unwittingly, is the significance of recognition of the significance of the fear of status loss in possible transitions. To what degree such fear can be bought off financially or accommodated with a new kind of status, I leave to another occasion.

 

 

To be sure, there are moments when the mulattoes are so provoked that they put "liberty before property" (83)

Trump's Renormalizing of Politics

Since his famous escalator ride, Donald Trump has, as Jacob Levy documented repeatedly, undermined many democratic norms and also the quiet, vital functioning of the government's role as a machinery of record. And while often, alongside the endless deception and bigoted offensiveness, Trump is very funny, his remarks this week are not humorous at all. They are dangerous: purposely undermining the credibility of the electoral process risks generating a non-peaceful transfer of power, or even civil war. As I write, he has not conceded the election yet.

So, it may seem perverse to rehabilitate Trump even in qualified sense. While a case can be made that, perhaps together with Jimmy Carter, Donald Trump was the most pacific president in the age of American empire. But this claim must be qualified, in turn, because the evidence suggests he only escalated the number drone attacks abroad; and here. But today I am going to leave that aside.**

Rather, Trump is to be credited for having (ahh) re-politicized politics. And my suggestion here is that as dangerous as this is, it is not all bad. As I write this around 145,000,000 votes have been counted, and many more -- including in populous places like California and New York -- remain uncounted. The 2020 election will be the highest turnout election in a century, perhaps longer. (To say that, is compatible with noticing that the United States makes it uncommonly difficult to vote; and has striking tendency to disenfranchise whole groups of citizens.) Now to be sure, as Orwell taught, one of the great virtues of a well functioning liberal society is that it permits one to be indifferent to politics without major cost. And, undoubtedly, a non-trivial amount of President Elect's Biden voters voted, in part, for the right to be able to ignore politics at least much of the time. (Feel free to call that 'privilege.')

Even so, the increased turn out reflects a real, renewed interest in politics. And that's because Trump seemed to offer a real choice distinct from the pre-existing status quo along multiple dimensions. And while I do not deny the significance of his ability to entertain, and to draw any attention to himself, his real almost instinctive genius was to frame every issue in terms of winners and losers that drew everybody into taking sides, often existential, and identity shaping (and aesthetically significant (here; here) sides. And in so doing he re-activated and mobilized the, one might say, ur-form of politics: the zero-sum fight (and recall).*

And while in power Trump left the running of much of the government to the cadres of those he had defeated (who delivered tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of environmental standards, and conservative justices), his rhetoric and persona altered the political landscape (including a changed conception of American empire--about which more in the future). But not unlike other demagogues, he failed to adapt to changing circumstances and his luck ran out at the worst possible moment.** 

The record turn-out (by US standards) was, of course, also a mobilization against Trump. And this mobilization was, in part, as Biden's campaign repeatedly suggested, in part about a truly alternative political vision, also of the political, for the country. This vision blends commitment to liberal and republican (in the traditional senses of both terms) ideals: it's a politics of inclusive win-win, logrolling compromises and a certain amount of anodyne cliches emphasizing unity.  

I do not want to suggest that Biden's Democrats are in all things the opposite to Trump. While Biden is no socialist, there is a clear retreat in the air from open borders, from free trade, and from market solutions to social problems. The last decade has reminded progressives of the awesome powers of the Presidency; and while wisdom would counsel a renewed vigor at curtailing the executive -- the next authoritarian nationalist may show more interest in being authoritarian --, I expect, on the contrary, more energetic attempts at using it. The debate to come is more about the manner of deploying government than its scope. (For more on my views about the future Biden presidency recall here.) 

So, my point is simple: Trump's ability to mobilize his base, and to mobilize a coalition against his, is constitutive of democratic politics. And his success has re-established citizen interest in political affairs. This energetic element of American polarization is not to be deplored; it is one of the ingredients of a lively, even healthy polity. In recognizing the inhumanity and dangers of a Trump presidency, American citizens also rediscovered what they value. To recognize this is to accept one the most fundamental liberal insights -- I learned it from Walter Lippmann --, that the survival and flourishing of liberal polity may well also require the presence of illiberal parties and commitments in order to maintain liberalism���s own vitality and thereby the vitality of the whole. 

One feature that a liberal conception of markets and liberal education have in common is a willingness to tolerate unpredictable outcomes. In markets this is due to fundamental uncertainty; in education it is due to our willingness to let the young find their own way and surprise us with their ingenuity and creativity.+

Political mobilization is also inherently unstable and unpredictable; but, as BLM has reminded us the last few years, it helps us discover not just what we we want/desire, but also who and what kind of 'we' we wish to be. And, so, we must acknowledge -- even those like me who prefer political debates to be settled by reasoned discussion in representative bodies--, that such mobilization is an essential ingredient to political self-legislation. 

The fact that also illiberal, disruptive, and even immoral forces must be tolerated to a considerable degree means that American experiment in self-government is intrinsically dangerous. It will not always be lucky in its enemies. For, the demagogues and the authoritarian-nationalists are enduring archetypes of democratic politics. Given that our modern profit-driven, algorithmic mediated media feed on anger and emotion, it is predictable we have not seen the last of them.

 

 

 

*Yes, he used the language of 'deals'--but in his universe, the point of a deal was to show the other a sucker. 

**I also hope to return some day to reflect a bit critically on the so-called 'resistance' that successfully de-legitimized his victory. 

+Yes, we educators often fall short of this. 

Otto Bauer and the Origin of the Functionalist Account of European Federation

But because it is precisely from the progress of social production and the international division of labor that the principle of nationality emerges, it is soon confronted by its own limits. Already within capitalist society, ever-closer interaction links the different states; a generally valid form of regulation of this interaction becomes even more necessary, a legal system the validity of which extends beyond the borders of the individual states. The increased interaction between states resulting from the development of the capitalist economy, the emergence of the great modern states, and the expansion of the power of the European nations over the colonial territories abroad has given rise to international law. In the first instance, the states regulate their relations through treaties. To the old pacts of alliance and peace are added agreements concerning the laws of land and naval warfare. Economic relations also gradually come to be regulated by agreements between states. Thus emerges the diverse system of treaties that constitutes the foundation of modern international law: agreements concerning inland and maritime shipping, trade and customs duties, railway traffic, postal and telegraph systems, and measures, coinages, and weights. But international law soon reaches beyond the sphere of immediate economic interests. Thus, today agreements between states regulate the policing of sanitary conditions, in particular in regard to the struggle against epidemics, and the struggle against both the white and black slave trade; thus, there is the attempt to initiate through agreements parallel systems of regulating civil and procedural law.
Out of all these agreements there emerges a series that creates a quite new structure, the international authority. Wherever the foundation of common administrative activity is to be established, the states create a common organ, an authority that, by virtue of its international mandate, is permanently to fulfill the tasks assigned it by the treaties between states. Such a character is borne by the international health commissions, the international commissions for the monitoring of the financial administration of individual states, the international rivers commissions. These are granted rights that are otherwise accorded to sovereign states and that even the theory of the state has therefore attempted to construe as a particular form of the state, as riverstates.
But by far the most important among the international authorities are the so-called administrative communities. These have been emerging since the 1860s and are based on agreements to which every state is in principle free to accede. Among them are, for example, the International Postal Union, the International Telegraph Union, the Community of States for the Protection of Commercial Property, the Association of States for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the Union of States for the Struggle Against the Seizure of Slaves, the Central Office of International Transport, the Office of the Standing Sugar Commission, and so on. Some of these authorities have already been granted judicial power, for example, the Health and Rivers Commissions, the offices of the International Postal Union and the Community of Railways; in addition, since 1899 The Hague has housed the permanent Court of Arbitration.
As imperfect as these individual structures are, they carry within them the healthy seed of new social organisms. The interaction between the different states has already become so close that the law and organs of the state are proving to be no longer enough. The direction of development is toward a legal system that stands above state rights and binds the states themselves; it is creating organs the activities of which will no longer be hindered by any state frontier. State treaties and international authorities today satisfy this need. But they are beset by an internal contradiction. The community of international law has statutes and organs, but has not itself yet been constituted as a legal entity. We have statutes and are ignorant of the collective will that establishes them and whose power guarantees them; we have international organs  and are ignorant of the body whose organ they should be.
In socialist society, the agreements between the polities and the international organs will without doubt rapidly grow in number. At the same time, the increasing interaction between the different polities will in the first instance compel the implementation of the international division of labor.
However, international regulation to a far greater extent will become possible and necessary only when the social processes that are today composed of innumerable decisions and actions of individuals are consciously regulated by the different polities. For example, large migrations will be possible only on the basis of international treaties. Finally, in socialist society the planned regulation of international interaction will also be necessary due to the fact that every disappointed expectation, every inappropriate calculation affecting the individual merchant, the individual emigrant, will quite directly affect the whole society. One can imagine, for example, the consequences when a socialist polity organizes itself for the production of a good that is to be exchanged against the products of the other nations and finds this expectation disappointed. The international division of labor is impossible if the exchange of goods and interaction is not directed and regulated on an international basis.
Interstate agreements and administrative communities will thus ultimately not be able to meet the needs of the society of the future. Statutes that are not guaranteed by an organized collective will and organs that cannot be regarded as the organ of any entity will not suffice for this society. It will ultimately have to constitute the community of international law as a legal entity and provide it with permanent representatives. This will come about the day the national polities establish an international office to which they entrust supreme authority over the exchange of goods between the polities and thereby indirectly also supreme authority over the production within every polity. Just as the development of capitalist commodity production linked the manorial estates and the towns isolated during the Middle Ages to form the modern state, so too will the international division of labor create in socialist society a new type of social structure above the national polity, a state of states, into which the individual national polities will integrate themselves. The United States of Europe will thus be no longer a dream, but the inevitable ultimate goal of a movement that the nations have long since begun and that will be enormously accelerated by forces that are already becoming apparent.-Otto Bauer (1907 [1924]) The question of Nationalities and social democracy, [Die Nationalit��tenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie]. translated by Joseph O'Donnell, University of Minnesota Press  pp. 412-414 (emphases in original).*

A few months ago Christopher Brooke alerted me to the significance of Bauer's work, and the passage above in particular, in the context of a series of posts on the historical and conceptual roots of modern federalism and its complex relationship to modern imperialism. When the book appeared Bauer was not yet a leading political figure and much of the excitement and turmoil of his life was still ahead. He was not, however, obscure, because Lenin makes a point of alerting his reader to the fact Bauer is one of his targets as one of ���most prominent theoreticians��� of the (bankrupt) Second International in his Preface to the French and German Editions Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism A Popular Outline.

It is noticeable that Bauer does not mention Hobson's Imperialism because there are many striking similarities in their analysis of the economic roots of (nationalist forms of) imperialism (recall here; here). And while Bauer is clearly marxist/socialist (as Hobson is not), not unlike Hobson, he sees in imperialism the possible seeds of something better. And in so doing Bauer articulates what we may call a functionalist account of the rise of federalism. And such functionalism is one of the ongoing, ruling commitments of the political and bureaucratic class of the EU. (I am unsure how well known Bauer's influence on this is--feel free to send literature my way!) So, it is worth taking a look at. 

Bauer's book has its roots in Bauer's PhD in law at the University of Vienna. And this is visible in the crucial passage quoted above. Internal law is rooted in capitalist development which gives rise to international trade. International trade generates the demand for international law along multiple dimensions (regulation of warfare and commerce). And with growing commerce, including commerce as a consequence of imperial conquest (this is part of Bauer's larger argument in the book), the range and complexity of international commercial law expands. 

Interestingly enough, it is the complex nature of some of modern commerce that gives an impulse to new forms of international collaboration, a "new structure, the international authority. Wherever the foundation of common administrative activity is to be established, the states create a common organ, an authority that, by virtue of its international mandate, is permanently to fulfill the tasks assigned it by the treaties between states." These international authorities have important characteristics: (i) they are created by states (ii) who create or delegate juridical authority to them; (iii) they are functionally, that is domain specific, organized;  (iv) they are technocratic in character, that is, a place where under the guise of authoritative law experts meet to solve coordination and standard setting problems; (v) they rely on the member states (with juridical/military power) for enforcement; (vi) they are heterogenous in character (not all have the same juridical power and internal structure). And (vii) in virtue of their existence, the character of states and their self-conception (that's the point of some turning into 'riverstates') and state sovereignty changes.

Crucially, for Bauer, the effect of (vii) is also to make room for, (viii), that is, there is a teleology toward both (a) a larger edifice of international law built into these new structures and (b) a (minimalist) federal state. It is pretty clear this directedness is a consequence of the economic forces of capitalism as it has turned into globalization and imperialism. 

Strikingly, the teleology is not automatic. For while, a spontaneous order ("innumerable decisions and actions of individuals") gives rise to the need for coordination and standardization, political guidance is needed for the organization and transformation of the state system ("consciously regulated by the different polities.") And what he has in mind is not just more treaty-making, but the establishment of a political (and federal) representative structure ground in international law ("constitute the community of international law as a legal entity and provide it with permanent representatives.")

If I understand him right this higher authority is also limited in character. Its jurisdiction is fundamentally economic ("the exchange of goods"). Now, the glue that would hold such a limited European Union together is, on the one hand, socialism, and, on the other hand, economic-juridical integration. 

What's striking about Bauer's approach is that it is quite clearly not wholly modeled on (say the way Kant and Adam Smith are inspired by) The United States of America, where republican/representative government comes conceptually first (or close to first alongside commercial connectedness). In Bauer's approach, politics remains in a sense nationalist (and socialist), but integrated in (and subordinated to) a larger juridical structure devoted to coordination and problem solving. (Kind of what Austrian liberals were hoping from the empire.) I use 'in a sense' because in socialism there are no incompatible ends, so it (the higher authority) need not do more (and certain kinds of politics are abolished). In addition, although this is not explicit in Bauer, socialism provides a common civic religion that ties the whole together.

It would be worth exploring what the pre-history of Bauer's ideas are. Brooke has given me hints to suggest that Cobden may be very important for this part of the story. But I close with the thought that one way to understand the present tragedy of the EU is that even more than Hayek (recall here; and here) or Mises (recall) and Kautsky (here; and recall Luxemburg's criticism) it has de facto adopted Bauer's vision (he died in 1938) without a glue like socialism that can help coordinate ends and act as a civic religion. 

 

*The book first appeared in 1907. But the translation is from the second (1924) edition, which has a new preface. 

14 March 1979: Foucault on Social Contracts, the welfare state, and American Neoliberalism (XXVI)

The second contextual element is of course the Beveridge plan and all the projects of economic and social interventionism developed during the war. These are all important elements that we could call, if you like, pacts of war, that is to say, pacts in terms of which governments���basically the English, and to a certain extent the American government���said to people who had just been through a very serious economic and social crisis: Now we are asking you to get yourselves killed, but we promise you that when you have done this, you will keep your jobs until the end of your lives. It would be very interesting to study this set of documents, analyses, programs, and research for itself, because it seems to me that, if I am not mistaken, this is the first time that entire nations waged war on the basis of a system of pacts which were not just international alliances between powers, but social pacts of a kind that promised���to those who were asked to go to war and get themselves killed���a certain type of economic and social organization which assured security (of employment, with regard to illness and other kinds of risk, and at the level of retirement): they were pacts of security at the moment of a demand for war. The demand for war on the part of governments is accompanied���and very quickly; there are texts on the theme from 1940���by this offer of a social pact and security. It was against this set of social problems that Simons drafted a number of critical texts and articles, the most interesting of which is entitled: ���The Beveridge Program: an unsympathetic interpretation,��� which there is no need to translate, since the title indicates its critical sense. Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 216

I have deliberately gone slowly through Birth of Biopolitics because I did not want to skip straight to Foucault's discussion of 'American neo-liberalism,' (215-216; especially the celebrated treatment of Becker). In this I echo Foucalt's deliberate procedure. When he arrives at lecture nine, he announces, at its start, "Today I would like to start talking to you about what is becoming a pet theme in France: American neo-liberalism." Foucault knows -- and we have seen him repeatedly remind his audience -- that what he has to say about ORDO-liberalism is of little interest to his audience, which he often castigates as being in the grip of cliches. Their real interest is to take on the new ascending, intellectual hegemony located in Chicago and in the public eye associated with Pinochet, etc. Foucault never mentions Pinochet or the Chicago Boys. His interest is not to contribute to cold-war dialectics; he want, as he says repeatedly through the lecture course, more immanently, discuss liberal govermentality toward which liberal democracies are -- and here Foucault exhibits the political sensitivity of a poet -- already moving. And while Milton Friedman has already won the first of the Chicago nobels, in 1979, Thatcher's first election victory is still a few weeks away, it is by no means obvious that a discussion of Chicago, Becker, and Hayek is then simultaneously prophetic.

In the 'banal' (216) part of his lecture, Foucault ties American-neoliberalism to the Chicago school. He writes, "The first, fundamental text of this American neo-liberalism, written in 1934 by Simons, who was the father of the Chicago School, is an article entitled ���A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire.��� (216) The first remarkable feature here is that Foucault will define the school in terms of a set of fundamental texts. This is a natural move for a philosophical historian, of course. But it is odd claim for somebody focused on practice (i.e., the art of governmentality). So, for example, Foucault ignores the two features of Chicago method, that, in its early self-understanding, can be said to define it as a school: (i) Chicago price theory (the same term is used for a famous introductory course and text-book);* (ii) a commitment to Marshallian partial equilibrium. 

The second remarkable feature is that Frank Knight is completely effaced from the narrative of Chicago. Given Foucault's interests this is no surprise. But it is worth noting: the Chicago legacy of focusing on uncertainty and a kind of meta-methodological sensitivity toward, and the political embeddedness of, the limitations of economics as a science are completely effaced. I don't mean to suggest that the focus on Simons (recall here; here), who was by then long dead and undoubtedly obscure to a European audience, is a mistake.**

The passage quoted at the top is the second of "three" (banal) contextual "elements" against which american neo-liberalism is defined: "Keynesian policy, social pacts of war, and the growth of the federal administration through economic and social programs���together 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) But as usual with Foucault, his asides are incredible illuminating. 

It may seem that to oppose the Beveridge plan is to oppose social planning. And undoubted social planning -- collectivism in the jargon of the age -- is one of the targets. But Foucault recognizes that the legitimacy of social planning is ground in a new kind of social contract. In Foucault's presentation the need for a social contract is felt by the elites, who recognize that after a decade of economic suffering calling people up for war may require justification that  goes beyond ordinary war propaganda. 

As an aside, Foucault here subtly historicizes the renewal of the social contract tradition then a decade underway by those who had been foot-soldiers (Rawls) in that great war. Rather than focusing on Rawls' religious roots, one can better understand this renewal as a (renewed) demilitarization of the social contract.

Be that as it may, to oppose Beveridge is not just to oppose social planning, but to oppose the very terms of the war-time social contract. For this social contract trades the non-negligible risk of death (or the death of a loved-one/breadwinner) in war for an obligation toward other forms of (social) security.+ That is to say, to criticize Beveridge is not just to criticize economic policy, but the very conceptualization of the polity. 

Why might one wish to do so? For one, in this hostile perspective (and it seems Foucault kind of endorses it), the very conceptualization of the welfare state is a war-state. This is a trope going back to the Vienna critic of Neurath (and Bismarck), but here it is part of the very conceptualization of the legitimacy of the welfare state. Second, it is by no means obvious that this social contract is liberal. And the problem is not so much the welfare state side of the equation (the benefit), but the war-side (the cost). The very point of a liberal state is the preservation of (bare) life. This is why, as Nick Cowen alerted me, life becomes before "liberty and the pursuit of happiness!"

In his rhetorically charged polemic, Simons (1945) presciently himself calls attention to this, "Written by a nominal Liberal, radical-reactionary in its substantive proposals, libertarian in its rhetoric, thissecond Beveridge Report may forecast or largely determine the course of British postwar policy." (212) Part of Simons' ire is that Beveridge is clothed as liberal, but substantively it is an odd mix of radicalism (that is, as Foucault had already explained in lecture 2, Benthamite utilitarianism) and reactionary-ness (that is, committed to war and hierarchy). And, indeed, Simons recognizes that for all its noble social ends, Beveridge plan is also a contribution to survival of (declining) political imperialism, "England's commercial power is to be mobilized and concentrated, to improve her terms of trade, to recruit satellites for a tight sterling bloc, and to insulate herself and them from unstable, unplanned economies, i.e., from the United States." (Simons 1945: 213)

That is to say, on the Simons interpretation of Beveridge, which Foucault shadows even amplifies beyond Simons' own rhetoric (notice the language of the "demand for war"), American neo-liberalism understands itself not merely as a critique of the welfare state, but it understands itself as a critique of an illegitimate social contract that underpins it; for from a truly liberal perspective, one cannot really, if one has minimal Hobbesian intuitions (one cannot contract away the natural right to mere self-preservation), consent to the pact inscribed in Beveridge. And, in fact, Simons is clear that if executed fully, the Beveridge plan would involve in open-ended trade wars leading to the real kind (Simons 1945: 227-228).** The point had been foreshadowed in lecture 5 (see what Foucault says about Ropke on p. 110).

Let me close with a remark. In what follows, Foucault is largely uninterested in Friedman (the focus is on Becker then still much more obscure). But the 'banal' point he has made in terms of Simons' criticism of Beveridge helps explain the increasing popularity of Friedman in the 60s and 70s. For Friedman was one of the most eloquent and visible critics of the draft (during the Vietnam war). His argument (inspired by Simons but not identical) was as much economic as it was political, "large armed forces plus the industrial complex required to support them constitute an ever-present threat to political freedom."   

 

 

*Of course what price theory, which evolved over the decades, is may well be thought contested. Glen Weyl does a good job offering a definition, even if anachronistic, that captures most of what falls under it: an "analysis that reduces rich (e.g. high-dimensional heterogeneity, many individuals) and often incompletely specified models into ���prices��� sufficient to characterize approximate solutions to simple (e.g. one-dimensional policy) allocative problems."

+There is subtle points lurking here. First, Beveridge was British, and one may think the United Kingdom's entry in WWII was existential, and so really did not require some such pact. But Foucault's eyes are on the US here, and its entry was to a considerable degree a matter of choice. Second, it's interesting that Foucault focuses on Simons here, since Hayek was also a critic of the Beveridge plan, and Foucault had already noted, in an earlier lecture, the significance of Hayek's movement from Austria to LSE to Chicago.

**I return to Simons before long. In his criticism of Beveridge, Simon notes, en passant, "one must plan for free-market controls just
as carefully as (indeed, more so than) for socialization." (213) This is a point worth returning to.